Simple Prayers (22 page)

WHEN MIRIAM HEARD
about the destruction of the new village center, she hurried out to the field beside the Chiesa di Maria del Mare and began trying to piece it back together again. For the most part the stones were too heavy for her to lift, but she did what she could in an earnest attempt to organize the disorder. About an hour after she had begun she felt a hand on her shoulder and looked up to see the Vedova Stampanini.

“And you think you can't lose a baby as easily as you got it?” she said.

Miriam neither answered nor argued. She simply put down the stone she was holding, took the Vedova's hand, and followed her back out into the confusion of the day.

AS SOON AS THE
storm had ended Albertino knew that he had to return to his room. His leg had been healed since the third or fourth day of the Novena; he had remained in his brother's bed only for the
brodo di pesce
and the
pan da pistor
that the Vedova Stampanini had served him throughout his convalescence. He felt nervous, however, about returning home after an absence of over six weeks. In the first place it had been an entirely unplanned absence: he'd flung himself out of his bed with such vehemence on the night he'd gone to Ermenegilda's window, he'd hardly had time to pull on his tights, let alone smooth down the blankets or sweep the floor or take the boxes to the cemetery and hide them behind the cypresses. In the second place there was Gianluca, and in the third the storm, and though Albertino was not sure which was more dangerous, he knew that between the two his room was certain to be in a different state from when he'd left it, those many weeks ago, in a moon-drenched moment of passion.

As he made his way to his
barca da pesca
and across the narrow width of water, he took note of the behavior of the other villagers as they reacted to the storm. He saw Anna Rizzardello on the Calle Alberi Grandi, plucking goose feathers from the grain of her wash barrel. He saw Gesmundo Barbon on the center plank of his
sandolo
, struggling to remove the scythe that was lodged in its prow. When he reached his little island, however, and crossed the slumbering radicchio patch to stand before the east wall, he was surprised to find that barely a stick on the hearth or a slug in the mud seemed altered. There was a slightly higher drift of dirt against the base of the north wall, the emerald blanket was between the violet and the rust instead of between the crimson and the ocher, but his boxes sat precisely where they ought to — not a hinge, a latch, or a lid seemed to have been touched by the violence.

When the storm had come, and had knocked the shelves off Gianluca's walls, and had caused his bed to jump up into the air and land with a thud on its back, Albertino had thought of only two things: his boxes and Ermenegilda. He trusted that the Ca’Torta had been able to withstand the pummeling of the elements; he only prayed that the battering winds had remagnetized Ermenegilda's heart's compass, sending its fragile needle spinning from hatred back to love.

He climbed over the east wall and hobbled toward the bed of blankets; his left leg felt like a piece of broken pottery pasted together in all the wrong places. After lowering himself to the ragged stack, he carefully removed his boots. Then he dropped to the ground and crept to the line of boxes.

For years they had sat there, from the chest of sun-bleached sandalwood to the cask of hammered brass, as free and as empty as his ever-uncomplicated heart. That heart, however, was no longer uncomplicated — and the boxes only reminded him of Ermenegilda. So one by one Albertino removed them from the south wall, opened their lids, and whispered his deepest apologies into their carved-out bellies. Then he piled them into his
barca da pesca
and carried them across to the main island, where he left them — as an offering to love — on the doorstep of the Ca’Torta.

WITH BEPPE GUANCIO
gone off to the docks to try to separate his boat from the mud, Piero was left in solitude. He tried not to think about what had happened — he tried to hollow out his mind until it was a void — but the image of the ruined
campo
kept flashing before him, and he could not help making certain connections.

It was because of the dead body. He knew it. How could he be allowed to build a tribute to higher understanding when he could not even properly dispose of a swollen corpse? He'd been careless and fearful, and God had brought down his fist to punish him. What troubled Piero was that in punishing him, God had also punished the people of Riva di Pignoli.

He tried once more to close down his consciousness. He hugged his knees and pressed his chin down into his chest. He tried to let his thoughts splinter and shake free like bits of straw off the tail of an old broom that the rats would then scatter into careless piles in the far corners of the hovel. But just as he began to give himself over to this fracturing of his perception, a rapping on the door brought him back to focused awareness. He opened his eyes and lifted his head, and as the door slid open a panel of light cut into the darkness, inside of which stood Gianluca.

“Do you know?”

“Yes.”

“Have you seen for yourself?”

“Yes.”

Gianluca remained motionless in the doorway; Piero sat silent against the wall. Then the door opened wide — bright sunlight mocked the shadows — and Gianluca entered the room. And when he closed the door behind him, returning the hovel to its quarter-light dimness, Piero felt a sorrow in his bearing that made him almost doubt it was Gianluca.

“I want to fix it,” he said.

“Fix it?”

“Rebuild it. The whole thing. From start to finish.”

Piero looked at him for a moment as if he were mad. Then he lowered his head back to his chest.

“Get out of here.”

“I mean it,” said Gianluca. “The
campanìl
. The
campo
. How long do you think it would take?”

“To rebuild it?”

“Exactly as it was the day before yesterday.”

Piero leaned his head back against the damp wall but did not respond.

“How long, Piero?” repeated Gianluca.

“If all the materials could be found, if anyone would bother to help with the labor — probably not much less than it took the first time. Six months. Five, maybe, if the foundations are still intact.”

“I'l do it in three.”

“Impossible.”

“In less than three. I'l do it by Easter. By spring.”

Piero gazed through the thick light into Gianluca's eyes. “Why?”

“Because it's my fault.”

“How can it be your fault?”

“Because I wanted it,” said Gianluca. “I willed it. And now I want to rebuild what I'e destroyed.” He paused for a moment, the intensity of his declaration like a third, immovable presence in the room. “Except the statue. That you have to do yourself.”

“The statue.”

“The monument. Of Miriam.”

Piero closed his eyes. “I can't.”

“Yes,” said Gianluca, “you can.” He crouched down and inched his way closer until he was practically whispering in Piero's ear. “Another three months with her body beneath your fingers? Another three months making love to her day and night? Standing close to her — concentrating on her — perfecting her hands, her hair, the light in her eyes? You can do it, Piero. Believe me. You can do it.”

Piero turned to Gianluca, their faces separated only by a few breaths. “You think you can win her by doing this,” he said. “That's what this is about, isn't it? She won't choose between us, no matter what's happened, and you think this will make her decide.”

“I think I can rebuild your
campo
. If it should please her, that's fine. But that's not why I do it.”

Piero looked hard into that face, which possessed all the confidence he had never known. “Why do I believe you?”

“Because I tell the truth, my little builder monk. I'm going to rebuild your
campo
, and you'e going to help me do it. I'm going to need your plans, your sketches, your eye for detail. And your artistry: you'e going to have to make me another monument.”

“What about your own work?”

“It's winter. I go crazy from nothing to do. Please, Piero — let me rebuild it.”

Piero pressed his feet down into the straw. “No,” he said.

Gianluca stood. “I'l start clearing tomorrow,” he said. “You'l change your mind.”

Then he turned and left the hovel.

For a long while Piero remained just as Gianluca had left him: alone in the corner with the rats and the straw and the shadows. Then he lifted himself up and went to the shabby worktable where he had sketched the plans for the
campanìl
, the
campo
, and the monument. The designs were all there, stacked in a neat bundle beneath a heavy brass pestle –– the measurements for the scaffolding, the gridwork for the laying of the tiles, the differing perspectives for the statue he'd made of Miriam. The only question was whether he could summon the energy to breathe them to life a second time.

Gianluca seemed to have enough energy, not just for Piero but for the entire village — and Piero realized that the main obstacle to the rebuilding of the village center would be his having to allow him to lead the project. There had not been a trace of hostility in him as he'd crouched on the floor of Beppe Guancio's hovel — and not a trace of the familiar swelling of
Il BastÒn
— and Piero knew that if he could feel the change in him, Miriam was bound to feel it as well.

He lifted the pestle and spread the sheets of sheepskin out on the rough-grain table until he came to the sketches of Miriam. That he had been able to capture even a glimmer of her beauty had seemed a miracle. That the work had been destroyed before anyone had seen it seemed a sign. Perhaps he'd been rash to create so rapturous, so stark, so uninhibited an impression for the center of a village square. If he went along with the reconstruction — if he allowed Gianluca to become the sweaty hero his efforts were bound to make him — it would afford him the opportunity to design a new statue, something easier to bear in the light of common day, something closer to the hearts and minds of the people of Riva di Pignoli.

He closed his eyes and tried to imagine the villagers clearing away the rubble and allowing the spot beside the Chiesa di Maria del Mare to return to the grassy field it had been before they'd begun. He thought of all the work that had been done, all the hopes and dreams that that work had embodied, and he knew that he could not let his feelings toward Gianluca endanger the island's fate. Reaching for his quill, he drew a clean sheet of parchment from the bottom of the stack; then he curled his body around the edge of the table and began to let his imagination do its work.

Chapter 14

A
S THE ISLAND
crept back to its usual routine — the people gradually patching up their roofs, their wells, their gardens — Gianluca threw himself, with an adamantine zeal, into the reconstruction of the new village center. By the morning of Epiphany he'd managed to organize the village into four teams, led by Silvano Rizzardello, Paolo Guarnieri, Ugolino Ramponi, and Gesmundo Barbon; fueled by Gianluca's seemingly inexhaustible energy, they worked day and night to clear away the rubble, separate it into pieces of the
campanìl
and pieces of the
campo
(making a special pile for pieces of the monument, which Piero placed in a burlap sack and had Giuseppe Navo bury at sea), and then find a way to put the whole thing back together again. While Piero waited for the new piece of stone that Enrico Torta had promised for the new central monument (guaranteeing, in addition to the twin burial vault, a perpetual flame at the rear of the chapel to be attended, after his death, by Beppe Guancio), Beppe Guancio went around the island with a two-wheeled cart made of woven twigs and lined with a piece of satin to gather up the bits of scattered tile. After forty-two rounds — including a thorough scouring of every hovel on the island — he managed to collect over two-thirds of the lost pieces. Added to what Giuseppe Navo retrieved by dragging the lagoon along the perimeter of the island with a quarter-nail double-mesh wading net, that accounted for everything except an occasional patch, which Piero assured them he could fill in with painted stones.

Gianluca worked feverishly both day and night. His strong body seemed to thrive on the exertion, and his enthusiasm was so great that it managed to blind the other workers to the sudden change in weather. Winter had come to Riva di Pignoli. Fog rolled in in thick waves, filling the fields and footpaths with a soft gray uncertainty. The Bora blew down, penetrating the flimsy hovel walls with its chill. The colder weather created problems that had not been present during the late summer and early autumn construction: the dampness rusted the pulleys so that the scaffolding ropes jammed; the mortar work had to be covered with straw and wet dung each night to prevent it from cracking before morning; the workers’dry, chapped hands became easily cut by the sharp edges of the hard glass tiles.

“The pieces don't fit the same way they did in the summer,” said Fausto Moretti. “Hot weather, cold weather — it's not the same thing.”

“Yesterday my thumb got stuck to the tile,” said Siora Bertinelli. “Maria Luigi had to ladle some
brodo di verzurra
over it to get it free.”

“Brunetto Fucci's spent so much time with his hands in wet mortar,” said Maria Patrizia Lunardi, “his fingers won't bend. He can't even pick up a sardine.”

No matter the complication, however, the villagers worked on, led by the spirit of renewal and the dash and diligence of Gianluca.

Of the handful or so of the villagers who did not participate in the labor — Orsina and the three Marias, Valentina and Piarina — the most obvious absence was Miriam. It wasn't that she didn't want to help; it was simply that having reached the final stages of her pregnancy, she had grown so large, she could neither stoop nor bend nor hoist nor lift nor carry. Her desire to be a part of the activity was so great, however, that Siora Scabbri let her leave the henhouse each morning and each afternoon to walk to the Chiesa di Maria del Mare and serve spiced cider to the workers. Gianluca pretended not to notice these visits, but everyone could see that he moved more quickly, shouted more loudly, and in general seemed more alive when Miriam appeared. For the rest of the villagers, it provided an opportunity to participate in what had become the island's favorite pastime: trying to guess the sex of Miriam's baby. Nearly everyone had a different means for determining what it would be, each equally emphatic that his or hers was the only reliable method.