Simple Prayers (7 page)
“Then how does it even know its own name? If you didn't know your own name, what would it be? Ignazio? Alfonso? Buondelmonte? A town needs to state its name or it isn't a town. An island needs to establish a center, forge its identity in stone, ring out its name on the hour — or it will just be washed away like a few dead seagull feathers.”
Piero felt the cool stone of the fountain against the palms of his hands and heard the muffled chanting of the monks inside at prayer. Bartolomeo Bon's words were strong and harsh — but they had a strange effect on Piero.
“Bless you,” he murmured to the quiet night. “Bless you!” he shouted to the startled scholar as he ran to him and embraced him.
“Piero!” cried Fra Danilo. “Have you lost your wits?”
“No, Fra Danilo,” said Piero. “I think I'e just found them. Sior Bon, I must concede that you are right. In the way that you mean, Riva di Pignoli does not yet exist. But there's still time to do something about it. Thank you. You'e helped me tremendously. If you'l excuse me now, I must get back to Riva di Pignoli.”
Piero made a slight bow before dashing from the cloister; then he hurried out through the monastery gates and across to the slip where his boat lay waiting. He'd come to Boccasante to find a way to bring the spring back to Riva di Pignoli — but how could he bring the spring to a place that didn't exist? He suddenly understood the message of the dead body — that it was the same as the message of the missing spring. Both were trying to tell the island to wake up. Both were trying to stir it from its dreamlike contentment and convince it to demand its place in the world. Piero knew it was possible. And as he loosened his boat from the dock at Boccasante he knew just what he would have to do to make it happen.
WHEN ALBERTINO WOKE
, his heart stopped for three full beats to find itself pressed flat against Ermenegilda's bosom in the thick shadows of the graveyard. Ermenegilda was snoring, the hem of her skirt still up around her shoulders, the look of Maria Ascendente on her face. At first he thought he would have to stay there until morning, but the memory of their midnight lust was too disturbing. Allowing for the chance that he might wake her — and might have to acknowledge the intimacy they had shared — he crawled slowly backward until his forehead met her feet and then quickly lifted himself to a standing position.
Ermenegilda barely moved; only for an instant did Maria threaten to drop from the clouds before an attentive angel swiftly buoyed her back toward God. After pulling up his tights and securing them under his tunic, Albertino lowered Ermenegilda's skirts, folded her hands across her chest, and placed an ashen rose upon her bosom. Perhaps she would wake and think herself the ghost of Cherubina Modesta Colomba Ernesta Franchin.
Albertino headed back toward his room, but his better sense stopped him before he got there. If Ermenegilda woke and remembered who she was, and remembered what they'd done, she was sure to come looking for him. If he went to sleep in his bed, she was sure to heave herself over the east wall and crawl in beside him. Much as he craved sleep — much as he craved the sweet security of his four uneven walls and his eight threadbare blankets — he couldn't bear the thought of her entering his room. So he let himself go in just long enough to fetch the gold blanket, then went down to spend the rest of the night at the dock.
When he reached the floating sanctuary of his beat-up little bark, he lifted up the seat plank, laid the blanket over the ribs, coiled a bit of rope to make a pillow, and settled back in to watch the stars. Albertino knew the stars almost as well as he knew the vegetables; he'd spent his whole life charting their gentle rotation across the sky. The Dolphin and the Hare. The Flying Horse and the Dove of Noah. The stars were friends to Albertino; it was one of the reasons he never felt lonely on his unpeopled little island.
If spring hadn't come, the heavens didn't know it. Albertino could see the Bear, the Lion, and the Crow just as he had each April of his life. The Crab was receding side-ways into the east, and on the rim of the west the Virgin was just floating into view. Albertino had been born under the sign of the Virgin. She was a guardian to him, a protectress of sorts. Now, as he thought about his encounter with Ermenegilda, he half expected her to fall out of the heavens and splash into the waters of the lagoon.
How could he have enjoyed it so much?
How could it have been so ineffably, unutterably pleasurable?
He recalled the night, years before, when Gianluca had returned home from his own first experience — abstracted, moonstruck, delirious. That morning, while he was trimming back the broccoli, Maria Patrizia Lunardi, whose father, Cherubino, grew the wheat fields at the east of the island, had sauntered into the garden, slid her hand between his legs, and whispered, “Ten o'clock.” Gianluca, who was only fourteen at the time, went instantly rigid and instantly limp; he could hardly keep himself from racing out of the broccoli patch and jumping into the lagoon. At ten o'k that night he slipped into Maria Patrizia's room; when he floated home at four in the morning he was so lit up with ecstasy that he could not keep from singing. He kept Albertino up until dawn with an explicit description of every position they had employed, using a list of adjectives that began with “paradisical” and then spiraled off into terms he'd created himself.
Spuntinodo. Incardelito. Stronzinfatagura.
Albertino was only eleven, but he never forgot the impression Gianluca had made as his spirit expanded over the joys of Maria Patrizia Lunardi. Now, after so many years of lying on the floor and listening to his brother howl, Albertino finally knew the truth: it was every bit as wonderful as Gianluca had said, and every bit as awful as he had feared.
He tried to push these thoughts from his mind. He tried to concentrate on the stars. But everything in the sky seemed to remind him of his heated encounter. The Centaur. The Wolf. The Water-Snake. Suddenly the heavens themselves seemed to be mingling in a strange, degenerate spectacle: the Lion mating with the Bear, the Crow with the Crab. Albertino covered his eyes, but the images only intensified. So he burrowed down between the blanket and the rope and prayed for sleep to take him from the orgy.
WHEN PIARINA EXITED
the church, the streaming taper clutched between both fists, she was already in a trance. Without pausing, she walked straight to the eastern dock and then slowly began to trace a path around the outer edge of the island. Her eyes were wide open, but they saw nothing; only divine protection kept her from tripping over rocks, slipping on sod, banging into trees, and falling into the lagoon. She walked for hours, sketching a faint line of flame around the island. While Albertino and Ermenegilda caught fire in the graveyard. While Piero carried torchlight back from Boccasante. While the hearths of the huts and hovels smoldered down to a handful of glowing embers. The Vedova Stampanini glimpsed her briefly as she set out the scraps for the cats. Gesmundo Barbon saw her float past his
sandolo
as he left for his morning catch. Piarina just kept walking — arms extended, mind extinguished, heart receiving.
By the time the moon had fallen she'd traveled the circuit nine times. Her hands were covered with candle wax, and her dirty tunic was damp from the wet night air. But just as she reached the point where she had begun, on the dock by the eastern shore, at the end of the ninth round, she stopped, closed her eyes, and sneezed. When she sneezed the candle went out, and when the candle went out she knew her task was completed.
She took the tiny plug of wax back to the Chiesa di Maria del Mare, placed it just where she had taken it as a slender taper, and went back home to the narrow bed to lie beside her mother.
ERMENEGILDA WOKE
precisely as the first rays of light crept into the graveyard darkness. She was not surprised to find herself sprawled out upon Cherubina Modesta Colomba Ernesta Franchin, and she was not surprised to find Albertino gone — wisps of angel hair still clung to her eyelids, and nothing, either physical or spiritual, could alter the sense of peace she felt inside. Her burgundy satin gown was speckled with crimson blood, but to Ermenegilda it was a symbol of glory.
As she rose to her feet and stumbled past the markers toward the gate, she half expected the skeletons to rise up and applaud her. All laws were suspended, all form and sense and reason turned upside down. She considered going to Albertino's room but decided instead to head straight for the dock; when she got there she stopped cold at the sight of him, twisted up like a puppy and still glowing from their encounter. She might have stayed there forever, content to watch him snore at the bottom of his boat, had she not instructed Romilda Rosetta to return for her at dawn. When the dwarfish servant appeared across the water precisely at half-past six, Ermenegilda cursed her punctuality. But when the elegant little boat arrived, she lifted her skirts and climbed in without so much as a snarl, a snap, or a bellow. She merely lay back against the polished prow, her arms resting sweetly in her lap, and let the confused Romilda Rosetta row her back to the main shore.
Albertino felt a sharp pang in his abdomen when he woke a second time; there was an odd smell that he couldn't quite place and a feeling of jubilance in the air. When he rolled over onto his back he could see that the sun had already traveled a third of its way across the sky; it must have been past ten o'clock. Kicking down the gold blanket, he drew himself to his feet and tried to toss off the traces of his troubled night.
It was lucky he had the posts of the dock to steady him, for what he saw nearly pitched him into the lagoon.
Once again the trim Torta boat was making its way across the slender isthmus of water that ran between the two islands. Once again Romilda Rosetta was at the oars; once again Ermenegilda was the lone passenger. But this time Ermenegilda was standing, and this time she could barely be seen for the sprigs and sprays, the stems and clusters and bunches, of fat, glistening flowers she carried in her arms. Pansies, chrysanthemums, violets, daisies, lillies, lilacs, pinks. Their perfume sent wild ribbons into the air, and their color woke the rabbits.
Spring had finally come to Riva di Pignoli.
And flowers were just the beginning.
I
T WAS LIKE A GREAT
, soundless explosion, the eruption into being of a thought, a dream, a dazzling incantation. In one swift movement the hand of Nature seemed to lower its quill to the surface of the island and etch an unbounded beauty into every inch. Fields that had lain caked and clotted suddenly undulated with life. Trees that had stood frozen and inarticulate suddenly hung down their branches with sweet, dripping fruit. Leaves sprouted like new ideas. Grass appeared like the flurry of cries at the height of a tournament joust.
Everyone on the island had a different story about the moment he first realized what had happened. The Vedova Stampanini had gone into her garden to remove the fishbones the cats always scattered after she gave them their late night feeding. She found, instead, the entire pack of them — Felice, Filippo, Rinaldo, Federigo, Nastagio, Lodovico and Lidia — curled up on a mound of clover that expanded and deepened even as she stood there watching. Siora Bertinelli had been stirring the morning broth when she heard a pelting sound outside. When she opened her door she saw the fig tree in her front yard spewing the fruit from its branches while the startled birds swept down to peck their fill. Ugolino Ramponi had gone to chop some wood for his hearth when he felt a rumbling beneath his boots. Dropping to the ground, he held his arms tightly over his head, certain that the sea was about to suck the entire island up into its gullet; when the trembling stopped, and he opened his eyes, he found himself covered from head to toe with woodbine and narcissus and morning gentian, the smell so intoxicating that he could not stand up for half an hour. Siora Scabbri woke to cries from her henhouse; the sweet violence in the air so shook her fussy brood that she had to take them back to bed with her.
Maria Luigi and Fausto were just sitting down to some garlic and salt cod when the branches of a beechwood tree thrust in through the tiny window above their hearth. Gianluca was in bed with a girl from Pieve di Forna when the room began to shake so wildly, he thought he'd returned to his first ecstasy with Maria Patrizia Lunardi. Orsina and the three Marias were in their chambers preparing themselves for battle when the tapestries leapt from the walls, the torches lit up in their sconces, and the goose-feather pillows exploded into the air as if Judgment Day had come.
Giuseppe Navo and Gesmundo Barbon claimed they saw the entire thing from the lagoon. First there was a blurring, as if the island were moving at a faster speed, sailing through an empty summer, a stale autumn, and a barren, brittle winter before arriving at the richness of an inconceivable spring. There was a silence — which even the fish attended — followed by an explosion of color that shot across the sky: great streaks of grape and celandine, bold patches of wild vermilion, warm rivers of sapphire, indigo, amber, and primrose. It was like a beautiful woman shaking out her skirts to find a fleet of wild birds hidden in the folds. It was like a great wave of laughter rising up from the soil to drench the air with its vitality.
Valentina had gone into the front yard to use the cider press. She and Piarina had a soap delivery scheduled for later that afternoon, and it looked as if it were going to be a long, thirsty morning of sorting and stacking and trimming. As she reached the well she heard a strange ripping noise, followed by the leaves sprouting forth on the branches of the trees. When she saw this she ran back into the hovel, slammed the door, and woke Piarina.
“Jesus Lord,” she said in a hushed voice. “You won't believe what's happening out there!”
But Piarina knew. From the moment she'd taken the taper from the Chiesa di Maria del Mare, she'd seen the entire process laid out before her. She only hoped Ermenegilda would be happy — and that she'd done no harm in tampering with Nature's plan.