Fioretta loved the farm. She loved the animals, even the mindless chickens, and the way the colors changed through the growing seasons and the way the air changed and the animals changed and gave birth to their young. She needed no urging to rise from her bed in the mornings. She would not miss the dawn; only sickness could keep her from it. She did her chores with a will. The farm, the farm, it was all she ever wanted.
But as she grew older, her father and uncle began to talk of sending her away.
At first, they spoke of sending her to a convent where she could be close to God who clearly had blessed her with such a rich soul. The talk persisted for several years while Fioretta grew, but it faded away when the child's ability with words and numbers and anything associated with school or learning or books proved more than she could master. She was a simple child. And she was relieved when the matter was dropped for a while.
Then talk began of something else. Zi' Carlo said that, simple though she was, Fioretta's heart was great, she was filled with love for God, clearly she was una ragazza santa, the holiest child he had ever seen in his years as a priest, and she must lead a life of service to God and to the Church. Certe, certe, her father said, his head nodding in time with his steps as he walked with his brother in the road. Across the field, among the dozing cows, Fioretta watched them in silence.
At last they told her. Fioretta lowered her eyes. She was an obedient child, an ornament, certainly, to any good family, her uncle told her father. But she could not enter the convent, she murmured slowly. The books were so hard. . . . Yes, that was true, the men agreed, but her uncle knew the good sisters who worked in Roma and helped to serve in the papal palace. Work for the pope? In Roma? In the house of the pope himself? Her uncle smiled. There is much to do, he reminded her, in the house of the Lord.
But the farm? Fioretta asked. Who will care for the cows and feed the chickens? Her voice could barely shape the words in the still air of the afternoon.
But every question had an answer and Fioretta, an obedient child, was, after a while, silent.
On the third day following her sixteenth birthday, accompanied by her mother's sister, Fioretta went to Roma to serve in the house of the Lord.
Roma bewildered and frightened her.
Around her in a dizzying circle swung the traffic, the buses, the people. People without faces or names filled the narrow streets and spilled over into the roads. Policemen frightened her, and the soldiers, endless Italian soldiers in bright and shiny uniforms, no two alike. And the chatter of foreign tongues, like the rattle of the devil's voice behind her. Twice she ventured out alone on her one day off in the week, explored the streets near her home without ever leaving sight of her landmark corner, and then went out no more.
From the single window in her tiny room on the fourth floor of the house she lived in, she could, if she strained a little past the window frame, see between two taller buildings the narrow brown ribbon of the Po. That, and the route from her house to the Vatican, was all she knew of Roma.
Six days of the week, she washed floors and polished furniture in the Vatican offices and apartments. At first, the lemon scent of the polish reminded her of the fruit trees at home, but soon she became accustomed to it and noticed it no more.
Three times in her first three months in Roma, Zi' Carlo came to visit her. On his first visit, she noticed with surprise how very much he resembled her father. The lines in his face were the same, his eyes the same shape, and the network of shadows around them. Only his mouth was really different, tighter, it seemed, and his laugh dryer, as if the old priest suffered from a fever.
"You work well?" he asked on his first visit.
"Oh, yes," Fioretta answered, her eyes averted.
"The work is agreeable to you, yes?"
"Si, Zi' Carlo," she said. "Yes."
They were standing in the shadow of San Pietro, near the little shop that sold Vatican postage stamps, with the motors of tour buses growling like beasts across the open piazza. Fioretta thought how the oil from the buses and their heavy black tires would stain the bright, hot concrete beneath them. Who washed the stories of the piazza? Fioretta wondered for an instant.
Zi' Carlo smiled down at her and placed one hand on the top of her head.
"You pray, yes?" he asked.
Fioretta nodded, and felt his hand move with her. Her hair, pulled back in a tight bun and flat on the top of her head, felt suddenly hot. "Yes."
"Good, good," Zi' Carlo said. "How happy you make me! And, child, remember always that your work is in itself a kind of prayer."
"Yes, uncle," she said. "I know it."
"As long as you are happy," said her uncle, the priest and brother of her father, and patted her twice on the head. He moved his hand and, smiling still, patted her twice on the cheek.
One true happiness she had, and one only.
She loved San Pietro and spent her free day—and, she whispered to her confessor, a few stolen hours as well—in its echoing cavern. With slow-moving feet, she traced in its cool marble floor the tiled outlines of the world's great churches, all of them smaller than hers. She patrolled the walls, drinking in the pictures and statues and textures of stone and light. She trembled for the saints and the martyrs and the pains they suffered. She visited the popes, ancient and recent, in the crypt and asked them to name her in their prayers. She craned her neck for long minutes to study the details of Bernini's marble and bronze baldachino above the high altar, where only the pope himself could say mass. She lost herself in dizzying visions of the dome. She loved the colored marbles and the gilt and fresco decorations. She loved San Pietro. And most of all she loved the Pieta.
Another girl who scrubbed floors in the Vatican offices, a girl from the north near San Marino, told her a terrible story. Not many years before, a crazy man had run up to the statue and hit it with a hammer, breaking pieces of marble from it. Look at the Virgin's hand, the girl told her, look at the Virgin's finger. Broken. It was broken right off, but the crazy man was caught and punished and the broken pieces were put back on. If you look very close, you can almost see the tiny lines where the pieces were put back in place. The Virgin's left hand, the one that sticks out like this, the girl said. She stuck her hand out, miming the posture of the statue, and giggled. Fioretta was stunned. She hadn't known, hadn't noticed.
How could a person do that, even a crazy person? Imagine attacking the milky white marble of the statue. She shivered at the thought and murmured a hasty prayer. She would have to look more closely at the Virgin's finger, she thought, as she glanced quickly down at her own left hand. The guards knew her. They would let her get close enough to see when there was no crowd around the statue. She had to see for herself this violation that she almost felt in her own limbs.
The next time she could, she went to the Pieta. The statue seemed almost to glow in the dim light.
Fioretta knelt on the hard cool floor before the Pieta, eyes searching and piercing the gloom of the corner, just to the right of the entrance, where the figure had stood for all these hundreds of years. The crowds were gone now. The guard, a nice man named Eduardo who reminded her of her father—but, curiously, not at all of her uncle—glanced briefly at her, smiled, and strolled away. He had once told Fioretta that he had a daughter just the same age as her. Only when the sound of his steps had moved away did Fioretta look in his direction. Then her eyes came back to the white marble figure of the suffering mother.
White marble trembled like living flesh. Fioretta caught her breath. No, she had only imagined it. But the figures were so real, so very real. Her eyes started over again, traveling across the features of mother and son, catching at details like fingers at a thread. The angle of the mother's head was itself enough to bring a tear. The exhaustion of her body. The delicate thinness of her hands. So young. Fioretta swallowed a lump in her throat and blinked back the blur from her eye.
White marble trembled like living flesh.
And the son. Lifeless. The b
ody sagging under its own emaciated weight. Ribs countable. Arm limp. Head lolling to the side. Fioretta wondered what it weighed. It. Wondered what it weighed. Heavy for the sorrowing mother, but otherwise light as dust.
White marble trembled like living flesh.
Fioretta rose slowly from her knees—knees stiff with long kneeling on stone floors—and took one tentative step closer. She paused, her breath coming quickly, and glanced over her shoulder. She saw one figure in the distance, Eduardo, she thought, but no one else. She turned back to the statue, took another step, and another. She moved to the right, toward the head of the son and the mother's outstretched hand, outstretched broken finger.
White marble trembled like living flesh.
She thought, only just thought, she could see the crack that marked the breaks in the finger. More suffering, even in stone. Fioretta stood still, balanced on the balls of her feet, plucked at a few more details unseen before, then straightened, sighed, shivered for an instant.
"Madre di Dio ..." she murmured, and realized she had no breath for whispered prayer. She stood in silence another moment, then backed off three steps before turning to leave the church.
Behind her, she knew, white marble trembled like living flesh.
"Ti piace?" Zi' Carlo asked, and gestured toward the statue.
"Si, Zio," she answered softly. "It is my favorite."
"Your favorite!" he exclaimed happily. "Ah! Ah! I knew my niece would have good taste. Of course, of course. Yes, this is the most beautiful statue in the world, a work of the truly inspired imagination. It is to your credit that you recognize it, niece." He looked briefly at the gleaming figure of mother and son. "Che belezza!" he said emphatically. Then he looked at the girl. "Eche santa ragazza."
Fioretta's eyes lingered, caressing the statue, as they moved away to pray before the dried remains of long-dead fathers of the Church.
Fioretta missed the farm and she was lonely. Far, far away, the cows and goats still grazed the hill, the chickens pecked in the dusty yard, and tiny purple flowers colored the fields. Below the hills, the city of Vasto slumbered, beneath the cliff Vasto Marina dozed by the water and sand, and the blue Adriatic, just visible from the door of her house on the hill, still twinkled in the sun, like daytime stars swallowed by the waves.
On her free afternoon, Fioretta sat by the window, elbows on the stone ledge, and craned her neck outside. In the growing gloom of evening, she could just make out the mud of the Po, snaking past the buildings that crowded her view.
It became her habit to visit the statue at night. By now, all the guards knew her at least by sight, if not by name. A strange one, said a few. But others recognized the girl as being like many they had seen come and go before her. These kept silent and looked the other way while Fioretta kept her vigil in the near total darkness.
She thought sometimes of the farm. She thought how, if she could be there, she would hold the farm the way the mother held the son.
In the dim light of the corner, the white milky marble glowed and shimmered before her tearful eyes.
She unclasped her hands and knelt up straight. If she reached out now, she could touch ... it. She could touch it. Touch the body of the son. She raised one hand, one finger outstretched, and .. . touched it.
What she touched was soft and warm.
Her hand, her finger, stiff with sudden fright, remained where they were.
The marble yielded beneath the soft pressure of her fingertip. She was touching the twisted, narrow chest. Beneath the . . . flesh . . . Beneath the flesh, she felt the bone of a rib. It did not move with the warm breath of life, but the flesh continued to yield to her finger.
Eyes wide, unblinking, she turned her gaze slowly to the face. A tiny trickle of blood ran from the son's nose, drew a dark line from nose to mouth, and ran between the slightly parted lips.
Fioretta recoiled from the body. And recoiled again, realizing that she had thought of it as a body. She blinked once and looked, breath still tight in her chest. It was a body. Her eyes swept up the details. Flesh the color of flesh even in the dim light. Soiled, once-white cloth draped across the loins. Wrenched muscles and tendons. The lifeless sag of the stomach, the breathless rigidity of the chest, the unfeeling droop of the head. She could see the length and curl of the dark eyelashes, blood and mud in the matted hair. A broken blister gleamed wetly on the back of one hand. The lower lip was swollen and raw. The right eye was blackened and the right ear filled with dark, dried blood. She had never seen these things before.
She let out one long slow breath and carefully withdrew her hand. It hesitated, hovered near the body, moved slowly toward the bony shoulder, and touched it. Still warm. Still yielding, with bone still hard beneath it.
Her lips moved but there was no prayer with words for this.
Heart pounding, she stared at the body. Then she thought of the mother. She looked up quickly. The Virgin was still stone, milky white in the dim light.
Silence cloaked Fioretta. No step moved near her. No voice.
She closed her eyes. Opened them. The mother was still marble, the son still dead.
A thought—one clear, specific thought—rose in Fioretta's mind. The body, she thought, cannot be left here. Crazy people will come and attack it. I have to take it away. And with the thought still shimmering like dark crystal in her mind, she stepped forward, arms out, and grasped with her right hand the legs and with her left hand the shoulders.
Moving without further thought, she slipped her arms beneath the yielding dead weight of the body—feeling the hard coolness of the marble mother on the backs of her hands—and lifted it against her stomach. It was lighter than she expected—about the same weight as a calf, she thought for an instant—but still she staggered back a step before she found her balance beneath the burden.
Out, she had to take it out of here.
It was only a few steps to the front entrance, the great main doors, and she was almost to them before she halted in sudden panic. Her awkward movement made the body shift in her straining grasp and one of the dead arms swung loose and rapped her on the leg.
She looked back at the dark interior of the basilica. No one. But she could not just walk out the front door of San Pietro with the body of Christ in her arms, the body that was supposed to be a statue. The statue. She looked toward the corner. The sorrowful mother bent her head over empty arms. And Fioretta was suddenly calm. What was the mother intending to do? She meant to bury her son. The girl looked down, for the first time, at the bruised and bloody face of the dead man in her arms. Peace. There was peace in the face. She looked up again at the huge doorway and began walking steadily toward it. Once she hitched the body higher in her arms, and once she thought that the blood would stain her clothing, but her step did not falter.
She reached the doorway. It was late now, the day dimmed into evening, and the great open piazza was empty. She stood in the doorway, breathing heavily with the strain of carrying the corpse, then walked the few paces forward to the edge of the first step. The weight dragged at her arms and shoulders and as she walked, her foot kicked something solid but yielding. The hand, she thought, the swinging, lifeless hand. She hesitated in mid-step, then shifted the corpse higher as best she could. Carefully she continued down the stone steps, leaving behind the shelter of the great doorway and the darkness of the shadows.
Only when she was outside, her feet touching the stones of the piazza, did she realize that the doors of San Pietro should not have been open at this hour. But she did not look back. She aimed her wavering gaze at the great obelisk of Heliopolis in the center of the piazza and walked slowly toward it.
Her arms were growing numb. A tingling filled her left hand and her wrist was caught at a painful angle. But she could not set the burden down, she thought, lest she be unable to hoist it up again. With every fifth or sixth step, she tried to lift the body higher, but each such movement brought new pain to her wrist and now her fingers were growing cramped. A sharp pai
n stabbed through her left shoulder and a dull one filled her right. As she walked, the pain slipped down from her shoulders and caught at her back. Her knees grew shaky and uncertain, her feet heavy. She bit her lower lip with the effort, but soon found that she couldn't breathe enough unless her mouth were open. She opened her mouth wide and tried to suck in enough air to sustain her. She was halfway across the piazza. She had given no thought to where she was going, but she saw now that she was heading toward her house, toward her room, the only place she knew in all of Roma. Breathe. Step. Hitch the weight higher. Breathe. Step.
Someone walked toward her out of the night.
Fioretta stopped, stood still, heard her own ragged breath, sucked in air, blinked as stinging sweat ran from her hair into her eye. A man. A policeman. What would he say when he saw her?
The figure came closer, step, step, closer, came walking toward her and passed right by her elbow.
She half turned to stare in amazement but the weight in her arms made it difficult to move. Walked right past her. Am I not here? she wondered. Do I not stand here with the body of Christ in my arms?
The weight of the body compelled her forward again. Step. Breathe. Step.
And halt again as another figure floated toward her from another direction, crossing the piazza on a path that would intersect hers. She stood, panting, and waited. The figure, a soldier this time, came closer, looked at her, looked through her, never saw her, never halted, walked on out of sight behind her.
"Madre di Dio, sono morta," she said, and caught at the air she had used to say it.
The weight of the body dragged mercilessly at her arms. A wrenching pain cut at the small of her back. A stitch nipped at her side. Her breath came in gulps of hot air.
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