Simple Prayers (16 page)

Though the completion of the
campanìl
constituted only a third of the projected work toward the construction of the new town center, the people of the island felt a celebration was in order. And as the excessive spring had led to an exceptionally abundant harvest, it was decided that the raising of the bells should coincide with an enormous
pranzo della vendemia.
The Feast Day of Flavio Ubaldo was chosen: on that afternoon, in the third week of October, the entire island would gather to watch the bells be lifted into place, to hear Piero's plans for the new
campo,
and to feast upon the best of the season's bounty before storing what was left away. Calendars were marked, and the villagers began to make plans for the festivities.

Only Piarina remained outside the busy web of preparation and anticipation. For her the magic season of plenty had meant the loss of Ermenegilda. For her the completion of the
campanìl
meant she could rise no higher above the horror of her matricidal fantasies. There was nowhere to go but deeper inside. No place to find refuge but within the confines of a body that was growing thinner, and brighter, with each successive night's climb.

FOR EVERY OUNCE
that fell from Piarina's frame, a dozen were added to Ermenegilda's.

“More shrimp tarts,” she declared when Romilda Rosetta came to clear away her breakfast tray. “And don't forget the cardamom jelly.”

Romilda Rosetta was happy to comply. Since returning from her recent trip to Venezia, Ermenegilda had dismantled her stinking vegetable pyre and had adopted so sweet a tone (relatively speaking) that it seemed almost a pleasure to be at her beck and call; Romilda Rosetta felt that her suffering had turned a corner — that she had moved up from the fiery rings of Inferno to the more somber shadows of Purgatory. What she did not understand was that the cause of Ermenegilda's good cheer was the satisfaction she felt at having finally wrought revenge on Albertino.

On that fateful night, as they lay upon the steps of San Marco, the taut Venetian sky dropping graceful benediction on their spent and sweaty bodies, Ermenegilda had briskly moved her plan into action. After slipping out from under Albertino's sleeping body, she carefully removed his boots, his tights, his tunic, and his blouse until he lay naked as a plucked pea-fowl. Then she lowered her satin underskirt to the ground, tore it quickly into a series of slender ribbons, and began trussing up her inconsistent lover: she tied his left hand, on a leash, to the door of the great basilica; she drew his right arm across his chest and bound it tight to his body; she pulled his left ankle back and wrapped his shin to his thigh; she knotted half a dozen ribbons together and strung his right leg to the base of a nearby flagpole. Then she fashioned a bow around his limp little penis and left him to the pigeons.

Albertino, as he was wont to do, slept on. It was only toward dawn, when an elderly woman who came to sweep the
piazza
found him lying there and gently shook him by the shoulder, that he became aware of his situation.

“Is it some kind of penance,
amore?”
asked the woman.

Albertino swallowed. “In a manner of speaking.”

She looked at him for a moment and then shrugged. “Seems a good way to catch cold,” she said.

She began to walk off, giving a sweep to the stones with every few paces, when Albertino called her back.

“Do you think you could untie me?” he asked.

She turned and looked at him again. “If you like.”

And with a terrific nonchalance she returned to where he lay and began to loosen his various bonds. When she had finished, and Albertino sat rubbing the dull cramp in his sore left calf, she pointed to the bow between his legs.

“I wouldn't call attention to it if I were you,
amore,”
she said.

Albertino looked down at the sad little bow tied fast to his manhood, but even humiliation couldn't dampen his desire for Ermenegilda. She had finally broken though his defenses, and nothing she either said or did could ever turn him away from her again. While the old woman shuffled off across the piazza to begin her morning labor, Albertino lowered the heraldic banner that flew above the flagpole, wrapped himself up in its colorful folds, and hailed a passing dairy barge to take him back to the Palazzo del Ponte. When he got there, the servant who answered the door seemed not in the least surprised to find him barefoot and bedraggled, wearing only the Lion of San Marco; Albertino wondered what had become of the other guests of Sior del Ponte's parties. With little fuss the servant found Albertino's clothes (still hanging in the changing room), his box (on a shelf by a window in an antechamber of the dining salon), and his boat (tied to a blue-striped pole by an
entrance
to the garden down a side canal), and within an hour of waking naked on the steps of San Marco, Albertino was rowing back to Riva di Pignoli across the open waters of the lagoon.

When he arrived at the island he docked his boat and headed straight to the vegetables. Piero was pacing between the parsnips and the rutabaga as he quietly entered the north end of the garden.

“Albertino!” he cried when he saw him. “How did it go? Did you meet Sior del Ponte? Did you bring back the tiles?”

Albertino nodded. “They'e in my boat,” he said. “Twenty-seven boxes. I'l help you unload them later.”

“That's wonderful!” cried Piero. “But where have you been? What took so long?”

“I don't have time to explain,” said Albertino. “But perhaps you can tell me if you'e seen Ermenegilda?”

“Ermenegilda? She's probably still sleeping. You know how the Tortas love to stay in bed.”

Albertino considered explaining that at least on this particular morning, Ermenegilda had good reason to want to stay in bed. But instead he simply turned and walked away. As he crossed the fields, he passed Siora Scabbri cleaning out the seed bins for the hens.

“Have you seen Ermenegilda?” he asked.

“I'm afraid not, Albertino,” she said. “Has she been at your vegetables again?”

But Albertino did not stop to reply. He did not know whether Ermenegilda was at home or if she had even returned to the island, but he could not control his need to see her. He strode past the still sleeping market stalls and crossed the open fields that backed the Chiesa di Maria del Mare until at last he arrived at the door of the Ca’Torta.

“I'd like to see Ermenegilda,” he said to the servant who answered his knocking, a grizzled fellow who had been with the Tortas exactly two weeks and had already posted his notice.

“One moment,” said the servant, who passed the message to Romilda Rosetta, who passed it to Ermenegilda, who laughed so hard that the swinging bed began to corkscrew.

The carved oak door was shut firmly in Albertino's face — but the following day, and the day after that, and every day since the morning after the evening of their passionate second encounter, Albertino rose as soon as the sun peeked over his east wall, took his tiny
barca da pesca
across to the shores of the main island, made the small trek through the wet fields to the door of the Ca’Torta, and promptly knocked on it again. He did not seem to notice when the servants changed; he simply cleared his throat and said in an even voice, “I'd like to see Ermenegilda.”

It was this message that was once again delivered to Romilda Rosetta on the morning she went to replenish the empty tray with shrimp tarts some two weeks after the incident at San Marco. And when she returned to Ermenegilda with both tray and message, the great girl's response was no less mirthful than it had been at each previous morning's announcement.

“He'd like to see Ermenegilda!” she giggled, sliding down between the goose-down quilting and the satin sheets. “He'd like to see Ermenegilda!”

Romilda Rosetta watched as she lifted a steaming shrimp tart from the polished silver platter. But before putting it into her mouth, Ermenegilda paused. “Hold out your hand,” she said.

Romilda Rosetta did as she was told — and with a red fist Ermenegilda squeezed the savory tart into a tight clump, and a tricolored ooze of pastry, fish, and fat drizzled out into her hand.

“Give it to him,” she said. “With love — from Ermenegilda.”

Romilda Rosetta hurried from the room, and Ermenegilda reached for another shrimp tart. But the smell of the hot pastry suddenly made her feel sick. So she threw the tray across the room, buried her head beneath the pillows, and tried to keep her laughter from giving way to the wail that was forming inside her gut.

PIERO ONLY HOPED
that his haste in burying the swollen body could be corrected by a more intentional second effort. He'd found little in Marcus Aurelius to guide him — nor Cicero nor Livy nor Dante nor Aristotle nor Ovid. There was much mention of death, and a surprising number of dead bodies, but nothing indisputable on the subject of “a proper burial.” So he decided to treat it as he would have treated any ordinary citizen of Riva di Pignoli: by taking it to the cemetery, giving it a small formal service, and leaving the rest to God. He waited until the new moon, when even the cats had a hard time telling one passing villager from the next, and then went to the north rim of the island, where he set about to dig up the body.

He had not ventured out to the field of wild thyme since just after the spring had come. Yet even on a moonless night, in the heart of an encroaching autumn, he could tell when he'd reached it by the delicate sweetness that laced the air. He dug for over an hour, careful as he reached the body not to nick or disfigure it with the sharp mouth of his shovel, and as he removed the final layers of soil the most horrifying smell rose up. Piero could barely keep from retching, and it was only after he'd torn the left sleeve off his tunic and had tied it securely over his nose and mouth that he could allow himself to climb down into the grave to loosen the stinking fellow from the earth. Without a moon he had nothing to go by but torchlight, and in the wildly flickering shadows he often could not tell what he was grabbing. The body seemed unfathomably heavy; he tried and he tried, but he could not make it budge. Then, suddenly, it wrenched free — and he found to his surprise that it was both lighter and more malleable than when he'd first come upon it some six months earlier. It gave in his arms, was stiff in places and like jellied mush in others. And when he finally pulled it from the ill-fashioned plot and laid it on the cold, damp ground, he found that it was covered from head to toe with snails. For the next hour — taking periodic intervals to walk a good distance away, slip off the sleeve, and take in deep draughts of the fresh night air — he sat snapping their hard shells off its face, its chest, its legs, and its back and out of the tangled mass of its slimy hair. Then he filled up the gaping hole and dragged the sad, reeking mess to his waiting boat.

It was an agonizing trip across the small stretch of water. Piero had no explanation to offer as to why he was moving a partially decomposed body from one shore to the other; if some insomniac islander had chanced to come upon him, he would have been as frightened by the look on Piero's face as by the creature lying fetid at his feet. When he reached the shores of the cemetery island, he proceeded with caution past Albertino's room — though had he tossed the body over the east wall, to land on his blankets beside him, Albertino would have just rolled over and continued dreaming of Ermenegilda.

He managed to drag the body through the rusted-open gate, past the still flowering rose bushes, and over to the south wall and a patch of unused earth that sat waiting between Sineraldo Saccardi and Apollonia Ambrosiana Barbon. As quickly as he could (and by now he was quite exhausted), he dug another plot and lowered the body in; then he softly recited a brief Latin mass, scattered a handful of pignoli over the corpse, and covered it back over with earth.

When he returned to the main island and his broad stump near the Chiesa di Maria del Mare, he gazed up to the top of the
campanìl
to see if Piarina was there. The night was so dark he could barely tell; he could just make out her ragged form as a patch of blackness blocking out the October stars. He felt a peacefulness at having reburied the body, which he wished he could communicate to her; he somehow felt that if she knew what he had done, it would ease her troubled mind. But Piarina was too deep inside her trance to receive anything he might have shared with her, so he curled himself up beneath a blanket and slipped off into sleep.

MIRIAM'S SOLACE CAME
from the solitude of her homemade altar. She knelt before it when she rose in the morning, when she returned in the evening from her chores in the henhouse, and just before she lay down at night to sleep. As the weeks went by, however, it became harder and harder to kneel: even with the strip of satin beneath her knees, her growing belly demanded a more relaxed position. So, like Ermenegilda in her splendor before her loom, Miriam took to propping herself up on a series of large pillows, leaving one hand free to hold
The Praise and Glory of the Virgin,
the other to comfort the restless child inside her.

“Easy,” she said to it now as it bucked beneath her fingers. “If we'e patient — if we'e quiet —it'l come.”

Ever since the baby had begun, Miriam could see a thin veil of light around things, a kind of luminous skin that made the objects themselves seem ephemeral. It began with the altar: the statue of the Virgin suddenly lost its hardness and became fluid; the bolts of linen started to glow; the straw at her feet began to pulse with an inner fire. It lasted only an instant, but for the span of that instant her longing dissolved — so Miriam found herself longing for the return of the glow. At first it came only when she knelt before her altar, but then she began to experience it throughout the day. She would be gathering the eggs and one would suddenly begin to vibrate in her hand — it would cease to be an egg, would become a ball of fire, an expression of pure energy — and by the time she'd laid it inside her basket, her entire morning was transformed. Sometimes it happened with the water jug, or the pine trees, or the Vedova Stampanini's face: like a loosened mask, the features would slip away until all that remained was radiance.