Vol. 46 No. 3 1979 - page 402

402
PARTISAN REVIEW
She craned after it. W.ouldn't it bump into the apartment
upstairs?
It
was like watching the underside of an elevator, all
dirty and hairy, with dust-roots wagging. The black floor moved
higher and higher.
It
was getting free of her, into loftiness,
lifting Jews.
The glory of their martyrdom.
Under the rising eave Lucy had an illumination: she saw
herself with the children in a little city park. A Sunday afternoon
early in May. Feingold has stayed home to nap, and Lucy and
the children find seats on a bench and wait for the unusual
music to begin. The room is still levitating, but inside Lucy's
illumination the boys are chasing birds. They run away from
Lucy, they return, they leave. They surround a pigeon. They do
not touch the pigeon; Lucy has forbidden it. She has read that
city pigeons carry meningitis. A little boy in Red Bank, New
Jersey, contracted sleeping sickness from touching a pigeon;
after six years, he is still asleep.
In
his sleep he has grown from a
child to an adolescent; puberty has come on him in his sleep, his
testicles have dropped down, a benign blond beard glints mildly
on his cheeks. His parents weep and weep. He is still asleep. No
instruments or players are visible. A woman steps out onto a
platform. She is an anthropologist from the Smithsonian Insti–
tute in Washington, D.C. She explains that there will be no
"entertainment" in the usual sense; there will be no " entertain–
ers." The players will not be artists; they will be " real peasants."
They have been brought over from Messina, from Calabria.
They are shepherds, goatherds. They will sing and dance and
play just as they do when they come down from the hills to while
away the evenings in the taverns. They will play the instruments
that scare away the wolves from the flock. They will sing the
songs that celebrate the Madonna of Love. A dozen men file onto
the platform. They have heavy faces that do not smile. They
have heavy dark skins, cratered and leathery. They have ears and
noses that look like dried twisted clay. They have gold teeth.
They have no teeth. Some are young; most are in their middle
years. One is very old; he wears bells on his fingers. One has an
instrument like a butter churn: he shoves a stick in and out of a
hole in a wooden tub held under his arm, and a rattling screech
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