Simple Prayers (21 page)
“It was as if I'd removed a pair of stone weights from my shoulders,” he said. “As soon as I'd said the prayers, and had covered it over, I felt as light as a gull feather in the wind.”
Fra Danilo lowered the manuscript he'd been holding aloft and closed its heavy cover.
“What's wrong?” asked Piero.
“Nothing.”
“I know you better than that. What is it?”
Fra Danilo hesitated.
“Please, Fra Danilo. Tell me.”
“Perhaps it's just superstition. Perhaps it means nothing at all.”
“
What?”
The old monk turned to him. “As a member of the order of San Gerolamo nel Bosco, it was deeply ingrained into me that once a body is buried it must not be moved.”
Piero closed his eyes. “Why not?”
“Because the body is placed into the ground in order to sanctify it,” explained Fra Danilo. “And in order to mark the spot where the soul can find it again on Judgment Day.”
“But surely it's better for a body to be moved than to remain in unhallowed ground without a prayer upon its head.”
“I don't know, Piero. Imagine if everyone went shifting bodies about after they were buried. It could wreak havoc of the highest order.”
“Surely God will know which souls belong to which bodies.”
“Come Judgment Day, Piero, God will have quite enough to keep him busy. You'l have to hope the angels get it right.”
Piero stood and walked to the window. “Is there some kind of law about this? Something I can look up?”
“No. If it's a law at all, it's an unwritten one. But what's the point in talking about it? It's been done. If the soul was virtuous, it will undoubtedly find its way back to itself come Resurrection. Please, Piero, don't let it ruin your good spirits.”
Piero looked down upon the courtyard of the cloister, where Fra Claudio was spreading sprigs of juniper and ivy along the rim of the small stone fountain.
“I won't, Fra Danilo,” he said, turning back to him. “I won't.”
“Good. Now come help me decide about these illuminations. I think you'e right about Fra Teodoro's work — but take one more look with me before I make up my mind.”
Piero returned to where Fra Danilo was standing, and together they compared the two manuscripts. But though he gave his opinion, his heart was not in it; it had already hurried down the stone stairs and across the lagoon, through the graveyard gates and into the unmarked grave with the twice buried body. Where it was likely to remain until Judgment Day. Or at least until he could think of what to do next.
THE REVELRY OF
the Novena focused down to a bright humming with the arrival of Christmas Eve. The carols were abandoned, the torches extinguished, and the bustling up and down the Calle Alberi Grandi was replaced by a gentle stillness within the island's homes. The night before Christmas was a time of solitude for the people of Riva di Pignoli. A light fog descended over the huts and hovels, and even the most curious of the island's inhabitants would have been unable to peek through a low window to see how his neighbor observed the night. Only the darkling spirits of the Riva di Pignoli dead, had they risen from their graves and floated out over the island — had they passed, like an insistent whisper, through the thatched roofs and the pebble-and-mud-brick walls — would have been able to describe both the fever and the calm that permeated the tiny village.
They would have seen Siora Bertinelli, sitting naked beneath a hemp blanket, asking God to grant her the capacity for gratitude. They would have seen Siora Scabbri describing Christ's passion to her chickens, Ugolino Ramponi beating himself in a corner with a switch, and the Vedova Scarpa, alone at her table, pouring
vin santo
for the Holy Ghost.
They would have seen Giuseppe Navo and the Vedova Stampanini, sharing a candlelit supper of
vongole, scungili, cozze,
and
capitone.
They would have seen Maria Luigi and Fausto, full of pig-and-blood pudding, sleeping peacefully on their chairs before the fire. They would have seen the Guarnieris eating the salt fish the Rizzardellos had given them, and the Rizzardellos eating the Guarnieris’pork. They would have seen Brunetto Fucci preparing a bed of herbs, and Beppe Guancio fashioning a Christ Child out of pinecones to place upon the
presepio
at midnight.
They would have seen Albertino, in Gianluca's bed, dreaming blissfully of Ermenegilda, and Ermenegilda, at the Ca’Torta supper, dreaming likewise of Albertino. They would have seen Miriam, on her cushions before her altar, singing softly to her child. And Piero, with a shovel in his hand, fighting the bitter taste of rust from the fog and the stench of putrid flesh, as he once more exhumed the rotted body and returned it to the field of wild thyme.
They would have seen Gianluca whipped up — between the whispered rumors about the soon-to-be-revealed statue and the pent-up energy of Il
BastÒn
— into a priapic rage that sent him storming across the island, praying that he could resist his desire to destroy the six-months’labor of the island's dreams.
And they would have seen Piarina — a faint gargoyle, eyes blazing beacons through the fog — wishing a strong wind would blow in from the north and bring the entire structure crashing down on her mother's head.
B
Y EARLY MORNING
the fog had thickened into an unstirred soup that completely covered the island. You could not see the henhouse from Siora Scabbri's gate, nor the boats from the dock, nor your right hand stretched straight out before you. The Ca’Torta dissolved like a snow crystal in a warm breeze, and the Chiesa di Maria del Mare vanished into the haze like a shrine before an unbelieving pilgrim. The damp gray mist even entered the hovels: when Maria Luigi woke she thought that Fausto had abandoned her, and Siora Bertinelli, for the life of her, could not find her clothes. All across the village the Christmas Day plans for feasting and celebrating were canceled. The island had simply disappeared.
Toward late morning, a heavy wind came up. This cleared away the fog but brought new problems: snapped branches and severed well buckets began flying through the air. Pinecones spiraled up off the ground and catapulted through blown-in windows. When the wind was joined by rain, in the early afternoon, the villagers began to huddle into dark corners hoping that the worst of it would pass quickly. But the rain only increased, beating hard upon the thatched roofs and overflowing the narrow canals. The straw floors became flooded; the villagers had to crouch upon their trestle tables and straddle the sides of their washtubs. The docks disappeared beneath the rising lagoon. The Calle Alberi Grandi became a muddy river, floating uphill through the trees.
The sky grew darker. Day became night. And then, with a cry of anguish, the heavens exploded. Wild streaks of fire blazed through the blackened storm clouds, huge gusts of wind tore the doors off huts, enormous waves splashed mud and muck across the gardens and footpaths and fields.
Trees were uprooted.
Bridges were wrecked.
Chickens and pigs were sucked up into the sky, never to be seen again.
It was not until almost morning of the following day that the winds quieted down enough to allow Piero to journey out to the Chiesa di Maria del Mare to view the damage. There was still quite a gust going, but the rain had slackened — and in the strange filtering of the pre-morning light he almost imagined that the project had been spared: he saw banners flying from the height of the
campanìl
and the statue of Miriam stretching out in the gradually thinning shadows. As he moved in closer, how ever, his fantasy dissolved, and he found himself face to face with the awful reality.
A heap of stone. A sprinkling of tile. A mud-soaked ruin where he'd hoped a town would rise.
The new village center, still cradled in its infancy, had been smashed to pieces like a child's clay kingdom by the swipe of a cranky hand. All the wrath and the longing and the frustration and the desire that had curled about the gatepost — and cowered behind the roasting spit — and coiled around the careful feet of the island's hot citizens — had finally taken its toll.
W
HEN THE SUN
came out — not long after Piero had returned to Beppe Guancio's hovel and curled himself up into an unconscious ball — the villagers felt as if God had sneezed and their world had come flying apart. There was so much muck on the footpaths and mud in the gardens, they had to remove their boots to exit their hovels. Bits of debris were scattered everywhere, and the entire island seemed to sag under the weight of heavy water. But what troubled them most was the fear that a pattern was forming: just as there had been no spring in the spring, there was now no Christmas at Christmas. The day had come and gone without a glimmer of grace.
The damage to the island's huts and hovels was less devastating than it was disorienting. The Vedova Stampanini's chimney wound up on Brunetto Fucci's roof. Maria Luigi's flower pots landed in the Rizzardellos’garden. Siora Scabbri's sundial hurtled clear across the island to surface in Giuseppe Navo's boat. Only Ugolino Ramponi had to actually vacate his home, since one of his goats had butted its way in during the storm to explode its bowels in his bedchamber. The rest were content to live, for a few weeks, without a door, without a well, or, in a few cases, without a roof, grateful that their four walls were still standing. After all, Albertino had been living that way for years.
As they began to pick their way through the damage, the people discovered rats in their washtubs, rabbits down their wells, and bits of colored tile in their boots, their beds, their hearths, their sheds, and their night buckets. Giuseppe Navo found a square of scarlet in his
sopa di legumi.
Maria Patrizia Lunardi brushed bits of damask and damson from the roots of her hair. Orsina encountered a sea of heliotrope and citron on the stairs that led from the main
portego
to the
piano nobile.
Piero's elaborate mosaic was strewn across the island; only the trace of a hoof and the remnants of a tail remained.
When Gianluca first awoke on that unusual morning, he felt light as a fistful of fennel seeds. The terrorizing winds had swept him clean; the power of their hot breath had got down inside him and had neutralized the power of his rage. He felt relaxed; released; almost giddy. The soft earth had never felt so comforting, the air had never smelled so sweet.
Gianluca had been in a state of torment on Christmas Eve that he had neither wished for nor could control. So when the rains came up, and the wind, and the hail, he went out to the docks along the western shore and invoked the elements to move their way through him like angry music through a clotted reed pipe. When the lightning flashed he hurled curses after it. When the water rose up he hugged the trunk of a pine tree and let himself be lashed by the waves. About midway through the deluge he began a low keening sound, which gradually rose into a great cry. He drew all the mad railing of the heavens into his body, in the hope of eradicating the wildness that had seized his soul.
He raged and wailed until the storm had run its course. Then, purged of his wrath and desire, he slept the most delicious sleep — as if he were lying on the surface of a sea of ambergris that was melting in the wan December sun. When he awoke and found himself half-naked beneath a pine tree, he slipped back to the Vedova Stampanini's hovel, where he found the Vedova and Giuseppe Navo huddled under a blanket beneath the chopping table, and Albertino, between the bed and the night bucket, tangled up in one of his old tunics. After the intensity of the storm, they slept like infants; Gianluca stayed just long enough to steal a couple of cold
capitone
off the Vedova's plate and to trade his tatters for a pair of warm hose and a dry muslin shirt.
When he left the hovel his mood was so light that he did not notice the glass-eyed fish lying strangled in the mud or the blasted branches and blown roots that scattered his path through the village. He moved past the Guarnieris’porkhouse and the Rizzardellos’salt shed and Siora Scabbri's henhouse, completely oblivious of the missing door and the torn-up garden and the three-quarters crashed-in roof. He wandered through the chaos and calamity in a state of dumb grace, until he came to the clearing beside the Chiesa di Maria del Mare and saw the campanìl-that-was-no-longer-a-campanìl, and the campo-that-was-no-longer-a-
campo
, and the statue-that-had-once-been-Miriam-but-was-now-merely-rubble.
And he fell to his knees.
And he covered his face.
For though he'd tried to prevent it, it seemed clear to him that his rage had lit the heavens — and that the storm had done precisely the damage he'd feared to do himself.
HAD EITHER PIERO
or Gianluca taken the time to examine the rubble, they would have found a slender girl lying slumped at the core of the confusion. For when the campanìl came crashing to the ground, so did Piarina. She landed in a heap on the broken mosaic, amid the scattered tiles and the shattered stones and a few pieces of Miriam's left leg. No bones were broken, but between the wind and the rain and the shock of her fall, she was torn from her trance and plunged into a wild fever. She rolled and writhed on the
campo
floor as if Piero's mosaic demons had sprung to life. She shouted out such a succession of cures, the Chiesa di Maria del Mare began to quiver. It was only when the storm had ended that she fell back into a trance that left her motionless and speechless, this time including her cures.
It was thus that Valentina found her when she came to look for her after the terrible winds had died down. She had prepared a lengthy speech, which she'd repeated to herself over and over again as she marched up the Calle Alberi Grandi, about how stupid the girl was to stay out in a storm and how lucky she was not to have been dashed to pieces. But when she arrived at the ruined
campo
and found that she
bad
been dashed — if not to pieces, to pulp — she could only stand there, staring, another bit of debris upon the map of disaster. For a long while she circled Piarina like a crow, her lone hand clenching and opening involuntarily. Then she scooped her up, tossed her over her shoulder like a sack of steaming coals, and carted her back to the hovel. Where she threw her into the low straw bed. And waited.