Simple Prayers Page 5

  When Ermenegilda left Piarina to prepare for her midnight assignation with Albertino, Piarina thought hard about what she had asked of her. She knew that this was not the same as healing Armida Barbon's swollen liver; she knew that for this she was going to need help. So that night, after Valentina had fallen asleep at her side, and Ermenegilda had rowed out to join Albertino on his island, and Piero had gone to seek counsel at Boccasante, Piarina snuck out of her one-room hovel and went to stand before the flames. She didn't think about God as she stood there. She didn't think about anything. She simply let herself be filled with light as she asked for help. Piarina asked the candles for help because of her love for Ermenegilda, who had asked Piarina for help because of her love for Albertino, who had asked Ermenegilda for help because of his love for Gianluca, and for the vegetables. It was a chain of love extending from soil to sky — a chain of hunger and devotion and generosity — and Piarina could feel it tugging at either side of her as she placed her tender soul before the flames.

  She almost put her fingers in. Almost. But instead she stood on the tips of her toes, reached up over her head, and grasped the tallest taper. Its hot breath made her hair dance up as she held it out before her, and its smooth body felt hard and clean in her fragile fairy hands. Without blinking she turned around, walked out of the tiny chapel, and set out to cure the land.

  IN AN ORDINARY YEAR, the spring would have simply meant a new stack of books to Piero. Fra Danilo was mad for herbs, and each April, in exchange for some crisp catmint or some savory sorrel, he would give Piero a share of the manuscripts that had been donated to the monastery that winter. For twelve years now Piero had traded his fragile bouquets of yarrow and rue for Plato and Aristotle, his tiny sackets of burdock and basil and burnet for St. Thomas Aquinas, Marcus Aurelius, and the two great writers of his day: Dante and Petrarch. Fra Danilo always kept the finest volumes and left the rattiest to Piero, but Piero would read anything and was glad to have them.

  This year, without a spring, Piero had nothing to offer Fra Danilo — and he wondered what his friend's reaction would be when he showed up at Boccasante without so much as a dill weed. It was almost midnight when he reached the island; he could hear the distant bells of Torcello and Burano and Mazzorbo as they rang out the hour at slightly different intervals. After docking his boat at the farthest slip — as a sign of respect — he approached the massive doors that stood beneath the stone portico of the entrance. In the blue-black light, the carvings on the walls took on a frightening reality; as Piero's torch cast waves of flame upon the marble he saw two-headed birds break into flight and scraps of Latin dance before his eyes.

  Fra Antonio answered his knocking. A slight gnome of a monk, half-blind and three-quarters dead, he considered it his absolute task, as the oldest member of the order, to receive all visitors to the monastery. He recognized Piero more by smell than by sight — slightly woodsy, slightly like something left out in the rain — and nodded slowly as he ushered him inside.

  Piero felt as he always felt when he entered Boccasante: that he was glad to no longer be ruled by its laws, and that it would always, in a way, be his home. Many of the monks were already rising for their first prayers; Piero watched as they appeared from the shadows, their faces lit by the candles they held, and then disappeared around corners, through doorways, behind hidden arches. He explained to Fra Antonio that he wished to see Fra Danilo; the elderly monk took him to a small alcove, where he gave him a candle of his own, and then escorted him out to the cloister where Fra Danilo was entertaining a guest.

  Piero was not surprised to find Fra Danilo with company, even at such a late hour of the night. Fra Danilo was almost always entertaining someone. The church at Boccasante had been built some ten years before the church of the nearby island of Due Vigne, but after a visit to Due Vigne by a wandering saint named Francesco, that island's fortune had changed dramatically. Religious men came from everywhere to pray at the altar Francesco had prayed at; Due Vigne became the holiest spot in the lagoon. Fra Danilo was certain that with a slightly different wind, II Santo d'Assisi would have come to Boccasante, so he devoted himself to the cultivation of visitors in the hope that one of them would lend his island the respect and dignity accorded Due Vigne. At first he concentrated solely on other men of the cloth, but over the years he broadened his receiving list to include doctors, theologians, justices, and scholars, having correctly observed that the visionary may as easily hide among the crowd as among the clergy. His fondness for Piero, in fact, was based on this theory: even though Boccasante had thrown him out of their ranks, Fra Danilo felt it was wise to keep the door open just a crack, in case the youth's fantastic visions proved to be of a higher order than his fellow brothers had realized.

  Piero entered the cloister, which seemed to float in a magical trance between the light of the candles that stood between the columns and the light of the moon that shined down over the open courtyard. Fra Danilo was sitting on the low wall that ran between the columns, and with him sat a slender, balding gentleman with a great black mustache and tiny eyes that kept widening and closing like those of a moon-dazed frog.

  “Piero!” shouted Fra Danilo warmly when he saw him. “I'd almost given up hope of your ever coming!”

  “I'm afraid I come empty-handed,” said Piero as they embraced. “I'm afraid I have nothing whatsoever to offer you.”

  “Nothing at all?” said Fra Danilo.

  “Not even a sprig of parsley,” said Piero.

  Fra Danilo leaned close and whispered into Piero's ear, “Is something wrong? It isn't like you to forget the herbs.”

  Piero inclined his head. “I haven't forgotten,” he whispered back. “And something is most definitely wrong. But perhaps it would be better if I spoke with you in private.”

  “I'l see what I can do. But first let me introduce you to Sior Bon.” Fra Danilo took Piero by the shoulder and walked him over to where his guest sat waiting. “May I present Sior Bartolomeo Bon, one of Bologna's finest scholars.”

  “You flatter me, Fra Danilo,” said the scholar with a wan smile.

  “Not at all,” said the monk. “Your accomplishments are well known, even here in the lagoon. I'd like you to meet Piero Po, a former member of our order.”

  Piero nodded.

  “A pleasure,” said Bartolomeo Bon, eyes widening — and closing — as he said it.

  “Piero is something of an expert on the legend of San Giorgio,” said Fra Danilo. “Not to mention certain other, less orthodox symbols.”

  “San Giorgio has been worshiped to death,” said Bartolomeo Bon. “I prefer San Stefano, or San Sebastiano. Something that can still make you wince.”

  “But surely you can't deny the power of the image,” said Piero, seating himself beside him. “The saint. The dragon. It's man's eternal struggle.”

  “Oh, I suppose it has a kind of primitive suggestiveness. If you fancy that sort of thing.”

  “I appreciate any depiction of the conflict between good and evil,” said Piero.

  “Piero has an extraordinary imagination,” said Fra Danilo. “A bit too extraordinary, I'm sorry to say, for some of the brothers of Boccasante.”

  “Have you read Sior Dante's Commedia?” asked Piero.

  “I have not,” said Bartolomeo Bon. “I do not consider political polemicism to be literature.”

  “But it's the most remarkable book! You must read it!”

  Bartolomeo twisted his legs together and laughed. “I have quite enough to read as it is,” he said. “Sior Dante's ideas of heaven and hell seem rather simplistic to me.”

  “Where I come from simple things are always appreciated the best,” said Piero.

  “And where,” asked Bartolomeo Bon, raising his left eyebrow, “is that?”

  “Riva di Pignoli,” said Piero.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “It's an island just north of here,” interjected Fra Danilo. “Small, but very green.”

  Bartolomeo Bon s
tared straight ahead for a moment, then shook his head. “Doesn't exist,” he said.

  “I'm sorry to disagree with you,” said Piero, “but it most assuredly does exist. Except for the seven years I spent here at Boccasante, I'e lived my entire life there.”

  “How literal,” said Bartolomeo Bon. “I realize that as a few clumps of soil, your little island sits sleeping in the water. But in the sense of mattering — in the sense of leaving any mark on our wretched civilization — it simply doesn't exist.”

  Piero opened his mouth to argue, but Bartolomeo Bon continued before he could speak.

  “The days of the contadi are numbered,” he said. “These paltry villages with nothing more than a few casks to piss in can't possibly survive the changing times. The feudal system is dead. Living without an education? Dead. The poor fellow who doesn't attach himself to one of the real cities is simply going to find himself feet up in his fields.”

  “These islands have been around for a long time,” said Fra Danilo, trying to soften the scholar's words. “Surely they can survive changing fashions.”

  “They can't survive,” said Bartolomeo Bon, “if they don't exist.” He turned to Piero. “This island you speak of. What does it have that will last?”

  Piero tried to envision the wobbly landscape of Riva di Pignoli. “It has a palazzo,” he said.

  “One of those cheap Venetian candy boxes?”

  “It has a church.”

  “Romanesque or Byzantine?”

  “Neither. Just a church.”

  “Can you see it from the water?” asked Bartolomeo Bon. “Does it have a proper campanile?”

  “No,” said Piero.

  “Then how do you know when the day begins? How do you know when it ends? Where is your island's voice? Its breath? Its music?”

  Piero had always thought that the day began when it began and that it ended when it was over. But the relentlessness of Bartolomeo Bon's words was making him question whether he could tell the sun from the moon from Siora Bertinelli's pignole pastries. Without speaking, he rose from the cloister wall and walked to the small fountain at the center of the courtyard.

  “Is there a piazza on your island?” asked Bartolomeo Bon. “A campo? A monument?”

  “No,” said Piero softly.

  “Then how does it even know its own name? If you didn't know your own name, what would it be? Ignazio? Alfonso? Buondelmonte? A town needs to state its name or it isn't a town. An island needs to establish a center, forge its identity in stone, ring out its name on the hour — or it will just be washed away like a few dead seagull feathers.”

  Piero felt the cool stone of the fountain against the palms of his hands and heard the muffled chanting of the monks inside at prayer. Bartolomeo Bon's words were strong and harsh — but they had a strange effect on Piero.

  “Bless you,” he murmured to the quiet night. “Bless you!” he shouted to the startled scholar as he ran to him and embraced him.

  “Piero!” cried Fra Danilo. “Have you lost your wits?”

  “No, Fra Danilo,” said Piero. “I think I'e just found them. Sior Bon, I must concede that you are right. In the way that you mean, Riva di Pignoli does not yet exist. But there's still time to do something about it. Thank you. You'e helped me tremendously. If you'l excuse me now, I must get back to Riva di Pignoli.”

  Piero made a slight bow before dashing from the cloister; then he hurried out through the monastery gates and across to the slip where his boat lay waiting. He'd come to Boccasante to find a way to bring the spring back to Riva di Pignoli — but how could he bring the spring to a place that didn't exist? He suddenly understood the message of the dead body — that it was the same as the message of the missing spring. Both were trying to tell the island to wake up. Both were trying to stir it from its dreamlike contentment and convince it to demand its place in the world. Piero knew it was possible. And as he loosened his boat from the dock at Boccasante he knew just what he would have to do to make it happen.

  WHEN ALBERTINO WOKE, his heart stopped for three full beats to find itself pressed flat against Ermenegilda's bosom in the thick shadows of the graveyard. Ermenegilda was snoring, the hem of her skirt still up around her shoulders, the look of Maria Ascendente on her face. At first he thought he would have to stay there until morning, but the memory of their midnight lust was too disturbing. Allowing for the chance that he might wake her — and might have to acknowledge the intimacy they had shared — he crawled slowly backward until his forehead met her feet and then quickly lifted himself to a standing position.

  Ermenegilda barely moved; only for an instant did Maria threaten to drop from the clouds before an attentive angel swiftly buoyed her back toward God. After pulling up his tights and securing them under his tunic, Albertino lowered Ermenegilda's skirts, folded her hands across her chest, and placed an ashen rose upon her bosom. Perhaps she would wake and think herself the ghost of Cherubina Modesta Colomba Ernesta Franchin.

  Albertino headed back toward his room, but his better sense stopped him before he got there. If Ermenegilda woke and remembered who she was, and remembered what they'd done, she was sure to come looking for him. If he went to sleep in his bed, she was sure to heave herself over the east wall and crawl in beside him. Much as he craved sleep — much as he craved the sweet security of his four uneven walls and his eight threadbare blankets — he couldn't bear the thought of her entering his room. So he let himself go in just long enough to fetch the gold blanket, then went down to spend the rest of the night at the dock.

  When he reached the floating sanctuary of his beat-up little bark, he lifted up the seat plank, laid the blanket over the ribs, coiled a bit of rope to make a pillow, and settled back in to watch the stars. Albertino knew the stars almost as well as he knew the vegetables; he'd spent his whole life charting their gentle rotation across the sky. The Dolphin and the Hare. The Flying Horse and the Dove of Noah. The stars were friends to Albertino; it was one of the reasons he never felt lonely on his unpeopled little island.

  If spring hadn't come, the heavens didn't know it. Albertino could see the Bear, the Lion, and the Crow just as he had each April of his life. The Crab was receding side-ways into the east, and on the rim of the west the Virgin was just floating into view. Albertino had been born under the sign of the Virgin. She was a guardian to him, a protectress of sorts. Now, as he thought about his encounter with Ermenegilda, he half expected her to fall out of the heavens and splash into the waters of the lagoon.

  How could he have enjoyed it so much?

  How could it have been so ineffably, unutterably pleasurable?

  He recalled the night, years before, when Gianluca had returned home from his own first experience — abstracted, moonstruck, delirious. That morning, while he was trimming back the broccoli, Maria Patrizia Lunardi, whose father, Cherubino, grew the wheat fields at the east of the island, had sauntered into the garden, slid her hand between his legs, and whispered, “Ten o'clock.” Gianluca, who was only fourteen at the time, went instantly rigid and instantly limp; he could hardly keep himself from racing out of the broccoli patch and jumping into the lagoon. At ten o'k that night he slipped into Maria Patrizia's room; when he floated home at four in the morning he was so lit up with ecstasy that he could not keep from singing. He kept Albertino up until dawn with an explicit description of every position they had employed, using a list of adjectives that began with “paradisical” and then spiraled off into terms he'd created himself. Spuntinodo. Incardelito. Stronzinfatagura. Albertino was only eleven, but he never forgot the impression Gianluca had made as his spirit expanded over the joys of Maria Patrizia Lunardi. Now, after so many years of lying on the floor and listening to his brother howl, Albertino finally knew the truth: it was every bit as wonderful as Gianluca had said, and every bit as awful as he had feared.

  He tried to push these thoughts from his mind. He tried to concentrate on the stars. But everything in the sky seemed to remind him of his heated encounter. The
Centaur. The Wolf. The Water-Snake. Suddenly the heavens themselves seemed to be mingling in a strange, degenerate spectacle: the Lion mating with the Bear, the Crow with the Crab. Albertino covered his eyes, but the images only intensified. So he burrowed down between the blanket and the rope and prayed for sleep to take him from the orgy.

  WHEN PIARINA EXITED the church, the streaming taper clutched between both fists, she was already in a trance. Without pausing, she walked straight to the eastern dock and then slowly began to trace a path around the outer edge of the island. Her eyes were wide open, but they saw nothing; only divine protection kept her from tripping over rocks, slipping on sod, banging into trees, and falling into the lagoon. She walked for hours, sketching a faint line of flame around the island. While Albertino and Ermenegilda caught fire in the graveyard. While Piero carried torchlight back from Boccasante. While the hearths of the huts and hovels smoldered down to a handful of glowing embers. The Vedova Stampanini glimpsed her briefly as she set out the scraps for the cats. Gesmundo Barbon saw her float past his sandolo as he left for his morning catch. Piarina just kept walking — arms extended, mind extinguished, heart receiving.

  By the time the moon had fallen she'd traveled the circuit nine times. Her hands were covered with candle wax, and her dirty tunic was damp from the wet night air. But just as she reached the point where she had begun, on the dock by the eastern shore, at the end of the ninth round, she stopped, closed her eyes, and sneezed. When she sneezed the candle went out, and when the candle went out she knew her task was completed.