Simple Prayers Page 6

  She took the tiny plug of wax back to the Chiesa di Maria del Mare, placed it just where she had taken it as a slender taper, and went back home to the narrow bed to lie beside her mother.

  ERMENEGILDA WOKE precisely as the first rays of light crept into the graveyard darkness. She was not surprised to find herself sprawled out upon Cherubina Modesta Colomba Ernesta Franchin, and she was not surprised to find Albertino gone — wisps of angel hair still clung to her eyelids, and nothing, either physical or spiritual, could alter the sense of peace she felt inside. Her burgundy satin gown was speckled with crimson blood, but to Ermenegilda it was a symbol of glory.

  As she rose to her feet and stumbled past the markers toward the gate, she half expected the skeletons to rise up and applaud her. All laws were suspended, all form and sense and reason turned upside down. She considered going to Albertino's room but decided instead to head straight for the dock; when she got there she stopped cold at the sight of him, twisted up like a puppy and still glowing from their encounter. She might have stayed there forever, content to watch him snore at the bottom of his boat, had she not instructed Romilda Rosetta to return for her at dawn. When the dwarfish servant appeared across the water precisely at half-past six, Ermenegilda cursed her punctuality. But when the elegant little boat arrived, she lifted her skirts and climbed in without so much as a snarl, a snap, or a bellow. She merely lay back against the polished prow, her arms resting sweetly in her lap, and let the confused Romilda Rosetta row her back to the main shore.

  Albertino felt a sharp pang in his abdomen when he woke a second time; there was an odd smell that he couldn't quite place and a feeling of jubilance in the air. When he rolled over onto his back he could see that the sun had already traveled a third of its way across the sky; it must have been past ten o'clock. Kicking down the gold blanket, he drew himself to his feet and tried to toss off the traces of his troubled night.

  It was lucky he had the posts of the dock to steady him, for what he saw nearly pitched him into the lagoon.

  Once again the trim Torta boat was making its way across the slender isthmus of water that ran between the two islands. Once again Romilda Rosetta was at the oars; once again Ermenegilda was the lone passenger. But this time Ermenegilda was standing, and this time she could barely be seen for the sprigs and sprays, the stems and clusters and bunches, of fat, glistening flowers she carried in her arms. Pansies, chrysanthemums, violets, daisies, lillies, lilacs, pinks. Their perfume sent wild ribbons into the air, and their color woke the rabbits.

  Spring had finally come to Riva di Pignoli.

  And flowers were just the beginning.

  Chapter 4

  IT WAS LIKE A GREAT, soundless explosion, the eruption into being of a thought, a dream, a dazzling incantation. In one swift movement the hand of Nature seemed to lower its quill to the surface of the island and etch an unbounded beauty into every inch. Fields that had lain caked and clotted suddenly undulated with life. Trees that had stood frozen and inarticulate suddenly hung down their branches with sweet, dripping fruit. Leaves sprouted like new ideas. Grass appeared like the flurry of cries at the height of a tournament joust.

  Everyone on the island had a different story about the moment he first realized what had happened. The Vedova Stampanini had gone into her garden to remove the fishbones the cats always scattered after she gave them their late night feeding. She found, instead, the entire pack of them — Felice, Filippo, Rinaldo, Federigo, Nastagio, Lodovico and Lidia — curled up on a mound of clover that expanded and deepened even as she stood there watching. Siora Bertinelli had been stirring the morning broth when she heard a pelting sound outside. When she opened her door she saw the fig tree in her front yard spewing the fruit from its branches while the startled birds swept down to peck their fill. Ugolino Ramponi had gone to chop some wood for his hearth when he felt a rumbling beneath his boots. Dropping to the ground, he held his arms tightly over his head, certain that the sea was about to suck the entire island up into its gullet; when the trembling stopped, and he opened his eyes, he found himself covered from head to toe with woodbine and narcissus and morning gentian, the smell so intoxicating that he could not stand up for half an hour. Siora Scabbri woke to cries from her henhouse; the sweet violence in the air so shook her fussy brood that she had to take them back to bed with her.

  Maria Luigi and Fausto were just sitting down to some garlic and salt cod when the branches of a beechwood tree thrust in through the tiny window above their hearth. Gianluca was in bed with a girl from Pieve di Forna when the room began to shake so wildly, he thought he'd returned to his first ecstasy with Maria Patrizia Lunardi. Orsina and the three Marias were in their chambers preparing themselves for battle when the tapestries leapt from the walls, the torches lit up in their sconces, and the goose-feather pillows exploded into the air as if Judgment Day had come.

  Giuseppe Navo and Gesmundo Barbon claimed they saw the entire thing from the lagoon. First there was a blurring, as if the island were moving at a faster speed, sailing through an empty summer, a stale autumn, and a barren, brittle winter before arriving at the richness of an inconceivable spring. There was a silence — which even the fish attended — followed by an explosion of color that shot across the sky: great streaks of grape and celandine, bold patches of wild vermilion, warm rivers of sapphire, indigo, amber, and primrose. It was like a beautiful woman shaking out her skirts to find a fleet of wild birds hidden in the folds. It was like a great wave of laughter rising up from the soil to drench the air with its vitality.

  Valentina had gone into the front yard to use the cider press. She and Piarina had a soap delivery scheduled for later that afternoon, and it looked as if it were going to be a long, thirsty morning of sorting and stacking and trimming. As she reached the well she heard a strange ripping noise, followed by the leaves sprouting forth on the branches of the trees. When she saw this she ran back into the hovel, slammed the door, and woke Piarina.

  “Jesus Lord,” she said in a hushed voice. “You won't believe what's happening out there!”

  But Piarina knew. From the moment she'd taken the taper from the Chiesa di Maria del Mare, she'd seen the entire process laid out before her. She only hoped Ermenegilda would be happy — and that she'd done no harm in tampering with Nature's plan.

  Chapter 5

  JUST BEYOND THE WALL that surrounded the Torta garden ran a slender canal. Every year, as the weather grew warmer, Ermenegilda would wade in its soothing green water. At the inside corner of the wall stood a great wisteria, which sent its lacy fingers out over her as she bobbed on the surface; on the opposite shore stood a sproutling from that tree whose smaller branches reached back toward the first. For as long as she could remember, as each spring had brought its sudden perfume and its brief flash of violet, Ermenegilda had thought of those trees as herself and Albertino: billowing and timid, yearning toward contact, separated only by a slim boundary of water. She had always believed that when the branches finally met, forming a natural trellis over the clear canal, she and her beloved would be one. Now, however, as she sank into the canal with the first dip of the delayed spring, that union had come and gone — and Ermenegilda wished nothing more than to yank the wisteria out by its roots.

  Ermenegilda was angry. It was a burning anger, a concentrated anger, hot and tender like the rosy edges of a fever blister. For after an idyllic few hours in the cozy reaches of Albertino's heart, Albertino had disappeared. For two days Ermenegilda had torn her hair and covered her food with salt and begged the fishermen to drag the lagoon. But then, as simply as he had disappeared, Albertino returned. And when he did he behaved as if their torrid encounter had been nothing more than the sticky midnight imaginings of a girl who'd eaten one too many miel-pignole pastries.

  To be honest, Albertino felt as confused as Ermenegilda at the drastic fluctuation of his emotions. On that morning when the spring had come — when the landscape had gone mad and Ermenegilda had arrived with all those flowers — he'd
felt a sweetness awaken in his heart that was unlike anything he had ever known before.

  “It worked,” he'd murmured as Ermenegilda placed the flowers in his astonished, opened arms.

  “Did you doubt it?” asked Ermenegilda, leading him gently across the radicchio patch to finally enter his room.

  For the rest of the day Ermenegilda's voice was a lute song, her cascading hair the sunset waters of a waterfall. They sat on the floor and ate pignoli; they walked around the tiny island holding hands; they lined the east wall with their fragrant sea of flowers. But as nightfall came, the flowers’scent began to fade, and Ermenegilda began to talk about the future.

  “I want a house that's even finer than the Ca’Torta. I want my own pastry chef and a personal seamstress, and I want to visit Venezia at least twice a month.”

  Now Albertino had been intoxicated by the rush of the sudden spring, but he was in no way ready to abandon his room and spend a lifetime with Ermenegilda. A part of him still thrilled at what they'd done in the graveyard, but another part was horrified at the astonishing intimacy of it. So before he could make the fatal mistake of doing it again, he slipped down to the dock and set off in his barca da pesca.

  He rowed the lagoon for three nights and two days. The dread he felt was like a turnip in his gut, and the only thing he could do to relieve its pressure was to keep rowing. He rowed in circles and zigzags, stopping only for a few brief naps. He rowed past the gleaming spires of Venezia and the sparse scrub of islands no bigger than his boat. He felt the spray on his face as the morning breeze came up, and he followed the seagulls at sunset. He rowed with the fishermen and the cargo boats and the great clumps of seaweed that floated in with the tide. But the longer he rowed, the heavier and harder grew the turnip, until he could feel its stony denseness rotting inside him. Until he could no longer bear the tension between his repulsion at what he'd done on top of Cherubina Modesta Colomba Ernesta Franchin and his aching, feverish desire to do it again.

  So he erased it from his mind. On the third night, as his arms could take no more rowing, he simply decided that the whole thing had never happened. And it was with that firmness of conviction that he rowed back to Riva di Pignoli, docked his little boat at his little dock, and wondered who had been so thoughtful as to deck his room with flowers.

  Which made Ermenegilda extremely angry. So angry she could barely float in the peaceful waters of the canal. She wanted to yank out the wisteria trees — and the azalea bushes and the gorse hedge and the tulip beds. For a few brief hours, the spring had been a triumph. The shores had shot green and Ermenegilda had been the most beautiful girl in the lagoon. Now every leaf, every breeze, every blossom, was mocking her. And she would not be content until their laughter was fully silenced.

  WHEN ALBERTINO rowed off into the lagoon, he forgot about the miracle of the resurgent spring. When he returned, however, on that third morning after the bay trees had appeared and the pomegranates had turned their delicate, whimsical pink, he was even more stunned by the richness and beauty of the landscape than he had been when he'd felt its first awakening vibrations. As he walked through the fields on his way toward market, he considered that there must have been a thousand different shades of green, each with its own power to soothe and cool and comfort. The butterflies alone were enough to amaze him: he'd never seen such transparency in their wings or such weightless ecstasy in their flight. Yet even as he marveled at these splendors, it never once occurred to him that the market would in any way be different from what it had always been before.

  The Riva di Pignoli market was a rather lazy affair. People came and went at a casual pace, buying a few carrots Monday, some eggs Wednesday, a nice fish Friday. There was never any hurry and never any wait; everyone knew that what they didn't buy today would always be there tomorrow. There were certain days on which certain stalls flourished — Siora Bertinelli's pastries did well between Christmas and Epiphany, Ugolino Ramponi could never stock enough pigeons at Easter, and Fridays were always good for Giuseppe Navo and Gesmundo Barbon — but most of the time the market was merely a slow parade of lookers and feelers, with more people coming to spin the island gossip than to actually buy anything. The stalls were set up in two short rows that faced each other: eggs, pastries, pork, and gowns on the north side of the field, fruit and vegetables, fish, game, and fowl on the south side. The stands were a combination of splintered casks and sawed-off tree stumps, laid over with torn-up planks from the storm-beaten docks. Spread out over the stalls to protect them from the sun were canopies made from the sails of Giuseppe Navo's boats and a few of Maria Luigi's less elaborate gowns. Spread out under the buyers’feet was a mixture of rotting fruit, matted chicken feathers, pig shit stuck to stale pastry, and fish heads grinning up at the morning sun.

  Albertino depended upon the market's simple and boring nature in the same way he depended upon the Swan to rise in the summer sky. So when he finally reached the stalls, in the field between the Guarnieris’smoke shed and Siora Scabbri's henhouse, he was thoroughly unprepared for what he found.

  Siora Bertinelli was wrapping up her pastries before they'd cooled. Maria Luigi was dancing with her gowns. The Guarnieris were slicing up soft pink mountains of ham; the fish stalls were brimming with catfish and sardines, with moon-surfaced crabs and dark black pools of seppie. But nowhere was the rapture more evident than at his very own fruit and vegetable stand. In one stunning stroke, the spring had delivered produce that usually took until June or August or October to ripen — every shape and variety and of the most glorious quality that anyone, from the Vedova Stampanini down, had ever seen. Radiant radishes with hot flushed cheeks and long pointed witches chins. Great knobby fennel with beefy thighs and veins the color of hope. Bruise-tinted eggplants, bound forests of broccoli; iridescent apples and dark, moody pears. They flooded out of baskets. They flowed over the sides of crates. They rose into lavish pyramids in the salty air.

  At the center of it all, moving like a highly varnished top, was Gianluca. Gianluca was not inclined toward tearing his hair, and he hardly ever put salt on his food, but he had been almost as upset as Ermenegilda at Albertino's disappearance. For close to a month they had waited for the slightest glimmer of the spring; then, when it finally burst upon them, full blown and practically dripping, Albertino suddenly vanished. Knowing his younger brother's diligence and his fierce dedication to the crops, Gianluca could only think that perhaps he really had drowned in the lagoon. So when he saw Albertino's blunt little body moving determinedly toward the stall, the only thing Gianluca could think to do to thank God for sparing him a watery death was to send an enormous eggplant flying straight toward his head.

  “Welcome home, Albertino!” he shouted out after the eggplant. “And if you say one word about where you'e been — one word — I'l stuff every piece of produce on this stand down your stupid throat. Now get over here and start helping!”

  Albertino was not very happy at being greeted by a flying eggplant — which only just managed to miss him as he ducked beneath its flight — but he recognized the danger in Gianluca's tone. So without so much as the clearing of his throat, he scurried in behind the strawberries and set to work.

  The day continued on as it had begun. By late morning Siora Scabbri and Siora Bertinelli were out of eggs and pastries, but they kept people at their stalls by singing fishing songs they'd learned from their fathers. By early afternoon Maria Luigi had given up dancing with her gowns and had turned the task over to her father-in-law, Fausto; though sixty-six years old, he could do a tarantella that no one on the island could match. Sometime toward late afternoon there was a fight at the fish stalls: Brunetto Fucci accused Gesmundo Barbon of placing seaweed on the scales, whereupon the bearded fisherman tried to strangle the dour apothecary with an eel. And through it all were the constant cries of “Atenzion!” and “Diese per do denari!” as Armando Guarnieri moved his broken-handled broom through the muck.

  It was into this maelstrom of activity that Pie
ro brought his excitement about the future of Riva di Pignoli. After he had left Boccasante, Piero had gone home to his corner of Beppe Guancio's hovel and had begun working with his chisel on a small piece of granite. He did not know what he was after; he knew only that he had somehow to focus the energy of what he had just discovered in the cloister. Eventually he fell into a deep sleep, only to be awakened the next morning by the most remarkable news.

  “Piero!” cried Beppe Guancio. “Wake up! The spring has finally come!”

  Piero leapt to his feet and ran out into the quickening landscape. But instead of filling him with joy, it only confused him. If the spring had come, perhaps Bartolomeo Bon's warning was without cause. Perhaps Piero's plan to revitalize the island was unnecessary. For the next two days he sat in the field of wild thyme where he'd buried the swollen body and wondered whether everything Bartolomeo Bon had said had been foolish and exaggerated. While Albertino was out rowing the lagoon, Piero sat contemplating the island's very existence. But, finally, the memory of those dark swellings convinced him that even if danger had passed them by this time, it would not leave so easily the next. So late in the afternoon on the same day Albertino returned from rowing the lagoon, he went to the market to share his new vision with the people of Riva di Pignoli.

  “Piero!” shouted Siora Bertinelli as he approached the line of stalls. “You look as if you'e just had lunch with the Devil!”

  “Not lunch, Siora Bertinelli,” said Piero. “Just a few sips of vin santo.”

  “I wouldn't waste vin santo on the Devil,” said Ugolino Ramponi. “Ordinary bianco would do.”

  “All wine is vin santo to Piero,” said Siora Scabbri. “It's in the way he holds the cup.”

  “He looks to me as if he's just got out of bed,” said Siora Guarnieri, wiping her stubby hands against her aproned belly. “Piero! Since when is it like the blessed of God to sleep until late afternoon?”