I wheeled around to face the cabinet. “What?”
“The mugwort, child. I may not have a body, but I do have ears and my hearing is preternaturally keen. How that can be, I do not know.”
I retrieved the jar of mugwort from the cabinet, closed the door, and headed after Emilio.
As luck had it, however, Papa had collared Emilio just outside of the door. “There you are! I’ve been looking for you. You’re in charge of feeding the donkey and wiping her down. Carmine! Rinardo!” The two younger boys exploded into view. “Help your brother!” Papa let go of Emilio and pushed him in the direction of the donkey. Whooping, the three boys descended upon the terrified donkey and proceeded to swarm her. She, in turn, kicked and brayed.
I tugged at Papa’s sleeve. “Emilio knows about Milady!”
“How? Did you tell him?”
“Not me!” I defended myself. “She overheard us and she just started talking!”
“I will instruct them not to say anything. Boys!” he yelled.
“Mind that donkey doesn’t kick one of you in the head!” Mama warned, as she passed by carrying a big pan of baked pasta. “Is that my mugwort, Mari? I thought I told Concetta to fetch it.”
“She was too scared.”
“Scared? Scared of what?”
“Never mind. Mama, Emilio knows!”
Mama looked stricken. “Emilio? Addio! Did you tell him? All the angels and saints! Can’t anybody keep a secret around here?”
“You told Papa and Concetta! And it wasn’t me. She just started talking. Sibylla! She’s turning out to be a real chatterbox!”
Mama cupped her hands around her mouth called out to Papa, “Umberto!”
“Don’t worry!” Papa called back. “I’m taking care of it.” I could not hear what he was saying to my brothers—not at that distance—but from the vigorous way he was flinging his arms around, I suspected that he was threatening them with a series of terrifying punishments should they betray our secret, which would have the effect of silencing them for the hour or so our visitors were expected to linger.
I held out the jar of mugwort. “What do you want me to do with this?”
“Stuff it up the priest’s nose.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Stuff it up the priest’s nose!”
I shuddered. “I don’t want to stuff it up the priest’s nose!”
“Do you think that I want to stuff it up the priest’s nose? Trust me, Mariuccia, there is not a person alive that wants to stuff mugwort up that old priest’s nose. The question is, is there someone brave enough to do it?”
“Oh, all right! Fine! I’ll do it!” I marched to the table to where the old man was sitting.
“Tip your head back, Father, and inhale!” Mama shouted her encouragement. “Did you know that John the Baptist wore mugwort shaped into a girdle to protect him from harm in the wilderness?”
Crumbling the dried leaves between my fingers, I took a deep breath and thrust the herb up the old man’s vein-riddled beak of a quivering nose.
As was typical for farm families without servants, Concetta and I sat down only long enough to eat one plate’s worth of pasta apiece. The rest of the time we spent fetching dishes back and forth to the pergola or serving the men. Then, when everyone looked as though they would burst and the men were visibly woozy with wine drunk under a hot sun, my mother set Concetta and me to cleaning up, while she brought out the mistà. One round of this potent liqueur and Padre Eusebio dug the dried mugwort out of his nose with his handkerchief and announced, “I’m having a nap. I don’t care what anyone says!”
“Emilio!” my mother ordered. “Get a blanket and spread it out under the fig tree for Padre! And you, Carmine! Help Padre to his feet!”
Between them, my brothers succeeded in getting Eusebio up, then over to the fig tree, then down onto the blanket, where the old man promptly fell asleep and began to snore.
“I’m feeling kind of sleepy myself,” Pasquale muttered, rubbing his eyes.
“Get him a blanket!” Mama instructed me, but before I could return from the house with a blanket, the sacristan’s son had gotten up from the table, stumbled drunkenly over to the fig tree and, lying down at the priest’s feet, curled himself into a ball and fallen asleep.
After a second round of mistà, Pio yawned mightily, laid his right cheek on the trestle table and fell asleep. A few moments later, the prior joined him. The two men sat slumped, their twitching cheeks flattened against the table’s rough surface, snoring, snorting, and muttering. It was a deep sleep that the visitors had fallen into—a mistà sleep, pall like, faintly hallucinogenic, and one from which they would not awaken until the next morning, at which point, with aching heads and stumbling feet, they resumed their journey northward to the Marches.
Concetta mourned their departure, which seemed to her to be the end of something. She was, of course, mistaken. We all were.
Montemonaco is a very small, remote village and strangers a rare sight. The appearance, therefore, of a party of unknown individuals, including an ancient priest on a recalcitrant donkey and a man decked out in an outfit closely resembling that worn by the puppet Pinocchio in the fairy tale…this had not gone unnoticed. Neither had the hollow, reverberant sound of a distant explosion.
Accordingly, less than half an hour after the Castelduranteans’ bedraggled and wobbly passage through Montemonaco en route to the valley, a delegation of villagers arrived at our farm determined to discover just what the mysterious strangers had been up to. This delegation was made up of the two most meddlesome and, therefore, most powerful women in the village—Gabriella Favero and Valeria Rossi—and the two men who would have been its mayor and his deputy—had Montemonaco required formal management—Gabriella’s husband, Pacifico, and his brother Bruno.
The first Umbellino they encountered was Mama. No sooner did they spot her under the pergola than they crowded around, firing questions from all sides.
“Who were those men?”
“What did they want? Everyone is dying to know.”
“Are you all right? There was a big sound, like a clap of thunder, only much louder.”
“Who was that man in the funny pants?”
“Was he from Switzerland? It is said that they dress like that in Switzerland.”
Mama held up her hand. “Please! Please! If you give me a moment, I will tell you. We Umbellini are fine, thank the Blessed Virgin, but I fear the Grotto delle Fate is not. The Pope himself sent those men to blow it up. And so, they did…blow it up, I mean. That was the loud noise you heard.”
There was a moment of shocked silence while everyone attempted to absorb this startling development. Then…
“Blew up the grotto?”
“How could they do that?”
“It’s been there since the beginning of time!”
“It’s a sacred place!”
“But what about the Oracle?” The women wrung their hands. “Was she…was she blown up too?”
Mama looked uncomfortable. She shrugged. “Who knows? Umberto said that the mountain collapsed in on itself with the force of the blast.”
“Umberto saw this?”
“And my sons and Mariuccia too.”
“Addio!” Gabriella cried. “What will happen to Montemonaco now? The Lady Sibylla has kept us from harm all these years!”
“She is not our patron saint, Gabriella,” Valeria reminded her. “Not like Sant’Agata. We don’t pray to the Sibyl.”
“When your precious daughter fell ill from the mal’occhio, who did you consult? Sant’Agata?”
“I did! I prayed to Sant’Agata for her recovery!”
“And you also visited the Sibyl! You forget that I accompanied you!”
Pacifico intervened. “Calm yourselves. This is no time for splitting hairs. We must assess
the damage and determine a course of action—and we must do so quickly if we are to have any chance of saving the Oracle. You return to the village and instruct all able-bodied men to come at once. We will convene here.”
Over the next hour the entire male population of Montemonaco began to assemble in our yard—some thirty men and boys, all eager to see with their own eyes the devastation wrought by the Pope’s emissaries and their remarkable black gunpowder.
“The faster you dig out the grotto and the sooner the Lady Sibylla is returned to the mountain, the better it will be for all of us!” Mama told Papa.
“How so?” Papa was not a stupid man, but he was unaccustomed to thinking things through and so tended to get mired in the process. Thinking things through, planning, and organization—that was Mama’s job.
“If people know that Sibylla is in the cabinet, the men are sure to hem and haw and dawdle. They will say, ‘It is too hot for digging. Let’s wait for a cooler day.’ And by the time they get around to it, it will be October.”
Papa considered this. “I could see that happening.”
“As for the women, there will be a constant stream of them, all wanting something from the Oracle—favors and spells and advice. That would only wear her out—she is, after all, very old—and it would try all our patience, especially mine.”
“Women day and night, traipsing in and out of the house…. On the other hand, they would probably bring us food and drink for our trouble. That would not be so bad.”
“And what about our boys, Umberto? You know how they are, always rough-housing. One of them might accidentally break her precious jug, and then where would we be? How could we transport her back to the cave without a container? It would be like your mother all over again, only Milady is immortal.”
The evocation of his own recent haunting caused him to shudder. Papa had loved his mother, but putting up with her ghost had taken its toll on him. Was she watching him or not? He could never tell. And all the time complaining and scolding.
“If, on the other hand, everyone thinks the Oracle is trapped inside the mountain, that the matter is urgent, then they will be more likely to apply themselves to the task at hand.”
Papa scratched his head. “So, let me get this straight. You want me to—”
“Lie, Umberto, I want you to lie.”
So it was that Papa found himself trudging wearily up the goat path to the grotto at the head of a column consisting of every Montemonacian male between the ages of thirteen and eighty capable of self-locomotion, with me taking up the rear.
Despite the advance warning, it was obvious to me that what the men saw on their arrival—an immense pile of rubble entombing what had been as of the day before and, indeed, in perpetuity, a sacred place—shook them to their very core. For a few moments they tried to dissemble. They coughed and turned aside, all the while dabbing at their eyes with dirty neckerchiefs—as if the yellow dust that still filled the air a day after the explosion was the cause of this unmanly display of emotion.
Then, when they had more or less recovered their equilibrium, Pacifico kicked off the discussion. “We know for a fact that the Grotto delle Fate is but one in a vast series of interconnected caverns that extend a very long way underground,” he said. “After all, it is well known that, following her quarrel with the Bishop of Campania, the Lady Sibylla traveled all the way from Cumae to Mount Vettore—all completely underground.”
While Pacifico was speaking, Papa tugged at the collar of his rough linen shirt and scratched his neck and I could read in his expression how much he longed to tell his fellow Montemonaci that all they need do to find the Oracle was to open the door to his cabinet—so much so that it made him itchy. But he kept his word to Mama, saying, “If I may be so bold as to make an observation, an Oracle is, by definition, one who predicts the future. Therefore, one cannot take an Oracle by surprise—not one that’s worth her salt, that is, and we all know that Lady Sibylla is worth her salt and more. This leads me to deduce that she knew in advance of the Pope’s plot against her and so took refuge deep inside the mountain in order to ensure her survival.”
“Which means that she is down there now!” said Pacifico. “And that it is up to us to dig her out and as quickly as possible.”
“Good idea,” said Papa. “Let’s start first thing tomorrow!”
Pacifico looked aghast. “Tomorrow? Not now?”
“We have to gather up our tools—picks and shovels, wheelbarrows,” said Papa. “The women must pack food and drink for us. Tomorrow will come soon enough.”
“Tomorrow then!” the men and boys shouted and threw their caps in the air. Having no cap to throw, I turned and ran back down the path toward the farm.
That night there was a party on our farm. It wasn’t planned. It just happened.
Not too long after the men left the farm via the goat path to inspect the damage to the grotto, the women and children and those old people who could walk the distance began to filter in, family by family. Curious, not content to wait in the village for the men’s return, they wanted to hear for themselves what had happened. However, after an hour or so of telling the story over and over and over again as each new family arrived, Mama’s throat grew scratchy. Besides there was dinner to fix, so it fell to Concetta to tell the story.
The women, seeing Mama hard at work under the pergola, remembered that they too, must make dinner for their families. Putting the grandmothers in charge of the younger children, they and the older girls returned to their homes in the village and gathered up whatever was at hand and portable along with an assortment of pots and skillets. Then, followed by a happy troupe of village dogs, they made their way back up the road to the farm where they set the girls to gathering kindling to make other fires, since Mama’s cookstove could not accommodate so many.
When the men and boys and I made our way back down the goat path from the grotto, we found the entire farm—from the goat pen to the olive grove, across the yard and around the house and outbuildings to the vineyard—teaming with women, children, dogs, and old people and ablaze with a half a dozen makeshift fires.
The women had tucked pans of baked pasta into the ashes and set meat sauce to simmering in pots hung from hooks over the fires. Fritto misto of brains, artichokes, zucchini, and lamb chops sizzled in cast iron skillets, while on tables drawn from the house and placed here and there were crocks of spelt soup and egg soup and cabbage stewed in wine. In and among these crocks were set plates of stuffed olives and pumpkin tortellini, interspersed with bowls of lentil salad, broad beans cooked with bacon, celery with marrow sauce, fennel with pork liver, and overflowing baskets of fried bread and wedges of flat bread seasoned with rosemary. There was roast rabbit and stuffed pigeons. A pit had been hastily dug in which an entire young pig roasted, dressed with bay leaves, juniper berries, onions, and cloves. And there were sweet things as well: chestnut cake, cheese fritters made with honey, prune dumplings, ricotta pie, and elderflower cake.
“Such a feast cries out for wine!” cried Pacifico. So, the men went home to raid their stocks, not only of green-tinted verdicchio, but also of grappa and liqueurs distilled from mountain herbs, and from green anise, and hazelnuts. As for Papa, he sent my brothers to fetch a half-dozen bottles of mistà from the same limestone cave in which Mama aged her cheese.
A free-for-all ensued, with everybody eating everything and even the children partaking of the wine. By the time all had eaten and drunk their fill, and the sun, a round ball the color of a ripe apricot, hovered on a stretch of rosy horizon over the Adriatic Sea, the farm resembled a battlefield littered with bodies of the wounded and dead. Those who had had the foresight to bring blankets lay on them, while others stretched out on the ground or perched on rocks or tabletops. Mothers tended to babies, and old men half-slept under trees, curled up as tight as bony fists. Little children tottered randomly about, stunned, looking like scruffy ki
ttens sideswiped in the road by a cart wheel, until their grandmothers bore down on them and, seizing them by the ear or tucking them under one arm, returned them, scolding, to their respective mothers. In the meantime, their older siblings, exuberant, finding freedom in circumstance, ranged broadly. As for the men, it was as though the alcohol they had consumed had transformed the rocky ground they attempted to negotiate into the rolling deck of a ship on the high sea. Which is to say that the ground seemed to them to pitch and roll, causing them to stagger, teeter, and reel, much to the suppressed hilarity of the children and the consternation of the dogs who moved between them all, eating what they could find or what they could convince someone to give them.
It was then, as the sun was setting and the evening was drawing close about them, that the Montemonaci began to tell stories about the Oracle who had for so many centuries inhabited our mountain and to whose patronage we owed so much. At first the stories were anecdotal in nature and based on personal experience:
“That time the twins nearly died of the ague, she told me how to make plasters out of mustard and flour. It was the plasters that saved them!”
“When my son had that gash in his leg from the scythe—Sibylla advised a salve made of fir balsam pitch and, though everyone said that the leg would have to come off or he would die, he made it through with only a limp.”
“What about when that woman from down mountain cast a love spell on my Pepe and Lady Sibylla told me how to break it using the feather of an eagle, an acorn, and the yolk of an egg?”
And the most memorable story of all.
“Do you remember when the jettatore came to town?” someone asked.
A hush descended upon the villagers, broken when one of the grandmothers snorted and asked, “The tinker with the eye patch? How could we forget him?”
“Addio! Now that was a terrible thing!” everyone agreed.
“What about it? Tell us about the tinker!” the children cried. Although they knew the story by heart, they never tired of hearing it.
The Oracle of Cumae Page 6