Simple Prayers (11 page)

Toward midafternoon, as the sun gradually began to relinquish its insistent supremacy in the pale blue sky, he saw Gianluca approaching the carrot patch with an unusual vigor in his gait.

“
Ciao,
little brother.”

“
Ciao,
Gianluca.”

“I'e brought you a pair of
coda di rospo.”

“Thanks.”

“Gesmundo Barbon said to grill them with a little sage. They'e too nice to fry.”

Albertino was surprised at his brother's carefree manner; considering the heat and the amount of work there was to be done, it seemed slightly ludicrous to him.

“How's the work today?”

“Fine, Gianluca.”

“And the carrots?”

“The carrots are fine.” Albertino raised a soil-flecked specimen to demonstrate. “Would you like to try digging up a few to see for yourself?”

“If you'd like that. It's a blazing day. I'm sure you could use a rest.”

Albertino paused midcarrot and looked up. “Are you all right?”

“I'm much better than all right,” said Gianluca. “I'm well, Albertino. Really, truly well.”

“Because if you'e serious,” said Albertino, “we could trade jobs for a while. I'l work the market, you work the fields.”

Gianluca thought about this for a moment and then shook his head. “It wouldn't work”.

“Why not?”

“You'e too good-natured. When I'm not there you give away as much as you sell. It's bad for business.”

“You'e lying, Gianluca. That's not why you won't do it.”

Gianluca drew his forearm up to his mouth and smoothed the silky hairs along his wrist with his lower lip; then a strange new light broke over his face. “She might come to market while I'm gone. I can't take the chance. Even now I might be missing her.”

Where Miriam's presence on Riva di Pignoli had turned Piero's spirituality into carnality, it had had precisely the opposite effect on Gianluca. From the first morning she had appeared at the market — her flowing hair tied back in one of Maria Luigi's silk ribbons, her clear, luminous eyes dancing briskly between the romano and the radishes — he'd felt a rising in his breast that was even greater than the usual rising at his groin. Not that he was oblivious of Miriam's body: Gianluca would have to have been dead not to notice the white throat as it curved beneath the loosened collar of her gown or the slightly tapered belly as she stood, suspended, before the strawberries. But where such charms had before been sufficient in themselves, they now seemed a stunning veil over something deeper — some quality beneath her flesh that produced an entirely new response beneath his.

“May I help you?” he'd asked, burning behind a pyramid of onions.

“Yes,” said Miriam. “I would like to buy some fruit.”

“Why?” he'd said, closing his eyes.

“Excuse me?”

“Why?” he'd repeated, opening them again to bask in her light. “You will only make them feel embarrassed to be seen beside the sweet
grape
of your eyes… the ripe
prugne
of your cheeks… the rich
ciliegie
of your lips…”

Miriam had turned and left without so much as an
albicocca
— so Gianluca had begun to court her. This was not an ordinary experience for him; he was used merely to swaggering up to whomever he happened to desire, leaning his strong, solid body against the frame of her door or the gate of her salting shed, and letting the honey pour down from his smiling eyes. Miriam, however, was different: from the moment he saw her, he could see no one else. So he had dedicated himself to a gentle, persistent wooing of her soul. Each morning, before he went to market, he would stand outside Maria Luigi's hovel and sing ballads in which Miriam chased the summer rains or stirred the winter breezes to blow. Each evening he would lay at Maria Luigi's door a pumpkin or a cantaloupe into which he'd carved, with a stickpin, a finely detailed scene of Miriam conversing with angels or dancing in a field of flowing wheat. The day now possessed two tasks and two tasks alone: selling the vegetables and winning Miriam.

“I'e never seen you like this,” said Albertino as he watched his brother's eyes gloss over. “It's very bizarre.”

“It's love, little brother. Reverent and holy love.”

“Reverent and holy?”

“I swear to you. I feel as if God has come and clapped me on the back and said,‘Take heart, Gianluca. It's not too late.’”

“Too late for what?”

“For God, for Christ's sake! For heaven and angels and holy ghosts. The whole ordeal.”

Albertino looked hard into his brother's eyes and saw the shimmer of halos and the white tips of furiously flapping wings.

“What about
Il BastÒn?”

“He's not quite convinced. But I'm working on him. He hasn't tried to thwart me so far.”

“And what about Piero Po?”

Gianluca fingered
Il BastÒn?
lightly and spat upon the ground. “Piero Po is an imitation insect with an obsession for what he lacks. I can't take such a bug seriously, and I'm sure she feels the same way.”

“That doesn't sound very Christian, Gianluca.”

“Some attitudes take longer to develop than others, little brother.”

“Tell that to
Il BastÒn,”
said Albertino, pointing to his brother's as-ever distended crotch.

“
Basta
!” said Gianluca, giving a playful swipe to Albertino's head. “I said I'm working on it.”

He tossed the pair of
coda di rospo
upon the basket of carrots; then he sauntered back toward market, whistling pale inversions of the liturgical chants he remembered from childhood mass. Albertino returned to the carrots, finishing out the rows he'd marked for that day before giving a look to what needed to be done tomorrow. Then he crossed the fields to the western docks and began rowing back to his island.

As he moved across the water, his body felt wonderfully well used from the day's long labor. Gianluca's visit stood out as a patch of oddity in an otherwise average afternoon, but Albertino chose to concentrate on the nice pair of
coda di rospo
he'd brought him for supper and the small basket of apricots he'd gathered himself to enjoy afterward. When he reached his island he docked swiftly, eager to hurry home and light the fire to cook the fish. But before he got even halfway to his room he completely lost his appetite.

It was not the first time it had happened. Two weeks earlier he'd found a basket of butchered artichokes by the east wall when he'd gone to empty his night bucket. Three weeks before that he'd come home to a slimy carpet of pulverized plums. But what he saw now made both those incidents seem like child's play.

Every last head of the radicchio patch had been brutally hacked off. Then one by one they'd been placed in a long, leafy arrow pointing accusingly toward the graveyard.

Chapter 7

A
T THE HEIGHT
of summer, Riva di Pignoli reeked of
cefalo, ombrina, ghiozzo, corvina, sogliole, rombo, acciugbe, sardina,
and
seppie.
Even with the continued bounty of the miraculous spring, the market energy slowed to a lazy peacock's strut and an invisible shroud of lethargy fell over the island. Fausto Moretti could be found, almost daily, standing perfectly motionless on the Calle Alberi Grandi. The three Marias tied poultices of lavender about their heads and stayed in bed until after sundown. Valentina took to standing with her head in the well, unaware that with Piarina's new state of mind she was placing herself in grave danger.

Yet despite the heat and the bitter stench, work on the
campanìl
kept on at a steady pace. There were no masons on Riva di Pignoli — no carpenters, no cutters, no mortar makers, no blacksmiths — but the villagers applied themselves to the various tasks of construction with a determined zeal. By mid-August the walls had risen above Piero's head and scaffolding had to be built to continue higher. A light wooden frame was erected outside the walls to complement the heavier one, which had been raised to support the bells, inside. Siora Bertinelli converted her second pastry oven into a kiln, and she and Siora Scabbri took turns roasting limestone into quicklime and placing it in a pit lined with clay to make a mortar that would, it was hoped, resist both time and beetles.

As the labor became more complicated and the structure began to take on a real shape, Piero asked the villagers to decide upon one afternoon a week in which they might all work together as a team; it no longer seemed likely they'd finish by the Naming of the Virgin, but he was hoping for at least the Feast of Michaelmas. Thursday afternoons were selected — and it was then that Miriam's subtle authority came into play. She seemed to hang on the fringe — sprinkling lime on the ropes, sharpening the axes with a whetstone — but in truth she was the central force that got the
campanìl
built. When the workers began to tire from climbing the frame with the heavy stones strapped to their backs, she devised a special pulley that could accommodate the multiknotted ropes and cut their labor in half. When the workers began to tire from heaving down on the weighted ropes, she casually observed that one of the empty
baccala
barrels would make an excellent windlass, and their work was halved again. She showed Siora Bertinelli how to tilt the mortar bucket so the mortar would not dry in the sun. She showed Paolo Guarnieri how to bend his knees when he lifted the lumber so his back would not go out. And her mere presence inspired Gianluca and Piero to scramble and hammer and hoist until the sweat poured off their bodies.

“How does it look?” Gianluca would shout as he placed the heaviest of stones at the highest of heights.

“
AtenziÒn
!” Piero would cry as he waved his arms to give instructions from the center of the field.

When Gianluca began his elaborate schemes to win Miriam, Piero had no choice but to try to court her as well. But where Gianluca's previous attempts at wooing had involved at least a grin and a shifting of the hips, Piero's had been virtually nonexistent. So now that he felt this strange fever in the backs of his legs and this spinning in his solar plexus, the only thing he could think to do was to follow her. Out through the waist-high grass that led to Siora Scabbri's henhouse, up the Calle Alberi Grandi to watch the evening sunset, he traveled behind her like a rat on an invisible leash. And gradually, as his footsteps behind her footsteps became a faint, familiar echo, he found himself having visions again.

They started with snakes. Tiny, slithery snakes with opalescent eyes, which gradually gave way to bloated, seething, monstrous snakes whose faceted skins reflected Piero's face in endless distortion. They emerged, in coiling numbers, from the base of the stump where he slept. They spread across the grassy expanse that footed the Chiesa di Maria del Mare. They wove themselves, like a chain of poison, into an intricate, ever-writhing ring — out of the center of which rose Miriam.

Miriam, in a cloud of light. Miriam, daubed with honey, dusted with dry snow, naked, breasts shining, arms floating, eyes glistening.

Piero watched as his own naked form moved in toward the light. But then he stopped. For before he could reach her, the serpentine circle began to transform itself into a twisting band of horned beasts, hell-sprites covered with tangled hair, three-faced demons with flaming bellies — and dragons. Piero had not seen such dragons since his days at Boccasante: malevolent creatures with steam-soaked wings, great polished devils with lightning-and-onyx eyes. They bristled in a foul
balotondo,
they mocked the pale simplicity of his and Miriam's nakedness. And they kept him from her. With their scabbed, scaly backs they raised a fortress between their bodies, with their hot, ashen breath they cast a screen between their souls.

Piero could not help but think of the swollen, blackened body; it circled in his mind the way the beasts and dragons circled in his dream. He could not shake the memory of its bloated limbs, the smell of its putrifying flesh. And though he did not know how his visions were related to the corpse, he knew that there would be no easy path to Miriam.

WITH THE EXCEPTION
of Orsina's self-interested donation of stone for the central monument, the Torta women contributed virtually nothing to the construction of the town center.

“I will not stand in the mud with a bunch of filthy peasants to help build some holy sand castle,” announced Orsina when Piero came to ask for her and her daughters’help.

But even if Orsina and the three Marias had agreed to raise the uneven structure with their own eight hands, there was a crisis within the walls of the Ca’Torta that would have kept them from the task.

“It's awful!” cried Maria Prima. “It's like sleeping with your head inside a pig oven.”

“It's digusting!” cried Maria Seconda. “My room smells like a cesspool!”

“You'e got to stop her, Mama!” cried Maria Terza. “She's going to burn the whole house down!”

For as if the smell of fish at the height of summer were not punishment enough, Ermenegilda had begun burning produce in her bedroom. Each day she would venture out of the Ca’Torta at
mezzogiorno
with a great straw basket slung over her shoulder and would not return until it was filled to the brim with turnips and mulberries and dandelions and fennel and watercress and maudlinwort and daisies. Anything that grew — anything that blossomed, either wild to the wind or carefully cultivated — was fair game to Ermenegilda.

When she got it home she would dump it all in the center of a small pyre she'd built at the foot of her bed and then set it on fire with one of the long wooden matches she'd had Romilda Rosetta steal from the kitchen. The flames were never very great, but the smell was horrific — it stank like the end of the world, like a hog in heat, like a river of dung peppered over with last week's vomit. To Ermenegilda, however, it was merely the faded perfume of a love affair come undone.

For the first few weeks, Orsina tried to ignore it. Her room was farthest away from Ermenegilda's, and to be honest, she was somewhat frightened of her youngest daughter. But now that the fumes were in danger of asphyxiating the entire household and the complaints of the three Marias were becoming intolerable, she soaked a linen handkerchief in some marigold and rose water and went to have a talk with her.