I Know This Much Is True

by Wally Lamb

  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.”