Simple Prayers Page 3

  “At midnight?”

  “At midnight.”

  “On the dock to my island?”

  “On the dock to your island.”

  Albertino swallowed hard. “Then what?”

  Ermenegilda smiled a broad, honey-dappled smile. “Then,” she said, “we make the spring come.”

  Albertino looked into her ravenous eyes, and though his face registered nothing he knew exactly what she had in mind. What troubled him was that he could not be altogether certain that what she had in mind could not bring the spring. So he turned, placed his hat upon his head, and headed out the front gate.

  Ermenegilda watched as he headed off toward the meadow. Then she closed the carved-oak door and climbed the first-, the second-, and the third-floor staircases to reach the chambermaid's quarters, from where she could follow him across the island until he reached his tiny barca da pesca. For a moment, as she knelt down before the low, arched window that opened beneath the slanting roof, she was distracted by the sight of another figure dragging what looked like a body toward the lip of the lagoon. But then she spotted Albertino, moving across the dry field like a heartsick badger, and all thoughts dissolved around the sweetness of that image.

  A spring Albertino wanted a spring. And although Ermenegilda knew as much about agriculture as she knew about alchemy, there was someone who just might be able to help her bring it. It was only a hunch — and it traded upon a softness she did not like to admit — but Albertino wanted a spring. And if it meant actually having him in her arms at last, Ermenegilda was going to get him one.

  Chapter 2

  VALENTINA'S ABUSIVENESS reached its peak when she tried to drown Piarina in the well. The starry child had spent the entire morning cleaning out the hearth, cheeks and forehead turning a murky gray. Yet regardless of her efforts to help, those knobby knees and that phantomlike flyaway hair drove Valentina into a more-than-usual rage. When Piarina slinked out to the well to get the water for the baking, Valentina followed her; as Piarina bent over to scoop it out, Valentina gave a large whack to her little body and the child tumbled over the edge, hitting her head and knocking herself unconscious. When Valentina realized what she'd done — and that she might still need the girl to turn the eel pasties — she called Gesmundo Barbon to fetch her out, cursing the child's clumsiness and the stupidity of having to draw from a well on an island surrounded by water.

  It was not a usual mother's affection.

  Six months earlier, Valentina had gotten so angry at supper, when Piarina had insisted on squashing open all the peas in her pease pudding, that she'd grabbed the sewing shears and cut off all of Piarina's hair, except for one rebellious clump in the center of her head. She'd painted this clump bright red and in the morning had set Piarina out with the roosters. Then there was the time with the quilting pins. On the time with the roofing pitch. Valentina knew Piarina was only a child, but there was something in the girl's spirit that created a jangling in her nerves, so that the smallest of her actions led to a series of offhand whacks and casual kicks that made the frail-limbed Piarina sink deeper and deeper into a private world.

  Valentina, whose ruddy, robust figure was in direct contrast with Piarina's gamine form, had had her left hand crushed in a rye mill when she was seventeen. She kept a severed hoe handle tied to her left forearm, which she managed to use to remarkable effect, but she used only her flesh on Piarina. Still, on the day of the incident at the well, something snapped. From the time Gesmundo Barbon carried her bent and dripping into the hut and laid her upon the stiff straw bed, Piarina stopped speaking. At first Valentina prodded her, with the tip of her red, right forefinger. When that didn't work she tried calling her names. Faccia-muto, Sordo Maria. La MaravÈgia Senza Lingua. But nothing she either said or did could raise a sound from Piarina. And though she continued to beat the child as regularly as she had before, without at least an occasional yelp something of her pleasure in it was lost.

  In time the silence seemed normal. They both began to listen for the rush of the wind through the low thatched roof and the rustling of the rats as they ran across the floor of their filthy one-room hovel. Valentina worked long into the night, making the soap she sold by day. Only a few of the families on Riva di Pignoli actually bought it, as the wax she used smelled of lye, but she was proud to have kept things going with one hand, no husband, and such a sorry runt of a daughter. What difference did it make, in the long run, if the girl could speak? Couldn't she clean the soap knives just as well? Couldn't she do the baking? Valentina ceased to worry about it and in time almost forgot that the child had ever said a word.

  Then, one year after the attempted drowning, one year of haunting looks and long, cryptic silences, Piarina spoke again. It was early evening and they were sitting by the pathetic little fire that coughed and sputtered in the crumbling hearth. Valentina coughed, too; she'd been suffering for two weeks with a terrible chest cold and a painful sore throat and could find nothing to ease her discomfort. Piarina listened to the dry rattle as she sat hunched on all fours at Valentina's knees; despite the violence that had shocked her speechless, Piarina loved nothing more than to sit at her mother's knees by the pale flame of the evening fire. Now, without the slightest flourish or the thought that there was anything at all unusual in it, she suddenly said:

  “Rhubarb leaves, in honey water, with small pieces of pinecone.”

  Valentina thought the ghost of her dead mother had come down through the hearth and into the tiny hut, so used was she by now to her daughter's silence. When she realized that it was Piarina who had spoken, and not the flames, she did not express so much as a single syllable of either gratitude or joy.

  “Jesus Savior, Piarina,” she said, giving the girl's head a slight knock so that her fine, wispy hair flew up in alarm. “You scared the breath right out of me.”

  Piarina looked up into her eyes and repeated the phrase. “Rhubarb leaves,” she said, “in honey water. With small pieces of pinecone.”

  Valentina tweaked her ear sharply. “Don't speak nonsense, girl. I'd rather have you mute.”

  Piarina reached up and placed her hands on the red and swollen throat. “Rhubarb leaves,” she said once more. “In honey water. With small pieces of pinecone.”

  She ducked this time as Valentina's hand flew out to whack her, but she would not give up. Over and over, like a prognosticating parrot, she repeated the strange prescription. Finally, in sheer exasperation, Valentina got up, went to the table, mixed some honey in some water, crushed up a few rhubarb leaves, pounded down a pinecone to a fine dust, and stirred it all together.

  “Like having a retarded animal for a child,” she said as she drank down the bitter mixture.

  In the morning, however, when her sore throat and cough had completely vanished, Valentina was of a slightly different mind.

  “How'd you do that, girl?” she asked the delicate child as she peered down into her sleeping face. But though Piarina woke with a start, she did not make a sound. She simply placed her hands against her mother's now cool throat and smiled her glittery, crooked smile. And no amount of Valentina's encouragements (like dropping chunks from the ice block down her torn and baggy tunic) could raise another word.

  Piarina returned to her chores, Valentina to her casual rage. But she was wary of the child now. She stole looks at her when she was bent over strewing calamint in the straw; she sat staring at her for hours after the weary thing had fallen asleep (when Piarina fell asleep she did it literally — she entered into night and dreams with a tumbling intensity that left deep, dark bruises). Something had shifted in Piarina. Something had changed. And Valentina was determined to figure it out.

  One morning, about two weeks after she had cured her mother's sore throat, Piarina woke to find Gesmundo Barbon sitting quietly at the foot of her bed. At first she thought she was still asleep: the squashed face and squat body seemed like the traces of some faded nightmare. Her mother's voice, however, stung her quickly into daylight; no dream co
uld ever reproduce the cutting edge that sound had for Piarina.

  “All right, Siorina Magica. Go ahead. Let's see you find a cure for Sior Barbon.”

  Piarina looked at the gross, lumpy man: his skin had gone yellow, and there were broken splotches on his arms, throat, and forehead. Even at her mother's command she could not bear to look at such an unpleasant sight so early in the morning, so she closed her eyes and slid down until her entire body was safely under the covers.

  “You come right back out here!” shouted Valentina. “Or you'l have to find a cure for yourself!”

  Piarina didn't move. But underneath the covers she closed her eyes, and underneath the covers she concentrated — and eventually her small, thin voice made its way up through the infested blankets like a trickle of steam rising out through a flaw in the kettle.

  “Two large turnips, boiled and diced. A pinch of comfrey, a pinch of mugwort. Mix with vinegar. Chill. Apply to hip and neck.”

  Gesmundo Barbon ran out of the hut before Piarina could resurface, but the next day he sent over six fresh sogliole to express his thanks. From then on, whenever the people of Riva di Pignoli felt ill, they called on Piarina. She cured the Vedova Stampanini's rheumatism and the Vedova Scarpa's gout. She removed Fausto Moretti's limp, and she diagnosed Anna Rizzardello's bloated stomach as twins. There was never anything logical about Piarina's cures, they simply worked: physical or mental, terminal or temporal, there was nothing she couldn't fix. She could even tell a bluff.

  “Crush five rotten olives in six spoons of lard. Add four pinches of wormwood, two sarde, and three beads of coriander. Grind together. Swallow morning and evening.”

  This was what she prescribed for Brunetto Fucci when he came to prove her a fraud. Brunetto Fucci was the island's apothecary. He never cured anyone of anything, but without a surgeon, or even a barber-surgeon, to tend their ills, the people of Riva di Pignoli had no choice but to go to him. When Piarina's powers came to light, however, Brunetto Fucci's livelihood became endangered. So he feigned a strange malady of the stomach and set out to prove her magic useless. Piarina wasn't concerned. She merely prescribed the worst-tasting thing she could think of and let Brunetto Fucci try to cure a real stomach malady. After a week of acute diarrhea — and no improvement in business — he purchased a new sign for his shop and went into spice selling.

  When Piarina began her cures, Valentina stopped beating her. For a while. But the habit was too deeply ingrained; she could hardly look at the glow in the dizzy girl's eyes without wanting to give her a good wallop. So despite the fact that Piarina's cures brought in a little extra money, Valentina soon began her old, familiar violence. Neither of them ever knew when the dark passion would come over her; neither of them could ever guess whether it would be a slap to the back of the head, a jab beneath the rib cage, or a blunt kick in the shins. But to Piarina it was all equal. Soon the witchcraft became just another chore: wash the clothes, weed the garden, cure Maria Luigi's sciatica. Her spirit curled up like a lemon rind in the sun, and her voice, when she used it at all, shrank down to a faint, embryonic whisper.

  The situation might have stayed that way if Ermenegilda hadn't become ill. Even with the renown of her cures, the Torta family had stayed away from Piarina's door. If Maria Prima had the grippe, or Maria Seconda an inflamed foot, Orsina would order in a specialist from Padova and pay whatever price was asked to be certain that her daughters got the best treatment in Italia. That the best treatment in Italia was often nothing more than guesswork didn't bother Orsina; the prestige of the physician's degree was what mattered.

  The finest physicians, however, could not help Ermenegilda. They tried bloodletting, phlebotomy, cautery, and cupping, but she just continued thrashing in her sleep and sweating through her bedclothes as her skin turned a scaly green. Finally, after several months of pain and at least two dozen physicians, her condition was diagnosed as “untreatable, incurable, and basically hopeless.” It was only then, in a dramatic burst of Sicilian despair, that Orsina allowed Romilda Rosetta to take her to see Piarina.

  To Piarina it was just another diagnosis. She was surprised at how fat the girl was, and how finely dressed, but otherwise she took little notice of her. She promptly prescribed ten drops of agrimony, two eggs laid precisely at midnight, a few, black mustard seeds, and a fistful of fresh earth. These were to be blended together and tied into a poultice, which was then to be tied securely over her buttocks. Piarina went through her usual process — the closed eyes, the palms at her temples, the momentary trance. But something unexpected happened to Ermenegilda. In the midst of her excruciating pain, as she watched the cock-eyed waif press her fluttery eyelids tight and sift through the field of images that flashed across her seven-year-old brain, Ermenegilda fell in love. It was not a sexual love, like the yearning she felt for Albertino Tonolo — a love that set her toes on fire and made her sit in the Torta garden eating lamprey with hot sauce as the sun came up — but it was love all the same. Piarina seemed so odd, so completely unknowing, Ermenegilda's wrathful heart simply melted away.

  When the great girl waddled out of the hut, followed by the molelike maid no bigger than Piarina herself, Piarina considered it to have been a cure like any other cure; two days later both she and Valentina knew that their lives had changed forever. Ermenegilda showed up at the door looking fatter and pinker and gayer than she had ever looked in her life, and she brought with her a fleet of Torta servants bearing all manner of gifts: chickens, pigs, and geese; harrows, tubs, and jugs; wardrobes, lanterns, pillows, pitchforks, and lace. But most of all she gave Piarina something the young girl had never known before: the attention and affection of a loving heart. In the late afternoon, while the sun was descending, Ermenegilda would burst into the hut, scoop Piarina up in her arms, and carry her to the western shore to watch the last of the light disappear into the lagoon. When Piarina was sunk in the straw cleaning the tallow knives, Ermenegilda would ease open the door, sneak up behind her, and tickle her until the featherweight child nearly floated away. The two girls rarely did anything, they merely sat together — Ermenegilda on the ground, Piarina curled up gently in her lap. What mattered was contact. What mattered was the warmth of the other's body and the snug feeling of acceptance.

  It was therefore to Piarina that Ermenegilda turned when Albertino came to see her about the spring. She wasn't certain the girl's powers could extend that far — and if they could, she couldn't think why she hadn't already used them — but her instincts told her that most likely no one had thought to ask her, and that she was far too unassuming to have suggested it herself. So after Albertino left her on the morning of his strange request, Ermenegilda headed out across the island to find her.

  Piarina was sitting in front of the hut plucking a chicken when Ermenegilda arrived. When she saw the familiar shape moving toward her, a great, lustrous smile broke out on her face. As she ran toward the gate, she tripped and fell forward; when she rose, dark clumps of dirt were stuck to her tunic and pressed in her flyaway hair, but the smile remained as wide and as glowing as if she'd been carried to her friend on angels’wings.

  When she reached Ermenegilda she reached up and lightly patted her soft, full cheeks with both hands: her usual form of greeting. Ermenegilda lifted her up, tucked her snugly between arm and hip, and carried her, laughing, to their favorite spot out behind the compost heap. For a long while they just sat there, cradled against each other, Ermenegilda stroking the fine wisps of the fey girl's hair. But Ermenegilda was too full aflame with thoughts of Albertino, so she broke the silence and explained why she'd come.

  “He says he needs the spring. He says he needs the carrots to grow, and the dandelions and the blackberries. I don't know if you can do that, but I want you to try. For Albertino. For my funny, silly, stupid little love.”

  Piarina felt the fingers moving gently across her scalp; their light stroking was like wandering minstrel music to her. She hated to break the contact between them, but something in Ermeneg
ilda's voice made her slither out of her arms and crouch down before her in order to gaze into her eyes — where she saw a love so intense, she could barely balance herself on her heels. She realized that Ermenegilda had spoken of this love before, had even called it “Albertino,” but in that moment the force of its meaning struck her for the very first time. Yet much as she wanted to hate Ermenegilda — to drum her out of her heart for daring to harbor this other love — nothing could alter the effects of her affection. She could curse her, beat the ground, dive headfirst into the lagoon and swim to Serbia, but she could never change the fact that the great perfumed girl had held her, and pampered her, and shown her real love. So she lowered her eyes, placed her delicate hands on the barren soil, and nodded.

  “Do you mean it?” Ermenegilda asked breathlessly. “Do you mean you can do it?”

  Piarina nodded again, and Ermenegilda smothered her with gleeful kisses. Then they sank back into each other's arms and thought about how much toil, and how much pleasure, the coming night would bring.

  BY THE TIME Piero returned to the dock, the body had ripened considerably. He had to hold his breath as he dragged it to the north rim, and as the spring hadn't come there was not even the scent of thyme to relieve him when he got there. He had never buried a dead body before, and as he began to dig he discovered that the earth near the north rim was marshy and difficult. The sides of the plot kept sliding toward center, and he worried that with a little wind and a little rain, a hank of hair or a few toes might suddenly stick up above the surface. He could only hope that neither the cats nor the curious would ever find anything to interest them.

  As he laid the salty earth in on top of the body, Piero tried to decipher its hidden meaning. It wasn't just a drowning, not with those hellish markings, but where had it come from and why had it washed ashore on Riva di Pignoli? To Piero there was no such thing as accident. Everything had its place and purpose, even if they were not always apparent to him. Had it been a vision, he might have accepted it better. A ghostly phantom of death would have had a clear, if dire, significance. But cold flesh and heavy bones confounded him entirely.