Vango (9 page)

He was leaning over Vango when he sensed someone behind him. Pippo Troisi turned around and said almost in tears, “Padre, oh, Padre! Forgive me, I think I’ve hurt him. I hit him on the head. But he was the one who started it. Please, I want to stay here. Can you tell him I want to stay here?”

Padre Zefiro was not a pirate. He was a forty-two-year-old monk.

He was nearly six and a half feet tall and carried off his monk’s cowl better than any film actor. He was accompanied by four other monks, with hoods on their heads and faces burnished by the sun. They had wicker fish traps strapped to their backs that were alive with fish.

“He’s come back. . . .” stated the padre, looking at Vango.

“Before you can so much as say Arkudah!” answered Pippo, who had heard this expression from Zefiro and was now using it ten times a day out of devotion to the great monk.

“He’s come back. . . .” the padre repeated, his face betraying his curiosity.

“Carry him to Brother Marco, in the kitchen,” he told Pippo. “Let him put some oil on his head.”

Pippo Troisi was startled.

“You’re . . . you’re going . . .”

“What’s the matter, Fratello?” asked Zefiro, who was already heading off.

“You’re going to eat him?”

Zefiro stopped. A smile from Father Zefiro was rare, but when one appeared, it truly shone.

“Yes,” he replied. “Before you can say Arkudah!”

In reality, Marco, the brother responsible for cooking, was something of a doctor. He nursed Vango’s head with camphor oil and settled him in the warmth, close to his oven.

Zefiro was now standing in his bedroom. The monks lived in tiny cells that flanked the garden. The cells were almost completely empty, just a simple straw mattress rolled up in one corner and a horizontal slit that served as a window the full width of one of the walls. Zefiro was looking through this notch in the stone, at eye level.

He wondered what he should do with the young visitor who had come to disturb the life of the monastery.

Arkudah was Zefiro’s life’s work. It was what he called his invisible monastery.

For five years, thirty monks had been living there around the padre, undetected by the rest of the world. During the initial period, they had constructed the buildings and dug the gardens with their own hands and made themselves selfsufficient for food and water, and then the life of the community had taken on the rhythm of every monastery. Work, fishing, prayer, reading, gardening, meals, and sleep were allocated their hours of the day and night according to a set timetable. It was a peaceful human clock.

But Vango was a grain of sand caught in the cogs.

Nobody knew about the invisible monastery except for the pope (who had encouraged Zefiro to found it) and a dozen contacts on the Continent and across the world.

Keeping it secret was a matter of life or death for Zefiro and his brothers.

The arrival of Pippo Troisi could already have been a serious cause for concern, but, having heard what he had to say for himself, the community had decided to keep him. The portrait he painted of his wife, the fearsome Giuseppina, made the assembly of invisible monks quake with fear and laughter.

They had accorded Pippo the title of “asylum seeker from marriage,” and they treated him as a survivor.

When he found out that they were going to let him stay, Pippo had jumped with joy. He felt as if he’d landed in paradise, before he could so much as say Arkudah!

But Pippo Troisi’s first day nearly went disastrously wrong. He took the considerable risk of not going to mass.

He was still asleep at half past six in the morning, when Zefiro came out of the chapel to fill a bucket of water from the cistern and empty it over the head of the poor novice.

“Are you sleeping in, Fratello Pippo?”

From the next day, Pippo, who had never set foot inside a church, was on his knees before five o’clock in the morning, with a meditative expression, hands together. Zefiro warmed to him. He had fun watching his lips move during the Latin cantos, which he pretended to know. Pippo mumbled, into his beard, the couplets of sailors’ songs, which weren’t strictly speaking liturgical:
“
What shall we do with the drunken sailor . . .”

Vango, the newcomer, was of more concern to the padre.

Zefiro had been observing him for three days now.

Vango was starting to feel better and was able to leave the kitchen more often. He spied on monastic life, following the monks’ every gesture. He had been spotted on the chapel roof listening to evensong.

Zefiro had found out Vango’s story from Pippo Troisi, including the boy’s mysterious origins and the existence of his nurse. It was all fascinating. But he couldn’t keep a child in a monastery. On the other hand, how could he make Vango keep the secret of Arkudah outside these walls?

Zefiro didn’t hear the knocking at the door. Brother Marco, the cook, entered and walked over to him.

“Padre.”

He broke off his thoughts.

“Yes?”

The conversation that followed between these two men of the church would have made their guardian angels blush.

“I’ve found your queen,” said the cook.

“My queen . . .”

Zefiro carefully pushed the door shut.

“Really? You’ve got my queen?”

“I believe I’ve found her, Padre.”

Zefiro pressed his hand against the wall. He seemed to be losing his balance.

“You believe so? Is this merely a belief?”

The cook stammered as he fiddled with his glasses, which were already half broken: “I b-b-believe so. . . .”

“Believing isn’t enough!” pronounced Zefiro.

Coming from the mouth of a man who had chosen to make believing his vocation, these words represented something of a blunder. Zefiro was aware of this. He tried to calm down before his guardian angel collapsed behind him.

“You have to understand, Brother Marco . . .” he went on. They were almost whispering. “I’ve been searching for my queen for such a long time.”

“I understand, Padre. That’s why I’m telling you about it. I believe — I
think
she could be with us in just a few days, if that’s what you wanted.”

This time, Zefiro turned very pale. He was smiling.

“In a few days . . . my queen, my God! My queen!”

“On one condition.”

“Yes?”

“You’ve got to let the little one go.”

Zefiro stared hard at Brother Marco and his mischievous face.

“The little one?”

“Yes, young Vango. As of today.”

Zefiro made a show of accepting these terms against his better judgment. In reality, he was ready to do whatever it took.

“Is this blackmail?”

“More or less.”

“All right. Let him go.”

“And then . . . you’ve got to let him come back.”

Padre Zefiro was stunned.

“What? Are you insane?”

“No Vango, no queen.”

“I repeat: Are you insane, Fratello?”

“No, I’m not insane. Vango is the one who knows where she is. He will bring her here.”

By this stage in the conversation between the two monks, there was only one way to revive their guardian angels, who would have passed out in a cold faint from the shock, their halos askew.

The only way was to explain a few facts.

Zefiro, who had become a wise man in all matters, nonetheless kept one vice hidden, a single crazy and chaotic passion. For many years now, he had had in his service an army of young and vigorous buccaneers, which he dispatched to pillage the other islands in the archipelago.

They would come back in the evenings, trembling, laden with gold and sweet delicacies, exhausted from the many miles they had covered, and they would unload their booty in front of their master.

These pirates were bees.

Zefiro was a beekeeper.

On the first day he’d arrived on the island, he had established five hives. These roaming bees consoled him for the journeys he would no longer be able to make, since a secret had condemned him to found the invisible monastery and to stay there until his final breath.

And so for many years, alongside his life as a monk, Zefiro had been a pirate chief, seeking out his bees morning and evening on their return from an adventure. But they had all died a few months ago, destroyed by a late-summer storm. Zefiro had kept his despondency well hidden and had even managed to cheer up the cook, who wept on account of there being no more clear honey for his gingerbread.

In the aftermath of that catastrophe, Zefiro had been looking for a queen. He needed a queen bee to attract a new swarm and to build up his hives again.

From his base in the kitchen, Vango had heard Brother Marco complaining about the situation. He had told the cook that he knew of at least three or four bee colonies in the cliffs of Salina. He could easily find a queen so that the apiary on Arkudah could be reborn.

The truth was, if they’d asked him to find a kangaroo or a coconut, Vango would gladly have promised to bring one back. He would have done anything to earn the right to return. But this time, he wasn’t lying. He was as familiar with the bees as he was with everything else that lived on his island. In his eyes, this kind of challenge was child’s play.

The next morning, the monks lent him one of the boats they kept hidden in a deep cave that had an opening at sea level on the western cliff of the island. Vango went away for four days and came back with two queens, some matches, cakes, and beef. The monks gave him a greater welcome than if he had been a prophet.

That evening, over a stew cooked for the monastery the way Mademoiselle had taught him, Vango understood that he had won his freedom. The freedom to come and go, invisible among the invisible ones.

And from then on, he divided his time between the wild nature of his island, with all of Mademoiselle’s warmth and knowledge, and the great mystery of the invisible monastery, where he would spend more and more time. He lived the life of a smuggler between two islands, supplying Zefiro with anything he lacked, posting slim letters for him in the post office at Salina, and receiving in exchange a warm welcome from the monastic community.

Vango observed the life of the monks and tried to understand it. He was interested in finding out what sustained them. And he kept an even closer eye on Zefiro.

The monk and the child didn’t say much to each other. But their rugged characters were complementary. The hardest stones make the sparks fly. A deep friendship was being forged between them.

Why nobody on Arkudah had seen it coming is hard to say. But one summer’s morning, when he was thirteen, Vango solemnly announced to Father Zefiro:

“I’ve been thinking, Padre. . . .”

“That’s good news.”

“I’m ready to take an important decision.”

Zefiro was trying to catch a rabbit in the enclosure behind the chapel.

“An important decision?”

The padre was chuckling to himself. Vango often sounded as portentous as a judge.

Zefiro grabbed a black rabbit by the skin on its back. He looked at Vango. He was enjoying watching this boy grow up. A beautiful present had washed up on his island three autumns earlier. It seemed to Zefiro as if, by appearing in their lives, Vango had nudged the earth around a little, to make it face the sun.

“Tell me about it,” said the monk.

“Not here.”

“Rabbits have ears,” whispered Zefiro conspiratorially. “But don’t worry, this rabbit won’t breathe a word to anybody.”

He was holding the rabbit tightly to him.

“Tell me what you’ve decided.”

“Not here. It’s important.”

“Speak, little one!”

Vango swallowed hard and announced: “I want to be a monk.”

Vango hadn’t anticipated the storm that was about to hit.

Zefiro let out a roar of anger. He released the rabbit and headed off to kick a pile of crates while cursing under his breath. He stumbled and fell to the ground. Then, unclenching his fists, he tried to pull himself together. He put his head in his hands, went very still, took several deep breaths, and said, “What would you know about it?”

“I’m sorry?”

“What do you know? Absolutely nothing.”

“I know . . .”

“Be quiet!”

Vango looked down. The rabbits were trembling under a rock.

“I’m telling you that you know nothing!”

“I’ve been coming here for three years,” whispered Vango.

“So what?”

The monk could feel his anger rising again.

“So what? After three years in a circus, you’d have wanted to become a clown! After three years in a rabbit hutch, you’d have wanted to become a rabbit! You know nothing, Vango! Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!”

“I know your . . .”

“But what about the world! Do you have any knowledge of the world? What have you seen of life? The islands! Two scraps of confetti floating on the sea! A nurse, a few men in hoods, lizards . . . The life of lizards, Vango, that’s what you know! You’re a lizard among lizards.”

Vango had turned around. There were tears welling up in his eyes. He had expected the padre to welcome him with open arms.

A little bird flew close by to console him.

Zefiro went to sit on a stone. Each stayed on his own side for several long minutes before Vango approached him.

“We need to say good-bye,” he heard Zefiro saying.

Another silence passed between them.

“You will leave this place, Vango, and you will leave your island too. You must go and spend a year far away from here. And in a year’s time, if you want, you can come back to see me.”

“But where am I going?” Vango said, sobbing.

Zefiro felt guilty.

He should have sent this boy away a long time ago.

“I’m going to give you someone’s name. You’ll visit him on my behalf.”

“In Palermo?”

“Farther away.”

“Does he live in Naples?” The boy sniffed.

“Much farther away than that, Vango.”

“In another country?”

Zefiro put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and hugged him.

“In another country?” Vango asked again.

“This whole planet is his country.”