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

  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 Monke
y 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.