Father Elio had to smile when he recalled how he had warned those boys, “If anyone comes to Santo Fico, it will be a miracle.” How could he have known that what they had in mind was a whole summer of miracles . . .
Suddenly, Father Elio sat up with a jerk and held his breath. In the adjoining closet Maria Gamboni had stopped talking. The old priest had no idea exactly when her words had stopped, but he had certainly heard something that had abruptly caught his attention. Maria Gamboni had growled at him. It was a low, rumbling, menacing sort of growl and he found it quite unsettling. He strained to listen, but now all he heard from the other side was the sound of the old woman’s heavy breathing.
In her adjoining cubicle, Maria Gamboni also strained forward with her eyes wide in both amazement and no small amount of fear. In all the years that she had been making her confessions to Father Elio, at no time, as far as she could recall, had he ever growled at her. But she had definitely heard it—a distinct growl. And now she too heard stirrings next door. He was leaving the confessional.
The old woman opened her door and peeked out and in the shadowed cathedral light she discovered Father Elio also peeking out of the adjacent door, staring back at her in a curious fashion.
“Excuse me, Father. Did you . . . ehh . . .”
Just as he was about to ask her a similar question, from outside the church came a low, rumbling growl. And it was getting louder. Father Elio, followed closely by Maria Gamboni, hurried down the empty aisle to the front of the church. Whatever grumbling beast was doing this growling, it was arriving just beyond the cathedral doors.
What greeted them outside was a blast of hot air, blinding sunlight, and the spectacle of a blue and white sightseeing bus straining up the last steep street leading into the center of Santo Fico. Its gears ground painfully and the engine groaned in anguish as the stunted little tour bus rounded the corner and drove past the church. The bus appeared to have been transported from a previous decade. It was too fat and too tall with exaggerated windows and it was only about a third the proper length. From where they stood on the church steps, Father Elio and Maria Gamboni stared dumb-founded into the vacant eyes of a dozen bewildered travelers trapped behind dusty windows.
The little bus made a slow exploratory circle around the piazza, using the empty fountain in the middle of the square as a pivot point. At one time the marble fountain was quite a centerpiece for the small piazza. The central pedestal was made of white marble and topped with a smiling cherub tipping some sort of jug that once poured an endless stream of water into the surrounding pool. But the cherub’s bottomless jug had been dry for many years and the only water that graced the pool anymore came during the rainy season. Nowadays the monument best served as a turnaround point for lost buses and a bench for old men.
At that moment one old man sat on the edge of the fountain watching the one-bus-carousel revolve slowly around him. A skinny gray dog lay at his feet, and as the bus rolled by, raising a cloud of dust and diesel exhaust, the dog lifted his head curiously. The old man scratched the white stubble on his chin and apparently decided that some greeting was in order because he offered them a friendly wave. The gray dog went back to sleep.
From their front-row seats behind the sun-baked glass the visitors had a wonderful view of all the high points of Santo Fico on their orbit around the town square. First, of course, came the blessed Church of Santo Fico, and standing on the church steps was an old priest with a wild shock of white hair and a bewildered smile that, like his hair, seemed to be gripped in perpetual surprise. It was sad, the observers thought, that there should be such a deformed lump growing out of the old priest’s back, but on closer inspection the lump blinked two frightened eyes at them. Even though Father Elio was a short man, Maria Gamboni was shorter still and as thin as a weed. And since both she and her priest tended to wear the same shade of black, and because at this moment the old woman was clinging to his back like a growth and peeking around his shoulder, their mistake was understandable.
The bus continued its extended left turn toward Santo Fico’s newest building—the Palazzo Urbano. Built before the turn of the century to house all the government offices, the faded two-story palazzo now stood empty and in disre-pair. Most of the windows were locked and shuttered and apparently nobody had even mentioned the word
paint
in its presence for many years. One small room on the ground floor remained open to serve as a postal drop for the obnoxious young man who came over from Grosseto every Tuesday and Friday with the mail.
The rest of their quick expedition around the cobblestone piazza showed a jumble of small homes and shops crawling down the town’s inhospitable slopes. Most of Santo Fico clung to the jagged cliffs above the sea by its fingernails, and many of the old buildings, like these newest visitors, seemed to be asking in surprise, “How did I get here?”
In a matter of seconds, the bus’s brakes screeched to a halt in front of a handsome old villa and the tour was complete. A weathered sign above the gate leading into the villa’s courtyard announced in fancy letters of faded reds, yellows, and greens that they had arrived at the Albergo di Santo Fico. With a gasp of gratitude the engine died and, except for a distant dog that continued to bark its personal protest, the village was silent again. Shiny tourist faces peered through the glass as if they had unexpectedly landed on the back side of the moon. Although they had no idea where they were, it was a safe bet that this place was not listed in any of their glossy, tri-folded, four-color brochures.
Back on the steps of the church, the novelty of the bus passed quickly for Maria Gamboni. She was impatient to get to her atonement.
“I think fifty today, Father. Don’t you think so? Don’t you think maybe fifty?”
Father Elio felt her insistent tug at his sleeve, but he was preoccupied with the bus. What was this bus doing here? Of course, it must be lost, but how strange, after so many years to have a tour bus become lost again. And with Leo Pizzola returning to Santo Fico just six weeks ago—a suspicious coincidence, he thought. He sighed as he also thought of all the finger waggings and forecasts of misfortune he could expect before this day was over—all because of Leo Pizzola’s return.
Since his return, rumors and speculations about what Leo Pizzola would do next ignited faster than grass fires. Gossip of scandal and doom is always engaging and the villagers enjoyed discussing these rumors as if they were omens. Even in the best of times insignificant incidents were good for at least a casual debate among the 437 inhabitants. And why not? For some time Santo Fico had only grudgingly conceded the passing decades, and the second half of the twentieth century visited only occasionally—and then, like this tour bus, usually by mistake. The inhabitants of Santo Fico no longer concerned themselves with unimportant things like the future. They had better things to do—like spending a cool evening at a verandah table with a friend, a glass of wine, and domino tiles, debating winds and cloud formations—or like sitting at their open windows studying how distant lightning storms changed the blues of the Tyrrhenian Sea.
Father Elio finally had to respond to the insistent yanks on his sleeve and so he patted Maria’s bony hand and said, “No, fifty is too many. It’s too hot. Ten is plenty.”
“Ten? Ten would be an insult to God!”
“All right, twenty. But no more than twenty.”
As he guided Maria back into the church where she could spend the next hour savoring every chastising moment of her penance, Father Elio stole one more glance across the piazza at the curiosity parked in front of his niece’s hotel. He liked the notion of these tourists staying for lunch. It meant that Marta would dress up her menu and that prospect made his mouth water.
At that moment a wiry little figure came hurrying up the street, following the route of the bus. Father Elio couldn’t help noting the appropriateness of Guido Pasolini’s lifelong nickname. It was more than just Topo’s short stature or slight build. It was also his gait; the way he moved with a comical jerking motion when he was excited. It couldn’t quite be called running, but might best be described as scurrying—like an excited little mouse.
Guido Pasolini didn’t notice Father Elio watching him from across the piazza. By the time the excited little Topo reached the hotel, he was dangerously out of breath. He’d run for almost a quarter of a kilometer up the hill and now his thin legs could barely hold him. But Guido Pasolini was not the type of fellow who failed to recognize opportunity when it presented itself and from the first moment he’d heard that diesel engine approaching, he was on the alert. When it rumbled past the open door of the Pasolini Fix-It Shop, it had taken him only seconds to abandon Signora Morello’s broken record player, grab his hat, and race out the door in full pursuit. Now, staggering up to the blue and white bus, gasping for breath, he tried his best to look uninterested.
Strolling nonchalantly by the bus, Guido knew that they would have to be getting out soon and opportunities pass quickly. So he hurried across the verandah and disappeared through the front doors of the Albergo di Santo Fico.
T
he silence of the empty lobby made Guido nervous and he felt the anxious urge to urinate. It was more than just his reasonable fear of the proprietress, Marta Caproni Fortino. It was also the hotel itself. The high ceilings and colorful tile floors were much more in keeping with a grand estate or important museum, and the stately rooms always made him feel slightly out of place.
Once upon a time the Albergo di Santo Fico had been a magnificent villa that, along with the church, had dominated the town for centuries. The villa had been in the Caproni family forever—that is to say, there was no memory of it ever having belonged to anyone else. According to legend, the villa had been built as a summer retreat for Cosimo de Medici, but the Grand Duke thought it was haunted by the ghost of his dead wife, Eleonora, and he refused to ever live there. When and how it actually came to the Caproni family is a detail lost in time and murky fables.
In any case, recent memory is reliable only back to about 1873 when Old Giuseppe Caproni (Father Elio Caproni’s father and Marta Caproni Fortino’s grandfather) decided to turn his family’s deteriorating villa into one of the finest hotels on the Toscana coast. It was certainly the most isolated, but the Albergo di Santo Fico occupied a prime spot on the piazza, directly in front of the juncture of two important roads. The smaller road bends around the hotel to a narrow cobblestone street that winds its way down to the sea. A wall of whitewashed shops and houses with terra-cotta roofs and colorful shutters lines one side of the street—and on the other side, a low stone barrier keeps the unwary or tipsy from plunging off the cliff-face road to the harbor below.
But it’s that other road just outside the hotel’s tall front doors—that road which the bus recently scaled amid a chorus of whispered prayers and curses—that has always been the more significant road. Centuries earlier it had been cut by hand through granite sea cliffs, and this is the road that leads inland away from Santo Fico, toward the Ombrone River and then farther on to Grosseto and beyond that, to the world.
Back then Old Giuseppe Caproni saw Santo Fico as a village with a future. He predicted that someday processions of holy pilgrims from all over Italy would trek to Santo Fico just to visit the Miracle and the Mystery of their blessed little church. Then his Albergo di Santo Fico would be a gold mine—as soon as the government widened that damn cliff road. But the old east road that was to bring the world to his hotel’s doorstep was never improved and the main highway never came closer to Santo Fico than seventeen kilometers. Many said that the tragedy of Santo Fico was how little that road has changed in four hundred years. But that was all too long ago for most memories. The village eventually just abandoned her dreams, resolved that opportunity had simply moved on, and settled into a comfortable obscurity.
Opportunity, however, can occasionally pull into even the most insignificant village and on this particular morning Guido Pasolini had it in mind that it was parked just outside—and the clock was ticking. He hurried through the lobby and directly into the restaurant. He wasn’t surprised to discover the large room empty, but better safe than sorry—so he called loudly enough to be heard, but not loud enough to be offensive.
“Marta . . .”
Silence.
He peeked through the open doors to the verandah and, sure enough, inside the bus the tourists were gathering their belongings to exit. The grumbling roar of its diesel engine had already announced the bus’s arrival to most of the village and Guido knew that shortly the square would be filling up with his curious neighbors. Guido also recognized the danger of venturing beyond the restaurant and into the kitchen without a direct invitation, but what choice did he have? If he was going to be the first to tell Marta of their arrival, he would have to hurry. It could be worth a reward— maybe lunch. The little man carefully stepped through the dining room’s swinging doors and entered the forbidden kitchen.
On a large stove, two steaming pots of water were threatening to come to a boil and the room smelled of fresh garlic and basil and onions and oregano. The door to the back garden was open, as were all the windows. The floor was still damp from a mopping, making the burnt umber tile an even deeper red.
“Woo-Whoo . . . Anybody here,” he pretended to call cheerily, but really it was just a loud whisper. The room was empty.
“Marta . . . Hel-llooo . . .”
Silence.
He was wise to be cautious. Marta Caproni Fortino had firm rules about outsiders in her kitchen and childhood friends were no exception.
“Marta . . . ?” A little louder this time.
“Topo! What are you doing back here?”
The voice came sharply from behind and above and it spun Guido around on his heels. Standing at the top of stairs that led from the kitchen to the family’s upstairs rooms, a young woman looked down on him with mild consternation as she carelessly wound her thick black hair into a yellow scarf.