Simple Prayers (3 page)

On the morning in which Gianluca had gone to Albertino and had encouraged him to speak with Ermenegilda, Ermenegilda sat dreaming at her loom. The weaving experiments had long since failed, and she was far from thinking of actually making anything, but the long wooden spindles that lined the frame were the perfect place to stack the ringlike breakfast pastries she feasted on each morning. So she propped herself up on a pair of Turkish pillows, spread her legs wide on either side of the rosewood frame, and lost herself in a
miel-pignole
daze.

Ermenegilda was thinking about her wedding day. It would be out in the Torta garden, and all of Riva di Pignoli would be there. She pictured the long, wide banquet tables piled high with savory delicacies and the path of wild rose petals leading out across the lawn. She pictured her mother, lit up like an altar, and her three sisters, stuffed and pickled in bolts of imported fabric. She pictured the fishermen, dressed in stiff tunics and cleansed of the smell of cod. And she pictured Albertino: quiet, serene, almost beatific — a man in ecstasy at the thought of his bride. The only thing missing, the only person absent, was Ermenegilda herself. She pictured only a radiance of light, a bright field of energy without features or form. A glow in a wedding veil.

When Romilda Rosetta, Ermenegilda's maid and the only servant ever to have stayed at the Ca’ Torta for longer than six weeks, rapped on the door and broke her reverie, Ermenegilda was vexed to find the glow gone to ash again — to see her enormous legs spread out before her and feel the great mass of her body squashed between loom and wall. When the servant told her that “Sior Tonolo” was waiting downstairs to see her, the glow resurfaced, but it located itself at heart level this time, burning inside her astonished bosom as she tried to differentiate between fantasy and reality.

“Sior Tonolo?” she asked, repeating Romilda Rosetta's announcement half in wonder, half in disbelief. “Albertino Tonolo?”

Romilda Rosetta had been with Ermenegilda for six years, since the latter's twelfth birthday. She'd stayed because she hadn't been able to think of anything else to do and because, being only half the size of Ermenegilda, she was afraid of what the girl might do to her if she ever tried to leave. Ermenegilda was a monster to Romilda Rosetta. No matter how devotedly the diminutive domestic beat out her tapestries, or clipped her nails in the bath, or brought her an extra plate of
frittele di manzo
when the rest of the house had gone to bed, Ermengilda used her to vent the boiling fury that ran through her Torta blood. When she was fourteen and Romilda Rosetta forty, she ordered the poor woman to stand on the roof of the Ca’ Torta during a hailstorm and imitate a seagull. The following year, on a shopping trip to Venezia, she knocked her down in the Piazza San Marco and left her to be carried home by a stray fishing vessel. She cursed her, mocked her, tormented her, reviled her. Yet no matter how cruelly Ermenegilda behaved, Romilda Rosetta always received her humiliation as so much fire on the path to spiritual purification. The worse the girl treated her, the more convinced she was of her ultimate redemption — and though she cowered at her mistress's commands and occasionally dropped things when Ermenegilda bellowed out her name, inside she felt the peacefulness and serenity of one of God's chosen. It never occurred to her that she enjoyed Ermenegilda's abuse, that without it she would have been nothing more than a very ordinary, extremely short maid: Her ill treatment gave her life meaning; it gave her a sense of martyrdom that thoroughly compensated for her inordinately small stature. It was therefore with great seriousness, when Ermenegilda tried to make certain that it was Albertino and not Gianluca who waited below to see her, that she replied: “It's the little one.”

Ermenegilda could not believe her ears. That Albertino would call on her unannounced — on
impulse
— was too much for her to comprehend.

“Well, what are you standing there for?” she shrieked. “Go tell him I'l be right there!”

Downstairs, in the drawing room, Albertino waited uncomfortably on a pink satin sofa embroidered with acorns. He had never been inside the Ca’ Torta before; he had met Ermenegilda only at the gate or, at most, the front door. Now he sat on a tufted throne on a golden chamber in a palace of glittering splendor — and he wished he were back with the dirt and straw of his own tiny room. Before he could change his mind, however, Ermenegilda swept in.

“Bon di,
Albertino,” she chirped gaily.

“Bon di,
Ermenegilda,” said Albertino, standing as she entered but averting his eyes.

“And how is your little island?”

“Oh, fine, fine. No one's been out since Vincenzo Bassetti was buried, and that was last January.”

Ermenegilda issued a high, false laugh, as if Albertino's words were deliciously witty, and began walking slowly around the room in an unnatural circle, as if perhaps her left leg were shorter than her right. She ended up on the tiny sofa in front of which Albertino stood. Albertino had no choice but to sit beside her.

“And your brother, Gianluca? Is he well, too?”

“Oh, yes, Gianluca's fine. Gianluca's very well.”

“And your little room?”

“Fine, fine. Everything's just fine.”

The conversation kept on in this way for half an hour. But after half an hour a silence descended. Ermenegilda was too intoxicated by Albertino's presence to think of any more questions, and Albertino was too conscious of the closeness of Ermenegilda's body to offer any of his own. But silence led to breathing, and breathing to sweating, and Albertino soon decided that it was safer to explain why he had come than to travel on in the direction they were heading.

“Ermenegilda,” he said measuredly, “Gianluca and I were wondering something.”

“Yes?”

“Well…” He shifted his body slightly. “We were wondering if you could do something to help bring the spring.”

Ermenegilda's shoulders twitched involuntarily; she looked at Albertino as if he were a piece of venison someone had already gnawed to the bone. “Excuse me?”

“The spring,” he said. “It hasn't come this year, if you haven't noticed. No flowers. No leaves on the trees. And not a sign of a vegetable. I don't know, perhaps you can get vegetables from one of the other islands, but on Riva di Pignoli there won't be any vegetables to be got because there hasn't been a spring. No spring, Ermenegilda. Not a pea, not a bean, not a lentil.”

Albertino looked despondent as he explained all this to Ermenegilda; Ermenegilda did not say a word. She merely rose, walked over to the plate of goose-liver tiles Romilda Rosetta had deposited on the side table, and devoured several of them in a single gulp.

“I'd heard something about it,” she said flatly.

“Well, Gianluca and I were talking,” Albertino continued, “and it suddenly occurred to us that maybe, with all your money, well — maybe you could somehow
buy
us the spring. I know it sounds absurd, but then the spring not coming is sort of absurd. Anyway, I figured it was worth coming here to ask if you thought you could do it.”

Ermenegilda had turned back to face Albertino by this time, her hands inert and sticky in front of her. As she watched him sitting there, she imagined him in a dozen guises: fisherman, landlord, pirate; shepherd, eunuch, priest; banker, brigand, bishop, serf, crusader, and hangman. But no matter how he appeared to her — no matter the clothing he wore or the station he represented — she could feel only the tenderest love for him.

“Yes,” she said.

Albertino stared at her. “What do you mean,‘yes’?”

“I mean‘yes.’I mean I can do it.”

Ermenegilda drew her left hand up to her mouth and licked a bit of goosefat off a fingertip. What mattered was not what he had come for, but that he had come. What mattered was not that he wanted to use her for her money, but that he had chosen to lay his anguish at her waiting feet.

“I can get you the spring, Albertino,” she said. “If that's what you truly want.”

Albertino could feel his hair grow hot and the tips of his ears begin to tingle. “What do we do?” he asked as he bounded up and hurried to where she stood.

“For now just go home,” she said, slipping her arm through his and guiding him toward the door. “Pull the covers up over your head and dream of artichokes and parsley and baby lettuce. Dream of carrots, and cauliflower, and dream of more of them than you ever thought there could be.” She led him out of the room, and down the stone stairway, and across the broad gallery that led to the front door. “Then, at midnight, meet me on the dock to your island.”

“At midnight?”

“At midnight.”

“On the dock to my island?”

“On the dock to your island.”

Albertino swallowed hard. “Then what?”

Ermenegilda smiled a broad, honey-dappled smile. “Then,” she said, “we make the spring come.”

Albertino looked into her ravenous eyes, and though his face registered nothing he knew exactly what she had in mind. What troubled him was that he could not be altogether certain that what she had in mind could not bring the spring. So he turned, placed his hat upon his head, and headed out the front gate.

Ermenegilda watched as he headed off toward the meadow. Then she closed the carved-oak door and climbed the first-, the second-, and the third-floor staircases to reach the chambermaid's quarters, from where she could follow him across the island until he reached his tiny
barca da pesca.
For a moment, as she knelt down before the low, arched window that opened beneath the slanting roof, she was distracted by the sight of another figure dragging what looked like a body toward the lip of the lagoon. But then she spotted Albertino, moving across the dry field like a heartsick badger, and all thoughts dissolved around the sweetness of that image.

A spring Albertino wanted a spring. And although Ermenegilda knew as much about agriculture as she knew about alchemy, there was someone who just might be able to help her bring it. It was only a hunch — and it traded upon a softness she did not like to admit — but Albertino wanted a spring. And if it meant actually having him in her arms at last, Ermenegilda was going to get him one.

Chapter 2

V
ALENTINA'S ABUSIVENESS
reached its peak when she tried to drown Piarina in the well. The starry child had spent the entire morning cleaning out the hearth, cheeks and forehead turning a murky gray. Yet regardless of her efforts to help, those knobby knees and that phantomlike flyaway hair drove Valentina into a more-than-usual rage. When Piarina slinked out to the well to get the water for the baking, Valentina followed her; as Piarina bent over to scoop it out, Valentina gave a large whack to her little body and the child tumbled over the edge, hitting her head and knocking herself unconscious. When Valentina realized what she'd done — and that she might still need the girl to turn the eel pasties — she called Gesmundo Barbon to fetch her out, cursing the child's clumsiness and the stupidity of having to draw from a well on an island surrounded by water.

It was not a usual mother's affection.

Six months earlier, Valentina had gotten so angry at supper, when Piarina had insisted on squashing open all the peas in her pease pudding, that she'd grabbed the sewing shears and cut off all of Piarina's hair, except for one rebellious clump in the center of her head. She'd painted this clump bright red and in the morning had set Piarina out with the roosters. Then there was the time with the quilting pins. On the time with the roofing pitch. Valentina knew Piarina was only a child, but there was something in the girl's spirit that created a jangling in her nerves, so that the smallest of her actions led to a series of offhand whacks and casual kicks that made the frail-limbed Piarina sink deeper and deeper into a private world.

Valentina, whose ruddy, robust figure was in direct contrast with Piarina's gamine form, had had her left hand crushed in a rye mill when she was seventeen. She kept a severed hoe handle tied to her left forearm, which she managed to use to remarkable effect, but she used only her flesh on Piarina. Still, on the day of the incident at the well, something snapped. From the time Gesmundo Barbon carried her bent and dripping into the hut and laid her upon the stiff straw bed, Piarina stopped speaking. At first Valentina prodded her, with the tip of her red, right forefinger. When that didn't work she tried calling her names.
Faccia-muto, Sordo Maria. La MaravÈgia Senza Lingua.
But nothing she either said or did could raise a sound from Piarina. And though she continued to beat the child as regularly as she had before, without at least an occasional yelp something of her pleasure in it was lost.

In time the silence seemed normal. They both began to listen for the rush of the wind through the low thatched roof and the rustling of the rats as they ran across the floor of their filthy one-room hovel. Valentina worked long into the night, making the soap she sold by day. Only a few of the families on Riva di Pignoli actually bought it, as the wax she used smelled of lye, but she was proud to have kept things going with one hand, no husband, and such a sorry runt of a daughter. What difference did it make, in the long run, if the girl could speak? Couldn't she clean the soap knives just as well? Couldn't she do the baking? Valentina ceased to worry about it and in time almost forgot that the child had ever said a word.

Then, one year after the attempted drowning, one year of haunting looks and long, cryptic silences, Piarina spoke again. It was early evening and they were sitting by the pathetic little fire that coughed and sputtered in the crumbling hearth. Valentina coughed, too; she'd been suffering for two weeks with a terrible chest cold and a painful sore throat and could find nothing to ease her discomfort. Piarina listened to the dry rattle as she sat hunched on all fours at Valentina's knees; despite the violence that had shocked her speechless, Piarina loved nothing more than to sit at her mother's knees by the pale flame of the evening fire. Now, without the slightest flourish or the thought that there was anything at all unusual in it, she suddenly said: