Simple Prayers Page 9

  It was not the first time it had happened. Two weeks earlier he'd found a basket of butchered artichokes by the east wall when he'd gone to empty his night bucket. Three weeks before that he'd come home to a slimy carpet of pulverized plums. But what he saw now made both those incidents seem like child's play.

  Every last head of the radicchio patch had been brutally hacked off. Then one by one they'd been placed in a long, leafy arrow pointing accusingly toward the graveyard.

  Chapter 7

  AT THE HEIGHT of summer, Riva di Pignoli reeked of cefalo, ombrina, ghiozzo, corvina, sogliole, rombo, acciugbe, sardina, and seppie. Even with the continued bounty of the miraculous spring, the market energy slowed to a lazy peacock's strut and an invisible shroud of lethargy fell over the island. Fausto Moretti could be found, almost daily, standing perfectly motionless on the Calle Alberi Grandi. The three Marias tied poultices of lavender about their heads and stayed in bed until after sundown. Valentina took to standing with her head in the well, unaware that with Piarina's new state of mind she was placing herself in grave danger.

  Yet despite the heat and the bitter stench, work on the campanìl kept on at a steady pace. There were no masons on Riva di Pignoli — no carpenters, no cutters, no mortar makers, no blacksmiths — but the villagers applied themselves to the various tasks of construction with a determined zeal. By mid-August the walls had risen above Piero's head and scaffolding had to be built to continue higher. A light wooden frame was erected outside the walls to complement the heavier one, which had been raised to support the bells, inside. Siora Bertinelli converted her second pastry oven into a kiln, and she and Siora Scabbri took turns roasting limestone into quicklime and placing it in a pit lined with clay to make a mortar that would, it was hoped, resist both time and beetles.

  As the labor became more complicated and the structure began to take on a real shape, Piero asked the villagers to decide upon one afternoon a week in which they might all work together as a team; it no longer seemed likely they'd finish by the Naming of the Virgin, but he was hoping for at least the Feast of Michaelmas. Thursday afternoons were selected — and it was then that Miriam's subtle authority came into play. She seemed to hang on the fringe — sprinkling lime on the ropes, sharpening the axes with a whetstone — but in truth she was the central force that got the campanìl built. When the workers began to tire from climbing the frame with the heavy stones strapped to their backs, she devised a special pulley that could accommodate the multiknotted ropes and cut their labor in half. When the workers began to tire from heaving down on the weighted ropes, she casually observed that one of the empty baccala barrels would make an excellent windlass, and their work was halved again. She showed Siora Bertinelli how to tilt the mortar bucket so the mortar would not dry in the sun. She showed Paolo Guarnieri how to bend his knees when he lifted the lumber so his back would not go out. And her mere presence inspired Gianluca and Piero to scramble and hammer and hoist until the sweat poured off their bodies.

  “How does it look?” Gianluca would shout as he placed the heaviest of stones at the highest of heights.

  “AtenziÒn!” Piero would cry as he waved his arms to give instructions from the center of the field.

  When Gianluca began his elaborate schemes to win Miriam, Piero had no choice but to try to court her as well. But where Gianluca's previous attempts at wooing had involved at least a grin and a shifting of the hips, Piero's had been virtually nonexistent. So now that he felt this strange fever in the backs of his legs and this spinning in his solar plexus, the only thing he could think to do was to follow her. Out through the waist-high grass that led to Siora Scabbri's henhouse, up the Calle Alberi Grandi to watch the evening sunset, he traveled behind her like a rat on an invisible leash. And gradually, as his footsteps behind her footsteps became a faint, familiar echo, he found himself having visions again.

  They started with snakes. Tiny, slithery snakes with opalescent eyes, which gradually gave way to bloated, seething, monstrous snakes whose faceted skins reflected Piero's face in endless distortion. They emerged, in coiling numbers, from the base of the stump where he slept. They spread across the grassy expanse that footed the Chiesa di Maria del Mare. They wove themselves, like a chain of poison, into an intricate, ever-writhing ring — out of the center of which rose Miriam.

  Miriam, in a cloud of light. Miriam, daubed with honey, dusted with dry snow, naked, breasts shining, arms floating, eyes glistening.

  Piero watched as his own naked form moved in toward the light. But then he stopped. For before he could reach her, the serpentine circle began to transform itself into a twisting band of horned beasts, hell-sprites covered with tangled hair, three-faced demons with flaming bellies — and dragons. Piero had not seen such dragons since his days at Boccasante: malevolent creatures with steam-soaked wings, great polished devils with lightning-and-onyx eyes. They bristled in a foul balotondo, they mocked the pale simplicity of his and Miriam's nakedness. And they kept him from her. With their scabbed, scaly backs they raised a fortress between their bodies, with their hot, ashen breath they cast a screen between their souls.

  Piero could not help but think of the swollen, blackened body; it circled in his mind the way the beasts and dragons circled in his dream. He could not shake the memory of its bloated limbs, the smell of its putrifying flesh. And though he did not know how his visions were related to the corpse, he knew that there would be no easy path to Miriam.

  WITH THE EXCEPTION of Orsina's self-interested donation of stone for the central monument, the Torta women contributed virtually nothing to the construction of the town center.

  “I will not stand in the mud with a bunch of filthy peasants to help build some holy sand castle,” announced Orsina when Piero came to ask for her and her daughters’help.

  But even if Orsina and the three Marias had agreed to raise the uneven structure with their own eight hands, there was a crisis within the walls of the Ca’Torta that would have kept them from the task.

  “It's awful!” cried Maria Prima. “It's like sleeping with your head inside a pig oven.”

  “It's digusting!” cried Maria Seconda. “My room smells like a cesspool!”

  “You'e got to stop her, Mama!” cried Maria Terza. “She's going to burn the whole house down!”

  For as if the smell of fish at the height of summer were not punishment enough, Ermenegilda had begun burning produce in her bedroom. Each day she would venture out of the Ca’Torta at mezzogiorno with a great straw basket slung over her shoulder and would not return until it was filled to the brim with turnips and mulberries and dandelions and fennel and watercress and maudlinwort and daisies. Anything that grew — anything that blossomed, either wild to the wind or carefully cultivated — was fair game to Ermenegilda.

  When she got it home she would dump it all in the center of a small pyre she'd built at the foot of her bed and then set it on fire with one of the long wooden matches she'd had Romilda Rosetta steal from the kitchen. The flames were never very great, but the smell was horrific — it stank like the end of the world, like a hog in heat, like a river of dung peppered over with last week's vomit. To Ermenegilda, however, it was merely the faded perfume of a love affair come undone.

  For the first few weeks, Orsina tried to ignore it. Her room was farthest away from Ermenegilda's, and to be honest, she was somewhat frightened of her youngest daughter. But now that the fumes were in danger of asphyxiating the entire household and the complaints of the three Marias were becoming intolerable, she soaked a linen handkerchief in some marigold and rose water and went to have a talk with her.

  “Ermenegil-da!” she called from outside the door. “Your mother wants to speak with you.”

  Inside the room, Ermenegilda sat transfixed before the flames that rose from the stinking pyre. The air was dense and heavy with smoke; Ermenegilda used it as a fog to buffer sensation. Her heart pined for Piarina, and it was better to feel nothing than to feel what she felt for Albertino, better t
o shroud herself in vapors and blot out her pain as firmly as he had blotted out his memory. What wrong had she done beyond laying her heart at his feet? What crime had she committed besides hopelessly, helplessly loving him?

  Orsina rapped loudly upon the door and called her name again; Ermenegilda did not answer, so she pushed the door open and entered the fuming chamber.

  “Ermenegilda!” cried Orsina. “I order you to stop roasting vegetables this instant!”

  “It's mostly herbs and flowers, Mama,” said Ermenegilda. “And a few moldy pears. He won't let me near the vegetables anymore.”

  Ermenegilda kept her eyes on the pyre as Orsina made a thin veil of the handkerchief she carried and came to sit on the edge of the bed just opposite where Ermenegilda sat.

  “Ermenegilda,” said Orsina in a lighter voice. “Come to your senses. You can't go on like this.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you'e tormenting yourself. Such a smell should only come from the inside of hell.”

  “I like the smell,” said Ermenegilda.

  “You like the smell.”

  “It makes me feel safe.”

  Orsina recoiled. “But it's the middle of August! The entire house is roasting!”

  “It's good for the skin, Mama. You won't have to go to Padova for your fancy treatments.”

  “I'm warning you, Ermenegilda. Your sisters are going to kill you if you don't stop this.”

  “They don't understand,” said Ermenegilda. “They have no idea what I'm feeling.”

  “Well, I understand,” said Orsina. “Believe me, Ermenegilda, I understand.” Fanning the smoke with one hand and holding the handkerchief tight to her face with the other, Orsina moved even closer to Ermenegilda, until she sat beside her before the pyre. “When I was seventeen, your father used to come to my house on horseback and fling wild violets in through the window. People called him 'e Cavaliere of the Wild Violets.’I thought my family was rich? Well, instead of asking for a dowry your father offered my parents three times their year's earnings for my hand in marriage. The first time we made love your father held back his own pleasure until he had satisfied mine no less than fourteen times. And do you know what? I still wish I'd listened to my own mama's advice to take the boat to Corsica and hide out at my uncle Ergolello's until your father had found some other girl to make his slippery blood boil. I know you'e infatuated with this vegetable farmer. And who knows, perhaps he has some hidden charm I just don't see. We all know about his brother. But he's not good enough for you, Ermenegilda. He's short, he's poor, and — most of all — he's from Riva di Pignoli!”

  “But Mama,” said Ermenegilda, “we're from Riva di Pignoli!”

  Orsina bolted to her feet. “Not by choice! Now I demand you stop loving him this instant!”

  Ermenegilda turned her gaze, for the first time, from the dancing plumes of smoke to her mother's bedeviled eyes. “But I don't love him, Mama,” she said. “I hate him.”

  “It's the same thing, Ermenegilda! You'l soon find out it's the very same thing!”

  Ermenegilda rose slowly and spoke in a quiet, even tone. “I hate him like a slug you scoop up out of the mud and you squeeze inside your fist until you can't tell what's the slug and what's the mud. I hate him like those little gnats that come up out of the canal in October and bite you on the insides of your thighs. I hate him like bream pasties, and canker sores, and the bloody time of the month. I hate him, Mama. I hate him. I hate him.”

  “Fine!” shouted Orsina. “Hate him! Just stop creating this infernal stench inside your bedroom!”

  “No.”

  “Ermenegilda — if you don't do what I tell you, I'm going to lock you in here, with no meals, until you wish you'd never seen a scorched turnip!”

  Ermenegilda planted her feet into the carpet and expanded to her fullest, most imperious stature. “And if you do, I'l climb out the window and light a stench you can't even imagine in every room of this godforsaken hell manor!”

  The two of them stood nose to nose, a pair of primitive warriors armed only with the fire inside their breasts. Orsina's fire, however, had been raging for a long, long time and could not hold its own against the youthful blaze that burned inside Ermenegilda. So she threw her handkerchief in the young girl's face and marched violently out of the room.

  Ermenegilda caught the handkerchief as it slapped across her smoke-stained cheek and twisted it into a tight ball. For a moment she thought of Piarina — of the sweet child's smile and the loving caresses that might have soothed her in her suffering. But Ermenegilda's pride was too great to allow her to go to her, and beg her forgiveness, and lay down in sorrow beside her. She could only spin around quickly and fling the handkerchief into the flames. She could only try to come up with a better way to wreak revenge on Albertino.

  AT THAT MOMENT, precisely three hundred meters into the water off the southwest shore of the island, Piarina and Valentina were on their way to the neighboring island of Terra del Pozzo di Luna; Gesmundo Barbon had lent them a small fishing vessel because Valentina had heard, through a series of rumors, that Terra del Pozzo di Luna was in short supply of soap. Valentina was rowing — one oar clutched tightly in her fist, the other strapped securely to her stubby forearm, her large, strong body pitched forward with the exertion of her efforts. Piarina sat behind her on the short plank at the aft of the little rig, surrounded in all directions by an immaculate sea of soap. Soda soap and lime soap, fish-oil and goat-fat soap, it rose about her in stack after stack of dullish gray- and faded bone-colored cakes. Valentina was in an unusually cheerful mood, singing gaily and talking to the seagulls that swooped and cawed above them. Piarina was silent — the bob of the boat against the wake of the waves luring her closer and closer to danger.

  “I'm telling you, Piarina girl, they'e going to buy the whole lot. Every last cake of it. Why Cunizza Scabbri said they haven't washed out a pair of hose since the Celebration of San Marco!”

  Piarina closed her eyes; the boat was rolling with greater and greater intensity, and the smell of lye was too much for her. In a dreamy haze she saw herself reach for one of the cakes and bring it cracking down upon Valentina's skull, over and over again, until the woman lay sprawled upon the endless stacks, their washed-out surfaces spattered with specks of blood.

  “If they buy it all,” continued Valentina, “we could set up a regular trade. A full shipment, every other month. We could eat like we did when your overgrown friend used to come round!”

  Piarina pulled her knees up and clasped her hands over her eyes, but the mention of Ermenegilda sent her teetering over the edge again. She could feel the weight of the oar in her hands as she yanked it from Valentina's grip, gave it a broad, sweeping swing, and sent the woman flying into the water.

  “Who knows?” Valentina chattered. “Maybe we'l move there for good! I'd give anything to leave that foul little hut and have a real home, with a pair of windows and a washtub!”

  Piarina couldn't stand it. Trapped inside the tiny boat, between the sea of soap and the sound of her mother's voice, she simply could not escape her mind's dark plans for murder. She considered throwing the cakes into the lagoon, she considered drilling a hole in the hull so they both might drown, but nothing could save her from her terrifying thoughts of destruction. So while Valentina was babbling on about all the dresses she would buy with all the money she would make from all the soap that she would sell, Piarina stepped up onto the highest stack and jumped overboard.

  Valentina felt the boat shift and heard the sudden splash, but she could not believe her eyes when she saw Piarina swimming briskly back to shore.

  “Piarina, you idiot! You come back here! How do you expect me to handle all this soap myself? You come back here, I tell you!”

  But Piarina kept swimming. She knew that when Valentina eventually returned home — having sold no more than a handful of her smelly cakes of soap — she was sure to give her an especially vigorous thrashing. But at least for the next few h
ours the young girl's troubled mind could think of butterflies, and light rain, and a host of other pleasures that were lately stained over with murder.

  OUT OF PIERO'S hideous vision of dragons and snakes emerged the tender seeds of a fantastic notion. With work on the campanìl nearing completion, it would soon be time to begin construction of the campo; it suddenly came to him to create an elaborate mosaic, depicting the struggle between good and evil, based largely upon the images from his dream. He felt certain that through Fra Danilo he could obtain the materials he needed. Three times each week he rowed out to Boccasante, unfolding his plan to visitor after visitor after visitor. Finally, as August slackened into September and the white summer sun eased down to an autumn glow, he received a message that Fra Danilo had found what he was looking for and that he should hasten to the monastery immediately.

  “Sior del Ponte is one of the richest men in Venezia,” said Fra Danilo as he introduced the wealthy merchant to Piero just a few hours later. “His palazzo on the Canal Grande is the new pride of the city.”

  “It is a beautiful creation,” said Eduardo del Ponte, a rather stocky gentleman dressed in heavy brocades. “I would be honored if Your Grace should care to visit it someday.” Eduardo del Ponte referred to everyone within the walls of Boccasante as “Your Grace”; fawned over by most of Venetian society because of his tremendous wealth, he gained a keen sense of pleasure in humbling himself before the quiet circle of monks, a circle in which, by friendly association, he seemed to include Piero. “The entire salone is in mosaic: the walls, the floors, the ceiling. It creates a most satisfying effect. Something like the Basilica di San Marco, if Your Grace will permit me to make such a comparison.”

  “It sounds magnificent,” said Piero. And with great tact and the utmost precision, he launched into a description of his own “little project.” He tried not to make it sound too ambitious, and he tried not to make it seem as if he were asking for anything, but before he had even outlined the dragons, Sior del Ponte offered to donate twenty-seven crates of Murano glass tiles left over from the elaborate depiction of the del Ponte family being received into heaven, which graced the upper salone of the Palazzo del Ponte. His only requirement was that Piero promise to prominently display the del Ponte family crest within the final design.