Praise for The Oracle of Cumae
“The 99-year-old female narrator of The Oracle of Cumae spins a wickedly engaging and hilarious yarn as she unloads her secrets. The story crackles with snappy dialogue, sorcery, romantic and evil spells, a mummy, oracles, jettatores, explosions, disembodied limbs, and boozy parties set in Italian olive groves. This reader didn’t want this party of a novel to end! Melissa Hardy practices her own kind of wizardry as her entertaining troupe of unusual characters navigates through humorous and imaginative terrains. One of the funniest novels I’ve read in a long time—maybe ever.”
—CathArine Leggett, author of The Way to Go Home and In Progress
“I had been under the apparently false impression that oracles are always dignified and confined to a single sacred space, but the oracle in Melissa Hardy’s new novel is sly, meddlesome and peripatetic. She gets around in the company of a scruffy, independent-minded young girl, the narrator of this hilarious, anachronistic, romance/comedy of errors. Written by a self-confessed Italophile, and mostly set in early nineteenth century Italy, The Oracle of Cumae is a fascinating book of secrets ‘steeped in tradition and marinated in superstition’”
—Stan Dragland, author of Strangers & Others: The Great Eastern
“Melissa Hardy is quietly becoming one of the best writers of short fiction working today, equally at ease with modern realist fiction, historical fiction, magical realism, and pure fantasy.”
—Terri Windling, editor, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (2003)
Dedication
This book is dedicated to
my granddaughter, Victoria.
May you be fierce.
Prologue
April 26, 1896, Casteldurante, the Marches
The morning that Mariuccia Umbellino turned ninety-nine, she asked her great-great-nephew, Cesare Bacigalupo V, otherwise known as Cico, to fetch her a priest. “There is something I want to tell him,” she said. “A terrible secret.” Then, as he was turning to go, she grabbed hold of his shirtsleeve. “And Cico, don’t you be fetching me that old fool Eusebio! No! Wait a minute!” She held up a hand. It resembled nothing so much as a fallen leaf, brittle and curled about the edges, and so paper thin as to be transparent. She bowed her head and, squeezing her eyes closed, mentally hacked her way back through the thick tangle of eighty-odd years to arrive at the point where she remembered what had happened to Eusebio. “Ah, yes!” She settled back into the battered India reed wheelchair and smiled, showing a remarkable number of teeth for a woman her age. “Eusebio choked on a biscuit. A greedy, selfish little man. In the end, it did him in.” Catching Cico’s confused look, she laughed. “Don’t worry. All this would have taken place before you were born.” But was that true, she wondered. It was difficult to know for certain exactly which Cesare Cico was. There had been so many, each bearing a strong resemblance to the first of that name—her long deceased brother-in-law—paunchy, with black mustachios, red lips, and ridiculously small feet. When she lost focus, when she did not concentrate, they all tended to blend together in her mind, the five Cesare Bacigalupi whom she had known over the course of her long lifetime.
As for Cico, he was astonished. His beloved and terrifying auntie had not attended Mass for more than eighty years and had committed this sin of omission with a degree of tart defiance that had puzzled and alarmed her family for generations.
“Aren’t you afraid you will go to Hell?” they would ask her.
“I have no intention of going to Hell,” she would reply. “And if St. Peter won’t let me through the Pearly Gates, why, then, I shall go to the Elysian Fields.”
So it was with great excitement that Cico Bacigalupo bounced down the stairs two at a time, ripped his hat from the rack, threw open the heavy oak door, and burst onto the Piazza Libertà. The month was April and the hour early enough that the cobblestones were still slick with chilly dew. Crossing the piazza, he headed east on the narrow, dark Via Ugolino until he reached the portico of the convent of San Francesco, the bell of which he proceeded to ring with an impatience that bespoke his errand’s urgent nature.
After a few moments, a Poor Clare opened the door. The nun was barefoot and black-veiled, her blue serge habit tied around the waist with a white cord, knotted four times to symbolize the vows she had taken—obedience, poverty, virginal chastity, and enclosure. “Signor Bacigalupo!” she greeted him, for his was a familiar face—he was, after all, a prominent businessman from a prominent family. “What is your business with us this fine morning?”
“Ah, Sister Benedetta!” Cico beamed, beside himself with joy. “I must see Padre Bernardino at once! A miracle has occurred, and, if we do not seize the day, I fear a golden opportunity may pass! My auntie wishes to speak with a priest!”
“Addio!” Sister Benedetta clapped her hand over her heart. “Signorina Umbellino? You mean she must want to confess? A miracle, indeed! Please come in, Signor.” Opening the door wider, she ushered him into a gallery that opened onto a courtyard, pointed to a marble bench, and bustled off, her bare feet padding across the tile floor.
A moment later she returned, the convent’s reluctant pastor in tow. Padre Bernardino was a slight, melancholy man with a woebegone expression and hairy ears. He had reason to be melancholy. Although the Bishop had appointed him shepherd to this flock of cloistered women, their roles had somehow become reversed. By constant bullying, nagging, mothering, and smothering the nuns ruled over the priest and not the other way around. “Stand up straight, Padre,” Sister Benedetta scolded him now. “And look here! Tch, tch! Food stains! What will Signorina Umbellino think? She will think we don’t take good care of you.” Removing a linen handkerchief from her sleeve, she spat on it and dabbed furiously at the front of his cassock. “There! Now you’ll do. But only just.” She turned to Cico. “Do you believe it? This rascal was trying to hide from me! Say hello to Signor Bacigalupo, Father. Go on, now.”
Bernardino made a sour face at the nun before turning to Cico and extending a damp, limp hand for him to shake. “Signor,” he greeted the businessman without enthusiasm. “I understand that your aunt wishes to speak to a priest.”
“My great-great-aunt,” Cico clarified. “That is correct, Father, but we must hurry, for she might change her mind, and that would be too bad.”
The two men bade farewell to Sister Benedetta and made their way up the narrow Via Ugolino and across the Piazza Libertà toward the Casa Bacigalupo. This was an imposing three-story structure, built in the seventeenth century around a central courtyard, with thick, apricot-colored walls and green louvered windows. Overlooking the piazza was an ornate wrought-iron balcony, lined with terra-cotta planters filled with red geraniums. On this same balcony a wheelchair had been parked. In it sat an old woman, no bigger than a girl and wrapped in a red shawl.
Bernardino stopped in his tracks. “Is that her?” he whispered. Although he had heard a great deal about the famous, indeed, one might go so far as to say infamous Mariuccia Umbellino, he had never seen her. He came from Pontericcioli, a small town to the south and east of Casteldurante, and had been dispatched to minister to the Poor Clares only a decade before; the old woman had ceased to venture forth some fifteen years before that.
“It is!” Cico replied fondly. For a reason Bernardino was about to discover, the Bacigalupo men doted on Mariuccia, who, in turn, turned up her nose at them. “Hallo, Auntie!” Cico called, waving at the old woman.
She acknowledged his greeting with a curt nod, then looked pointedly away.
Cico chuckled. “She has never been what you would call warm. Nothing soft about her. Did you know that she single-handedly ran Bacigalupo & Sons for mor
e than fifty years? Up until ten years ago, that is, when I took over.” Bacigalupo & Sons specialized in the manufacture and exportation of fine majolica ware and was the largest and most profitable such enterprise in the entire region of Alto Metauro.
“I had heard that.” Bernardino clenched his teeth so they would not chatter. Women in general alarmed him. Capable women terrified him. Then there was the matter of class—Cesare Bacigalupo and his auntie were Casteldurantean aristocracy, while Bernardino was the son of a humble cheesemaker from a small backwater. Although it was early in the day, he could already smell himself—garlic and onions and just that hint of tangy cheese that was his birthright, mixed with wood smoke and the pungent odor imparted to his cassock by the cheap black dye used by the nuns in its manufacture. It was not a good combination. He wished that he could do something about it, but knew that this was hopeless.
Cico bounded up three marble steps, worn slick by two centuries of use, and flung open the front door to his ancestral home. “Come in! Come in! What a treat awaits you, Padre! You get to meet my auntie!”
Reluctantly Bernardino followed Cico into the foyer, up a narrow staircase to the house’s second floor, and to the end of a gloomy corridor lined with closed doors and dark ancestral portraits.
“Don’t let her eat you alive,” Cico whispered. He knocked, then called out, “Auntie? Can you hear me? Here’s Padre Bernardino from the convent.”
“Bring him in!” Although her voice crackled with age, the old woman’s tone was still commanding.
Cico opened the door to reveal a large, airy room, sparsely furnished, with a high, vaulted ceiling and a tiled floor, over which lay a red Turkish carpet. The French doors to the balcony stood open and, through them, Bernardino could see the back of the old woman’s wheelchair.
“Come, Cico!” she said now. “Bring him to me. Don’t dawdle. I’m ridiculously old, you know. I could die at any minute.”
“Ninety-nine years young today and trust me when I say she doesn’t look a day over seventy!” Taking hold of the priest’s arm, Cico steered him out onto the balcony and made the introductions. “Auntie, this is Father Bernardino from the convent of San Francesco. Padre, my adorable great-great-aunt, Signorina Mariuccia Umbellino.”
Clearly ‘adorable’ was in the eye of the beholder, for it occurred to Bernardino now that Mariuccia Umbellino bore the same degree of resemblance to a woman that a raisin bears to a grape—as if she had somehow imploded. All of her features, except for a pair of keen, dark eyes, were encased in wrinkles. She was no taller than a twelve-year-old child and could not have weighed more than eighty pounds. What’s more, if he was not mistaken, she wore a man’s trousers under the robe that lay across her lap and, beneath the shawl wrapped around her shoulders, a man’s jacket, cut in a fashion popular several decades earlier. So it was true, he thought, what he had heard, that Mariuccia Umbellino was more like a man than a woman.
“Charmed, I’m sure,” mumbled Bernardino and awkwardly thrust out his hand in greeting, hoping that it would not prove distastefully sweaty. When the old woman showed no inclination to take it, Bernardino quickly and somewhat gratefully withdrew it and thrust it deep into one of the side pockets sewn into his cassock.
“Charmed?” Her tone was arch. “Surely not, Padre! I am a very old person, skin riding bones. There’s nothing charming about me!”
“On the contrary!” Cico protested adoringly.
“Still here, Cico?” She sounded exasperated. “Fetch this young man a chair and go away. What I am going to tell him is not for your ears. Oh, now, don’t look so disappointed! You didn’t think that you would get to know my terrible secret, did you? Close the door on your way out and, Cico, no listening through the keyhole!”
Cico looked offended. He drew himself up to his full height and thrust out his chest. “I am not a child, Auntie,” he informed her loftily. “In any case, I have a business that requires seeing to.”
“The business that I preserved and built upon for fifty years so that it might be yours!” she reminded him.
Clearly Cico could not stay angry at her long. He chuckled. “I warn you, Padre, though she is lovely as a rose, her thorns are sharp.” He exited the balcony, returning a moment later with a chair that he placed opposite the old woman’s wheelchair so that Bernardino might sit facing her with his back to the piazza. Then he planted a kiss on a little bald spot on the top of his great-great-auntie’s head. “I wish you a good confession, Auntie,” he said and left, making a great show of pulling the French doors closed behind him.
“Confession!” muttered the old woman. “Ridiculous!” She turned her attention to the priest. “Sit down,” she told him. “I hope this heat is not too much for you. I am like an old cat, always cold in the bones, always seeking the warmth of the sun.”
Bernardino grunted something noncommittal. In fact, he was already uncomfortably warm, so much so that his heavy, dank cassock was beginning to stick awkwardly to his sweaty body. Inwardly he cursed the Poor Clares who had sewn this garment for him out of the cheapest, scratchiest wool they could find. Them and their infernal vow of poverty!
But Mariuccia Umbellino was addressing him. “So you replaced Padre Eusebio at the convent? The Capella Cola, as well?”
The Capella Cola, next door to the Casa Bacigalupo, was a tiny, independent chapel that served as the headquarters of the Brotherhood of Good Death, a lay confraternity that arranged for the transport and burial of deceased paupers, assisted the dying, registered the dead, and distributed money to the poor. Although the Capella Cola had no temporal connection to the Convent of San Francesco, the Poor Clares had, for centuries, loaned their priest to its handful of a congregation for the purpose of saying mass several times a week.
“Yes and no,” replied Bernardino. He pulled at his Roman collar in an effort to promote air flow. “Yes, I serve as the priest of San Francesco and say Mass at the Capella, but Padre Eusebio died a very long time ago. There have been several priests since his time.”
The old woman shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. I haven’t set foot in the Chiesa di San Francesco…or the Capella Cola…or any other church for that matter for a very, very long time. Longer, I’d wager, than you’ve been alive.”
Bernardino cleared his throat. “Perhaps if you were to confess, you would feel that there was once again a place for you in God’s house. Is there, perhaps, some sin that weighs on your conscience?”
The old woman glared at him. “Some sin? Don’t be absurd! I have acted of necessity at times, but I have never, ever sinned. The matter I wish to discuss with you is something else entirely. It is a secret that I have kept since I was a girl…one I wish to disburden myself of before I die. I have kept it to myself far too long.”
Cowed, Bernardino swallowed hard. “Yes, Signorina,” he stammered. “Whatever you say!”
“I take it that priests are still obliged to honor the confidentiality of the confessional? That hasn’t changed?”
“No, Signorina.”
“Then I will tell you my secret. Well, my secrets, for there are several. Now. Here. That is, after all, why I sent for you.”
What follows is what Mariuccia Umbellino told Padre Bernardino Franconero in confidence on her ninety-ninth birthday. It is the same story that Bernardino Franconero told Padre Giuseppe Tosti fifty-two years later on his deathbed. And it is the same story that Giuseppe Tosti, who was to leave the priesthood to marry, told his daughter, Filomena Tosti, who undertook to write it down. Signorina Tosti prefaced her account with these words: “This story I am about to relate…for the record, I don’t believe a word of it. Nevertheless…”
Part One
It may surprise you to know that I, Mariuccia Umbellino, was not a native of Casteldurante. Not many people know that. I have outlived all those who would remember where I came from and when and why. I hailed from Montemonaco—a little village strewn
about the upper slopes of Monte Vettore, one of the highest peaks in the southern Sibylline Mountains, some one hundred and fifty miles to the south of here in the province of Macerata. Montemonaco was not so much a village as a loose collection of agricultural concerns—vineyards, olive groves, scrubby orchards of chestnut and hazel bushes, and various grazing operations. These were owned by perhaps as many as two dozen families, all of whom had inhabited those heights since pre-Roman times.
At the center of my village stood a small stone church dedicated to San Sebastiano. Above its humble altar hung a dark and terrifying oil painting of that saint’s martyrdom. He was shown naked, save for a strategically draped loin cloth, with his head thrown back, his mouth agape, eyes rolling and nostrils flaring, and stuck so full of arrows that he resembled a porcupine. Needless to say, we children of the parish found this painting sufficiently lurid that we never objected to attending Mass, which was, at any rate, shorter in Montemonaco than elsewhere. This was because our parish priest, Padre Antonio DiNardo, was blind and, as such, could neither read nor write and so had substituted a kind of dumb show for Mass. By this I mean that he would go through the motions of the Mass, pressing his hands together in prayer and casting his unseeing eyes upward when he wished us to pray, making the sign of the cross when he wished us to do likewise, pantomiming kneeling when it was the congregation’s turn to do that, and so forth and so on.
As for my family, the Umbellini, we lived about fifteen minutes up the road from San Sebastiano, just beyond the village’s edge. Ours was a rambling mud and straw farmhouse, crumbling portions of which dated back to the second century after Christ.
My father, Umberto Umbellino, tended to the ancient grove of olive trees surrounding our house, gnarled as old men, and was a renowned hunter and trapper—wolves, whose pelts were much prized, abounded in those days, as did boar and deer and martens of various sorts.
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