I Know This Much Is True (99 page)

Sometimes in the morning, Violetta and Prosperine would meet each other on the village road, the beautiful girl rushing toward the sea for her day of posing, her homely friend trudging in the opposite direction, accompanied by the hunchback and her half-starved chickens and rabbits. Sometimes, too, Violetta and the Monkey passed each other again in late afternoon, each now traveling the other way. At first, when they confronted one another on the road, they waved or nodded. After a while, though, Violetta looked away and did not speak. Her silence drove a stick through Prosperine’s heart. The Monkey knew that more than painting and posing went on in Ciccolina’s house while the old woman and she were away in the square—that Gallante Selvi and her pretty friend were doing the stallion’s dance. It was Prosperine, after all, who had scrubbed Violetta’s blood from the painter’s sheets.

Sometimes, after they passed each other on the road, Prosperine would look back and peek at her friend. Violetta looked more I Know[649-748] 7/24/02 1:31 PM Page 664

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beautiful than ever, her skin now darkened to gold, her hair wild and tangled by the wind and salt air of the
Adriatico
.

“She was more beautiful then than now,” she said.

I sat up in my chair. “Than
now
?”

The Monkey jumped a little, as if she suddenly remembered she was talking not to the air, but to Tempesta. “I . . . I meant more beautiful then than I would imagine her to be,” she said. “If she had lived. But who is to say, eh? She died so long ago. Violetta lies buried in the Old Country.”

Prosperine stared at me. I stared back and held my tongue. “Go on,” I said. “Go on with your story.”

It was at those times when she saw Violetta on the road that Prosperine felt most miserable about her own new life. Alone with the old woman, she was neither happy nor unhappy and, little by little, the aching for her father and sisters went away. Freed from all that macaroni-making, she realized how much she had hated it—the
ripetizione
, the soreness each day in her back and legs and fingers. If she had stayed there, she might have turned hunchback like the old woman. Who knew? Perhaps that would be the fate of the sisters who had forsaken her? God punished such betrayals, did He not?

Prosperine was free on Sundays to attend Mass in the village, and it had been her habit to go until one morning when Ciccolina had a dizzy spell. The Monkey stayed to help her. That was the day the old woman first called her
figlia mia
and hinted about someday passing on potent gifts. As the old woman said this, she pulled Prosperine near to her and patted her face. The Monkey no longer feared her, or any power she might have to do harm. As Ciccolina smiled and touched Prosperine’s face, the Monkey realized the
strega
was more blind than she had known. She studied her white chin whiskers, her big nose pockmarked like a lemon, her brown teeth more crooked than the cobblestones in the village square.

Nothing about Ciccolina repelled the girl anymore—not those two filmy eyes with yellow
caccola
in the corners, not even the purple I Know[649-748] 7/24/02 1:31 PM Page 665

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lump on the old woman’s forehead. The Monkey dared herself to touch that thing, then watched her fingers move slowly toward it.

Against it. The warmth of that knob surprised her. . . .
Figlia mia
, that was what Ciccolina started calling her.

By the middle of September, small crowds had begun gathering near the water’s edge to watch Gallante Selvi draw and paint his pictures of Pescara’s stained-glass
celebrità
. Townspeople and travelers went to stare and pray. The old nuns who had once taught Violetta—who had so often slapped and scolded her for misbehaving—now became afflicted with a convenient loss of memory. “Such a sweet girl she always was,” they sighed. “So obedient and smart. So pious.”

Often, the leader of the oglers was the village priest who had selected Violetta for the crowning at the Feast of the Assumption.

He now took full credit for Gallante Selvi’s choice of Violetta as his model. Prosperine had forgotten that priest’s given name—
Padre
Pomposo
is what she had called him back then and that was the only name she remembered now. He was a lover of
stravaganza
and self-promotion, that one! Did he not have a fine eye for spiritual beauty? Was there not some divine connection between himself and Selvi’s stained-glass project? He began to talk of organizing a religious festival once Gallante Selvi’s masterpiece was finished and, perhaps, a holy pilgrimage to Torino once the triptych had been installed in the great cathedral. And as for Violetta, she could do no wrong. In a month’s time, the girl who had pestered street vendors and fishermen and pulled the backbones from a million fish had been transformed into the queen of all Pescara!

One afternoon Violetta and Gallante stopped their work and rode to the village square to shop and flaunt themselves and eat
gelato
at the
trattoria
—the very same café whose awning Violetta and Prosperine had once hidden behind, taunting the old woman whom the Monkey had somehow come to love. Now, from her spot across the street among Ciccolina’s coops and cages, Prosperine glared at Violetta. She hated her fancy new clothes and shoes, her fancy new ways. She knew her secrets.

As she stared, Prosperine saw Violetta whisper something to the I Know[649-748] 7/24/02 1:31 PM Page 666

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artiste
. Then he looked over at the Monkey and scowled. “What are you looking at, butcher-girl, eh?” he called across from the little porch. That day, Ciccolina had been too sick to go to the market and the Monkey sat alone. “Is my
madrina
teaching you the fine art of
il
mal occhio
? Should I hold up
mano cornuto
to ward off your curses?”

He laughed when he said it—had meant it as a joke. But the waiter and several others who overheard his remark eyed Prosperine suspiciously. She reddened with anger at the slander, and at Violetta’s haughty smile! The Monkey stared and stared at her former friend until that smile fell off her face.

When this fine gentleman and lady—ha!—rose to leave, Violetta staggered against the table, complaining of shooting pains in her legs. “Is this
your
doing?” she screamed to Prosperine across the road. “Do you send pains to afflict me because of your jealousy?”

“Bah!” the Monkey called back. “Stop your new friend’s visits between your legs, ‘
Santa Lucia,
’ and those pains will go away!”

Violetta gasped and hobbled in shame toward their carriage.

Gallante Selvi pointed at Prosperine and warned her he would beat her when she returned to his
madrina
’s hut that evening.

“What a disgusting accusation!” someone said.

“Sacrilege!” another villager agreed.

“Who does that butcher-girl think she is?”

“She’s a strange one—that little witch.”

In the days that followed, Prosperine was stared at, whispered about, spat upon. Even her own sisters held their noses in the air and did not speak to her. At home, Gallante Selvi tried to make good on his promise to beat her, but the old woman stood between them and forbade it. Selvi settled for growling and shoving, threatening her whenever his godmother could not hear.

But within a month of her public humiliation, the Monkey was avenged! On the first of October, Selvi quit Pescara like a thief in the night. A porter at the train station said the
artiste
had taken with him two trunks, two portfolios of the drawings and paintings he had made of Violetta, and Violetta herself! She had bid no one goodbye, not even her father!

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Afraid of losing business, D’Annunzio spread the story that
Padre
Pomposo
had secretly married Gallante Selvi and his daughter before their departure, but the following Sunday the priest denied it from the
pulpito
. After that, Violetta’s father tried a different approach, denouncing his immoral daughter on the streets in the same loud voice he used to hawk fish. His business fell off nonetheless and before the month was finished, a drunken man punctured D’Annunzio’s lung in a tavern brawl and killed him. Gallante Selvi and Violetta were located in Torino and notified of the tragedy, but Violetta did not return to bury her father. Everyone agreed that Pescara’s once-celebrated
Santa Lucia
had broken both the third and ninth commandments and would, no doubt, spend eternity in Hell.

By November, the village tongues had tired of speaking the name
Violetta
and gone on to other sinners. It was during that same month, Prosperine said, that she witnessed the strange magic involving the rabbits.

“Ah, at last the rabbits!” I said. “I was afraid I would die of old age before you got to those magical
conigli
of yours.”

The Monkey lit her pipe and puffed on it, took a sip of wine, said nothing more for two, three minutes. I shut up and waited.

Then she sighed and continued her story. “There were three of us who saw it,” she said. “The hunchback herself, Pomaricci the schoolmaster, and I.”

Pomaricci was a miserly man, tall and bony but with a little potbelly in the front. His teeth were long and yellow like a horse’s, and his mouth emitted a foul smell. Ciccolina could hardly see, but knew by the stink of his breath when Pomaricci had come for fresh meat.

Every day he bought a rabbit or a chicken for his dinner and never forgot to complain to the old woman that her prices were too high, her animals too skinny. Sometimes he poked his fingers through the poor creatures’ cages, more to bother them than to feel the meat on their bones. “One of these days, I’ll starve to death or go bankrupt from trading with you, old woman,” Pomaricci I Know[649-748] 7/24/02 1:31 PM Page 668

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would complain to Ciccolina. Then he would turn to Prosperine and smile, revealing small bits of meat stuck between those yellow teeth from the evening before.

Ciccolina would answer that even paupers needed to eat, so for him she chose starvation. “At last I would be rid of your complaining,” she told him.

Here, the Monkey’s voice became a dog’s growl in the throat. She drew her chair closer to mine, as if we were two criminals not wanting to be overheard.

That day, Pomaricci did his usual complaining and poking of fingers through Ciccolina’s cages. Finally, he sighed and opened one and pulled his dinner out by the ears. “How much do you want for this half-dead bag of bones?” he asked.

Ciccolina lifted the rabbit and named her price.

“What? You rob me, old woman!” Pomaricci protested. “For that price, I should get twice the meat that this puny creature will yield.” But as always, he opened his shabby change purse and prepared to pay what she had asked.

Ciccolina had been ill that day—afflicted as she sometimes was with dizziness and
mal di capo
. On the walk into town, she had fallen twice against the cart and once in the road. She had been angry all day. “Twice the meat, eh?” she snapped back at that
spilorcio
, Pomaricci. “If twice the meat will shut up your face, then twice the meat you shall have!”

She slammed the frightened rabbit against the cutting board and directed Prosperine to hold down the animal by its thumping back feet. The Monkey obeyed and the old woman’s big cleaver flashed in the air and came down hard, slicing the creature exactly in half and narrowly missing her assistant’s right hand and her own left breast.

The magic Prosperine saw that day was this: the rabbit, split clean, shed not one drop of blood. Instead, each half grew another half—became, before the girl’s eyes and the schoolmaster’s eyes, two whole, living rabbits where only the one had been!

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“Here! Take them both and be gone with you!” Ciccolina shouted at the schoolmaster. “I hope you choke on the bones!” She held the twitching twins by the ears in front of the schoolmaster.

There they rocked back and forth, two furry
pendoli.

Struck dumb, Pomaricci dropped the coins from his hand and stumbled backward and away from his strange bounty. At a short distance, he turned and ran, screaming about dinner and the devil’s work.

Ciccolina grabbed Prosperine by the arm. With her thumb, she traced the cross of Jesus Christ on the Monkey’s forehead.

“
Benedicia!
” the old woman whispered. “Say it quickly!
Benedicia!
And make the sign of the cross!”

The stunned girl did as she was told, but in a kind of trance.

Was she dreaming? Had she really seen what she had seen? Her disbelieving eyes could not look away from those two rabbits that had been one.

That evening, the church bell rang for Pomaricci, who had died of apoplexy. As for the old
strega
and the macaroni-maker’s eldest daughter, they celebrated! Ciccolina ordered Prosperine to kill and dress the two rabbits. At first, the girl thought she would not be able to slaughter and skin those magical creatures, much less fry them and chew the cooked flesh off their bones. But she did! The two ate fried rabbit, and
zucca
from the old woman’s garden, and bread sopped in tomato gravy. A feast, it was! Enough so that Prosperine thought her stomach would burst like
palloncino
. In truth, it was the most delicious food she had ever tasted!

“I know it sounds crazy, Tempesta,” Prosperine told me that night.