Simple Prayers (6 page)

The walls, which were pale and evenly textured, reflected the sunlight that poured down over the lagoon. The only ornamentation was the marble archway that framed the main doorway: here, in two-thirds relief, was the story of San Nicolo, patron saint of fishermen, virgins, children, thieves, and practically every home on the island. Inside the church were ten pews, five on the left side, five on the right. They faced the altar, which was separated from the rest of the chapel by a brief step and a low wooden railing. There wasn't much marble in the Chiesa di Maria del Mare — Giacomo Navo, Giuseppe's grandfather, had managed to obtain a few choice pieces from a wealthy Veneziana who particularly liked his
baccala
— but what there was was wisely saved for the altar. The top was a single sheet of Tuscan
pavonazetto;
the facade consisted of two rose diamonds, a strip of cobalt blue, and a yellow circle surrounded by six cream-colored cliptei. The altar was so beautiful it was kept covered with a piece of white cloth; the people of Riva di Pignoli couldn't bear such ravishment on a daily basis.

Behind the altar, framed by two bas-relief columns, was a painting of the Virgin and Child. It was by Massimo Correlli, the Vedova Stampanini's father, and it was cherished by everyone on the island for its soft tones and its deep, luminous light. There were only three complaints hurled at the Correlli Virgin and Child: first, that the Virgin looked too much like the Vedova Stampanini's mother; second, that the Child looked too much like the Vedova Stampanini (even as an infant the Vedova Stampanini had had a delicate look of sensuality that many found disturbing in a depiction of the baby Jesus); last, that instead of the traditional golden globe, Massimo Correlli's Child held a flounder in its hands. The Riva di Pignolian painter could think of no greater symbol of God's love for man.

Piarina loved many things about the Chiesa di Maria del Mare. She loved the way it was cool inside when the summer days were hot. She loved the way the door would mutter as she closed it behind her, but how the walls would never, ever utter a sound. But most of all Piarina loved the candles. Whenever she could she would creep into the little chapel to sit in the shadows and stare at the flames. The whole world stilled when Piarina sat before the candles—as long as they were burning, her trampled heart felt calm. Often she had to restrain herself from putting her fingers into the flames; she knew the fire would burn her, but then there was something inside her that longed to burn.

There were no clergy on Riva di Pignoli — no priests, no prelates, no clerics, no monks. In moments of great inspiration someone might give a sermon, but for the most part worship was between villager and God. Everyone on Riva di Pignoli had his own way of worshiping. There was Piero's path of obsessive idolatry and Romilda Rosetta's path of humiliating servitude. There were the evening prayers of the island's widows and the dawn conversations the fishermen held with the images of Santa Maria they tacked to the prows of their boats. There was no question of believing or not believing in God. On Riva di Pignoli, God was a fact.

To Piarina, God was in the candles. If she went to church and found them low, she would scamper across the meadow to Beppe Guancio's hovel and tell him they needed tending. Beppe Guancio had become severely depressed one February late afternoon when he went into the chapel and was not able to distinguish the Christ Child from the flounder; from that moment on he took it upon himself to check the candles every day, before and after his work cleaning fish for Giuseppe Navo and just before he went to bed at night. He took his job quite seriously and needed no reminding, but whenever Piarina rapped at his door he pretended she'd come to him just in time, seeing how much pleasure it gave the child to think she'd saved the light from going out.

When Ermenegilda left Piarina to prepare for her midnight assignation with Albertino, Piarina thought hard about what she had asked of her. She knew that this was not the same as healing Armida Barbon's swollen liver; she knew that for this she was going to need help. So that night, after Valentina had fallen asleep at her side, and Ermenegilda had rowed out to join Albertino on his island, and Piero had gone to seek counsel at Boccasante, Piarina snuck out of her one-room hovel and went to stand before the flames. She didn't think about God as she stood there. She didn't think about anything. She simply let herself be filled with light as she asked for help. Piarina asked the candles for help because of her love for Ermenegilda, who had asked Piarina for help because of her love for Albertino, who had asked Ermenegilda for help because of his love for Gianluca, and for the vegetables. It was a chain of love extending from soil to sky — a chain of hunger and devotion and generosity — and Piarina could feel it tugging at either side of her as she placed her tender soul before the flames.

She almost put her fingers in. Almost. But instead she stood on the tips of her toes, reached up over her head, and grasped the tallest taper. Its hot breath made her hair dance up as she held it out before her, and its smooth body felt hard and clean in her fragile fairy hands. Without blinking she turned around, walked out of the tiny chapel, and set out to cure the land.

IN AN ORDINARY YEAR
, the spring would have simply meant a new stack of books to Piero. Fra Danilo was mad for herbs, and each April, in exchange for some crisp catmint or some savory sorrel, he would give Piero a share of the manuscripts that had been donated to the monastery that winter. For twelve years now Piero had traded his fragile bouquets of yarrow and rue for Plato and Aristotle, his tiny sackets of burdock and basil and burnet for St. Thomas Aquinas, Marcus Aurelius, and the two great writers of his day: Dante and Petrarch. Fra Danilo always kept the finest volumes and left the rattiest to Piero, but Piero would read anything and was glad to have them.

This year, without a spring, Piero had nothing to offer Fra Danilo — and he wondered what his friend's reaction would be when he showed up at Boccasante without so much as a dill weed. It was almost midnight when he reached the island; he could hear the distant bells of Torcello and Burano and Mazzorbo as they rang out the hour at slightly different intervals. After docking his boat at the farthest slip — as a sign of respect — he approached the massive doors that stood beneath the stone portico of the entrance. In the blue-black light, the carvings on the walls took on a frightening reality; as Piero's torch cast waves of flame upon the marble he saw two-headed birds break into flight and scraps of Latin dance before his eyes.

Fra Antonio answered his knocking. A slight gnome of a monk, half-blind and three-quarters dead, he considered it his absolute task, as the oldest member of the order, to receive all visitors to the monastery. He recognized Piero more by smell than by sight — slightly woodsy, slightly like something left out in the rain — and nodded slowly as he ushered him inside.

Piero felt as he always felt when he entered Boccasante: that he was glad to no longer be ruled by its laws, and that it would always, in a way, be his home. Many of the monks were already rising for their first prayers; Piero watched as they appeared from the shadows, their faces lit by the candles they held, and then disappeared around corners, through doorways, behind hidden arches. He explained to Fra Antonio that he wished to see Fra Danilo; the elderly monk took him to a small alcove, where he gave him a candle of his own, and then escorted him out to the cloister where Fra Danilo was entertaining a guest.

Piero was not surprised to find Fra Danilo with company, even at such a late hour of the night. Fra Danilo was almost always entertaining someone. The church at Boccasante had been built some ten years before the church of the nearby island of Due Vigne, but after a visit to Due Vigne by a wandering saint named Francesco, that island's fortune had changed dramatically. Religious men came from everywhere to pray at the altar Francesco had prayed at; Due Vigne became the holiest spot in the lagoon. Fra Danilo was certain that with a slightly different wind, II Santo d'Assisi would have come to Boccasante, so he devoted himself to the cultivation of visitors in the hope that one of them would lend his island the respect and dignity accorded Due Vigne. At first he concentrated solely on other men of the cloth, but over the years he broadened his receiving list to include doctors, theologians, justices, and scholars, having correctly observed that the visionary may as easily hide among the crowd as among the clergy. His fondness for Piero, in fact, was based on this theory: even though Boccasante had thrown him out of their ranks, Fra Danilo felt it was wise to keep the door open just a crack, in case the youth's fantastic visions proved to be of a higher order than his fellow brothers had realized.

Piero entered the cloister, which seemed to float in a magical trance between the light of the candles that stood between the columns and the light of the moon that shined down over the open courtyard. Fra Danilo was sitting on the low wall that ran between the columns, and with him sat a slender, balding gentleman with a great black mustache and tiny eyes that kept widening and closing like those of a moon-dazed frog.

“Piero!” shouted Fra Danilo warmly when he saw him. “I'd almost given up hope of your ever coming!”

“I'm afraid I come empty-handed,” said Piero as they embraced. “I'm afraid I have nothing whatsoever to offer you.”

“Nothing at all?” said Fra Danilo.

“Not even a sprig of parsley,” said Piero.

Fra Danilo leaned close and whispered into Piero's ear, “Is something wrong? It isn't like you to forget the herbs.”

Piero inclined his head. “I haven't forgotten,” he whispered back. “And something is most definitely wrong. But perhaps it would be better if I spoke with you in private.”

“I'l see what I can do. But first let me introduce you to Sior Bon.” Fra Danilo took Piero by the shoulder and walked him over to where his guest sat waiting. “May I present Sior Bartolomeo Bon, one of Bologna's finest scholars.”

“You flatter me, Fra Danilo,” said the scholar with a wan smile.

“Not at all,” said the monk. “Your accomplishments are well known, even here in the lagoon. I'd like you to meet Piero Po, a former member of our order.”

Piero nodded.

“A pleasure,” said Bartolomeo Bon, eyes widening — and closing — as he said it.

“Piero is something of an expert on the legend of San Giorgio,” said Fra Danilo. “Not to mention certain other, less orthodox symbols.”

“San Giorgio has been worshiped to death,” said Bartolomeo Bon. “I prefer San Stefano, or San Sebastiano. Something that can still make you wince.”

“But surely you can't deny the power of the image,” said Piero, seating himself beside him. “The saint. The dragon. It's man's eternal struggle.”

“Oh, I suppose it has a kind of primitive suggestiveness. If you fancy that sort of thing.”

“I appreciate any depiction of the conflict between good and evil,” said Piero.

“Piero has an extraordinary imagination,” said Fra Danilo. “A bit too extraordinary, I'm sorry to say, for some of the brothers of Boccasante.”

“Have you read Sior Dante's
Commedia?
” asked Piero.

“I have not,” said Bartolomeo Bon. “I do not consider political polemicism to be literature.”

“But it's the most remarkable book! You must read it!”

Bartolomeo twisted his legs together and laughed. “I have quite enough to read as it is,” he said. “Sior Dante's ideas of heaven and hell seem rather simplistic to me.”

“Where I come from simple things are always appreciated the best,” said Piero.

“And where,” asked Bartolomeo Bon, raising his left eyebrow, “is that?”

“Riva di Pignoli,” said Piero.

“I beg your pardon?”

“It's an island just north of here,” interjected Fra Danilo. “Small, but very green.”

Bartolomeo Bon stared straight ahead for a moment, then shook his head. “Doesn't exist,” he said.

“I'm sorry to disagree with you,” said Piero, “but it most assuredly does exist. Except for the seven years I spent here at Boccasante, I'e lived my entire life there.”

“How literal,” said Bartolomeo Bon. “I realize that as a few clumps of soil, your little island sits sleeping in the water. But in the sense of mattering — in the sense of leaving any mark on our wretched civilization — it simply doesn't exist.”

Piero opened his mouth to argue, but Bartolomeo Bon continued before he could speak.

“The days of the
contadi
are numbered,” he said. “These paltry villages with nothing more than a few casks to piss in can't possibly survive the changing times. The feudal system is dead. Living without an education? Dead. The poor fellow who doesn't attach himself to one of the real cities is simply going to find himself feet up in his fields.”

“These islands have been around for a long time,” said Fra Danilo, trying to soften the scholar's words. “Surely they can survive changing fashions.”

“They can't survive,” said Bartolomeo Bon, “if they don't exist.” He turned to Piero. “This island you speak of. What does it have that will last?”

Piero tried to envision the wobbly landscape of Riva di Pignoli. “It has a palazzo,” he said.

“One of those cheap Venetian candy boxes?”

“It has a church.”

“Romanesque or Byzantine?”

“Neither. Just a church.”

“Can you see it from the water?” asked Bartolomeo Bon. “Does it have a proper campanile?”

“No,” said Piero.

“Then how do you know when the day begins? How do you know when it ends? Where is your island's voice? Its breath? Its music?”

Piero had always thought that the day began when it began and that it ended when it was over. But the relentlessness of Bartolomeo Bon's words was making him question whether he could tell the sun from the moon from Siora Bertinelli's pignole pastries. Without speaking, he rose from the cloister wall and walked to the small fountain at the center of the courtyard.

“Is there a piazza on your island?” asked Bartolomeo Bon. “A
campo
? A monument?”

“No,” said Piero softly.