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  “Do not tell me. You'e a painter of icons!”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Those are the hands of a painter of icons. I'm certain of it.”

  Albertino looked first at the startling face from which the startling voice had emanated: the incarnadine lips, the plucked eyebrows, and the hair that seemed to have been frightened by the abundance of courses. Then he looked down at his stubby, soil-stained fingers, which thrust gingerly at the succulent food upon his plate.

  “No, no,” he said. “I'm a vegetable farmer.”

  The woman let out a rich, gurgling laugh. “Of course!” she cried. “And I'm the Holy Virgin!”

  Albertino kept his gaze upon the moist wedges of partridge that dangled between his thumb and forefinger. He was certain that this woman was not the Holy Virgin, but he was grateful nonetheless for the rousing manner in which she drew his attention away from Ermenegilda.

  “I knew you were an artist. I'm always right. I could have been a witch, you know. My cousin is a painter of icons — or should I say‘was’? Poor Bertoldo. So much talent simply swept away like a few crumbs on the terrazza. They say it's some kind of awful sickness, you know. Half of Naples dead, bodies everywhere. But I don't believe nine-tenths of what I hear these days. The Neapolitans eat too much garlic. In that kind of heat you pass out for three days and they bury you before you wake up again. I only hope poor Bertoldo was actually dead. Imagine yourself a great artist, a man of excruciating sensitivity, waking up in a wooden box because you ate too much garlic. Between you and me, it's what he deserves for going to live with those animals.‘The light,’he says — or said.‘You cannot imagine the light.’Well, light is light and Naples is Naples, and now the poor fool has nothing to paint but the inside of a wooden box. If I were you, I'd keep my apostles in the Veneto. You agree with me, don't you? I just know you agree with me.”

  Albertino was fascinated by the way the woman's head bobbed above the thick strand of pearls wrapped tightly about her neck. He imagined that if he were to remove those pearls, the head would topple onto the floor — all the while continuing to talk about his hands, the light, the cousin in the box.

  “I once met a Russian painter of icons,” she said. “He was very, very handsome, but he refused to paint the crucifixion. Absolutely refused. Which seemed somewhat cowardly of him. Don't you agree?”

  Albertino was on the verge of saying something, anything, when he became aware of an odd pressure against the inside of his ankle. As the woman continued talking — about Greek versus Roman statuary, about the inability of the eye to perceive the subtleties in a fresco without the aid of direct sunlight — he felt it move its way up to his knees, push in between his thighs, poke up under his tunic, and press quite firmly against his crotch. Once there it began moving back and forth in a rhythmic manner that rendered Albertino utterly speechless. It was all he could do to keep from moaning or from flinging up strips of dripping partridge to sizzle in the chandelier.

  For the remainder of the meal Albertino remained trapped between the embroidered musings of the shock-haired matron and the maddening ministrations of Ermenegilda 's foot. By the time the mulberry custard was served he had forgotten the tortured cabbage leaves and the ruined artichokes — indeed, everything that had happened since their idyll in the graveyard — and could only think of where, and how, he might be with her again.

  Ermenegilda had to fight back the feelings of arousal her footwork stirred inside her. She was not there for pleasure, and she resented the tingle of satisfaction the hardness beneath the sole of her stocking gave her. The feeling was so delicious, however, she decided it made no difference if it pleased her. So she downed her custard in a series of quick spoonings, reached across the flowers to take up Albertino's serving, and breathlessly excused herself from the table to accelerate the encounter. As she moved away from him, Albertino felt his modest organ fairly rip through his tights. Without even a nod to the shock-haired matron — who had advanced to theories concerning the overabundance of flies in the Adriatic in August — he rose from his seat and followed Ermenegilda out of the room.

  She led him down through the gilded mansion to the shadowy gates where the boatmen waited. Then she whispered something into one of their ears, stepped down into his gondola, and spread out her skirts as she seated herself. Albertino followed, and the boat set off.

  He hadn't the slightest idea where they were going. He was barely able to breathe. For as soon as the gondola began to wind its way down the canal, Ermenegilda placed her hand in the bowl of mulberry custard and lowered it into Albertino's tights. Albertino thought he would die from the sheer bliss of it — either convert into liquid and pour off into the lagoon or explode into fire and add a bead to one of the lesser constellations. Before the ecstasy could outrun itself, however, the boat stopped and Ermenegilda withdrew her hand. Albertino regained awareness of the stars, the smell of the torchlight burning, the sound of the water lapping against the stone shores of the fabricated island. When Ermenegilda climbed up out of the gondola he climbed out after her, his tunic smeared with mulberry juice, his tights stained and dripping with the clotted cream. He followed her as she moved through the enormous marble columns. He followed as she entered the piazza, a pawn trailing his queen across the ordered field of an Olympian chessboard. He followed as she approached the magnificent facade of the glorious basilica, until the great leaping horses and the kneeling saints and the majestic mosaic deities loomed like phantoms overhead. Then she lay back on the steps, tore down his demolished tights, and pulled him — custard-covered and gleaming in the moonlight — inside her.

  For Albertino, it surpassed their first encounter as a comet does a campfire. The unexpectedness of seeing her, the subtle workings of her foot, the slow torture of the cream inside his tights — all led him to a state of desire from which he knew he could never again retreat. No more resistance. No more denials. Only Ermenegilda — thighs and knees and hair and arms and all.

  And she — whose deft manipulations had drawn him back to her bosom — whose still aching heart had only that morning set to flame an entire patch of parsley and half a dozen rotten pears — who would have given anything to have him inside her again as late as June or even into early July — was carefully laying the trap that would ensnare him. For Ermenegilda's heart could stretch only so far without snapping. And Albertino had more than earned what she was about to do.

  Chapter 9

  As THE CAMPANìL began to take its place among the zigs and zags of the Riva di Pignoli landscape, the roosters, pigs, and ducks discovered it cast an altogether different shadow in sunlight than by the light of the quisling moon. Had they been able to describe it, they would have called it a flatness versus a roundness, a smooth-honed edge versus a scalloped irregularity. For as the stones and the wood and the mortar rose up by day, Piarina, in all her longing, rose up by night. Each evening she left her bed at precisely the hour at which she'd set out upon her fateful circuit of flame; each morning Piero found her sitting upon the uppermost stone, her fragile countenance like that of a banished monarch: slack, eviscerated, waiting for some sign from the forces of heaven to indicate what to do next. She was generally covered with birds: they sat on her knees and her shoulders like a gaggle of gossips and perched in her wispy hair as if it were straw. Piero had to fetch the ladder to bring her down, and though he removed it immediately once he had done so, she always managed to find her way back to the top again each evening without it.

  On recent mornings, when Piero placed Piarina upon the ground, she scampered off into the shadows as if she were afraid of what the rising light might reveal. Autumn had come to Riva di Pignoli. The fruit tree boughs sagged heavy to the ground or sprang back slender and empty. The triumphant greens lost their conquering vitality and began to make way for the ginger, rust, and blood that would succeed them. Even a spring-that-outdid-all-other-springs had to end sometime. The villagers only hoped they could preserve some of its richness to last t
hroughout the winter.

  The campanìl rose like a stone vine of ivy creeping up the side of the church, until finally, around the first week in October, it was finished. The villagers smoothed out a slightly domed roof over the rough walls and placed a small iron cross at the top; the only thing left to do was hoist the bells. The brothers of Boccasante, at Fra Danilo's insistence, had donated three great bronze bells to the island. They were to have been used for a second campanìl that was to have been built along the south wall of the monastery, but after having procured them from an order on Elba (which had closed the previous summer because of a scandal concerning the chief prelate and a neighboring flock of goats), the monks decided that a second campanìl might seem prideful. So they offered them to Piero, who accepted them gratefully and had them delivered to the Chiesa di Maria del Mare before the brothers could change their minds.

  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.