Ardor (8 page)
Authors: Lily Prior
T
he following day the paths of my mistress and her doctor crossed again. It was an extraordinary stroke of good luck for them, being thrown together twice in two days. The circumstances of this encounter, however, were not auspicious. It was the funeral of the town's undertaker, Don Dino Maddaloni of the Maddaloni Funeral Home. His death had caused a stir, largely because nobody had expected the funeral director himself to die. It was as though his occupation made him exempt. A Rotarian and a player of bridge, he was a big man in the community, and naturally an important man in the local organization of the Mafia.
Concetta Crocetta had been treating him for a stomach ulcer, which periodically gave the undertaker cause for alarm, interrupting the schedule of lavish banquets for which his household was famous. In addition, she had been applying poultices to Don Dino's right foot.
Nevertheless, neither the ulcer nor the gout carried him off. It was a sausage. Or so the rumor told. Word circulated that
Happy Pig sausages, those same sausages made with such care by Primo Castorini, were responsible for bringing Don Dino down in his prime.
Of course there was no truth in this rumor. Don Dino's associates had made it up, for the pork stakes in the region were high, and the Mafia-controlled Pucillo's Pork Factory on the outskirts of the town was out to destroy its rivals. The Happy Pig was the last family concern to remain in business.
The funeral, as might be expected, was perfect in every detail. The widow Maddaloni's grief for the loss of her husband was overshadowed by her regret that he wasn't there to witness his glorious send-off. The six Maddaloni sons, Pomilio, Prisco, Pirro, Malco, Ivano, and Gaddo, were the pallbearers, and they moved with the precision of soldiers on a parade ground. So perfectly timed were their movements they looked like clockwork dolls. No fewer than three priests officiated over the service; indeed, there could not have been more pomp and circumstance if they had been burying the bishop himself.
Whispers that the Maddalonis were reaching above themselves with the excessive and even impious funeral were soon silenced.
In the clouds of incense, the mourners who weren't weeping in their grief were crying because of the inflammation of their eyes and nasal passages. Countless wax candles lit the interior lighter than heaven itself, and the smoke was blackening the ceiling, which had been repainted for the occasion.
In spite of his reluctance and natural shyness, Arcadio
Carnabuci was singled out for the particular honor of singing the Ave Maria, on account of the impression he had made that Palm Sunday on Don Dino. In case his resistance got the better of him at the last moment, he was collected from his cottage in a car, seated between Don Dino's cousins Selmo and Narno. He was even supplied with a robe to wear that gave him the appearance of an overgrown choirboy.
What agonies did Arcadio Carnabuci feel during the service. And it had nothing to do with his grief for the departed. All he could think about was seeing Fernanda Ponderosa again, clearing any misunderstandings, and hopefully delivering a proposal of marriage to her; instead he had to sing at this funeral. Of course he could not refuse. He knew only too well if he tried to assert his will, the ancestral olive grove of the Carnabuci dynasty would be set ablaze. But how bitter were his feelings at the injustice of it all. And how he willed the proceedings to get under way so he could run off as quickly as possible.
In the midst of all of this, through the haze of incense, Dr. Croce spotted the distinctive form of my mistress in a pew a few rows behind him. It was a pure fluke that he had arrived on time. They exchanged nods, and when the service was finally over, after three hours of eulogies interspersed with hymns and readings and the Mass itself, they met in the aisle.
Wearing matching blushes, they both spoke at once in their anxiety to break the ice.
“Lovely service,” she.
“Lavish send-off,” he.
Their words collided in the thick air and jumbled themselves, causing them both to blurt half-suppressed giggles and then look around furtively for fear that others in the congregation had heard them.
They looked into one another's eyes for what seemed an eternity, but was probably no longer than a few seconds.
“Keep moving there,” said someone from behind.
The doctor felt an elbow in his back.
“There's a blockage in the aisle.”
“Don't push.”
“Be patient, won't you?”
“I can't breathe in this scrum.”
“Move along.”
The force of the stream pulled them apart. The bodies of the mourners, like a weight of floodwater, came between them. The moment was gone. They kept looking back at one another from their relative places in the surge. Neither could struggle against the current. Were the doctor's sensuous lips forming some word intended for the nurse? She craned her neck to see, but it was too smoky in there, and too dark now that the candles had burned away. Had he said something, anything? He felt her eyes upon him still, brown, warm, smooth. Afterward, when he closed his eyes, he could see them still.
Outside, each was engaged in conversation by interfering busybodies. Policarpo Pinto wanted to talk about his bunions. Filiberto Carofalo wanted a remedy for the aggressive warts
that marred his life. Fedra Brini got out her cellulite in full view of the congregation.
In the throng they lost one another, and although the eyes of each continued to search for the other in the swelling mass of people, the figures they sought had vanished.
A
s soon as Arcadio Carnabuci was able to squeeze through the pressing mass of mourners and discard his chorister's costume, he tore along to the Happy Pig, where he heard with dismay that the object of his dreams was now working. He knew the butcher's ways and he didn't like it at all. Arcadio would ask her to resign at the earliest opportunity.
Fernanda Ponderosa was alone in the shop as Primo Castorini had urgent business to attend to. Earlier, he had received one of his own pigs' heads through the post with a note attached saying, “Don Dino will be avenged.” Of course, the butcher knew the dangers of standing up to the Mafia, but he wasn't about to be intimidated. He had gone to Pucillo's Pork Factory for some straight talk on the subject of sausages. His were innocent, and anyone who said otherwise would have trouble on his hands.
As soon as the bells in the venerable campanile had heralded the end of the funeral Mass, Fernanda Ponderosa saw entering
the shop the man who had serenaded her the first evening she'd arrived. She knew it was him. She recognized his hands immediately. Large as shovels, clumsy, and totally out of proportion to the rest of his puny body. She looked at the man through narrow eyes. He'd better not start singing now or she'd throw him out on the street. What did he want?
“Signor?” She added a note of steel to her voice for discouragement.
God, she was gorgeous, Arcadio thought. Her uniform had mysteriously disappeared, and she was wearing a tight red dress that clung to her curves and drove him to distraction.
The speech Arcadio Carnabuci had constantly rehearsed in his head since he had woken from his dream the previous night, and in a less specific form over the past twenty years, immediately deserted him.
Now, in the daylight he could see her glory clearly. That night on the balcony, in the shadowy light of the lantern, he had gained only an impression of her, but now he was struck by her startling splendor. Even her teeth were magnificent. Massive. Like those of a horse. He was dealt a physical blow at seeing her in the flesh, the embodiment of his throbbing desires, surrounded by legs of pork and hanging hams.
He felt himself staggering. His legs had gone weak. They seemed unable to support him. Suddenly, it had become unbearably hot. He knew he was growing red. He began to panic. How was he to begin to pour out his heart here in the pork butcher's? There were so many things he needed to say.
He was overwhelmed by the scale, the force of his feelings. He was bursting with sentiment.
Should he reconsider and start to sing? He had always been more eloquent in song than in conversation. The moment was stretching out like elastic. Both were conscious of a rising embarrassment. Fernanda Ponderosa's eyes were sending out arrows and barbs. Why did he not speak?
“Yes?” she said again.
He moved his mouth, but no words could find their way out of the jumble of his brain and onto his lips. To kick-start the process and connect the necessary synapses, he opened and closed his mouth a number of times like a fish.
“Ham,” he was able to blurt at last, and his larynx stung with the effort this one word had cost him.
The crisis was over. The tension in the air of the butcher's shop relaxed a little, but not enough to make either feel comfortable.
“Which?” came her curt reply.
Arcadio Carnabuci could only point with one of his huge, purplish fingers at the ham hanging immediately above Fernanda Ponderosa's head. The hand, huge and hairy, hovered in the air right before her eyes. It was hideous. Her disgust could not have been more tangible or more obvious, but Arcadio Carnabuci was blind to it. He had his script and he was sticking to it. In her eyes, full of venom, he could only find love. A fledgling love, he had to admit, but it was there. It had to be.
Fernanda Ponderosa reached up and took the ham down
from its hook. He watched her with fascination. She felt his eyes on her. He broke into a sweat. She flushed. He colored. She wrapped the ham in brown paper and pushed it toward him across the counter.
“Fifty,” she said.
He fished a crumpled note out of a pocket and held it out. She looked at it as if it had a disease. She removed it carefully from his grasp with the tip of a finger and thumb, dropped it into the cash register from a height, and slammed the drawer shut. Then she occupied herself behind the counter, arranging jars and pickles, and wiping the already gleaming surfaces with a cloth. Arcadio Carnabuci tried to think of every possibly reason for remaining, but he couldn't and eventually took the hint, and the ham, and muttered, “Good day,” and left the shop.
Fernanda Ponderosa did not reply but took a bottle of disinfectant to the part of the counter that had been polluted by the touch of his hands.
He had been inside for twenty-three minutes, and precisely seven words had been exchanged between them. Out in the street, Arcadio Carnabuci was ready to demolish himself.
He hit his head repeatedly against the wall of the Bordino Bakery in full view of the passing crowds.
Policarpo Pinto and Sebastiano Monfregola exchanged glances and shook their heads.
“It's what living alone can do to a man,” offered Policarpo sagely.
“He should take a wife,” agreed Sebastiano.
“But who would have him?” shouted Luca Carluccio, the wrinkled shoemaker, enjoying the spectacle from his doorway across the street.
“Heard he's been buying bedsheets⦔
“He's on the edge, that's clear.”
Susanna Bordino was not slow in emerging from the bakery to inspect for any damage to the premises she vowed would soon be hers.
“Hey,” she barked at my unfortunate olive grower. “Go hit your head on someone else's wall. A block of a head like that thumping against the walls. It's enough to cause an earthquake.”
Arcadio, stunned both by his inadequacy and by the blows he had inflicted upon himself, slunk away to his olive grove and confided his bitter secret to his trees. The conversation, such as it was, had not gone well, he knew. When preparing his fine speech, he had fatally failed to take into account his nervousness. He had sabotaged his well-laid plans. How he cursed his self-destructive urges.
I watched him from behind the whispering hedge at the perimeter of the grove, and my eyes were filmy with tears. It shames me to say that my mistress had been obliged to travel to the funeral on foot, for that morning I was once again missing from my stall.
Once Arcadio Carnabuci's tears had run dry and sunk into the compost of the olive grove, tears that would later give an added piquancy to his famous oil, and the soothing air of the
ancient grove had calmed him, he began to try to garner together like a magpie the silver slivers of hope from the scrap heap of despair.
In spite of this second setback, he knew she belonged to him, and to him alone. Tomorrow he would spruce himself upâno more half measuresâand return to the butcher's shop. There he would declare his love and carry off his prize.
T
he following morning Arcadio Carnabuci caught sight of his image in the gleaming glass frontage of the Happy Pig and almost failed to recognize himself. He had decided to leave his spectacles at home and could see little without them. Without them his face bore an entirely different character. It looked wrong, and even those who had never seen him before would have been able to tell something was missing from it.
It took a number of seconds for him to identify himself with the dapper be-suited individual with slicked-back hair and red carnation that he saw reflected there.
The suit, it is true, showed it had long been the sole source of nutriment to the family of moths that were resident in his closet, and they watched with alarm as he removed it from the rusty hanger and took it away. “It will be back in time for lunch, my darlings,” said the mother to her hungry grubs, trying to sound cheerful, but the prospect of no breakfast was grim.
The length of the pants was no longer as modish as when the suit had been new, now that it had become fashionable for
there to be less of an expanse of sock between hem and shoe. But nevertheless, once Arcadio Carnabuci recognized himself, and his surprise had waned, allowing his eyebrows to resume their accustomed position on his face, he felt a surge of pride at the way he had pulled it off.
He fumbled in his pocket for the cue card on which he had noted the most important points; he would not allow his nerves to get the better of him this time. He had agonized over the wording of the card the whole of the previous evening. The packet of one hundred cards he had acquired from the stationer's in the Via Battista for this purpose had quickly formed a crumpled mountain at his feet beneath the table. When he came to the last one, he knew he had to get it right this time. It was now or never. No more mistakes. His hand, feeling a frustration of its own, without any instruction from him, took up the pen, and he could only watch as it spelled out the following words in a childish hand:
“Fernanda Ponderosa, I love you. Be mine.”
He scrutinized the hand's words, looking for a hidden meaning. They were simple enough, and to the point. No excess, no wooliness. True, there was none of the extravagant emotion that he would like to have got across, but all things considered, it was good, and taking the independent action of the hand as a favorable omen, he turned out the lamp and went to bed and tried in vain to dream of Fernanda Ponderosa. The gauzy likeness of her hovered somewhere above him, and every time his mind tried to grasp her, she vanished.
The following morning, the flat note of the cowbell once more announced Arcadio Carnabuci's presence in the Happy Pig, and once inside, his weak eyes sought out the statuesque figure of Fernanda Ponderosa.
All he could make out were floating pink masses, which troubled him until he realized they were the hams blurred at the edges by his myopia. A booming voice made him jump guiltily. It was not the voice of Fernanda Ponderosa. No. It was Primo Castorini.
“
Salve,
Arcadio Carnabuci.”
Again, the olive grower's mouth performed the motions of a fish. This was not what he had expected.
Primo Castorini was not slow to notice the transformation in Arcadio Carnabuci, and his jealousy reared up like a cobra ready to strike.
“Why, neighbor,” he boomed, “your appearance is so changed I hardly recognized you. Has there been another death? Are you on your way to sing at another funeral? What has become of your glasses? Has there been an accident?”
These questions confused Arcadio Carnabuci even more. His eyes kept roving along the shelves piled with jars of pickles that seemed alive, for they were forever changing shape, seeking out the certitude with which he had entered the shop, and the absent form of Fernanda Ponderosa.
“Are you ill? Shall I call Concetta Crocetta?”
Arcadio Carnabuci's fingers felt the cue card in his pocket. But he couldn't turn to that for guidance. At last, after an
engulfing silence, just when Primo Castorini's form was moving toward the door to summon help, Arcadio knew he had to get some words out; one word at least. Finally, desperately, like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat he roared:
“Ham.”
It came out far too loud. After the silence that had preceded it. But it was out. It had got him out of a crisis. That one syllable contained all the anguish, all the aching and longing and churning and burning and suffering in the world.
Now it was Primo Castorini's turn to jump. His comfortable frame momentarily lost contact with the ground beneath its feet. He turned around and looked at Arcadio Carnabuci with different eyes. Had he made that sound? A sound unlike any Primo Castorini had ever heard before. Was Arcadio Carnabuci capable of it? Had Primo, and everybody else in the region, misjudged him? Was this pitiful mouse really a man?
Primo Castorini retraced his steps and scrutinized Arcadio Carnabuci, trying to find a trace in this gibbering wreck of some spark of the passion that had led him to release that incredible bellow. There was none. Embarrassed, Arcadio Carnabuci looked down at the flagstones dusted lightly with sawdust and shifted his weight in the shoes that were pinching his toes so painfully. They hadn't been out of their box since his mother's funeral twenty-two years before. They pinched then, and they still pinched now.
“Did you say âHam'?” asked Primo Castorini, his incredulity stretched to the limit.
Arcadio Carnabuci nodded feebly.
Primo Castorini lifted one down from the display in the manner one would hold a newborn babyâwith love and care and the terror of dropping itâand wrapped it tenderly in waxed paper. It seemed such a waste of such a wonderful ham, to let a fool such as this have it, but such was his business after all. He couldn't allow himself to be sentimental.
“Seems to me you're getting through a lot of ham lately, Arcadio Carnabuci,” he said darkly and deliberately. “Fernanda Ponderosa sold you one only yesterday, didn't she?”
At the mention by name of his goddess, his paragon, his muse, his love, his life, Arcadio Carnabuci jolted as though a charge of electricity had surged through him, then struggled to remain on his feet, for how much did he want to lie down where he was and weep.
“You wouldn't want to overdo it now, would you?” Primo Castorini continued quietly, tying the package neatly with a length of string, which he severed with a giant knife. A knife much bigger than was necessary for severing string. The look in his animal eyes as he did so struck fear into the heart of Arcadio Carnabuci. Did it really sound like a threat, or was it only his strung-out nerves, stretched taught as a violin string, that made it seem so?
Arcadio Carnabuci managed to hand over a bill and take hold of the ham, which seemed to weigh so much that he could barely lift it. He shuffled out of the shop a different man to the spry and jaunty one who had come in four minutes previously.
In those four minutes he seemed to have aged forty years. He was broken, and pitiful, in his brilliantine and boutonniere, and in his fine clothes that any other man in the region would have been too ashamed to donate to the
poveri
.
As he left the shop, he was almost mowed down by Fernanda Ponderosa, who had been out running errands. She looked at him as at something she might have stepped in. Before he could apologize for getting under her feet, she disappeared inside and the clanging cowbell was smothered by the closing of the door.
Susanna Bordino, at that moment engaged in a thorough cleaning of her window display prior to a visit by Signor Cocozza of the Environmental Health and Sanitation Department, cast a look at Arcadio Carnabuci that could have scorched the bread then baking in the Bordino ovens. Having done so, she called over her husband, Melchiore, and her father-in-law, Luigi, and the entire line of customers waiting for the bread to emerge hot and crusty and heavenly from the furnaces, then plumping the air with an irresistible aroma, to witness Arcadio Carnabuci's new look for themselves. Instinctively Luigi Bordino knew why Arcadio Carnabuci had dressed himself up like a clown, and jealousy bubbled up like frothing yeast in the normally placid waters of his soul.
Arcadio Carnabuci, even in his confused state, didn't even consider hitting his head on the bakery walls, but looked blankly at the sea of faces in the window, which were themselves watching him. It was only a matter of good luck that the
loaves were not burnt black, for Luigi Bordino was as glued to the actions of my poor Arcadio as were all the others.
The impasse lasted until the dazzling May sky cracked open and, despite the heat, blistering drops of rain fell down from a great height, plastering the greasy hair against Arcadio Carnabuci's scalp and causing the moths' lunch to become waterlogged in an instant.
In those moments, which seemed to stretch out and last forever, Arcadio Carnabuci believed that he had somehow died and gone to hell. Still he did not move from the spot, as if he had put down roots there like a tree. Finally, as the rain coursed in rivulets down his face and filled his eyes, making them doubly incapable, he recognized his need for shelter and limped slowly homeward, bowed down by the weight of his ham and his misery.
In the fragrant warmth of the Bordino Bakery, the citizens became animated again, like actors on a stage. Luigi Bordino remembered the bread just in time, and if truth were told, the glazed crust was a slightly darker shade of umber than it would usually have been. Melchiore went back to icing his
pasticcini
with sugar-crusted raindrops, and Susanna loudly denounced Arcadio Carnabuci to anybody who would listen to her.
The cause of the spectacle, Arcadio Carnabuci, had no sooner reached the door of his cottage than the rain stopped with the suddenness of someone turning off a tap. Every rain cloud vanished, the sun burnt fiercely, and within seconds every puddle had dried up. The only reminder of the downpour
was the enduring dampness of Arcadio Carnabuci, whose dark front passage became a swamp. To his credit he did not cry.
The waterlogged suit had become as heavy as a suit of armor. The red carnation in the buttonhole had drowned. In the pocket, the cue card had turned to mush, its precious message lost in a splot of ink. Without thinking, he took off the jacket and pants. The smell of must and decay was overwhelmed now by the stench of wet dog coming from the soaking wool. He left it where he had shrugged it off in the hallway. It remained standing by itself. The suit had become his bitter enemy. He identified it now with the terrible morning and blamed it unfairly for his misfortune.
He hauled the ham into his little kitchen, shaded now with failure and disappointment. How different it was from the bright, happy room he had left just a while ago. He put on his spectacles, spectacles he had been too vain to wear, which were lying next to the cup containing the last splash of coffee he had been too impatient to drink. It seemed as though it had been abandoned years before. As he sat down, he saw himself reflected in the kaleidoscope of film on the surface. His haunted eyes looked back at him, full of reproach.
“You fool,” read their expression.
Yes. He was a fool. An old fool.