Gospel (39 page)

She straightened her shoulders. “Hardly.”

“What do you think?” O'Hanrahan asked the American yuppie tourist-couple in their late twenties who were also looking at goods in the stall.

“Needs a belt,” said the woman seriously.

The couple was Steve and Donna, they were from Michigan. Really, where about? Birmingham, near Detroit? You're from Chicago, at the university? How long you been over here? Having fun? Isn't Florence nice? Yes, Florence is nice—

“Yeah, real nice,” interrupted O'Hanrahan, cutting short the cant. “Donna, what color belt do we need with this dress?”

“Red … about this thickness,” she said, demonstrating with her hands.

“How about green?” suggested Steve.

“Green with blue polka dots on white?” said Donna. “Good thing you don't work in fashion, sweetheart.”

Lucy was sort of thinking green might be nice. But a red belt was decided on, which dictated a red hat.

“Dr. O'Hanrahan,” she said, “you don't have to keep buying things.”

“Silence,” he insisted, reaching for a floppy, cardinal-red, woven-straw circular hat, a bit too big. “Steve, Donna. We need your judgment here.”

Steve said the hat needed to be smaller in diameter, Donna said nonsense, it should be bigger and more audacious. It was Italian and meant to be excessive. There was a guy who looked Irish-American, ginger-headed with freckles, with a rural U.S. accent Lucy overheard as he tried to ask how much a wallet was. He had been sneaking glances at Lucy for some time, which O'Hanrahan noted. “Excuse me, young man,” said the professor, “but we need your fashion advice here.”

He turned to them, at their service.

“I think a reeeal big hat,” he said, breaking the tie.

His name was Farley, from Louisiana, his first time in Florence. Your first time too? You been to the Uffizi? Some'n else, huh? Florence is nice, ain't it? Yep, Florence sure is nice—

“Well then,” interrupted O'Hanrahan again, “I think we're just about presentable here…” Donna, Steve, Farley, and O'Hanrahan stepped back to observe the finished product. “Sunglasses,” remarked O'Hanrahan. “This fashion plate from the pages of
Moda
needs sunglasses.”

Leaving the others in a chorus of seeya arounds, have a nice trips, Lucy and her companion moved on to a sunglasses stall. Before a minuscule tiny mirror, they tried numerous pairs. To make Lucy laugh, O'Hanrahan found a pair of heart-shaped purple plastic spectacles and put them on: “Is it me?”

Laughing, she shook her head. “I dare you to wear them when you get to Assisi. Maybe in Rome too, for a papal audience.”

“I think they suggest the dignity I deserve.”

“You look like Elton John.”

“Who?” He asked if Elton John had anything to do with the Baptist, the Evangelist, John the Presbyter, John Bishop of Rome, John of the Cross, John Chrysostomos, John the Silent, John the Almsgiver, John of God, Juan de Capistrano?

“You live in the wrong millennium, Dr. O'Hanrahan.”

“
Here
you go,” he said, handing her a big black pair of standard anonymous-making sunglasses.

“With the big hat and the sunglasses, people will think I'm a pop star hiding out, incognito.”

“Tonight,” promised O'Hanrahan, augmenting with Italian hand gestures, “the wolves,
i lupi,
will be out stalking the hot, reech
milionaria americana, capisce?
”

“I have my doubts anyone will be stalking me tonight. Too much competition from my countrywomen.” Lucy bowed her head serenely, peering over the top of the sunglasses. “And of such dubious virtue.”

Lunchtime.

“So what will it be?” said O'Hanrahan, scanning the menu. They were in an outdoor restaurant of the Piazza della Repubblica, a modern plaza of busstops that despite the most uncharming view in Florence, manages a formidable café life. “A little milktoast perhaps? Some oatmeal or gruel? Something to calm the ever-churning stomach?”

Lucy hid her smile behind the big menu.

“You're probably one of those American girls,” he said vagariously, “who comes to Italy looking for a hamburger, some french fries…”

She put down her menu. “You order for both of us. Do your worst.”

To the bored narcissistic waiter, O'Hanrahan ordered in Italian, a flurry of an order—Lucy tried but couldn't follow it. First, there arrived a bottle of chianti.

O'Hanrahan: “A glass,
signorina?
” And as he filled it:

“Whoa, sir, that's enough.”

“You're not going to let me drink this nectar all by myself, are you?”

“Wine always upsets my stomach. I'm not a drinker, really.”

O'Hanrahan smiled artificially. “I'd noticed.”

First course, after Lucy polished off a basket of warm Italian bread, was
spaghetti aglio e olio,
so simple, so perfect, just oil and bits of fried garlic and that was splendidly simple and complete. The next course arrived and Lucy examined it oddly.

“They look like little octopuses. Octopi,” she corrected herself.

“Squid,” said O'Hanrahan, on his fourth glass of chianti. “
Calamari,
and a bit of octopus there, too. In vinaigrette.”

Determined to be as cosmopolitan as her costume, Lucy bit into one with a positive attitude—
deliziosa!
she declared, before O'Hanrahan corrected the gender. She devoured her serving, even stealing one from O'Hanrahan's dish before the third course arrived and was set before them. Something orange and spongy and slimy.

“Hmmmmm,” said Lucy, trying a bit. First it was delicious. Then, still chewing, she considered it again. “Strange texture.” She swallowed with difficulty. “Not so sure about this.”

“Five different cuts make up the world-famous Florentine tripe dish, as there are five different stomach tissues in the cow—that crisscross fleshy tissue there…” He pointed with his knife to the tripe slices in question. “… and this bit looks like tentacles almost, these little sucker pods here, see?”

Lucy, somewhat paler, nodded curtly.

“Ymmmmm,” said O'Hanrahan, spearing a tripe piece, running it around in the tomato sauce and popping it into his mouth. “Fortunately, our Miss Dantan's no philistine. Sheeeee's not gonna turn up her nose at international cuisine, is she?”

“No,” said Lucy, “she's not.”

O'Hanrahan gazed around the square while breaking off a piece of bread. “It's a wonder beautiful as everyone is, good as the wine is, tasty as the food is, that Italy ever developed a cult of poverty and celibacy.
Il Poverello
and The Virgin Martyrs. Ever looked into your namesake?”

“St. Lucy?”

“
Santaaaaa Luciiiia,
he warbled.

She put her fork down, and recalled Sister Miriam's lectures at St. Eulalia. “Somewhere in Sicily?” she ventured. “Back in Roman days. Some girl who, given the choice of losing her virginity with some rich, good-looking Roman prince or dying in unspeakable tortures, took unspeakable tortures.”

“Very good. Lucia, the Blessed and Most Holy Virgin Martyr of Syracuse, lived at the end of the 200s, and is often,” O'Hanrahan went on comfortingly, “pictured with her eyes on a plate.”

Lucy slowed in the chewing of her tripe.

“One legend said they were torn out by the Romans. But that's not the older, more beloved Sicilian legend.”

“Which is?”

“She had this Christian boyfriend who wanted to marry her,” said O'Hanrahan, reaching over to steal another square of tripe. “But,” he added, raising his fork to make the point, “he would respect her spiritual marriage to Our Lord. But he kept getting tempted by her curvaceousness, her loveliness, her heaving Sicilian breasts—”

“I'm waiting.”

“And he felt lust in his heart when he looked into her limpid blue eyes. So, like a good girl, she tore them out and presented them to him on a plate.”

Lucy tore at a piece of bread, unimpressed. “Don't worry, Dr. O'Hanrahan, these eyes are staying right in here.”

“You can go see her incorrupt arm up in Venice.”

“Her incorrupt arm?”

O'Hanrahan poured himself the next-to-last glass of the chianti. “Lot of ol' girls around Italy refused to rot upon deliverance from their earthly ordeals. Up the road,” he continued, “is Lucca. A lovely Tuscan city. You can see in some church whose name I've forgotten the Most Blessed Virgin of Lucca, Santa Zita, incorrupt from the 1200s, no formaldehyde, no taxidermy. She's on display in a glass case, all dried-up and dusty. Probably as she was in life.”

Lucy was caught again with a full mouth of rubbery tripe.

“And every April something-or-other the old widow women and faithful line up down the block to come and
kiss
the mummy on her rotted, wasted maw. They stroke her withered, shriveled hands and feet. That's really good sauce, isn't it? And too bad you can't take in Cascia this trip.”

(The Blessed and most Venerable Santa Margherita, Miracle Worker of Cascia, the Saint of the Impossible.)

O'Hanrahan regaled his companion: “While in the convent Margherita prayed for ordeals to befall her and, in His infinite mercy, God allowed a thorn from an altarpiece to float down miraculously to the praying Rita and pierce her forehead, producing an open, festering wound from which an unbearable putrescent odor would emanate all of her days. Such Divine Favor!”

(Watch it, Patrick.)

“On her death, light shone forth from this gash,” he added.

“Do tell,” said Lucy, resolutely continuing to eat.

“Now true incorruption, Lucy, has a Roman Catholic checklist of sorts, if you want to start planning ahead. Benedict XIV's
De cadaverum incorruptione,
which allows that the skin can be discolored and black or bruise-tinted, but the joints have to be flexible and limbs shouldn't snap off when moved. There should be a moistness to the body. Often, it is found that congealed or fresh blood will form on the saint's wounds, as holy men through the centuries carve up and divide the previous relic. Or go in for repairs.”

“Repairs?”

“Some repairs are allowed,” O'Hanrahan continued. “Santa Margherita's cheek gave way and sank into her face in 1650, but it was lovingly repaired with string.”

“Fascinating,” said Lucy.

O'Hanrahan gaily noted Teresa of Avila and her sidekick, Mother Maria of Jesus, whom he billed as “that great double-act of incorruption.” While the various parts of Teresa exuded divine perfume, Mother Maria's remains have been known to flow with sacred ooze. Divine leakage was recorded when a loving priest amputated St. Teresa's hand for a relic, before cutting off one of her fingers, which he carried around with him as a cherished keepsake. One of Teresa's feet went to Rome, a cheek was hacked off and sent to Madrid and was stolen during the Spanish Civil War, as was her left hand, which ended up in Franco's personal collection.

“He must have thought,” speculated O'Hanrahan, “that this blessed amputation would intercede for him before God for his many crimes.”

(It didn't.)

“I've been to Teresa's convent in Spain, Alba de Torres, dear girl. And one can see her heart and left arm. You are familiar with Bernini's famous statue of St. Teresa in Ecstasy?” Lucy nodded. “The most overrated piece of sentimental schlock in Western art. Anyway, Teresa's heart was pierced by an angel's flaming dart during one of her transports and the nuns are able to show you the
precise
point the dart pierced her aorta.”

(An autopsy in 1872 confirmed the piercing of her then 300-year-old heart. Science in the service of religion.)

“But that is not,” added O'Hanrahan, far from exhausted, “the only sacred ticker on the block. What about the miraculous incorruption of Clare of Montefalco?”

Lucy looked grim. “What about it?”

“Her immaculate heart!”

(Clare insisted until her death at forty that the Passion of Our Lord had imprinted itself irrevocably upon her heart. Go ahead and tell it, Patrick.)

“As her blessed, sacred, most holy corpse was incorrupt—”

“Does anyone in this country know how to rot?” asked Lucy, putting down her fork for good.

“As her blessed relic was incorrupt,” O'Hanrahan pursued, “they cut her open looking for the Lord's Passion, and indeed, there imprinted on her heart were the miraculous signs.”

O'Hanrahan recounted: on Clare's abnormally enlarged heart is a white mound of tissue in the shape of a crucifix, the body perfectly outlined and completely white except for a livid scarlet puncture in the figure's side—Christ's spear wound. A small ring of hard nerve fibers forms a crown of thorns. There is a hard whitish nerve with knobbed ends—the dreaded scourge! There are dark, sharp fibers intruding into the engorged heart—the nails driven through Our Savior's hands and feet. Another hard nerve tissue with a soft tissue at the end has been pronounced the sponge of the crucifixion scene. Rummaging around the blessed Clare's incorrupt body for other miracles, three large nut-sized gallstones were found, of equal size, weight, and disposition.

“The Blessed Trinity!” pronounced O'Hanrahan.

“Yuck,” said Lucy.

“Dessert?”

“Yes, actually,” she responded, hoping to get the imagined tastes out of her mouth. A
mousse di cioccolata
was O'Hanrahan's choice, and a
cassata siciliana
for Lucy, in honor of Santa Lucia. And as Lucy began to enjoy her cake:

“Of course, we must consider the advice of John Damascene, that great Doctor of the Church.”

“Must we?”

(In the 700s, John was able to provide an explanation for the wonders of leaking, sacred corpses:
Christ gives us the relics of saints as health-giving springs through which flow blessings and healing,
wrote John.
For if at God's Word water poured forth from hard stone in the wilderness … why should it seem incredible that healing medicine should distill from the relics of saints?
)