Ardor (6 page)

F
or the rest of the night, Fernanda Ponderosa was jittery and watchful. Would Silvana come back? It took a long time for her heart to regain its normal rhythm, for her breathing to slow. Again and again, she spoke out to her sister, going over the things she had wanted to say but hadn't got the chance. She was met only with silence, stillness. Every sound in the creaky old house, and the countryside beyond, made her start up in anticipation.

Eventually, though, toward dawn, sleep stole up on her, but it wasn't the restful sleep she so desperately needed. She was beset by horrible dreams. She was being beaten by someone she couldn't see and so was unable to defend herself. She was fighting through layers of sleep to tear herself awake but couldn't reach the surface. She was trying to flee but an overpowering force was holding her back.

She finally awoke and felt a surge of relief that these were only dreams. But what about Silvana—was she a dream, too? Or had Fernanda Ponderosa really seen the ghost of her sister in the night?

As she lay thinking, she became conscious of a voice inside her urging her to stay, at least for a while, and she always listened to such voices. A free spirit, she went where her visions drove her, submitting to the will of the time and tides, and the breezes that sent her in new directions.

Although she was fanciful, Fernanda Ponderosa was also practical. She reasoned that since she had come all this way, she had to try to make peace with Silvana. If she didn't, she knew she would continue to be haunted by regrets. Fernanda Ponderosa also knew that the family business could use her help. In her travels she had gained experience of all kinds of occupations, and working in a pork butcher's would be easier than many things she had done. She hoped this would please Silvana and give her an understanding of her sister's life. Finally, as she didn't feel drawn to anywhere else just yet, she considered this as good a place to be as any other.

So she climbed out of bed, opened the drapes, and threw back the shutters to find the sun was already shining, and from the window she beheld the beauty of the countryside: the plain stretching out ahead of her, its vastness divided neatly into hedge-edged squares containing wheat, rye, and barley. There were rows of sturdy vines leaning on one another's shoulders, fields of young sunflowers nodding their floppy heads, and meadows full of fresh, minty grass.

Beneath the window, the furniture was covered in dewdrops. Already spiders had gone to work spinning glistening strings from piece to piece like Christmas tree lights. A badger
had moved into the crib, doves were nesting in the hair of the goddess Aphrodite, around whose plinth were shards of marble the shape of tears.

Fernanda Ponderosa released the family of turtles under the fig tree at the side of the house. The monkey, Oscar, sat up in the branches, watching as she dragged the statue of the goddess into the center of the yard and then hauled the rest inside the house. It was an eclectic collection, and one that jostled for position amongst the dust-covered stuff of her sister and brother-in-law. She didn't take pains with the arrangement. She knew she wouldn't be staying long enough for it to matter.

That done, she set out to find Maria Calenda, who lived in one of the outbuildings on the far side of the property, close to the piggery. Maria Calenda avoided the house as much as possible because she knew it was haunted. Sightings of Perdita Castorini, Primo and Fidelio's long-dead mother, brought her out in monstrous swellings, and she had to plaster herself with a magic emollient before taking to her bed. Other ghosts produced different symptoms, and in the current crisis she just didn't have the time for allergic reactions.

A troupe of miniature goats danced around Fernanda Ponderosa as she crossed the fields. The pigs looked at her dolefully as she passed their pens. Not even the boisterous babies made a sound. Their dolor was because there had been a death in the family.

Fernanda Ponderosa made her way toward the buildings in
the distance. She could detect two or three figures working there. When she got closer, she realized there were only two people, Maria Calenda and a man, and between them, strung up on a frame of timbers and ropes, was the carcass of a pig. Maria Calenda was gathering into a pail the blood poring from a gash in its breast. She had an enormous boil on the end of her nose, which was throbbing like a beacon.

“Ghosts are walking the earth,” she announced to Fernanda Ponderosa, gesturing toward her swelling with a hairy finger. “You can depend upon it, the undead are amongst us.”

Perhaps she was right.

The man stood up as Fernanda Ponderosa approached. His eyes drank her like a draft of crystal water on a burning day.

He wore no shirt, only coarse waterproof pants and rubber boots, and his great broad, brown breast, which heaved at the sight of her, was smeared with the blood of the pig he had just killed. He was tall. So tall Fernanda Ponderosa had to tilt her head backward to look him full in the face. He was not fat, but built solidly of muscle, and his shoulders were wide. Afterward she could not tell which of his features had struck her first. Was it his hair, a thick and bushy growth of shiny black that had an existence all its own? It was alive. It rippled. It parted and reparted itself. If flexed and shimmied. Or was it his eyes? They were unlike any other eyes she had ever seen. Dark, practically black, like burning coals. They were the eyes of an animal, a wild animal.

Fernanda Ponderosa could feel them physically upon her,
scorching her, but she was used to this. They rested on the puckers of her nut-brown cleavage, on her serpentine curves, on her plump mouth.

“So you're going to save us?” asked Primo Castorini quietly, for evidently it was he, Silvana's brother-in-law. His tone was even, offering respect or sarcasm depending on how you chose to take it. His voice was as deep as his eyes were black.

“Isn't that nice?” he added in the direction of Maria Calenda, who cackled while her squinty eyes flashed between him and Fernanda Ponderosa, enjoying the moment.

Fernanda Ponderosa watched him wipe the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand, leaving a smear of crimson blood there that made him look even more dangerous.

“I'll stay until your brother comes back,” she said softly.

He could never have imagined her voice, would never have believed it real. He would always remember the thrill of hearing it for the first time. A bolt of lightning seared through him and down to his crotch. He willed it to stay still.

“My brother isn't coming back,” he managed to answer, but barely.

His look dared her to contradict him, but she knew Fidelio would return. Primo Castorini's throat was sun-baked sand. Fernanda Ponderosa felt a splash of hot water against her face as Maria Calenda threw a steaming bucketload over the pig, then started to scrape at its bristles with a hook.

“I'll come this afternoon,” she said, “to help out.”

“I'll be disappointed if you don't,” he said slowly, coming
closer. He was speaking now in little more than a whisper that made Maria Calenda pause in her scraping to extend her ears.

Fernanda Ponderosa turned her back and walked away. The swaying of her hips was the curve of a wave lapping on a beach. A man who had never seen the ocean, he wanted to lie down and drown himself in it. He watched her cross the field until she disappeared from view. When he returned to his work on the carcass, the expression on his face made Maria Calenda cackle again. The stranger would need to watch out.

I
t was a beautiful day, the first in May, and already it was unseasonably hot. Summer had come overnight to the region, but nobody could have predicted what the weather had in store for us later on.

In the hedgerows flowers bloomed furiously. The air was overstuffed with their rich perfume and with the sound of insects, fat bees buzzing as they collected their pollen, cicadas singing, busy flies zubbing. Sancio, the daft mule of the Castorini family, was in his meadow, braying loudly. To think that once I had considered allowing him into my heart! The mooing of cows was jubilant, like a church choir. Chickens clucked, goats chattered, and sheep chomped. The earth teemed with life, and up in the blue sky that looked freshly washed, swallows were darting in arcs and circles.

Fernanda Ponderosa arrived in the town, where the streets were full of people discussing the strange phenomenon of the singing the previous night.

Gerberto Nicoletto was demanding compensation from the
Ministry of Agriculture on account of his melons: they had come up overnight, monstrously big, and warped into embarrassing shapes.

Filiberto Carofalo was complaining that his goats had all given green milk.

Amelberga Fidotti claimed her fountain was spouting olive oil.

Earlier in the day a deputation had trudged up the mountain to consult the hermit, Neddo, but no reassurance could be gotten from him: he seemed to have gone into a deep trance and would answer no questions. Although the citizens had waited patiently for him to speak and had held under his nose their choice offerings of meat, eggs, bread, and woolen socks, the savant remained mute, and after several hours of intense scrutiny of the bearded sage, the citizens trudged away again no wiser than when they had come.

After that disappointment they approached Speranza Patti, who was the closest thing the town had to a scholar. She had examined several books in the library and failed to come up with an explanation. This, however, didn't stop her inventing one.

Sebastiano Monfregola had set up a stool and was cutting hair in the street as he did on festivals. When Fernanda Ponderosa squeezed her way past him, he was so struck by her resemblance to her dead sister that he almost cut the ear off Franco Laudato with the blade of the razor.

Fernanda Ponderosa knew the magical sound was nothing but the crazy serenade of the village idiot, but she said nothing.

Before she reached the butcher's shop, she had to elbow her way through the crowd waiting in line outside the world-famous Bordino Bakery. Today it was doing a roaring trade in the carnival atmosphere that had taken over the town. And in addition to the usual breads and pastries, Melchiore Bordino, son of the proprietor, who was a magician with a spun string of sugary caramel, had commemorated the day with marzipan angels whose throats poured forth notes of golden sugar crystals.

Luigi Bordino, Melchiore's father, had inherited the business from his father, Luigi Bordino, who had himself inherited it from his father, Manfredi Bordino, before him. No one could remember a time when there hadn't been a Bordino Bakery in this town.

Bread was Luigi Bordino's life. The smell of bread hung around him in a vapor. At night in bed he thought about bread. The books he read were about bread. The only shows he enjoyed on television were about bread. Bread was his favorite food. He liked nothing better than a hunk of his own bread, unadorned, with no oil, no butter, no cheese or jam. It was good enough for him just as it was.

The Bordino bread was immensely popular. Another bakery was at the other end of the town, and indeed its bread was slightly cheaper than Bordino's, yet it was only patronized by misers. Those who wanted love in their bread joined the line outside Bordino's in the mornings when the smell of heaven hung in the air outside the shop.

But, as the saying goes, a man cannot live by bread alone. Many a long year had passed since Luigi's wife, Gloriana, herself from a baking family in Gubbio, far to the north, had gone to that great oven in the sky. For many years he had harbored hopes of finding a new love, but the object of his affections, my mistress, Concetta Crocetta, never encouraged his advances.

Many times he had kneaded a special dough for her, with love as the secret ingredient. Sweet temptations like fig or pomegranate, raisin and angelica, cherry, or in season, peach, even rose petal. He formed his loving doughs into the most wonderful shapes: wreathes, bouquets of flowers, hearts, fruit shapes, baskets. There seemed no end to his inventiveness. And then with the most tender care he would wrap them in tissue paper, place them in boxes, and deliver them personally to our cottage with a respectfully worded card.

Concetta Crocetta's thank-you notes accumulated under the baker's pillow, but they never gave him the pretext of pressing his suit further. Concetta Crocetta enjoyed the loaves, but the magic ingredient, love, never seemed to rise like dough within her breast, at least not for Luigi Bordino. Though when she ate the bread, she did feel more love for Amilcare Croce.

Luigi shared his home with his son, Melchiore, the pastry cook, and his wife, Susanna. In his heart Luigi could not understand Melchiore's choice. True, it wasn't Susanna's fault that she was stricken with celiac disease and couldn't appreciate the bread that was their life. But Susanna was not an easy girl to get along with. There was something spiky about her. Physi
cally she was the only skinny person in the region. And her tongue was as sharp as her features. She spoke often of progress, about the need to do things in the modern way, and she never tired of singing the benefits of electric ovens to replace the wood fires, and of industrial equipment that would mechanize the kneading process Luigi loved more than anything else. The baker stood firm, but his son, longing for a quiet life, was beginning to support his wife.

The greatest fear Susanna had, and one that often disturbed her sleep at night, was that her father-in-law would remarry, and she regarded with dismay his attentions to Concetta Crocetta. She was not slow to put a curse on the union, and it may have been this that prevented my mistress from responding with more feeling to the baker's suit.

And so lonely Luigi soon began to feel himself outnumbered in his own shop and was fearful of what the future would bring. As a result or perhaps because of his loneliness and fear, he worked harder than ever and made more and even better bread.