The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

  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 periwi
nkles 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 Monke
y 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.”