12 August 1949
That was the night the Monkey told me her story . . . the night my enemy drank my wine and revealed to me the truth of what she was—what they both were.
“Once, many years ago,” the Monkey began, “I witnessed some very strange magic. It changed my life. And now, what I saw that day long ago has come back to me with the birth of the two . . . and because the one that lived is cursed with the rabbit’s lip.” She was whispering—confiding to me in the manner of a criminal. “The magic I speak of involved rabbits,” she said.
At the time, she told me, she was a girl of fourteen, living in her native seaside village of Pescara.
“Pescara?” I interrupted. “I thought you were siciliana.”
“You thought that because it’s what those two plumbers wanted you to think. You thought I was their cousin, too. I am not.”
“Don’t be stupid, woman,” I said. “Why would they have sponsored a creature as homely as you, taken on the burden of marrying you off to boot, if not because of obbligo di famiglia?”
“Why does anyone do such things?” she said, and stroked her thumb against her fingers. “Lying was profitable for those two plumbers, that’s why. They played you for a fool, Tempesta.”
I leaned toward her and grabbed her arm, demanding that she explain herself.
“I begin at the beginning,” she said. “But not with you squeezing my arm like it’s a chicken’s neck. And not with an empty glass, either. Let go of me and pour the wine! And don’t be cheap about it.”
Her father was a poor macaroni-maker cursed with bad luck, she said. Typhoid had taken his wife and son and left him with three daughters to raise. Prosperine was the oldest of these, forced by circumstance both to serve as mother to the other two and to make macaroni all day long. Ripetizione rapida was everything in that work, she said, and those repeated movements lived still in her hands. Sometimes when her mind wandered, she told me, she still caught her fingers making macaroni. Even now, even here, an ocean away from her sisters and the life she had been forced to leave.
As soon as each was able, the sisters were put to work at the wheels and mills and bowls in the macaroni shop. They began each morning before dawn, their father turning semolina into dough, his three daughters pressing, cutting, and shaping the strings and strips with their knives and machines, their thumbs and fingers. Flour would fly in the air, the Monkey said, making a paste in their mouths as they breathed and dusting their hair and skin, turning each sister into a pale, gray-haired nonna by the time the sun had climbed to its full height in the sky.
In Pescara, she said, the noon hour was her favorite time of day. While her papa took his nap and the macaroni sat drying on racks and trays, Anna and Teodolina and she were free to roam through the busy square. Often, they were joined on these daily walks by another motherless girl, a fishmonger’s daughter named Violetta D’Annunzio. She was younger than the Monkey—closer in age to Teodolina. A saucy thing, she was! Violetta’s friends, the three sisters, were plain, but she herself was beautiful. She had dark eyes and hair and skin like cream. Her eyebrows grew in an upturned direction that gave her the tortured look of saints.
Like young girls everywhere, the four friends laughed and ran through the village, touching and coveting the expensive merchandise that their poor fathers could never have afforded. They amused themselves with whatever was new that day in the marketplace—jugglers, puppet shows, some rich woman’s new finery. When nothing was new, they satisfied their restlessness by mocking and giggling at the poor village eccentrici, those unfortunate villagers who were defective or crazy.
A favorite target of the girls was Ciccolina, a bowlegged old butcher-woman burdened with a hunchback and breasts that hung from her like two big sacks of semolina. Ciccolina mumbled to herself and cursed the girls when they teased her from across the road, swiping at the air with her walking stick. Half-blind from cataracts, the old woman was afflicted with an ugly tumor that stuck out on her forehead—a knob the size of a baby’s fist that had darkened to the color of an eggplant. That hideous lump both repelled Prosperine and drew her to the old woman like a magnet. Don’t look at it! Don’t look! the Monkey would counsel herself, even as she stared in horror.
Each morning from the window of her father’s shop, Prosperine watched Ciccolina hobble to the village square, dragging behind her a small cart weighted down with coops. Inside were scrawny hares and half-bald hens. These doomed creatures the old woman sometimes sold to customers, who would make their choices, and then stand and watch as their dinner was strangled, beheaded, plucked, skinned. The old woman used a rusty cleaver and a rusty knife for the job, and a scarred, bloodstained cutting board that she balanced against her knees. Her untrussed tette—those two big sacks of semolina—rested on the board as she worked.
There were rumors that Ciccolina was a witch as well as a butcher and that, for the price of a few coins, she could be hired to perform small acts of revenge. People said she could both cure and inflict il mal occhio. Superstitious mothers shielded their children from the old woman’s milky-eyed gaze and guilty men crossed the street rather than walk past the strega. The old hunchback was said to have caused the customs officer’s haughty wife to go bald and to have curdled the milk of a farmer’s cows for an entire summer. According to rumor, that poor devil of a farmer had tripped over Ciccolina’s cages and stumbled to the ground, drawing laughter from other villagers. Humiliated, he had stood and slapped the old woman for what, in fact, had been his own clumsiness. His cows’ milk began to go bad the very next day.
Prosperine’s sisters would not go near Ciccolina, but the risk of dark magic thrilled both the Monkey and her daring friend Violetta. Young and stupid girls, they wanted both to bow to the possibility of evil and to laugh in its face. And so, from across the road, they hid behind the awning of the trattoria, calling and chanting to the old witch.
Finocchio, finocchio!
Non dami il mal occhio!
In other ways, the Monkey said, she was the shyest and most sensible of the four girls, but in the teasing of the old strega, she was the loudest and most cruel, because that was what Violetta loved. Once, Prosperine dared to call out to the poor old eccentric that she must be the smartest person in all of Pescara since she had grown that second purple brain on her forehead. Ciccolina spun in the direction of the insult, squinting and demanding to know who had said it. Prosperine shouted back that it was she, Befana, the good witch of the Epiphany. “Be a nice little girl now!” she called to the old hag. “Or I will leave coal in your shoes instead of sweetmeats!” From behind the safety of the awning, Violetta screamed with delight at her friend’s brazen disrespect and Prosperine laughed so hard that her throat hurt.
She stopped her story for a minute to sip more of my wine and I watched her closely as she smiled and remembered. . . . That Monkey’s smile was a rare thing in my house, and soon enough into her remembrances of the past, it was replaced again by her more familiar scowl. “That was before I knew that young girls, like litters of cats and rabbits, grow toward separation,” she continued. “Before I realized that fathers could sell away their eldest daughters. More wine, Tempesta. Pour!”
“Never mind about fathers,” I said, refilling her glass. That night, it was as if I were the bartender and she were the paying customer! “Tell me why you lied about your birthplace. Tell me how those two plumbers played me for a fool! I ask you for the time of day, you tell me how to build a clock!”
“Shut up, then,” she said. “Shut up and listen. Tonight I feel like talking and will talk!”
As the four friends grew toward womanhood, Prosperine, her sisters, and Violetta began walking not just through the square but also down to the docks to peek at the fishermen. There, Violetta sometimes cast her nets for the men’s attenzione, encouraging the saucy remarks the men threw her way and making bold remarks back at the handsomest of them—even the married ones! Though she was the youngest of the four, Violetta knew things the other girls did not and was happy to school the macaroni-maker’s daughters about the exchanges between women and men. Once, walking back from the docks, the girls saw a stallion mount a white mare in a rich man’s field.
“Look,” the innocent Teodolina said. “Those two cavalli are doing a dance.”
“Si,” Violetta said, “the dance that puts a baby inside the mother. All men like that dance!” Then she had her pupils draw nearer and squat to the ground, the better to see the stallion’s thing slamming in and out of the mare, whose flank shook with each thrust, who stood and took whatever he gave her.
“Aspetti un momento!” I told the Monkey, stopping her. “I tell you to explain how those plumbers from Brooklyn played me for a fool and you talk about fungol between two horses in the Old Country. Make sense, woman, or else put the cork back in the wine jug and shut up your mouth and go to bed.”
“I tell you my story the way I want to tell it,” she said back. “Or else I don’t tell it at all. Which shall it be, Tempesta? Eh?” I sighed and poured myself some of the wine and waited. She was pezzo grosso that night—that skinny bitch.
Having attracted the fishermen’s attenzione, Violetta, Anna, and Teodolina began the practice of grooming themselves before they took their noonday strolls. Teodolina and Anna rubbed olive oil into each other’s hair and skin to rid themselves of the accumulated flour which had settled on them all morning and which made them look like old women; the anointing turned them back into flirtatious girls. As for the Monkey, she wanted none of primping and preening. With a face like hers, what good would a little olive oil do? But Violetta, who spent each morning cutting fish for her father, wanted the dried scales and flecks of flesh cleaned from her long dark hair. She kept two tortoiseshell brushes in her apron and always insisted that Prosperine do the brushing—only Prosperine knew how to do it right, she insisted. Some days Violetta snitched a lemon or two from a fruit cart on her way to the macaroni shop. She would cut the fruit and wash her hands with the juice to take away the stink of fish. Sometimes, too, she rubbed lemon against her neck and squeezed the juice between her pretty breasts. Violetta’s naughtiness would have shocked the older people and sometimes shocked the three sisters, too!
In the summer of the year when Violetta was fifteen, the village padre selected her for the honor of crowning the statue of the Blessed Virgin at the Feast of the Assumption. The custom of Pescara dictated that the heavy statue of the Holy Mother be carted by horse and carriage from the church down to the shore at low tide. There, the waters of the Adriatico would lap at the Virgin’s feet and the sea would be made safe for sailors for the year to come. After ceremonial blessings by the village priest, the statue would then be hoisted by the men of Pescara, sailors and others, and carried in a procession back to the village, through the square, and up the steps of the church. There, parishioners would leave their offerings to the Holy Mother and say prayers, entreating the Vergine to keep their families safe. At the climax of the festivities, the fortunate village girl chosen to crown the Blessed Virgin would emerge from the crowd, dressed in ceremonial bridal gown and veil, and climb the ladder to place a crown of flowers and periwinkles on the top of the statue’s head. The priest’s selection of Violetta for this important honor was a shock to the townspeople and a sweet victory for the quartet of friends! Usually a rich girl was chosen.
It was during the men’s holy procession through the village that Violetta first saw, from behind the lace of her bridal veil, the face and figure of a blond, lynx-eyed devil named Gallante Selvi. Selvi was a famous stained-glass artist from Milano. He had traveled to Pescara that summer to visit famiglia, bathe in the Adriatico, and draw inspiration from the spectacular Pescaran sunshine. The Monkey’s eyes spotted Gallante Selvi, too, that morning. From the start, she knew that son of a bitch would bring trouble.
As Violetta slowly climbed the steps with the Virgin’s crown, the faithfully devoted dropped their heads in submission and made the sign of the cross. Not Gallante Selvi. The Monkey watched as that dog stroked his waxed mustache, took a little sip from a silver flask, and eyed Violetta. Violetta, who should have been concentrating on the Blessed Virgin, got to the top step of the ladder and turned to have another peek at Selvi. It was then that she lost her balance and fell, crashing onto the offerings below and demolishing several of the more fragile gifts. But even in the midst of her terrible humiliation, Violetta was distracted with her staring after Gallante Selvi. From the start, her passione for that no-good glass painter was a sickness and a consumption, the Monkey said.
Selvi entered the macaroni shop the very next morning in the midst of the bustle of pasta-making. “Fetch your father,” he commanded Prosperine, as if he were the king of Italy himself. The Monkey’s sisters stopped their work to stare at him. Not Prosperine! She was not hypnotized like the others by those pretty looks of his. She told him to come back later, after the dough had been kneaded and cut but before her father’s nap. But the great Gallante Selvi would have none of waiting. Like Garibaldi commanding his troops, he ordered Prosperine to do as he said or he would reach across the counter and twist off her nose!
Selvi told Prosperine’s father that several townspeople had advised him to seek out the macaroni-maker with the shortage of money and the surplus of daughters. He would be leaving Pescara soon, he said, to begin an important commission in the city of Torino. An earthquake there had loosened from its frame an ancient stained-glass triptych at the Cathedral of the Virgin Martyrs and sent it shattering to the ground. What worse tragedy than the loss of great art? But who better than he, Gallante Selvi, to replace it? He would be a year or more designing and executing the new triptych, which would honor Santa Lucia, who had gouged out her eyes in an effort to fend off a rapist—who had made herself horrible to look at so that she might remain pure. On and on and on, that puffed-up painter talked until her father finally interrupted.
“Scusa, signore,” he said. “I mean no disrespect, but what does all this have to do with me and my surplus of daughters?”
Gallante Selvi told the Monkey’s father that he had been staying during his visit with his old madrina, who had grown feeble now and needed a housekeeper. He wished to arrange for one before he left. Did the macaroni-maker think he could spare one of his unmarried daughters? The commission in Torino was a generous one. He could make it worth his while.
Although the three sisters stood side by side, Papa looked only at Prosperine. “Come into the other room, Signore Selvi, come in and sit,” he told the artiste, and Prosperine’s knees knocked together from what the two men might be planning.
By the time Gallante Selvi left the shop, the Monkey had been hired to sweep and gather firewood for the painter’s old godmother, and to feed her goats and chickens and help with a small business she maintained. In exchange, she would be provided a place to eat and sleep. Her father had received a small first payment and would get the balance at Christmastime, when Gallante Selvi returned to Pescara. Prosperine’s father told her he was sorry to lose a good daughter and macaroni-maker, but that he could not afford to pass up the money Gallante Selvi had offered him. Business had been worse than ever that year, he said, and such opportunity did not often walk through the door of the macaroni shop.
Prosperine dropped to her knees and begged her father to void the agreement he had made. In her mind, she saw Teodolina, Anna, and Violetta strolling through the village without her. Who would keep those silly girls in line as they paraded themselves on the docks? Who would comb the fish scales out of Violetta’s hair? Only she could do it properly! “Why choose me?” she sobbed.
“Because you are the homeliest and most responsible,” he answered. “My selecting you is a compliment to your seriousness and your domestic abilities.”
“If this is my reward, then I fart on such flattery!” she shouted back.
Her father reached back and let fly his open hand against her face. He had hit the girl before, but never this hard.
“You’ll see your sisters every day in the square if you like,” he told her later, after she had quieted again and her face had swollen up like macaroni in the pot. “The old woman’s business brings her into town each day. You know who she is: the butcher-woman who sits in that little space near the church, across from the trattoria. The poor hunchback.”
“Ciccolina?” Prosperine screamed. “You’ve given me away to that crazy witch?” When she heard this terrible news, the Monkey wailed loudly enough for Heaven to hear. She hugged her father’s knees, calling on the saints and the apostles to end her life and save her from this terrible fate. Now what she dreaded most was not separation from the others, but that ugly witch’s vengeance. Surely Ciccolina would recognize the mocking voice of the girl who had so often insulted her! Surely Prosperine would die from this arrangement her father had made, or go bald, or discover that her blood had curdled!
But her father showed her no mercy.
When Violetta D’Annunzio heard of Prosperine’s fate, she shed fat tears and hugged her friend and volunteered to walk with her the next morning to the strega’s house near the woods and to carry her basket of belongings, the better to give her a sad and proper goodbye.
Along the road the next day, the Monkey’s steps were slow and heavy, but Violetta seemed, almost, to race toward their destination. How much longer did that haughty painter say he was staying in Pescara? she asked Prosperine. What had his voice sounded like the day he had entered her father’s shop? Were those eyes of his green or blue?
As Ciccolina’s thatched roof came into sight between the trees, Violetta insisted that they stop first and wash their dirty feet in a nearby stream in case the old woman had visitors. Violetta produced the familiar tortoiseshell brushes and insisted, too, that her friend brush her long hair one last time. On that day, Violetta was wearing her prettiest blouse—the one that Prosperine herself had sewn, embroidering the bodice with wildflowers and cutting the neckline an inch or two below the clavicola. As Violetta bent over, the Monkey brushed and peeked inside that blouse at her friend’s pretty tette. Her tears fell into her friend’s long brown hair.
I drank some wine and laughed at her. “What does one girl care about peeking at another girl’s ‘pretty tette’?” I asked. “You sound like a man!”
She stood and went to leave the room.
“Where are you going, eh?” I said.
“To bed,” she said. “Where no one laughs at me and calls me uomo.”
“Stay,” I said. I pulled her by her sleeve back to the chair. “Sit and finish your story, Signorina Hothead. Finish my jug of wine, too, what the hell! Don’t walk away now that I’m interested.”
“Interested?” she asked. Her eyes were stupid from the wine.
“Si,” I said. “I want to find out what happened to you and the witch. . . . Tell me more about your friend’s ‘pretty tette.’ “
She sat. “If you’re interested,” she said, “then show some respect. Keep your mouth shut while I speak. Now where was I?” I told her where and she went on.
Just as Violetta and Prosperine reached the clearing where Ciccolina lived, the Monkey said, they stopped, suddenly, and gasped. There, in the adjacent field, stood Gallante Selvi, barefooted, his hair crazy, his body covered only by a nightshirt too short and flimsy to serve the cause of decency. The girls stood frozen for several minutes and watched as the artiste painted the air with invisible brushes, arguing with himself, bending to scribble on a tablet on the ground. “Demente!” the Monkey whispered, but Violetta was too mesmerized to hear.
“Ah, so here you are, you lazy girl,” Selvi said when he eyed his employee. “Lucky for you my work has put me in a good mood, or else I’d slap you for your tardiness.”
Prosperine told him she was not late—that she had arrived earlier than expected. (This was because of Violetta’s eager pace along the road!) She looked to Violetta to confirm what she had said, but that naughty girl was paying no attention to words. She was too busy watching the place where Gallante Selvi’s nightshirt ended and his privacy began.
Oblivious, Selvi began babbling about his work—about a vision that had come to him as he woke from a dream that morning. “This will be my masterpiece—my legacy to all of Italy!” he boasted. Then he turned to Violetta, noticing her for the first time.
As Selvi looked her up and down, Violetta blushed and turned away. “And what wind carries you here, pretty one?” he asked. “I don’t remember bargaining with the macaroni-maker for two housekeepers for Zia Ciccolina.”
“Sir,” Violetta said in a squeaky voice. “I’m just escorting my friend.”
“Sir,” Gallante Selvi repeated, “I’m just escorting my friend.” He put his hands against his hips and wiggled girlishly as he mimicked her words. Shameless, he was, that one! Those coglioni of his flopped back and forth beneath his nightshirt.
Then, without warning, Selvi snatched Prosperine by the hand. She let out a little scream. “See her tragic story with me, little housekeeper!” he said, dragging the Monkey through the field, pointing here and there at nothing. “See my vision! In the first panel, on the left, Lucia the Innocent prays piously! Opposite that, on the right, she’s a saint in Heaven, the holy patroness of sight. In the middle—the largest window—she rips her eyes from her head! Embraces her debasement! Blood streams down her face! Her tormentor recoils as the angels bear witness! Oh, such a tragedy to make you weep, the story of the brave little saint! I will paint my Lucia so that her sacrificio, depicted there before you in vetro colorito, will make you drop to your knees and howl with grief for that saintly girl!”
Here, that figliu d’una mingia of a crazy artist stopped abruptly and jerked his head back at Violetta. He circled her, making the sign of the cross and staring rudely. His breath blew against her face. “I have seen you before?” he asked.
Violetta was too afraid to answer.
“Sir,” Prosperine said. “You saw her in the village at the Feast of the Assumption, but her face was veiled. She was the clumsy girl who crowned the Holy Mother and fell off the ladder.”
He ignored the Monkey and spoke directly to Violetta. “You are the one. Yes?”
“Which one is that, signore?” Violetta squeaked out.
“The one delivered to me by divine intervention.”
“Delivered, sir?”
“The saints have sent you to me, have they not, Santa Lucia?” He reached over and fingered her hair, kneaded her cheeks as if they were bread dough. “Such eyes! Such facial bones! Perfezione! . . . Have the saints willed you to me, Lucia? Has Heaven itself commissioned my work?” As he stared and touched and circled her, red blotches appeared on Violetta’s face and neck. The girl was breaking out in hives!
“I must begin sketching you immediately—capture you in case you are a spirit who will dissipate.”
“A spirit, signore?” Violetta asked. With the sailors on the docks, my friend had a voice as loud as the fire bell that shouted to all Pescara. But with Gallante Selvi, she could only squeak like a mouse.
“Come with me,” he said, taking her hand in his. “Come down to the sea this instant. I must study your face in brilliant light—must let the sun be my collaboratore! Inspiration is a fickle mistress, after all—keep her waiting and she may desert you for another!”
He leaned forward and kissed Violetta’s eyelids—made, with his thumb, the sign of the cross on her forehead. Reaching behind her, he gave her cula a little squeeze, as if she were a melon instead of a “saint.” “My sweet Virgin Martyr,” he whispered, sniffing the air around her. From the start, Selvi acted like the dog he was in Violetta’s presence. “My Lucia, who has been sent to me by the saints themselves!”
“Her name is Violetta D’Annunzio,” the Monkey said. “Her father sells fish.”
“Shut up and go inside to your work!” he ordered, without looking away from Violetta. “Catch up on all you’ve missed by being late!”
“I was not late, sir,” the Monkey reminded him again. “Violetta has to walk home now and make the baccala. And as for you, sir, you should put on your pants.”
“Scusa, Lucia,” that figliu d’una mingia said to the fishmonger’s daughter. He took her hand and kissed each finger. “Un minuto, un minuto.” He approached the Monkey and boxed her ears so hard that they rang like the church bells at Easter. He yanked her nose, too, and gave her a shove toward the old woman’s house. Then he turned back to her best friend and dropped to his knees.
“Santa Lucia, my blind patroness of vision, help me see! Help me see!” That crazy artiste was begging Violetta, praying to her as if she was a statue! Then he got up and took her hand again, leading her past Ciccolina’s goats and chickens. Over an embankment the two of them ran, that crazy painter hurrying Violetta toward the sound of the sea.
Prosperine stood staring at the place where they had disappeared, tears falling from her eyes. Should she run for Violetta’s father? For her own? She listened for Violetta’s screams, her cries for help that did not come. And when she looked back at the hut again, the old hunchback was out in the yard, standing stooped among her chickens, beckoning her.
* * *
Prosperine pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and blew her nose. I had assumed that hard little stone incapable of tears. She had shed none over Ignazia’s troubles the day and night before—no tears for the death of my infant son. She took a gulp of wine. Another. A third. She was talking like a husband who wears the horns! But I held my tongue and waited. Then she blew her nose again, pushed the cloth back into her sleeve, and sighed. Continued.
If the old witch recognized Prosperine as her tormenter from the village square, she said nothing, took no revenge. Compared with macaroni-making, the work was easy. Ciccolina demanded little and taught the girl much: how to peel back a rabbit’s skin in a single, untorn sheet, how to make a soothing bath of almond water, how to fashion a pipe from clay and smoke. It was from Ciccolina that the Monkey learned the comfort and pleasure of tobacco.
Each morning, she walked beside the old woman, dragging her butcher cart to the village square. The days there were long and hot and Ciccolina had few buyers for those skinny animals. Some days, only Pomaricci the schoolmaster—Ciccolina’s most faithful but most despised customer—bought meat. At noontime, Prosperine watched her sisters stroll through the square, waving quickly from the other side of the road, pretending to be deaf when she called for them to come and sit and visit. Her own sisters, whom she had loved and looked after, now forsook her because she kept company with the old strega. As for Prosperine’s father, he never once left the macaroni shop and walked to the square to visit his daughter or ask how she was surviving.
Having discovered in Violetta D’Annunzio the faccia of Santa Lucia, the Virgin Martyr, Gallante Selvi changed his plans and announced that he would stay in Pescara through September. Each morning, he met Violetta at the old woman’s cottage and walked her down to the sea. There, he draped her in linen or lace or sackcloth—drawing and painting her in pose after penitent pose.
In town, word spread that that clumsy girl who had crowned the Holy Mother at the Feast of the Assumption and made a shambles of things—that fishmonger’s daughter!—would now be immortalized as Santa Lucia, the Virgin Martyr, in a stained-glass masterpiece at a grand cathedral in the great city of Torino. Gallante Selvi had traveled all the way to Pescara to find her, the gossips said—because only a sun-kissed Pescaran girl would do for such a work of art! It was rumored that Santa Lucia herself had appeared in a vision to the artiste and had led him to Violetta. All day long, the Monkey sat in the square and heard the buzzing about her friend.
D’Annunzio the fishmonger at first forbade his daughter’s posing for the artiste—not out of moral concern but because the mackeral were running. There were hundreds of those silver fish to clean, salt, and sell. Why pay for a helper when a daughter’s help was free? But Violetta’s passione for Gallante Selvi was so crazy that she defied her father and went anyway, and before D’Annunzio could manage the time to go after her, his business began to improve dramatically. Suddenly, everyone in Pescara wanted to buy their fish from the father of Santa Lucia!
Sometimes in the morning, Violetta and Prosperine would meet each other on the village road, the beautiful girl rushing toward the sea for her day of posing, her homely friend trudging in the opposite direction, accompanied by the hunchback and her half-starved chickens and rabbits. Sometimes, too, Violetta and the Monkey passed each other again in late afternoon, each now traveling the other way. At first, when they confronted one another on the road, they waved or nodded. After a while, though, Violetta looked away and did not speak. Her silence drove a stick through Prosperine’s heart. The Monkey knew that more than painting and posing went on in Ciccolina’s house while the old woman and she were away in the square—that Gallante Selvi and her pretty friend were doing the stallion’s dance. It was Prosperine, after all, who had scrubbed Violetta’s blood from the painter’s sheets. Sometimes, after they passed each other on the road, Prosperine would look back and peek at her friend. Violetta looked more beautiful than ever, her skin now darkened to gold, her hair wild and tangled by the wind and salt air of the Adriatico.
“She was more beautiful then than now,” she said.
I sat up in my chair. “Than now?”
The Monkey jumped a little, as if she suddenly remembered she was talking not to the air, but to Tempesta. “I . . . I meant more beautiful then than I would imagine her to be,” she said. “If she had lived. But who is to say, eh? She died so long ago. Violetta lies buried in the Old Country.”
Prosperine stared at me. I stared back and held my tongue. “Go on,” I said. “Go on with your story.”
It was at those times when she saw Violetta on the road that Prosperine felt most miserable about her own new life. Alone with the old woman, she was neither happy nor unhappy and, little by little, the aching for her father and sisters went away. Freed from all that macaroni-making, she realized how much she had hated it—the ripetizione, the soreness each day in her back and legs and fingers. If she had stayed there, she might have turned hunchback like the old woman. Who knew? Perhaps that would be the fate of the sisters who had forsaken her? God punished such betrayals, did He not?
Prosperine was free on Sundays to attend Mass in the village, and it had been her habit to go until one morning when Ciccolina had a dizzy spell. The Monkey stayed to help her. That was the day the old woman first called her figlia mia and hinted about someday passing on potent gifts. As the old woman said this, she pulled Prosperine near to her and patted her face. The Monkey no longer feared her, or any power she might have to do harm. As Ciccolina smiled and touched Prosperine’s face, the Monkey realized the strega was more blind than she had known. She studied her white chin whiskers, her big nose pockmarked like a lemon, her brown teeth more crooked than the cobblestones in the village square. Nothing about Ciccolina repelled the girl anymore—not those two filmy eyes with yellow caccola in the corners, not even the purple lump on the old woman’s forehead. The Monkey dared herself to touch that thing, then watched her fingers move slowly toward it. Against it. The warmth of that knob surprised her. . . . Figlia mia, that was what Ciccolina started calling her.
By the middle of September, small crowds had begun gathering near the water’s edge to watch Gallante Selvi draw and paint his pictures of Pescara’s stained-glass celebrità. Townspeople and travelers went to stare and pray. The old nuns who had once taught Violetta—who had so often slapped and scolded her for misbehaving— now became afflicted with a convenient loss of memory. “Such a sweet girl she always was,” they sighed. “So obedient and smart. So pious.”
Often, the leader of the oglers was the village priest who had selected Violetta for the crowning at the Feast of the Assumption. He now took full credit for Gallante Selvi’s choice of Violetta as his model. Prosperine had forgotten that priest’s given name—Padre Pomposo is what she had called him back then and that was the only name she remembered now. He was a lover of stravaganza and self-promotion, that one! Did he not have a fine eye for spiritual beauty? Was there not some divine connection between himself and Selvi’s stained-glass project? He began to talk of organizing a religious festival once Gallante Selvi’s masterpiece was finished and, perhaps, a holy pilgrimage to Torino once the triptych had been installed in the great cathedral. And as for Violetta, she could do no wrong. In a month’s time, the girl who had pestered street vendors and fishermen and pulled the backbones from a million fish had been transformed into the queen of all Pescara!
One afternoon Violetta and Gallante stopped their work and rode to the village square to shop and flaunt themselves and eat gelato at the trattoria—the very same café whose awning Violetta and Prosperine had once hidden behind, taunting the old woman whom the Monkey had somehow come to love. Now, from her spot across the street among Ciccolina’s coops and cages, Prosperine glared at Violetta. She hated her fancy new clothes and shoes, her fancy new ways. She knew her secrets.
As she stared, Prosperine saw Violetta whisper something to the artiste. Then he looked over at the Monkey and scowled. “What are you looking at, butcher-girl, eh?” he called across from the little porch. That day, Ciccolina had been too sick to go to the market and the Monkey sat alone. “Is my madrina teaching you the fine art of il mal occhio? Should I hold up mano cornuto to ward off your curses?”
He laughed when he said it—had meant it as a joke. But the waiter and several others who overheard his remark eyed Prosperine suspiciously. She reddened with anger at the slander, and at Violetta’s haughty smile! The Monkey stared and stared at her former friend until that smile fell off her face.
When this fine gentleman and lady—ha!—rose to leave, Violetta staggered against the table, complaining of shooting pains in her legs. “Is this your doing?” she screamed to Prosperine across the road. “Do you send pains to afflict me because of your jealousy?”
“Bah!” the Monkey called back. “Stop your new friend’s visits between your legs, ‘Santa Lucia,’ and those pains will go away!”
Violetta gasped and hobbled in shame toward their carriage. Gallante Selvi pointed at Prosperine and warned her he would beat her when she returned to his madrina’s hut that evening.
“What a disgusting accusation!” someone said.
“Sacrilege!” another villager agreed.
“Who does that butcher-girl think she is?”
“She’s a strange one—that little witch.”
In the days that followed, Prosperine was stared at, whispered about, spat upon. Even her own sisters held their noses in the air and did not speak to her. At home, Gallante Selvi tried to make good on his promise to beat her, but the old woman stood between them and forbade it. Selvi settled for growling and shoving, threatening her whenever his godmother could not hear.
But within a month of her public humiliation, the Monkey was avenged! On the first of October, Selvi quit Pescara like a thief in the night. A porter at the train station said the artiste had taken with him two trunks, two portfolios of the drawings and paintings he had made of Violetta, and Violetta herself! She had bid no one goodbye, not even her father!
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.
Naturally, their showy arrival at midday drew a crowd. Selvi was always happy to act the strombazzatore. He stood and made a speech about beauty and art. He and Violetta had returned, he said, to mourn at the graves of his beloved madrina and Violetta’s beloved padre, and so that he could capture in chiaroscuro for the Santa Lucia triptych the rich blue shades of the Adriatico as it looked only off the Pescaran coast. He described the terrible inconvenience of being so far from the glassworks at Torino and from his trusted glazier who bound together the pieces of his art with ribs of lead. But he had willingly taken on the trouble of doing his own firing and glazing to be in Pescara. His palette would not be limited by mere geography, he told the crowd. Only the hues found in Pescara would do for the cloak and the eyes of Santa Lucia, the Virgin Martyr!
Here he took Violetta’s gloved hand and kissed it and the village women sighed. All but the Monkey! She spat on the ground at the lies of that faccia brutta.
Selvi and the Monkey’s father decided that she should stay at Ciccolina’s house and cook and clean for the artiste and his “fine lady” of a wife while they visited. As usual, the macaroni-maker ignored Prosperine’s protests and told her that a complaining daughter was a howling dog begging to be beaten.
On their first day in Pescara, Violetta and Selvi were polite and affectionate with each other—putting on a show for the benefit of Padre Pomposo and the other important visitors to Ciccolina’s little cottage. But that night, through the wall, Prosperine heard the first of the couple’s fighting and fisticuffs.
The next morning, Selvi complained that the cornmeal Prosperine had cooked for his breakfast had no grit and was swill for pigs. He threw the cereal against the wall, barely missing the Monkey’s head, and then left to walk the seacoast.
Violetta came into the little kitchen, hiding her swollen eye with her hand. She told Prosperine that she should forget about their past friendship. That was long ago, she said, and many things had changed. Prosperine would do well to remember who was the servant and who was mistress.
“Smell your hands, Signora Aristocratica,” the Monkey retorted. “No doubt they still stink from fish.”
A scowl overtook Violetta’s swollen and bruised face. “Prepare me a warm bath and then leave me,” she said. Prosperine did the first thing but not the second. From the doorway, she stood watching as Violetta disrobed, exposing the pretty pink flesh that that son of a bitch Selvi had marred with welts and bruises. Violetta flinched when she turned and saw the Monkey. “Get out! Get out!” she screamed. “I won’t stand for this disobedience!” But Prosperine approached instead.
Violetta grabbed her nightgown and clutched it to herself. So many injuries, she could not cover them all. Prosperine’s heart ached to see the damage Selvi had done. “This would not have happened,” she told Violetta, “if you had not let him make you his puttana.”
“How dare you call me names!” Violetta shouted back. “You, who let that old hag turn you into a witch-woman!”
“Bah!” Prosperine answered. “Puta!”
“Bah!” Violetta answered back. “Strega!”
“Puta!”
“Strega!”
“Puta!”
“Strega!” Violetta reached out and slapped the Monkey across the face.
When Prosperine raised her hand to slap back, Violetta shrank with such fear in her eyes that her friend’s hand dropped down again. Gallante Selvi’s cringing wife was nothing like the saucy girl who had paraded on the docks for the fishermen and explained the “dancing” horses to Prosperine and her sisters. The artiste had beaten all that out of her. Now Violetta seemed as doomed as the rabbits outside in the old woman’s cages—as tethered to her fate as Ciccolina’s goat.
The two women collapsed into each other’s arms, rocking back and forth and weeping. For the rest of that morning, Violetta told what her year had been. One beating after another, umiliazione upon umiliazione. Once, when she had refused Selvi in their bed, he accused her of being unfaithful—of being more slippery than the surfaces on which he painted. “Unfaithful with whom?” she had demanded, and Selvi had named half the drunks he’d invited into their appartamento, describing in detail the squalid acts she supposedly had performed on each. Then, as if she were guilty of those deeds of which he had wrongly accused her, he dragged her to the washing basin and held her head down in the water so long she was sure she would drown. Another time, when she had fidgeted too much while posing as Santa Lucia, he had thrown her against the wall and knocked her unconscious. Her left shoulder never worked right after that. “And he has a friend, Rodolpho, a dirty pig of a fotografo,” Violetta whispered, amidst her sobs and pauses. “Twice Gallante made me pose for that filthy man—ordered me to take off my clothes and spread my legs and worse while that other one took pictures. The second time, I begged him no. I was in the middle of miscarriage, Prosperine! That night, Gallante accused me of enjoying what he had made me do for that photographer and burned me on the back and legs. What kind of man makes his wife do such things and burns her besides? I tell you, Prosperine, I made a tragic mistake the day I left Pescara. Many times I have thought about ending my life to be rid of him. How much worse could Hell be than marriage to that monster who paints the saints but is himself the devil?”
When Violetta had no more terrible stories left to tell, no more tears inside her head, Prosperine bathed her in almond water and rubbed olive oil onto those bruises and scars. Then she dressed her and brushed her hair as she had done before. Violetta still had the tortoiseshell brushes—that much was the same. She told Prosperine her touch was medicine and the Monkey put her to bed in clean clothes and watched her sleep.
That afternoon in the village square, Prosperine killed and dressed many rabbits—a busy day. Never had butchering satisfied her more. Each head she hacked off, each body she watched twitch and bleed, belonged to that son of a bitch Gallante Selvi. He would suffer for what he had done to her friend. She promised herself that much. He would pay with his life.
But it was not so easy. What could she do? Stick a knife in his heart while half of Pescara watched him paint the glass? Behead him in the village square with his madrina’s big cleaver? He deserved such a fate, but she would not live the rest of her life in a dark cell. Not with her beloved friend returned to Pescara—not with Violetta to care for and protect.
At first she tried to inflict il mal occhio. Although Ciccolina had refused to teach her the art of vengeance, she hoped that, since she knew how to cure and diagnose the evil eye, she might also have the power to gaze with it, too—to give devils what they deserved when God Himself was too busy to do the job. For the next two, three days, she stared at Gallante Selvi with hatred in her soul. Stared at him while he slept and ate, painted and soldered. Glared back in defiance when he yelled out his list of complaints about her work: her sweeping raised dust and made him sneeze, her scowling face made his eyes hurt, the cornmeal she boiled for his breakfast each morning had no salt or grit.
But her staring did no good. The longer and harder she watched Gallante Selvi with wicked intent, the more powerful and healthy he seemed to become. At night, Violetta’s begging and sobbing would wake her from troubled sleep. In the morning, the suffering wife would tell Prosperine her latest shame, show off her new bruises—teeth marks, once, on her leg, as if she had married a vicious dog instead of a man! But he was a dead dog, that one. That much the Monkey promised herself. And when she first whispered the word murder to Violetta, Violetta did not stop her. She listened quietly, her hands fidgeting. Fear and hope were in her eyes.
The triptych—Gallante’s unfinished “masterpiece”—was not going well. He was a perfectionist when he worked, always painting small studies on glass squares before adding even a fingernail or a fold to the half-completed work. When these efforts displeased him, he would throw them against the wall or kick the goat or yank his wife’s long hair or slap her face. He would melt lead cable, soldering one finished piece of glass to another, and then hate what he had joined, pulling the pieces apart and smashing a day’s or several days’ work against the iron kiln. All of his attempts to capture with paint on glass the gloomy azzurro of the sea were failures to his critical eye. Over and over, he mixed his pigments and lead powders and tried the results on squares of milky glass. He wrote down his recipes and waited like an expectant father for the paint to bake itself onto the glass inside the kiln. Always, when he yanked it out again and held the result to the sun, he saw that it was wrong and flung the hot glass, shouting terrible curses: “I shit on the Virgin Mary!” he would say, or “May Jesus Christ fuck your sister!”
Prosperine was expected after these tantrums to drop her work and sweep up his mess. Selvi liked the freedom of working barefooted and warned her that he would beat her blind if he cut his feet. And so, whenever she heard the smashing, she had to grab her broom and run. Each day she added new breakage, spilled paint pots, and jumbles of lead wire to the pile out past where the goats were kept. Then one morning, a kid chewed through its rope and helped himself to some of Selvi’s wreckage. Later that day, Prosperine watched the creature vomit up glass and wire. Before the sun set, that poor goat convulsed and bled and died from what was inside him. Then she knew how she would kill Gallante Selvi.
They prepared for days, Violetta and she, whispering secretly when Gallante was near and hurrying to their preparations when he left. They decided they would do the job on Sunday—the only day of the week when Prosperine was not obliged to go to the square and butcher. She collected Selvi’s discards of colored glass, broke the shards into chips and crumbs, and ground these to a fine powder. Crunch crunch crunch—she could still hear the sound of the glass between the mortar and pestle, she said. In a pot on the stove, she soaked and boiled scraps of the cable he used for glazing. Little by little, they would poison him with lead and cut up his insides with glass. They worked when he went to the tavern to drink, or to the ocean to swim. If they could only get him to swallow the food they tainted, they would be rid of his tyranny. By Saturday Prosperine and Violetta had many handfuls of fine, glittering powder.
“Tomorrow morning, his cornmeal will have grit, all right,” Prosperine whispered to Violetta. “More grit than he bargained for!” But she would take no chances: on that day, she would cook for his afternoon meal some special braciola rolled with ground veal and walnuts and more of their special powdered glass. For dinner, she would roast him a chicken stuffed with cornbread and pignoli and plenty more of that powder! By nighttime or the day after, he would be as dead as Ciccolina’s little goat. That bastardo would die from his own digestione!
Prosperine sat still in the chair and closed her eyes. Was she telling the truth? Telling a story to frighten me? Had she fallen into torpore from all that wine? Why had she stopped her story at this inconvenient place?
“Wake up,” I said, and shook her sleeve. Her eyes popped open.
“Tempesta,” she growled. “It worked!”
That next morning, Gallante Selvi ate his breakfast with no complaints—two bowls of the gritty mush made with extra salt and grit and the lead-poisoned water. Violetta and Prosperine busied themselves, holding their breath until the last spoonful had been swallowed—until they heard the sound of Selvi’s satisfied belch. An hour later, he was already complaining of thirst and nausea and a strange taste that would not leave his mouth. If he could only shit, he said, he’d feel better.
“One of Ciccolina’s laxatives will fix you,” Prosperine told him. “It tastes vile but it does the job.” She brewed him a tea of lemon-weed and fennel and lead water, with a big pinch of something extra. “Your madrina taught me this recipe,” she said, handing Selvi the tea. “The gravel in it will loosen you up. Drink it quick, not slow. Two cups of the stuff are better than one.”
He swallowed it gratefully in long gulps that made his pomo d’Adamo go up and down, up and down. “Grazi, signorina! Grazi!” he told Prosperine, wiping his mouth and lying back on his bed. On that last day of his life, Gallante Selvi was the politest of gentlemen!
By noontime, he was whimpering and moaning and pulling up his shirt so that Violetta and his servant-girl could watch the strange movements of his stomach. He complained that his insides felt hot, his head felt dizzy. His hands could not make fists. “A good big meal will settle that stomach of yours,” Prosperine told him. She helped him off the bed and to the table. But when she placed the plate of braciola in front of him, Selvi coughed a milky vomit onto the uneaten food.
While he slept fitfully, Violetta paced the floor and the field outside, sobbing and muttering to herself. Prosperine stuffed and roasted Selvi’s special chicken.
But he never ate that bird. By late afternoon, he awoke with stomach pains that made him scream. An hour later, he was shitting bloody stool. As night fell, he slept so quietly, they had to put a goose feather to his nose to see the breathing.
Somewhere in the nighttime, his thrashing began. Strings of blood and drool came out of his mouth. His stench was foul, his eyes wild. A few times, he tried to speak—to pray, perhaps—but his lips only made movement without sound. By the candlelight, his green eyes seemed lit with the suffering of his painted saints!
Toward the end, Violetta could not look. She cried and said they had done a terrible thing—a thing that would damn them both in the afterlife. “You were damned in this one!” Prosperine reminded her. “Remember the evil he did—the evil he would have kept doing if we hadn’t stopped him! We did what we had to do!” Still, the Monkey took no pleasure in Gallante Selvi’s dying and death. All during that night, water poured out of the sky and she wondered if the rain was the old witch’s tears.
Gallante Selvi stopped breathing in the hour before the sun. Prosperine washed the blood away from both ends of him and Violetta combed his hair, crying and kissing his yellow curls. She kept begging that poisoned devil to forgive her and, finally, Prosperine had to slap her and cover the body with Ciccolina’s quilt to make her stop.
The Monkey told Violetta that to sit and do nothing—to fail to go for priest or dottore—would cast suspicion. But Violetta was afraid to stay alone with him—afraid Selvi might come alive again and strangle her, or that his unholy soul would suck the air from her mouth. She stayed outside while Prosperine walked to the village.
In town, the Monkey knocked on the door of the more stupido of Pescara’s two dottori—the one whose errors had killed more patients. “Hurry, please, while he is still alive,” she said. Together they rushed to wake up Padre Pomposo.
Through all the examination and prayer that followed, Violetta wailed her sorrow—a diva’s performance, or else real tears, Prosperine never knew which. That lazy dottore made a poke here, a prod there. “Appendice,” he said. “The poor man died of burst appendice.” Then he went to the kitchen while the padre gave that son of a bitch the Rites of the Dead.
Padre Pomposo—that lover of pageantry and stravaganza—advised Violetta that she must arrange a funeral befitting the great religious artiste her beloved husband had been. With her permission, he said, he would contact Panetta, the impresario di pompe funebri, as soon as he returned to the village. Panetta would collect the body, prepare it, and transport it to the church where all of Pescara would come to mourn. Prosperine’s eyes tried to warn Violetta, “No, no!” They needed a fast burial. But Violetta’s eyes looked only at the priest, as if his foolish ceremonia could save her husband’s soul and hers. Padre Pomposo spoke on and on about holy music and special candles, a processione, perhaps, on Wednesday or Thursday morning, from the ocean where the genius had worked to the church where the High Mass would be celebrated.
Prosperine made her tongue click and shook her head in a futile attempt to capture the attenzione of her friend and accomplice. The padre looked at her, then back to Violetta. Perhaps, he said, if he could have a moment of privacy with the widow . . .
Then, a shock! A thing those murdering women had not planned on—the thing that ruined them! Banished by the priest from the room where the funeral arrangements were being made, Prosperine reentered the kitchen. At the table, that stupid dottore sat devouring the roasted chicken she had stuffed with bread and glass!
“Scusi, Signorina,” he told the Monkey, waving a half-gnawed leg. “I hope your pretty padrona won’t mind that I had a little something for my stomach in exchange for my troubles. Do you have, maybe, a bottle of vino to help wash down this bird?” In front of him was a pile of bones and a spoon. The bird’s carcass was half empty of the tainted stuffing!
Panetta the undertaker and his man came that afternoon to haul away the body. Violetta hugged Prosperine, sobbing, as the wagon drove away. That stupid dottore had not seemed sick when he left. He hadn’t eaten nearly as much of the ground glass as Gallante had. Perhaps things would be fine.
But that greedy fool was sick by the time the wagon had returned to the village! Sick for the rest of that day, too, and through the night. When he moved his bowels the next morning, he screamed from the pain of it. His wife carried his business outside and studied it in the sunlight. The bloody cacca floating inside the chamber pot glittered and told on Selvi’s widow and her murdering friend!
The dottore and his wife carried their smelly evidence to the magistrato and, together, the three visited Panetta the undertaker. Then the four went to the church to cut open Gallante Selvi’s stomaco.
It was Prosperine’s father who told all this to her, as he stood in his apron at Ciccolina’s doorway. His hair was dusty from macaroni flour, his eyes jumped with fear for his estranged daughter. Panetta the undertaker’s wife was Papa’s cugina. She had run to the macaroni shop and tipped him off and Papa had beaten his mule half to death to get to Prosperine before the polizia arrived. “Take this, whatever you have done, and run away,” he said. He put two fistfuls of coins into his daughter’s upturned apron, then hugged her hard enough to break her bones. That was the last she ever saw of her papa, but ever since, she had been comforted by her memory of him standing there in Ciccolina’s doorway. He had felt a father’s love for her all along, and even before his arms had let go of her that day, she had forgiven him for having sold her away.
They ran! Through the woods and then down to the docks—ran to those fishermen who had lusted after Violetta. They employed the charms of the beautiful one and the money of the ugly one and got away from Pescara. They did what they had to do. It was the only way.
From boat to boat, down the coast, they traveled. Prosperine had never before been out of Pescara, but now they sailed past Bari and Brindisi, and across the stretto at Messina. And that was how Prosperine became siciliana—she had gone there to hide from murder!
For a while, the two women lived in Catania, lost among the workers on a wealthy man’s olive farm. They were safe there until the farmer’s capomastro became curious about what was beneath Violetta’s skirts and his suspicious wife began questioning where two young signorini had traveled from and why. On the same night of that jealous wife’s interrogazione, Prosperine and Violetta stole money and escaped again, this time by train to Palermo.
Those were terrible months in that busy city where people came and went. Violetta found work as a servant at a busy inn, and Prosperine toiled as a laundress there. Although the Monkey could hide in the back with the hot water and soiled linens, Violetta was obliged to serve meals to travelers. Her heart stopped a little each time the door of the inn opened. Prosperine, too, was afraid—forever mistaking people in the streets for traveling Pescarans! Women and men and bambini all seemed to look at her with familiar faces—with eyes that knew what she had done. She was homesick. She longed to see the Adriatico, the Pescaran square, her papa, her sisters Anna and Teodolina. But a bigger part of her longed to be safe—to buy safety for herself and her friend Violetta. They could not be caught! They had to get further away!
One of Violetta’s regular supper customers was a fine and proper legale. On nights when the inn was quiet, he invited her to sit with him and talk and join him in a cognac. He was well traveled, this gentleman; three times, he told her, he had visited la ‘Merica. And it warmed his heart to think of the number of poor siciliani he had helped sail to that Land of Dreams.
Had he ever aided any poor souls, Violetta asked cautiously, who were, perhaps, in trouble with the law?
The legale leaned closer to the murderous widow and whispered si, he had from time to time assisted fellow citizens whose criminal records had needed a little whitewashing. He had a friend, he said, an ufficiale di passaporti. Together they sometimes made the dead come alive again, equipping them with traveling papers besides! They asked no questions of prospective emigrants, he said, except the one question they needed to know: how much was a fugitiva able to pay?
In the weeks that followed, Violetta began to grant her friend the legale certain favors. In exchange, he sent secret word back to a certain Pescaran macaroni-maker that the two fugitives were alive and well and needed money. Then they waited and waited—almost a year, long enough so that Prosperine was sure her father had disowned her for the shame she had brought on his head.
One day a young sailor came to the inn. He asked to see the laundress and was brought out back to her scrubbing tubs. Without speaking a word, he took out fotografia, holding it before himself and looking back and forth, back and forth, from the Monkey’s face to the likeness in his hand. Prosperine’s hands shook the water in the tub while she washed and waited. She thought, of course, that he was agente di polizia, but he was not. Here stood her sister Teodolina’s new husband. Her younger sister had married and it was her own brother-in-law who stood before her! The sailor handed her a leather purse. Inside was money from her father, the amount the legale needed for passage and counterfeit passports, and for the fugitives’ sponsorship once they got to America, plus a little more. Prosperine’s father had sold his macaroni shop—had sacrificed his livelihood for the daughter he had first rented away to an old witch, and then to her brute of a godson.
“And so, Tempesta, I became Prosperine Tucci, a girl five years my junior who had died of consunzione and whose mother had been sister to those stinking Iaccoi brothers—those goddamned plumbers who tricked you. They made a nice profit from their lies, Tempesta, and made you a fool as well. And here we sit, you and me, each a curse for the other.”
I reached over and grabbed her wrist. “What is your real name then, eh?” I said. “If Prosperine is a name stolen from a dead girl?”
“Bought, not stolen,” she said. “Paid for with a father’s sacrifice. My other name doesn’t matter. I am myself, Tempesta—the woman who watches what you do. That’s all you need to know.”
“And are you planning to feed me glass to tear up my insides? Stab me some night with your butcher knife?”
“I have no wish to watch another man die—to be twice damned,” she said. “Gallante Selvi was the devil himself. You’re only a bully and a fool. Keep your hands off her and you’ll be safe from me.”
She stood, teetering, and then made her way to the bathroom. That one who had never drunk spirits in my house before had, that night, drunk nearly half of the jug. Now, from behind the door, I heard that witch turn her wine back to water. I heard her moan, too, and wondered if she had begun to sober herself—to realize that she had told too much.
When she came out again, I stood in front of her, blocking her way to her room. “Your friend,” I said. “Violetta D’Annunzio. What became of her?”
Fear crossed the Monkey’s face and left just as quickly. “Eh? Violetta? She stayed . . . stayed in Palermo. . . . She changed her mind and married that legale.”
“Eh?”
“He fell in love with her and turned her into a gentlewoman. Now she’s happy.”
“Happy to be dead?” I said.
“Eh?”
“Before, you told me she died. You said she was buried in the Old Country.”
The fear and confusion in her eyes spoke louder than her words. “She is buried there. I said she was happy before she died. . . . Maybe I misspoke, but that’s what I meant.”
“Ah,” I said. “And has her second husband maintained good health?”
The Monkey’s eyes could not look at me. “The legale? He was grief-stricken, poor man.”
“Si?”
“Si, si. He wrote to me with the sad news when I lived with the plumbers. Influenza is what took her, poor thing. She had a sad life.”
“Before, you said your father’s money had paid for ‘our’ escape. Did Violetta come to this country or not?”
“I said ‘my’ escape.”
“You said ‘our’ escape. Nostro. I heard the word come out of your mouth.”
“You heard wrong then,” she said. “Mia, no nostra. You must have potatoes in your ears.”
Now she looked at me and I looked at her. We stood there, watching each other, neither of us looking away. That’s when I saw the Monkey’s lip tremble. And then, in the other room, the baby cried.
I held her gaze ten, fifteen seconds more. “You’d better go,” I finally said. “Your friend Violetta needs you.”
Her drunken, frightened eyes jumped from my face to the bedroom door, then back again. “My friend Violetta is buried in Palermo,” she said—a little too loudly. “I just told you. It is a sin to mock the souls of the dead.”
I took her arm and whispered some advice into her ear. “You’re a fine one,” I said, “to talk to me about sins against the dead!”