Simple Prayers (12 page)

“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 to 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 hours 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.

“Everyone in Venezia, I'm sorry to say, is out to imitate my
salone,”
explained Eduardo del Ponte. “If Your Grace does not take the tiles, I will simply have to dump them into the Canal Grande. Besides, it will be amusing to imagine a tiny splash of del Ponte color at the outskirts of the lagoon.”

All that Piero need do, he continued, was send someone to Venezia to pick them up — and it was this that Piero was contemplating as he circled the Chiesa di Maria del Mare on the following morning. He could not go himself; with Gianluca's obvious intentions toward Miriam, he would not allow himself to be away from Riva di Pignoli for more than three hours at any given time, and a trip to Venezia would take at least half a day, or even more. He could ask Giuseppe Navo or Gesmundo Barbon to get them on their rounds of the lagoon, but he feared that with their rough manners either one of the old fishermen might say something to spoil the entire affair. It had to be someone innocuous. Someone honest, and trustworthy, and easy to deal with. And the name he'd awakened with on his lips was Albertino.

Piero had no question as to where he might find him: since the violation of the radicchio heads, Albertino had begun sleeping in the vegetable garden. With the exception of the time he contributed to the construction of the
campanìl,
he could always be found between the onions and the celery, beside the turnips and the broccoli, beneath the almonds and the pears. Now Piero found him upon a ladder, picking apples from one of the five trees the Tonolo brothers considered their orchard. To his consternation, however, Albertino was not alone. Stretched out against the trunk of the tree was Gianluca. And Piero felt certain, from the light in his gaze and the dreamy fluidity of his gestures, that the subject he was discussing was Miriam.

“
Buongiorno,
good brothers,” said Piero, eager to interrupt the conversation before he could hear what was being said.

Albertino and Gianluca both turned to him with a start, Gianluca's expression twisting from rapture to malice.

“
Buongiorno,
good brother,” he said with sarcasm. “Lost the way to heaven?”

“I'e come to speak with Albertino,” said Piero.

“With Albertino!” said Gianluca. “Little brother! I never knew you entertained such holy guests!”

“Be quiet, Gianluca,” said Albertino. “Piero's done nothing to harm, you.”

“
In nomine Domini Dei,”
said Gianluca, rising into an elaborate bow. “Say what you like. I won't stop you.”

“I'd like to speak to Albertino in private,” said Piero. “If you don't mind.”

“If I don't mind!” said Gianluca. “If I don't mind being kicked out of my own fields! And what if I do mind, my little builder monk? What if I mind very, very much?”

“Oh, stop it, Gianluca,” said Albertino. “You'e late for market anyway. Get going.”

“Do you hear that, good brother?
My
good brother suggests I go to market and leave you two alone. Well, as I always follow
my
good brother's instructions, I won't argue.” He bowed again, quite deeply, to both Piero and Albertino; then, slipping into his usual, arrogant posture, he sauntered off.