The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (174 page)

Afraid of losing business, D’Annunzio spread the story that
Padre Pomposo
had secretly married Gallante Selvi and his daughter before their departure, but the following Sunday the priest denied it from the
pulpito
. After that, Violetta’s father tried a different approach, denouncing his immoral daughter on the streets in the same loud voice he used to hawk fish. His business fell off nonetheless and before the month was finished, a drunken man punctured D’Annunzio’s lung in a tavern brawl and killed him. Gallante Selvi and Violetta were located in Torino and notified of the tragedy, but Violetta did not return to bury her father. Everyone agreed that Pescara’s once-celebrated
Santa Lucia
had broken both the third and ninth commandments and would, no doubt, spend eternity in Hell.

By November, the village tongues had tired of speaking the name
Violetta
and gone on to other sinners. It was during that same month, Prosperine said, that she witnessed the strange magic involving the rabbits.

“Ah, at last the rabbits!” I said. “I was afraid I would die of old age before you got to those magical
conigli
of yours.”

The Monkey lit her pipe and puffed on it, took a sip of wine, said nothing more for two, three minutes. I shut up and waited. Then she sighed and continued her story. “There were three of us who saw it,” she said. “The hunchback herself, Pomaricci the schoolmaster, and I.”

Pomaricci was a miserly man, tall and bony but with a little potbelly in the front. His teeth were long and yellow like a horse’s, and his mouth emitted a foul smell. Ciccolina could hardly see, but knew by the stink of his breath when Pomaricci had come for fresh meat.

Every day he bought a rabbit or a chicken for his dinner and never forgot to complain to the old woman that her prices were too high, her animals too skinny. Sometimes he poked his fingers through the poor creatures’ cages, more to bother them than to feel the meat on their bones. “One of these days, I’ll starve to death or go bankrupt from trading with you, old woman,”
Pomaricci would complain to Ciccolina. Then he would turn to Prosperine and smile, revealing small bits of meat stuck between those yellow teeth from the evening before.

Ciccolina would answer that even paupers needed to eat, so for him she chose starvation. “At last I would be rid of your complaining,” she told him.

Here, the Monkey’s voice became a dog’s growl in the throat. She drew her chair closer to mine, as if we were two criminals not wanting to be overheard.

That day, Pomaricci did his usual complaining and poking of fingers through Ciccolina’s cages. Finally, he sighed and opened one and pulled his dinner out by the ears. “How much do you want for this half-dead bag of bones?” he asked.

Ciccolina lifted the rabbit and named her price.

“What? You rob me, old woman!” Pomaricci protested. “For that price, I should get twice the meat that this puny creature will yield.” But as always, he opened his shabby change purse and prepared to pay what she had asked.

Ciccolina had been ill that day—afflicted as she sometimes was with dizziness and
mal di capo
. On the walk into town, she had fallen twice against the cart and once in the road. She had been angry all day. “Twice the meat, eh?” she snapped back at that
spilorcio
, Pomaricci. “If twice the meat will shut up your face, then twice the meat you shall have!”

She slammed the frightened rabbit against the cutting board and directed Prosperine to hold down the animal by its thumping back feet. The Monkey obeyed and the old woman’s big cleaver flashed in the air and came down hard, slicing the creature exactly in half and narrowly missing her assistant’s right hand and her own left breast.

The magic Prosperine saw that day was this: the rabbit, split clean, shed not one drop of blood. Instead, each half grew another half—became, before the girl’s eyes and the schoolmaster’s eyes, two whole, living rabbits where only the one had been!

“Here! Take them both and be gone with you!” Ciccolina shouted at the schoolmaster. “I hope you choke on the bones!” She held the twitching twins by the ears in front of the schoolmaster. There they rocked back and forth, two furry
pendoli.

Struck dumb, Pomaricci dropped the coins from his hand and stumbled backward and away from his strange bounty. At a short distance, he turned and ran, screaming about dinner and the devil’s work.

Ciccolina grabbed Prosperine by the arm. With her thumb, she traced the cross of Jesus Christ on the Monkey’s forehead. “
Benedicia!
” the old woman whispered. “Say it quickly!
Benedicia!
And make the sign of the cross!”

The stunned girl did as she was told, but in a kind of trance. Was she dreaming? Had she really seen what she had seen? Her disbelieving eyes could not look away from those two rabbits that had been one.

That evening, the church bell rang for Pomaricci, who had died of apoplexy. As for the old
strega
and the macaroni-maker’s eldest daughter, they celebrated! Ciccolina ordered Prosperine to kill and dress the two rabbits. At first, the girl thought she would not be able to slaughter and skin those magical creatures, much less fry them and chew the cooked flesh off their bones. But she did! The two ate fried rabbit, and
zucca
from the old woman’s garden, and bread sopped in tomato gravy. A feast, it was! Enough so that Prosperine thought her stomach would burst like
palloncino
. In truth, it was the most delicious food she had ever tasted!

“I know it sounds crazy, Tempesta,” Prosperine told me that night. “But I swear at the feet of Jesus Himself that it happened the way I say! I saw what I saw! I know this much is true!”

Here, the Monkey drew so close to me that the smells of her wine and tobacco mingled with the warm, wet breath that pushed against my face. She clasped my knee and began to whisper, as if this next was only between her and me.

“What did I see that day, Tempesta?” she asked. “A mortal sin? A
miracle? The question came back to me yesterday when I midwifed your wife’s twins—the boy who came out dead and the girl who came out with the rabbit’s lip. What does it mean, Tempesta? Tell me. What does it mean?”

“Foolish woman,” I said, and pulled my chair back a little from that crazy fool. “It means only that you should have thrown your superstitions and
allucinazioni
into the sea on the way to the New Country.
Mal occhio
and miracles—bah! You talk the stuff of idiots and ignorant peasants.”

“Be careful what you mock, Tempesta,” she warned, pointing her bony finger at me. “Where there is no shadow, there is no light. Heaven help the heretic!”

We sat there in silence, the Monkey and I, the word
heretic
falling hard like a rock onto my soul. And I felt, again, my dead child in my arms. Saw my thumb trace the oily cross on his forehead. If my son had been baptized by the hands of a heretic, then his was a lost and unprotected soul. I had cast him not into Heaven but Hell.

“Better shut up now about heresy and go to bed,” I told the Monkey. “Ignazia will need you before the sun comes up and your head will be bigger than this house.”

She stood and waited, blocking the moon in the window. There was something she was waiting to say.

“What?” I asked impatiently. “What do you want now?”

“I know what the
dottore
told you,” she said.

“The
dottore
told me many things,” I answered. “How should I know what you’re talking about?”

“I know that if another baby comes, it could kill her,” she said. “It could stop her heart.”

“What of it?” I said. “That is private business between a husband and his wife. Keep your nose out of it.”

“Come to me when you need to,” she said.

“Eh?”

“Remember the promise I made you when we arrived here. If you hurt her, I’ll make you pay. When you need to, come to me and be done with it.”

At first, I did not understand what she was saying, and when I
did
understand, the thought of it repulsed me. “I have no wish,” I said, “to fuck a monkey.”

“And I have no wish,” she said back, “to be fucked by a fool. Still, I’ll do it for her sake. What do I care, if it will keep her safe? It means nothing to me. Stay away from her, I warn you. Just remember, Tempesta. I killed a man.”

I laughed in her face. “A poor schoolmaster dies of apoplexy and you claim responsibility for yourself and your old witch-friend. Ha! That was God’s work, woman, not yours. If there is a heretic in this kitchen, it is
you
!”

“I claim no responsibility for Pomaricci’s death,” she said. “I do not say he died because of the magic. I do not say he didn’t.”

She picked up her empty wineglass, then banged it back down against the table, cracking it. “Gallante Selvi is the man I killed,” she said. “That bastard of a stained-glass painter.”

“You said he left Pescara,” I protested.

“I told you he left,” she said. “I tell you now he came back!”

My heart raced; my hands were moist with sweat. “Sit, then,” I told her. “Sit and tell me the rest.”

After she had seen the witch’s magical twinning of the rabbits, Prosperine devoted herself entirely to the old
strega,
whom she now both feared and loved. She begged Ciccolina to teach her the powers, but for weeks the old woman put her off with nods and smiles, pretending not to hear. Then, as the season of the Epiphany approached, the old hunchback began to hint that the time was drawing near—that midnight on Christmas Eve was the hour when mothers gave their daughters the gift of secrets.

And that was when she taught her—on the last Christmas Eve of her life, before it was too late. At midnight, as the church bells rang in the village to celebrate the birth of the Christ child, Ciccolina began Prosperine’s lessons: how to diagnose and cure
il mal occhio
. The girl begged her to teach her the other, too—how to
inflict
the evil eye, cause suffering on those who had wronged her.
She had enemies, after all: those villagers who had spat on her in the square and called her “little witch”; a father who had betrayed her for Gallante Selvi’s money; and, most of all, Gallante Selvi himself—he who had turned her friend Violetta against her and kidnapped her from her village! But Ciccolina refused to teach the Monkey the art of revenge. Maybe the old woman suspected she would use bad power against her godson. Maybe not. The world was already too full of bad intent, Ciccolina told her—already too full of prideful people wanting to take over God’s work for
Him.

On that Christmas Eve, Ciccolina took from inside her shawl a necklace of red chilis which she had strung and dried the summer before. “Wear this,” she ordered Prosperine. “The point of the
corno
bursts the evil eye and protects you.”

She told the girl to take out olive oil and to draw three bowls of Holy Water from the cistern that
Padre Pomposo
had blessed on his visit the summer before. Into the night, the Monkey repeated the incantations that Ciccolina spoke, practiced the reading of the oil on the water. When the old woman was satisfied that the gift had been transferred, she spat into her hand and told the girl to close her eyes. She rubbed the wet from her mouth into the skin of each eyelid. “
Che puozze schiatta!
” she murmured—over and over she said it, not to Prosperine but to the darkness. Then she had the girl rub the hump on her back for good luck. “
Benedicia!
” she said. “Use what you know against evil.”

She died the next month, beside the Monkey, on the bed where the two slept each night. Prosperine suspected it as soon as she woke in the morning. She jumped from that mattress of husks and feathers, trying to call and shake the old
strega
back to life. When she was sure she was gone, she poured Holy Water into a bowl, placed it beside the body, and sprinkled the oil on top. The beads did not spread but held firm on the surface, which meant that Ciccolina’s soul rested peacefully. The Monkey thumb-shut the old woman’s eyes and kissed her hands, her face, even the purple lump on her forehead. The butcher-woman had been kind to her, like a
madre,
and Prosperine had come to love even her ugly parts.

The notary sent word to Gallante Selvi about Ciccolina’s death and the painter sent back instructions that Prosperine was to continue to maintain his godmother’s house and butcher business. He would return to Pescara after the solstice to pay her father for her services and to paint his colored glass in the summer light of Pescara. Nowhere else in all of Italy was the illumination so perfect for his work in
vetro colorito
. The visit would, as well, allow his little wife to enjoy a homecoming with her many admirers.

His little wife! If he was not lying about the marriage, then he was a bigger
figliu d’una minga
than the Monkey had imagined. And Violetta D’Annunzio was a bigger fool!

At this, I held up my hand to stop
Signorina
Monkey-Face. “
Aspetti un momento!
” I said. “Is this a riddle you tell?”

“This is
truth
I tell!” she protested. “Why do you say ‘riddle’?”

“It’s a puzzle to me to understand how your pretty friend had been a fool to trade her life of fish-cleaning and giggling at sailors for a life as a rich artist’s wife and model. Ha! What did you expect—that Selvi would have immortalized
you
in a work of holy art? Married
you
? And what’s this about your killing the poor man? How did you kill him—burst the blood vessels in his brain with
il mal occhio
?”

Her fist banged the table, made me jump back. “I killed him with his own art,” she croaked.

“What? Quit this fantasy, woman. My chianti has turned you lunatic.”

“Your chianti has made me talk truth to a fool,” she snapped back. “You would be wise be keep quiet while I’m in the mood to tell my secrets.”

“All right, then, talk!” I said. “Talk until the sun comes up. Talk until your tongue falls out of your mouth. How did you kill this poor painter? Tell me! Talk!”

Gallante Selvi made a grand show of his return to Pescara. He and Violetta arrived at the square in a caravan of three horse-drawn carriages and one horse-drawn cart. The first carriage held the couple
themselves and their fancy luggage. In the second were the finished pieces of Selvi’s precious “masterpiece,” to be pieced and soldered together later in Torino. The third carriage held Selvi’s crates of supplies. In the open cart sat the small kiln the artist used to bake his paintings onto glass. Each small glass section of the masterpiece-to-be was wrapped in buntings and blankets to guard against breakage. Ha! Violetta, too, was wrapped in packaging—a fur-trimmed red
bolero
with gold
aigletti,
a fancy fur toque on her head. She would have seemed quite the lady if she had not looked so shrunken and miserable in her fine new clothes.