Simple Prayers (15 page)

The formality of Miriam's words cut short the sudden, genial flow of Gianluca's. He felt too rough, too uneducated, to rise to the level of her righteousness.

“What is it?” she asked, sensing the change in his manner.

“You — aren't like the other women I'e known.”

“How do you mean?”

“When I'm near you — it's — hard to explain. You make me feel …”

“Yes?”

He paused. “Holy.”

Miriam lowered her eyes, and they continued walking in silence. In time they reached the western docks, but Gianluca was so dazzled by Miriam's presence that he could not fathom how they had got there. Had they floated on a breeze? Had they disappeared within the flames of their exchange to rematerialize, halfway across the island, as the smoke cleared? He only knew that the sun was gone behind the horizon, that the sky was cracked with pink beneath the lowering darkness, that the golden hairs on Miriam's upper lip were traced with tiny pearls of perspiration.

“There's a part of you that craves what any man craves,” said Miriam. “A dry bed. A plate of sardines in the evening. A woman. But there's another part — the part that stops when you'e carrying a heavy load and listens for the sound of crickets, and finds it, and follows it. That part craves something else. That part is holy.”

“You'e watched me?”

“I'e watched everyone, these past months. It's a small island. A difficult place, I think, to keep secrets.”

“I don't have any secrets,” said Gianluca. “Everyone here knows me for what I am.”

“And what is that?”

Gianluca studied the planes of her face, washed of color now as the light escaped from the sky. “I'e been with many, many women,” he said. “I never gave it a thought until you arrived.”

“‘There are sixty queens and eighty concubines, and maidens without number, My dove, my perfect one, is only one.…’”

Gianluca raised his hand and placed his fingertips against her cheek; for the first time, Miriam felt a trace of the same desire he felt for her.

“I must go,” she said. “It's late.”

“I was going to sing you a new ballad tonight. I'e been working on it for over a fortnight.”

Miriam realized then that she had been about to leave without saying what she'd come for. “I don't want any more ballads,” she said. “And I don't need any more cantaloupes. We can meet again. But you must stop coming to see me every day.”

“But what will I do when the song starts rising up in my throat?”

Miriam smiled. “Swallow.”

Gianluca smiled, too. And though he wanted to protest, he gave in to Miriam's request. “All right,” he said. “No more ballads.”

“And no more cantaloupes.”

“Not even a honey melon?”

“Not even a honey melon.”

Gianluca shrugged and nodded, then escorted Miriam back to Maria Luigi's hovel. They did not say much as they walked, and they did not touch again. When they reached Maria Luigi's door, Miriam whispered a soft “
Bona notte”
and then crept to her darkened alcove to prepare for bed.

No more cantaloupes. No more ballads. But the feel of Gianluca's hand against her cheek would remain in her mind for days and days to come.

FOR ERMENEGILDA,
the evening was just beginning. From the moment she looked across the table and saw Albertino, trimmed in bright silks and satins like a wayward capon, she knew her carefully laid out plan for revenge would travel toward its ultimate end. There was no accident in his suddenly appearing on the seat opposite her at the del Ponte supper; Ermenegilda had been responsible for every step that had guided him toward his fate.

Once a month Beppe Guancio came to the Ca’Torta to get a fresh supply of candles for the Chiesa di Maria del Mare. On his latest visit Ermenegilda informed him that he could only have them if he helped her find a way to ensnare Albertino. At first Beppe refused — but when Ermenegilda threatened to have her father take back the marble he had donated for the new village monument, he gave in. The following day he came to her with the news that Piero was looking for mosaic tiles for the
campo,
and Ermenegilda sprang into action. She went to visit Eduardo del Ponte, who was a client of her father's, and deftly arranged his visit to Fra Danilo, his offer of tiles to Piero, and the elaborate supper to which she would lure Albertino. Getting Albertino to the supper was the most difficult part; Ermenegilda was depending on her sense that Piero would not wish to fetch the tiles himself. Her instincts proved correct — so on the night after he'd spoken with Sior del Ponte, when he was trying to decide whom to send in his place, she crept to his bedside and patiently repeated “Albertino” from midnight until dawn. Piero awoke with the name echoing in his head, and the rest went according, to schedule.

Albertino knew none of this and so did not know what to make of Ermenegilda's presence before him. That she would be invited to dine at an elegant Venetian palazzo didn't surprise him. That she would appear, however, directly opposite him, at the only such dinner to which he'd ever been and most likely ever would be invited, seemed a joke too malicious for anyone he'd ever have considered to be an inhabitant of heaven. For the first three courses — the pastries, the pike, and the goose — he kept his eyes upon his plate in an effort to block out her presence. When the raspberry ice arrived he prayed that his torment was over, but it proved to be only an interval before the quail, the lobster, the partridge, the venison, and an assortment of purees Albertino could not identify. It became more and more difficult, amid the chatter and the music, to ignore the silent fire that burned across the aspic. But somewhere around the partridge he was aided by a rumpled, fluty voice that piped up to his right.

“Do not tell me. You'e a painter of icons!”

“Excuse me?”

“Those are the hands of a painter of icons. I'm certain of it.”

Albertino looked first at the startling face from which the startling voice had emanated: the incarnadine lips, the plucked eyebrows, and the hair that seemed to have been frightened by the abundance of courses. Then he looked down at his stubby, soil-stained fingers, which thrust gingerly at the succulent food upon his plate.

“No, no,” he said. “I'm a vegetable farmer.”

The woman let out a rich, gurgling laugh. “Of course!” she cried. “And I'm the Holy Virgin!”

Albertino kept his gaze upon the moist wedges of partridge that dangled between his thumb and forefinger. He was certain that this woman was not the Holy Virgin, but he was grateful nonetheless for the rousing manner in which she drew his attention away from Ermenegilda.

“I knew you were an artist. I'm always right. I could have been a witch, you know. My cousin is a painter of icons — or should I say‘was’? Poor Bertoldo. So much talent simply swept away like a few crumbs on the
terrazza.
They say it's some kind of awful sickness, you know. Half of Naples dead, bodies everywhere. But I don't believe nine-tenths of what I hear these days. The Neapolitans eat too much garlic. In that kind of heat you pass out for three days and they bury you before you wake up again. I only hope poor Bertoldo was actually dead. Imagine yourself a great artist, a man of excruciating sensitivity, waking up in a wooden box because you ate too much garlic. Between you and me, it's what he deserves for going to live with those animals.‘The light,’he says — or said.‘You cannot imagine the light.’Well, light is light and Naples is Naples, and now the poor fool has nothing to paint but the inside of a wooden box. If I were you, I'd keep my apostles in the Veneto. You agree with me, don't you? I just know you agree with me.”

Albertino was fascinated by the way the woman's head bobbed above the thick strand of pearls wrapped tightly about her neck. He imagined that if he were to remove those pearls, the head would topple onto the floor — all the while continuing to talk about his hands, the light, the cousin in the box.

“I once met a Russian painter of icons,” she said. “He was very, very handsome, but he refused to paint the crucifixion. Absolutely refused. Which seemed somewhat cowardly of him. Don't you agree?”

Albertino was on the verge of saying something, anything, when he became aware of an odd pressure against the inside of his ankle. As the woman continued talking — about Greek versus Roman statuary, about the inability of the eye to perceive the subtleties in a fresco without the aid of direct sunlight — he felt it move its way up to his knees, push in between his thighs, poke up under his tunic, and press quite firmly against his crotch. Once there it began moving back and forth in a rhythmic manner that rendered Albertino utterly speechless. It was all he could do to keep from moaning or from flinging up strips of dripping partridge to sizzle in the chandelier.

For the remainder of the meal Albertino remained trapped between the embroidered musings of the shock-haired matron and the maddening ministrations of Ermenegilda 's foot. By the time the mulberry custard was served he had forgotten the tortured cabbage leaves and the ruined artichokes — indeed, everything that had happened since their idyll in the graveyard — and could only think of where, and how, he might be with her again.

Ermenegilda had to fight back the feelings of arousal her footwork stirred inside her. She was not there for pleasure, and she resented the tingle of satisfaction the hardness beneath the sole of her stocking gave her. The feeling was so delicious, however, she decided it made no difference if it pleased her. So she downed her custard in a series of quick spoonings, reached across the flowers to take up Albertino's serving, and breathlessly excused herself from the table to accelerate the encounter. As she moved away from him, Albertino felt his modest organ fairly rip through his tights. Without even a nod to the shock-haired matron — who had advanced to theories concerning the overabundance of flies in the Adriatic in August — he rose from his seat and followed Ermenegilda out of the room.

She led him down through the gilded mansion to the shadowy gates where the boatmen waited. Then she whispered something into one of their ears, stepped down into his gondola, and spread out her skirts as she seated herself. Albertino followed, and the boat set off.

He hadn't the slightest idea where they were going. He was barely able to breathe. For as soon as the gondola began to wind its way down the canal, Ermenegilda placed her hand in the bowl of mulberry custard and lowered it into Albertino's tights. Albertino thought he would die from the sheer bliss of it — either convert into liquid and pour off into the lagoon or explode into fire and add a bead to one of the lesser constellations. Before the ecstasy could outrun itself, however, the boat stopped and Ermenegilda withdrew her hand. Albertino regained awareness of the stars, the smell of the torchlight burning, the sound of the water lapping against the stone shores of the fabricated island. When Ermenegilda climbed up out of the gondola he climbed out after her, his tunic smeared with mulberry juice, his tights stained and dripping with the clotted cream. He followed her as she moved through the enormous marble columns. He followed as she entered the piazza, a pawn trailing his queen across the ordered field of an Olympian chessboard. He followed as she approached the magnificent facade of the glorious basilica, until the great leaping horses and the kneeling saints and the majestic mosaic deities loomed like phantoms overhead. Then she lay back on the steps, tore down his demolished tights, and pulled him — custard-covered and gleaming in the moonlight — inside her.

For Albertino, it surpassed their first encounter as a comet does a campfire. The unexpectedness of seeing her, the subtle workings of her foot, the slow torture of the cream inside his tights — all led him to a state of desire from which he knew he could never again retreat. No more resistance. No more denials. Only Ermenegilda — thighs and knees and hair and arms and all.

And she — whose deft manipulations had drawn him back to her bosom — whose still aching heart had only that morning set to flame an entire patch of parsley and half a dozen rotten pears — who would have given anything to have him inside her again as late as June or even into early July — was carefully laying the trap that would ensnare him. For Ermenegilda's heart could stretch only so far without snapping. And Albertino had more than earned what she was about to do.

Chapter 9

A
s THE CAMPANìL began to take its place among the zigs and zags of the Riva di Pignoli landscape, the roosters, pigs, and ducks discovered it cast an altogether different shadow in sunlight than by the light of the quisling moon. Had they been able to describe it, they would have called it a flatness versus a roundness, a smooth-honed edge versus a scalloped irregularity. For as the stones and the wood and the mortar rose up by day, Piarina, in all her longing, rose up by night. Each evening she left her bed at precisely the hour at which she'd set out upon her fateful circuit of flame; each morning Piero found her sitting upon the uppermost stone, her fragile countenance like that of a banished monarch: slack, eviscerated, waiting for some sign from the forces of heaven to indicate what to do next. She was generally covered with birds: they sat on her knees and her shoulders like a gaggle of gossips and perched in her wispy hair as if it were straw. Piero had to fetch the ladder to bring her down, and though he removed it immediately once he had done so, she always managed to find her way back to the top again each evening without it.

On recent mornings, when Piero placed Piarina upon the ground, she scampered off into the shadows as if she were afraid of what the rising light might reveal. Autumn had come to Riva di Pignoli. The fruit tree boughs sagged heavy to the ground or sprang back slender and empty. The triumphant greens lost their conquering vitality and began to make way for the ginger, rust, and blood that would succeed them. Even a spring-that-outdid-all-other-springs had to end sometime. The villagers only hoped they could preserve some of its richness to last throughout the winter.

The
campanìl
rose like a stone vine of ivy creeping up the side of the church, until finally, around the first week in October, it was finished. The villagers smoothed out a slightly domed roof over the rough walls and placed a small iron cross at the top; the only thing left to do was hoist the bells. The brothers of Boccasante, at Fra Danilo's insistence, had donated three great bronze bells to the island. They were to have been used for a second
campanìl
that was to have been built along the south wall of the monastery, but after having procured them from an order on Elba (which had closed the previous summer because of a scandal concerning the chief prelate and a neighboring flock of goats), the monks decided that a second
campanìl
might seem prideful. So they offered them to Piero, who accepted them gratefully and had them delivered to the Chiesa di Maria del Mare before the brothers could change their minds.