The Miracles of Santo Fico (31 page)

“What do you need, Father?”

Father Elio stood by one of the braces and tried to heft a short-handled sledgehammer.

“Every time I try to drive one of these braces into place, the other one tips over and then that cross beam falls on my head.”

“Here . . . You steady the other one.”

Leo took the hammer from the weak old hands and with Father Elio holding the opposite brace in position, Leo drove each one into place with just a few blows. The transept wasn’t rebuilt yet, but the braces would help.

Father Elio patted Leo on the back and thanked him. And Leo thought, since the old priest doesn’t feel the need to mention anything about the absent fresco, why should he? He tried to effect a good-bye, but Father Elio just kept following him—out the transept door and across the garden. Then the old man said something that caught Leo completely off guard.

“Marta isn’t angry with you, you know.”

Sometimes a thing can come at you so unexpectedly that you don’t have time to fashion a facade, and before you know it, the truth just spills out.

“Yes, she is and I don’t care. A long time ago I did something stupid,” Leo confessed. “If she wants to hate me, okay, fine. But she hates everything. I’m sorry Franco died. Excuse me, Father, but to hell with her.”

The old man sat down on one of his mounds of stones and scratched his head. “A lot of things happened after you left. What happened between Marta and Franco wasn’t good. Franco got everything he wanted. He got Marta. He got the hotel. He got beautiful children. And the more he got, the unhappier he became. Then, he got mean. He might have even hit her. I hope not, but maybe he did. He was cruel in many different ways—more painful, more lasting. I don’t think Marta wants to be unhappy anymore, but it’s become her way of life. It’s hard to watch her struggle, isn’t it?”

“You’re her uncle, you’re her priest—there must be something you can do to help her.”

“A long time ago, when I was at the university in Bologna, I took many wonderful classes. My favorite was the class about science. I wasn’t good at it, but I loved that class. It taught me all about plants and animals, water and fish, air and birds. It taught me about clouds and storms. It taught me so many things, but one thing that it taught me . . . maybe the most important thing of all . . . it taught me about butterflies.

“God has a habit of working miracles all the time that we don’t even see. Like butterflies. God works such a miracle in butterflies. He teaches us about our lives through them. Have you ever watched a butterfly break its way out of its cocoon? Oh, it’s a terrible struggle. It appears to be agony . . . Maybe it is. Only the butterfly knows for sure. But one thing is certain—it’s an exhausting struggle. The butterfly must break through the shell of its old life—this thing that, at one time, was strong enough to protect it from other bugs, birds, and lizards . . . all sorts of dangers. And other terrors too, like wind and rain—all the things that would have destroyed it because it was so fragile. But one day it knows that it’s time to break through the cocoon. It wants to become a new thing, you see, and to do so it must break through that shell. But the cocoon isn’t like a room with a door. It’s something that the butterfly created herself, out of a single thread spun over time. Around and around herself the caterpillar wrapped that single thread, until it buried her. So, now she’s a butterfly and she wants to be free . . . but she’s trapped. And certain threads, threads that were spun with a certain. . . passion, they don’t want to break. They cling to her and entangle her. And her struggle to free herself can be both frightening and inspiring. But for the butterfly, it’s severe and unrelenting.

“As I watch a butterfly struggling and I pity her plight, sometimes I’m tempted to play the hand of God and reach down and help her. I could so easily pull open certain threads—just a few. It would make her struggle so much easier and she would never know. But I don’t. Do you know why? Because I know it would destroy her. She would die. I learned this in the science class at the university. The butter-fly has a . . . a . . . thing in her stomach, I think. This . . . thing is full of a fluid that is meant to fill the veins of her butterfly wings. It’s the pressure of the struggle and the squeezing to escape this prison cocoon of her own making that forces the fluid out of this . . . thing in her stomach, and into the veins of her wings. Without the fluid her wings would never expand and she would never fly. She would drop to the ground and die.

“Marta worked hard creating her shell. Now her time has come, and she will escape or she won’t. But she must do it herself. We all must do it ourselves. That’s God’s plan.”

Carmen Fortino had been coming to the Pizzola farm for one thing or another all her life. Some of her earliest memories were of walking down the north coast road, holding her mother’s hand until they turned down through the opening in the old stone fence. From there, Marta was too slow for Carmen because she had to carry Nina, who was still a baby—and the little girl liked to race ahead to find the road’s deepest pools of fine dust to plop her bare feet in and pretend she was wading through warm puddles of her grandmother’s lavender dusting powder. The walk was beautiful in those days. The weeds were kept low, there were flowers everywhere and they were always well watered. Her mother told her many times that Signora Pizzola loved flowers and when Marta was Carmen’s age, she would often help her plant in the spring and fall. Signora Pizzola had been dead a long time, since her mother was a young girl, but her mother told her that Signore Pizzola would rather lose an arm than let his wife’s flowers die. Carmen found that gruesome image thoroughly strange—after all, they were only flowers, and an arm was an arm.

Her mother was always respectful to Signore Pizzola, who was a tall man with a neatly trimmed white beard. He looked strong and he had a big laugh, but he didn’t use it often and his eyes were usually sad. She remembered the old man’s eyes when she saw Leo for the first time. As a little girl she liked sitting on the porch, sometimes on the old man’s lap, and they would drink cold
limonata.
The old man liked it with a lot of sugar and so did she. She would sit and drink and her mother would talk to Signore Pizzola about people Carmen didn’t know and things she didn’t understand. Sometimes he would rock Nina and sing her funny songs that made her laugh or sleep and Carmen would go off and play with the goats. After Signore Pizzola died, she had no more reason to turn off the north coast road and wander down through the gate in the old stone fence.

In fact, she’d only returned once, although she would never have admitted it if anyone had ever asked—she was that ashamed. It had been over a year ago that Solly Puce had brought a bunch of his Grosseto friends over to Santo Fico. He said it was so they could go for a swim, but they never did. Instead they just sat on the beach and drank wine and talked dirty. Carmen didn’t like them. She suspected they came to Santo Fico because Solly Puce had told them lies about her because they kept saying nasty things to her right in front of him and he let them. So she said cruel things about Solly’s manliness to humiliate him and the other boys laughed harder.

When they’d drunk all their wine and run out of dirty jokes, they were at a loss for anything else to do, so Carmen suggested that they go to an old haunted house she knew about. She brought them to the Pizzola farm.

It had stood abandoned for some years. This was the first time Carmen had visited since even before Signore Pizzola died. The flowers had been replaced by weeds. The tile porch was empty and covered with dead leaves. The windows were dark and looked haunted—Carmen thought they looked like Signore Pizzola’s sad eyes searching for a friend to come calling and drink some
limonata
and maybe make him laugh. But these were not friends she brought. Carmen hadn’t even thought of throwing rocks until she heard the first stone smash through a window. She didn’t like it. She told them to stop, but they wouldn’t. They kept throwing rocks and smashing the windows. She screamed at them and ordered them away, but they just laughed and broke more windows. They left only because Carmen started throwing rocks at them. They rode out of town calling her ugly, drunken names and mocking her. She knew everyone heard them and she was ashamed. She didn’t speak to Solly for two weeks.

Arriving now at the Pizzola house on this August morning, she found shutters covered the windows and the doors were boarded up as well. The trees surrounding the porch were already pruned back, and scattered around the front of the house large piles of dead branches, leaves, and weeds waited to be hauled to the field across from the olive grove and burned.

Leo was at the side of the house working with a hand scythe when he saw Carmen coming down the road. She walked briskly, her head held high, carrying a red and white checked cloth bundle under her arm, and for an instant he thought it was Marta, magically turned sixteen again. But Carmen’s arrival meant he had to do something that he’d been avoiding and so he put down his scythe and went up onto the porch. Starting with the windows, he pulled at the weathered boards and tossed them one by one onto a waiting trash pile. By the time Carmen arrived at the porch, all the front windows had been cleared and Leo was tugging at the barricades covering the front door. She stood back and watched, unsure if he had even seen her. Rusty nails screeched and moaned as he pulled the boards back, but in a short time the door was clear and Leo tried the handle. Locked.

“You don’t have a key? I thought this was your house.” Leo turned cold eyes toward her and Carmen wished she had kept her mouth shut. He picked up a large terra-cotta pot and hefted it as if he were debating whether to toss it through a window or at her. But a key was hidden beneath the flowerpot, so he only moved it out of the way and set it back down. Leo slid the key into the lock and turned the handle. As the door creaked open, a wave of musty air greeted them, and Leo stepped back—politely allowing Carmen to enter first.

From the moment she entered, Carmen remembered why she loved the old Pizzola place. The rooms were open and inviting, with high ceilings and wide corridors. She passed through the entryway with its broad staircase leading to the rooms upstairs and entered the living room. The inside was dark and silent and the shadows made her anxious. Scattered around the gloom, pale mounds of furniture covered with white sheets gave the eerie appearance that the great room was filled with sleeping ghosts who were well content being left undisturbed. Even in the murky light she could see this was going to be a bigger cleaning job than she imagined. Cobwebs hung everywhere and in some places the dust was so thick that, with proper watering, she thought, plants could grow right out of the floor. And everywhere she stepped the crunch of broken glass under her feet pricked and scratched at her guilty conscience.

“You need to open the shutters . . .”

She was speaking to Leo of course, but when she turned she found she was alone in the large house. He was still on the porch and it occurred to her that she might not be the only one who was troubled by sleeping ghosts. But after a moment Leo abruptly moved into the room, began opening the wide, tall windows, and throwing back the shutters. Most of the front windows were broken out, as well as many on the south side.

“Looks like some kids had fun with the windows. I’ll see if Topo can get me some glass next time I go into town.”

As Leo went through the house opening windows and shutters, Carmen followed him, listening to his orders about what he wanted done. He needn’t have bothered. It was obvious. Then he was gone, as abruptly as he’d entered.

Carmen watched him from a kitchen window as he returned to his scythe with a new ferocity and she wondered what terrible thing it was that he imagined he was hacking down.

Even though cleaning wasn’t anything new to her, as she’d been helping at the hotel since she was small, this was the first time she’d cleaned anything that had been neglected for this many years. She didn’t mind, however—she liked the house and she found that cleaning someone else’s things was much more interesting than cleaning your own. And she was getting paid too. But the real fascination was Leo—this man who had been her father’s best friend. There was just too much mystery surrounding him and her father and her mother. So as the morning progressed, with clocklike regularity, Carmen found more and more reasons to go outside and ask questions that might engage Leo in conversation, yet he persisted in ignoring her. She couldn’t get him to either talk much or even enter the house. When questioned he simply called out a curt response from the yard and went right back to his work.

Around lunchtime Leo sat down on the edge of the porch with some bread and cheese, and so Carmen stopped her mopping, found the bundle Marta had given her as she was leaving the hotel, and went outside too. Leo was working on a loaf of semipetrified bread and a hunk of yellow cheese of questionable origin. Even though he used a knife to slice off thick slabs of cheese and lay them across slices of the crusty bread, the cheese still showed smudges of dirty fingerprints and other less identifiable things. He was washing it all down with water he would swig from an old wine bottle. To his credit, when Carmen joined him, he offered to share what he had, but she declined with a laugh, sat down on the edge of the porch not far from him, and unwrapped her bundle of red and white checked cloth. From within the parcel appeared grapes and oranges, carrots and radishes, hard-boiled eggs, slices of ham, cheeses, and two thick meatball sandwiches dripping with a red sauce—all neatly wrapped in brown waxed paper. Leo gazed at the girl’s banquet longingly.

“My mother told me you probably wouldn’t have any food fit to feed a pig, so she made enough for two.”

It didn’t take Leo long to decide to swallow his pride rather than his stale bread and rancid cheese, and so the two sat on the edge of the porch, in the shade of a cork tree, and quietly feasted. They talked of small things—the view of the sea, the age of the trees, the names of the birds that flitted overhead—and little by little they began to know each other.