La Vita È Bella [1]
Enrico was a quiet boy who never played sports but would sit with his father and watch them on TV. He was a wallflower at the high school dances at West Broadville High and his parents ran a Kinkgo’s shop in one of the storefronts of the old buildings on Hanover Street where he and his older sister Margareta (who hated him for being dirty and stupid, and who was going to marry a businessman one day and throw pool parties) lived in an apartment above with their parents Annunciata and Guiseppe, who in their youth bonded over the shame of their embarrassingly Italian names and hatred for the dogma of the Catholic Church that, as it turns out, married them back in 19__, to live happily ever after as Nancy and Joe who ran the Kinkgo’s shop with the help of their adorable kids, Rick and Maggie.
The estranged grandparents, all devoted members of San Antonia Cecilia Pontifical Catholic Church, who insisted on calling the children Enrico and Margareta, strongly disapproved of their parents’ lack of faith. Enrico was only 7 the last time his parents begrudgingly took the family to church on Easter Sunday, which his mother vociferated her complaints for weeks afterward:
“They stare at you like they just know you did something terrible. I’m never going back there. We’re nothing but gossip fodder,” she would say.
Enrico didn’t see the big deal; he always enjoyed the fanfare: the costumes, the dramatic lighting, the trancey music and eerie chanting in some whole other language. It was quite a show.
For the neighborhood stifled with hoarded rowhomes along narrow streets, the diagonal arterial road cutting through it (where the family made their residence) was an open expanse, full of colors and movement instead of brown brick walls. As a teenager, often alone by himself looking out the third-floor window of his bedroom, Enrico would soon bore of the usual traffic, and was always stealing glances of two women across the street who did not realize that the blinds were more transparent than opaque. He came to know and love the two dimples on the right butt cheek of Mrs. Randall Shankmeyer, who was just tickled to wear thongs for her husband, as well as for the other man with a dark beard who came to visit her when Randall was not home. For Enrico, she was like an angel appearing to that person in the Bible, with the light of the bedroom lamp glowing behind the silhouette of her shoulders, breasts, waist, hips, and thighs. The way the light caressed that curve at the top of her buttocks made Enrico consider the beauty of God’s creation and how much more beautiful it was when one could watch from above like God himself. Enrico knew what would happen every time he saw her – the routine was almost always the same – so he became the director of the production across the street, the merciful and compassionate maker of a creation, a world, that pleased him greatly, that he would spare from the flood for another look.
That second woman was Mrs. Roland Woodson, Miss Martha to all the neighborhood children whom she would lovingly correct and look after, a devout member of the First Unity Baptist Church, preceded to heaven by her dear husband, proud mother of Isaiah Woodson and doting grandmother to Tariq and Shariah. She slowly walked her bent body down to the market every day with her shopping cart full of reusable cotton tote bags and would often see Enrico (bless his heart) staring out his window at that whore next door, she just knew it. She would see him, too, from her parlor window, from behind her curtain of course because it’s rude to stare, watching and watching out that window like he had nothing better to do.
Miss Martha also did not realize her curtains were more transparent than opaque and her small form appearing at her window, even when not pretending to tend to her flower box, gave Enrico a jolt of conscience to his gut and deflated his reveries.
Enrico’s dear father Guisseppe developed ALS and his limbs stopped following along with what his mind would tell them and to lift them would require strings and pulleys impossible to assemble. It took him so quickly, and by then Annunciata’s hands, hips, and knees were swollen and crippled with arthritis. Margareta did marry her businessman and had a house with a pool before his business went under and they moved back to a rowhome in the old neighborhood. Meanwhile, Enrico indulged in his hobby of photography and opened a digital camera store downstairs in the old Kinkgo’s shop only a few years before cell phones developed multi megapixel capacity and took away most of his business.
By then, Enrico had a wide array of lenses, and a top-notch closed-circuit camera system so that he could watch, from the ergonomic chair in the back office, every movement on the sidewalk in front of the store, in the doorway of the store, the rectangular store front area from all four corners. From the grand bay window of the storefront there were two cameras that each looked down the street to the end of the block, and three pointed at approximately 60 degrees, 90 degrees, and 120 degrees at the front of the bay window so that there is an uninterrupted visual field of all apartments across the street and above the storefronts (they were positioned at a 25 degree rise). This busy hive of televisions behind the store downstairs was Enrico’s cozy escape from his agonizing mother Annunciata, whose joints, stomach, head, eyes, feet, hands, hips and neck were in constant pain so that even those on the other side of walls would know about it.
And by then, dear Miss Martha had passed on, and her youngest grandchild, who had come to stay with her as she could no longer take her own walks down to the grocery store, had taken up residence in her apartment. Never having exchanged a word, Enrico watched her grow up and knew her intimately through the stages of her blossoming womanhood. Now that the Shankmeyers divorced, moved out, and the new resident hung thicker curtains, the routines of precious Shariah became his regular soap opera, full of desire, drama, and anticipation.
Shariah disturbed his hegemonic view into her life by installing a large bird cage in the kitchen window, so he lost the sight of her braless in her underwear making coffee, which later turned to green tea before this unruly obstruction. The cage housed what was, apparently, an African Grey Parrot, an ugly dull-feathered bird who compensated for his bland appearance with a piercing screech and ability to repeat whole sentences. This petty novelty that Shariah doted over was about as darling as a cataract. And speak it did. So loudly, in fact, that the few customers inside the camera store across the street commented of still being able to hear it.
But it was quiet in the back office, where thankfully no one could hear the rhythmic thumping, heavy breathing, and low groans of Enrico. From his sanctuary, he thought he had created a new Gaia. His favorite part of the day was the morning, when he could sit in the back, unbothered by customers, and watch her exercise routine. Every day around 9:30 it began. Neighbors had commented later how loud the aerobic video was, and how the bird would join in (you could see from the street in the kitchen window) moving its head back and forth, strutting across its bar, lifting its wings partway in a territorial stance and putting them slowly back down. Neighbors, however, did not see Shariah. One of the cameras looked up to her living room window, and with the help of a mirror on the wall, Enrico could get precious glimpses of a young lithe body becoming moist with sweat to a rhythmic video. Enrico could not hear the rhythm or the bird screaming with the video, “Rawk… I’m on fire!” but he could see it all from his own cat-bird seat – Shariah lunges, again, gritting her teeth she pushes back up, again. He loved to watch her work it as he gripped himself tighter and his forearm started to tire.
And the neighborhood loved to watch her parrot. When a car with loud music would creep past it would bob its head. On warm days when the window was open, people walking past would hear it squawk “hello” and would try to talk more with it. When the salon opened downstairs from Shariah, his “hello” developed a softer tone from his many exchanges with the ladies walking in and out. Salon owner Sofia, to this day, is still trying to get the bird to say “hello beautiful.”
Eventually, the hardware store at the corner changed hands and became a corner deli and bodega. They installed a neon light that said “OPEN” in a multicolored oval and another with their name “Rodrigo’s” written in cursive, which Rodrigo himself (an 86-year-old man with a half-wit son) thought was all a giant waste of money. The parrot was fixated on its colorful lights. When part of the Rodrigo’s sign developed a glitch and the “d” was blinking on and off (to which Rodrigo said, “Of course it did!”) the parrot would become entranced and squawk and dance, much to the amusement of the passersby.
On one of the first warm days of the year when everyone’s windows were open, a curious thing occurred.
On this unseasonably warm day, a man walked into Rorigo’s and ordered a submarine sandwich at 9:25 am. At 9:34 he walked out and headed down the block toward the camera shop. Biting into his sandwich – he must have been famished- caused the dog walking in front of the salon across the street to take notice and halt to head across the street toward the sandwich. This eventually caused its walker to stop and look up from his phone, long enough to notice three boys speeding down the street on their bikes. They all pull over to notice the parrot in the window, dancing along to the loud exercise video music coming from the apartment.
On that particularly lovely bright day an unsuspecting driver speeding late to an appointment was hopelessly tossed around by the sight of the blinking neon sign, the boys on bikes pointing at a window where several strange voices yell “I’m on fire!” and drifted leftward into oncoming traffic. Then he overcompensated his correction and drove right into the camera shop’s display window. One camera – several cameras – in the window hooked to a closed circuit TV in the office allowed Enrico to look away from Shariah long enough to see Sofia bend over to pick up something in the salon and then the car barreling in toward it just as he was about to come. Paralyzed with delight, he could do nothing but watch and listen to the crash. The display of zoom lenses tumbled around the car in a spray of sparkling glass while the driver stared, stunned, straight into the camera shop. That sight cost his insurance company a pretty penny because it was all caught on security video of the shoe store just down the street. Police found a half-eaten submarine sandwich near the accident, but the only witness they could consult, besides the driver, was Enrico, who saw it all.
No one was hurt, besides of course the camera and lens collection in Enrico’s store window, and Annunciata, whose screams were the first thing neighbors heard after the crash – she thought the floor was caving in! – whose only injuries, thankfully, were her pre-existing ailments, to which she succumbed not long after.
Enrico mourned the loss of his view; it was such a beauty to behold. So, with the help of some insurance money and small inheritance, Enrico set up a café in his old camera shop. He cleared out the hole left by the car and installed folding plexiglass walls where he serves panini and coffee on plastic tables and chairs for a four-star price, and the open-air seating is always full of spectators, watching the world pass by. Enrico’s closed circuit was restored, and he now records even more angles of the café and its neighborhood unmolested from the living room upstairs. However, now that he is the master of his abode, the spry 45 year old bachelor stands proudly at the door to his establishment, grinning widely under his thick glasses as he watches over his customers who just love this up and coming neighborhood. La vita è bella.
[1] (Italian) Life is beautiful.
Sandra Jones 
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