Ardor (12 page)

Y
et I am getting ahead of myself. Shortly after Serafino Fondi flew away, Primo Castorini's ham was exonerated by the Environmental Health and Sanitation Department. But while the ham was cleared, my beloved remained ill. He lay still, trapped within his corpselike body. Nobody, not even me, knew that inside he was conscious. The staff at the infirmary had grown bored watching for signs of recovery. He was largely forgotten by all except me, Speranza Patti, whose weekly visits were a cause of bitter jealousy to me, and by our priest, Padre Arcangelo, who never failed to say a special prayer for him at Mass.

Often the curtains around his bed were left closed as the other patients found the sight of him depressing. The monitoring equipment, which registered no activity whatsoever, gathered dust. A spider spun its web around Arcadio's toes. A solitary fly developed a taste for his upper lip, and the tickling drove him mad but of course he could do nothing about it. The
burden of his own body caused him new and greater miseries with each passing day.

I am proud to say that though he was often in despair, I never once gave up hope for him. I firmly believed that one day he would be restored to life, emerging like a butterfly from its chrysalis. Who knew, maybe in the process he would wake up to me, and we would have a glorious future together? And so I threw myself into my work, and into my nightly runs to the infirmary. I can honestly say that my Arcadio was never out of my thoughts, although I cannot say that I was ever in his.

It grieves me to relate that all the while he lay incapacitated, his mind ran on the subject of Fernanda Ponderosa. Night and day, having nothing else to do, he thought about her. Like me, he was tortured by the peaks and troughs of love. How I cursed my fortune that I was not the source of his anguish. Since the tragedy, most often he was slumped into that corner of his brain furthest from reality, where he took refuge from the despair brought on by his illness. There, tucked away, he agonized over whether she would ever love him. Will she? Won't she? Will she? Won't she? Stripping the petals from a daisy.

At times he wound himself up into a frenzy with jealous imaginings on what was happening in his absence, and how Primo Castorini would be taking advantage of his disappearance from the scene to ingratiate himself with the future Signora Carnabuci. These were the thoughts that made him feel worse than any other and brought out in him a lather like soap suds that burst stinging his eyes and irritating his nasal passages. Oh, the torture of not being able to sneeze!

Although Primo Castorini was technically cleared of causing my poppet to fall into the coma, nobody bought his ham. The citizens couldn't stomach it. And this, of course, played right into the hands of the Maddalonis and their associates at Pucillo's Pork Factory.

Consequently all the hams that Primo Castorini had so lovingly prepared were left hanging in the stockroom of the Happy Pig. Not just the stockroom either. There was a serious overproduction problem, for the hams take years to reach the required state of perfection, and until the tragedy there could never be enough of them. There were so many hams they had to be stored wherever there was space. They hung in the passage, in the kitchen, in the attic beneath the eaves, even in Primo Castorini's bedroom.

It is true he no longer entertained there as he had done in the days before Fernanda Ponderosa came and removed his taste for any other woman, but still he wouldn't have chosen to share his sleeping accommodation with masses of pork. The hams hung there in neat rows suspended from the beams and watched him. Even while he was asleep, he could feel their dead eyes upon him, rebuking him. An awful lot of money was tied up in them, and this made the situation even worse.

And whether it was because of the weather or because of duress from his enemies, not many people were buying sausages either. People still came into the shop, but they didn't really buy anything, which made Primo Castorini furious. They just came in to gossip.

The weather was beginning to concern everybody. The
intensity of the heat was unnatural. The temperature was rising as if a giant hand were turning up the thermostat. It was a white heat, the very worst kind. The sun was a wound in the sky. The earth baked like a loaf in the searing heat of the Bordino furnaces.

Our lush grass was no longer the color of apples. It was singed brown, and no nutriment was left in it for the poor grazing stock. Naturally crops suffered, too. Tomatoes burst on their vines. Apples, peaches, pears, cherries, and figs fried on their branches. Melons exploded like artillery, and the luckless Gerberto Nicoletto suffered the indignity of a piece of rind puncturing his bottom like shrapnel. My mistress had never witnessed such an injury, and although by means of a delicate operation she was able to extract it, Gerberto Nicoletto never fully recovered his confidence. The incident prompted him to give up the melon farm that had been in his family for fifteen generations, and instead he began a new career as a vacuum cleaner salesman.

Rye, wheat, corn, barley, and lentil crops all blackened. An entire field of tomatoes was subject to spontaneous internal combustion. Everybody feared a forest fire, and those rash enough to continue smoking cigarettes were regarded prematurely as murderers.

The pastures could no longer nourish the animals that depended upon them for their food. The poor sheep in their woolly coats seemed to suffer the most. They just lay on their backs with their legs in the air. There was nothing the shepherds could do. The goats and the cows stopped giving milk
and lay in the shade fanning themselves with dock leaves. All the animals dehydrated. Then they shrank up and wrinkled. Maria Calenda spent her days drawing water and bathing her pigs in it. It was impossible to churn butter or curdle cheese.

Dogs went mad and many had to be shot, including Max, my poor Arcadio's dog, which soon started to froth at the mouth. Many, of course, saw this as a sign. Cats started to go mad, too. Then the spiders followed them. They spun curly webs like ringlets of hair. Flies could no longer be bothered to fly and lay where they were, praying for death. Rats, too, lay down, in the roads and in doorways, panting.

One day Fernanda Ponderosa came home from the Happy Pig to discover her monkey, Oscar, had given birth to twins. She found him sitting in the cage nursing the tiny creatures the size of pomegranates. Oscar looked at her with eyes full of reproach that she had not done something about the situation sooner, but in truth Fernanda Ponderosa had suspected nothing. She had not even noticed that the monkey had gained weight, although the sailor suits in which she invariably dressed him were certainly a tighter fit. She called the babies Sole and Luna, Sun and Moon, and regarded their birth as a good omen, although she was surprised she had not foreseen it.

The plump citizens of the town could never remember a summer so hot. People became sluggish and idle and lost their appetites, even for Bordino's bread. Susanna Bordino, the only person in the region without excess weight, was the only one who could remain comfortable, and her boasting made her even more unpopular. But Luigi Bordino was pleased the busi
ness was suffering. He was considering selling the bakery. It would fetch a high price and give him more time to pursue Fernanda Ponderosa. What did he care about bread now? As if able to read his thoughts, Susanna Bordino was planning her next move, and had Luigi's eyes not been blinded by love, he would have shuddered to see her evil eye on him.

While most people lay around all day complaining about the heat and the heat and the heat, some enterprising individuals turned the difficult situation to their advantage. Sebastiano Monfregola, the barber, had never been so busy. The heat made everybody's hair grow so fast that many of his clients needed their hair cut every day.

Fedra Brini had taken to making garments out of her cobwebs instead of sails. They were the lightest of clothes, practically weightless as a whisper, as well as fashionable, and she was able to charge a high price for them.

My mistress, of course, who always put her duty first, kept up her punishing schedule of treating the sick and injured throughout the region.

Predictably, heatstroke and rashes kept us remarkably busy. There were a huge variety of rashes from purple spots to green fungus to elaborate curlicues in multicolors that looked like tattoos. There were other strange reactions, too. Amelberga Fidotti grew a beard, her hormones being confused by the heat. Berardo Marta developed a lump on his shoulders that looked like a second head, and many people shunned him, believing this the work of the devil. Those who were over
weight suffered palpitations and incredible sweats that made them leave trails in their wake like snails. All my mistress could do was advise them to stay in the shade and drink a lot of water, but soon water supplies were running low.

But even at night there was no relief from the heat. People slept out on their verandas to try to catch the fleeting breeze.

For weeks there had been no rainfall. The rivers dried and shriveled. The lake evaporated, leaving the swans stranded. The mud left by the receding waters turned into dust and blew away. Not even the riverbeds were left. People had dust in their eyes all the time. Belinda Fondi was beset by people demanding to know when it would rain, but she just couldn't tell. There wasn't a single sign of a change in the weather. The sky remained the most blinding blue.

Worse was to come. There were ominous rumblings deep underground. Creaks and groans sounded in the middle of the night, and even during the day. It was obvious to everybody that the earth's crust was thinking of cracking open. It was not going to be a small earthquake either, like those that regularly shook the region.

Holes opened up in roads. Masonry slipped. In the great campanile, the bells became dislodged and clanged incessantly although nobody was ringing them. The mechanisms of clocks were similarly affected, and now nobody could be sure what time it really was.

Susanna Bordino anxiously checked the exterior of the baker's shop several times a day, and each added crack was
another crack to her heart. There were landslips and slides. Trees moved.

In my Arcadio's olive grove the trees that had stood in the same place for a thousand years were dancing around, reacting to the pressure beneath their roots. The ghost of Remo Carnabuci, who had loved the grove above everything else, was going crazy. He cursed his unfortunate son, willing him to stop idling in bed and return to the grove. But even if Arcadio got out of bed, there was nothing he could have done.

The cottage where my true love lived fell down in one of the many landslides, so now he was homeless in addition to being unconscious. Such of his meager goods that lay amongst the rubble were picked over by the unscrupulous, who treated it as a rummage sale.

Some people fled the region, gathering their belongings and heading off north or south, east or west, hoping to escape the quake when it came. Even the hermit Neddo abandoned his retreat and set out to return to his wife and twelve children, who lived on the coast near Fano. This was a terrible blow for us, as Neddo had made his home in the mountains for many years and was regarded by the citizens as a sage and a blessing. Predictably he said nothing, and with his knapsack thrown over his shoulder, he walked barefoot out of the shaking district and out of our lives. Although a few followed in Neddo's footsteps, most people chose to remain. This was our home after all, and even if it was destroyed, what would we do somewhere else? Everywhere there was a feeling something was about to burst.