Simple Prayers

by Michael Golding

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

In his debut novel, Golding makes sense of the current AIDS crisis as he envisions another time and place transformed by a fatal horror. Take a journey back six centuries to a secluded island in the Venice lagoon--a wondrous place where superstition reigns and life and death are created by magical equations.

Release date: January 1, 2001

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 320

Sample

Chapter 1

THE ROOM WHERE Albertino sat was not really a room — that is, it had no roof, no door, no vasi di fiori hanging from the windows. There was no table, no chair, no desk, no bed — no piece of hand-worked cloth, no favorite churning stool — still, to Albertino it was a room. Set out near the old cemetery, on the tiny island just north of the island where Albertino had been born, its sunken walls rose like a fortress against the waters of the lagoon. There was a north wall and a south wall, an east wall and a west; like everything else in the lagoon, they echoed the points of the fisherman's compass and smelled of the dark, bitter algae that washed in from the sea.

The west wall was largest. Albertino slept with his head at its foot on a stack of old blankets the Vedova Stampanini had given him: first the chestnut, then the azure, then the crimson; next the emerald, the ocher, the violet, the rust, the gold. The Vedova Stampanini had been careful to instruct him on the names of the colors and to show him the exact order in which they were to be placed, and though he could never remember any of the names, once a month Albertino would shake them out and lay them back precisely as she had indicated. They were worn, and filthy, and in various seasons hosted various pests, but they were Albertino's bed and he was happy with them.

After the west wall came the north wall. Albertino lit his fire there, and hung his boots out, and cooked his meals. The east wall was hardly there at all: at its highest point it came up to about waist level and at its lowest point stood right above Albertino's knees (Albertino considered this part the door). But it was at the south wall, in the protected hollow of what once must have been the hearth, that Albertino kept his boxes. Great somber caskets with intricate clasps, delicate coffers of frosted ivory, wood chests carved over with fabulous three-masted ships. Albertino's boxes were his only vanity; he saved most of the money he made selling fruit and vegetables to go once a year into Venezia to buy a new one. When he left the island, even just to row across the water to fetch fresh dung for the radicchio patch, he carried them to the cemetery and hid them in the bottom of an empty vault he'd discovered behind a shock of cypresses. He kept them oiled and waxed and brushed and varnished, but most of all he kept them empty.

“I don't own anything nice enough to put in them,” he explained to his brother, Gianluca, who thought he was pazzuccio to spend his money on such extravagant affectations and not even use them. But the truth was Albertino liked his boxes empty. They seemed more honest to him that way.

Spring hadn't come to Riva di Pignoli that year. Rosebuds opened hollow with a sudden crack and a trail of dry smoke. Turnips and cabbages were yanked from the earth like snapped fingers and shrunken heads. The trees stayed bare; the strawberry patch stood firm with tiny pellets of hard, unborn fruit. The weather grew warmer — sultry, in fact — but in the small fields along the island's southern shore, and the gardens that bordered the docks, nothing happened. Nature just didn't respond.

The people tried everything. Midnight incantations and morning prayers. Peppering the land with bits of bazzatello and salsiccia, hunks of old bread —hoping the soil might recognize, and remember, and thrust up something into life. The other islands were fine: Torcello and Burano to the north, Chioggia to the south, and the great Venezia, which prospered no matter the season or the circumstance. All across the lagoon it was a spring like any other spring, with bright patches of green appearing to balance the surrounding blue. But on Riva di Pignoli the palette never quickened. Brown stayed brown and gray stayed gray, and it might just as well have been midwinter.

Ugolino Ramponi said that it was because Saturn and Jupiter had aligned themselves in a cross-conjunction with Mars. Giuseppe Navo said that it was because he had pulled too many fishes from the sea. But Albertino wasn't fooled. Albertino knew exactly what had caused the troubled earth to hold back its offspring.

“It's that damned Ermenegilda,” he said to himself as he lay on his back on his stack of tattered blankets. “She smears herself with so much lilac water and jasmine, and stuffs herself with so many eggplants and artichokes and onions, the damned things just don't want to come up this year.”

Ermenegilda was in love with Albertino. The youngest daughter of the only wealthy family on Riva di Pignoli — the only family to have a stone house, the only family to have chickens and pigs and cows — Ermenegilda would have given her life for Albertino. That her father, Enrico Torta, had chosen to live on Riva di Pignoli in the first place seemed a somewhat perverse joke: Enrico Torta was rich enough to live wherever he liked, and Riva di Pignoli was hardly the sort of place one “chose” to settle in. Besides that, Enrico Torta did his business in Verona and had to travel an absurd distance — a journey of several days — to reach his isolated island home. But most everyone on Riva di Pignoli knew that Enrico Torta would have done his business in Africa if he could have been certain of a good rate of exchange. The farther away he could get from his family, the happier he seemed to be. His wife, Orsina, was a great explosion of a woman, with red-hot eyes and a mouth that poured smoldering lava. Together they had four daughters: Maria Prima, Maria Seconda, Maria Terza, and Ermenegilda (Orsina had wanted to name Ermenegilda “Maria Basta,” but Enrico pitied the child and chose “Ermenegilda”; it was only then that the first three girls considered themselves to have been fortunate in their naming). Each daughter was fatter than the former, each uglier, each angrier. Whether their anger came from Orsina's blood, from Enrico's absence, or from the frustration of being wealthy on an island where there was nothing to buy, it was potent enough to make the Ca’ Torta a place where even the most courageous Riva di Pignolian was loath to go. Maids and cooks came and went weekly; they could often be seen waving to one another as their boats passed in the lagoon. Women were sent from Padova, Mantova, and Milano to instruct the Torta girls in sewing and weaving; they generally ended up racing from the lavish home with spindles of brightly colored thread ricocheting from their heels. Invitations to dine at the Ca’ Torta — which Orsina insisted on sending out, despite her hatred of the villagers — were tossed into the canal, or burned in the hearth, or buried beneath the roses (Siora Scabbri suggested that this was why the spring hadn't come). Only a handful of the people of Riva di Pignoli could read, but everyone knew the kind of hell that was implicit in those carefully calligraphed lines. Orsina made a weekly venture of going about town to draw the latest invitation out of the drinking fountain or the pig shit, and then taking it home to pin to the kitchen wall; it was one of her favorite ways of keeping her anger freshly fueled.

Ermenegilda, infant of the household, was especially malevolent. As a child she liked to go from field to field tying the animals’ legs together, until the island was reduced to a bestial symphony of grunts, bleats, and squawks. Later she delighted in pouring rubbish into people's wells and unmooring the boats from the docks so they drifted out to sea. When people saw Ermenegilda coming they shut their shutters. Even the fishermen were afraid of her; they felt she set up a vibration that sent the salmone swimming back downstream. But though Ermenegilda was easily the most insufferable of the family, she was also the one for whom there was the greatest hope: Ermenegilda knew how to love - deeply, passionately, without caution or reserve — and in that capacity lay the possibility of her redemption. In Albertino's presence her anger cooled into a kind of glassy-eyed splendor. For a moment of his attention she would sacrifice the most deliciously malicious scheme that boiled in her eighteen-year-old brain and become a great, silent mass of perfumed flesh.

Albertino, on the other hand, couldn't stand the sight of Ermenegilda. Though somewhat odd-looking himself— he had a sort of pasry-nothing face that exhibited the same neutral expression no matter what he was feeling — Albertino was exceedingly sweet of nature. That he chose to spend one afternoon a month with her, however, baffled everyone but Gianluca. Gianluca knew that Ermenegilda gave Albertino boxes. The dazzling silver box with the smooth disks of jade along the rim. The heart-shaped box of red Murano glass with the dancing pesci gatto for handles. Albertino could not resist them. So once a month he would walk down the Calle Alberi Grandi with her, and hold her sweaty hand which felt like burst sausage, and sit on the dock at the east of the island while she talked. Ermenegilda spoke sweetly when she was with Albertino. She imagined that she was sylphlike and beautiful, and her wrath dissolved around her like smoke into the damp sea air. If he closed his eyes, Albertino could even bear her stories of crusading knights and their faint, fair maidens. But when the stories ended, and he turned to look at her, he could only wonder himself that a new box could mean so much.

It has to be her, he thought to himself. Who else could scare the blood out of the soil like this?

Albertino rose from his blankets and went to the east wall. He'd lived in his room that wasn't a room for eight years, ever since the great storm that destroyed the hovel that had been left to him and Gianluca when their mother had died. He'd planted the radicchio patch that first year he'd moved in; each spring the purple-and-white heads made him feel hopeful and invigorated. Now, as he looked out over the garden through the morning fog, he saw nothing but an empty expanse of dry, clotted earth.

He climbed over the wall. He walked toward the cemetery. But though it was silent as always, it now seemed to have extended its quiet out to the meadow and across the water and over all of Riva di Pignoli. He walked until he reached the small juniper tree that stood halfway between his room and the cemetery gate. Every year he'd watched it shoot up a little taller, and spread its spiny needles, and drop its tender cones upon the grass. Now there was no grass — and the juniper tree stood naked as December.

“I'd better go talk to Gianluca,” said Albertino. “If this goes on much longer, the fruit and vegetable stand won't be a fruit and vegetable stand anymore.”

He bent down and picked up a tiny pellet that lay in the cracked soil at his feet.

“On the other hand,” he said, crushing the pellet into powder between his thumb and forefinger, “what can Gianluca do that God hasn't already thought of?”

He watched for a moment as the dry breeze blew the crumbled dust toward the gates of the cemetery. Then he walked to his room, climbed over the east wall, and crept back in between the emerald and the ocher to sleep.

PIERO COULD NOT decide what to do about the blackened body. He considered throwing it back into the water, but he was afraid that it would only wash up on some other part of the island — and Piero was convinced that the people of Riva di Pignoli could not handle any more bad omens. An odd wind and the hope of a good catch had blown their fathers’ fathers’ fathers to this small swelling in the lagoon. And though the fishing had stayed good, and the families had merged into a community, they all knew another good blast up the Adriatic might whisk them right away again. Three generations after the first of their fathers had snared and salted a cod, there was still an air of impermanence to the village and a casual lack of order. Houses made right turns when they hit a canal. Gardens fanned wide at the middle or narrowed down to a point. Roosters and pigs and ducks roamed the island freely, entering and exiting the hovels as they liked; floors and streets were therefore covered with rooster shit, pig shit, and duck shit, which was either washed away with water on the first of each month or covered over with a fine layer of straw and flowers (another reason the villagers missed their spring). Bread not eaten on Monday was saved for Tuesday or Wednesday; bread not eaten on Tuesday or Wednesday was used to serve food on on Thursday or Friday; bread not eaten on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, after having been used to serve food on on Thursday or Friday, was thrown on the floor to feed the roosters, pigs, and ducks on Saturday and Sunday. Baths were taken on Midsummer's Eve and the Nativity of the Virgin. Clothes were changed when they caught fire.

To Piero such things were normal, even though he had been raised in a monastery away on another island. What disturbed him was that things were getting worse. The winters were growing colder and wetter. The livestock was dying because the villagers could no longer afford to spare their grain for feed. Fierce storms were racking the island's shores with greater and greater frequency. And now, in addition to the charred roots and the somber fruit the earth was flinging from its belly, the sea was heaving up dead bodies with horrible midnight swellings in their sides.

Piero heard a rustling behind him and turned with a start, but all he saw was the Guarnieris’ sow trotting casually up the Calle Alberi Grandi. When he was certain that it had neither seen nor smelled what he had discovered, he covered the body with twigs and rushes and went to fetch a wheelbarrow; when he returned, however, he found that it was easier simply to drag it. So he pulled it to the edge of the lagoon, hid it beneath the splintered remains of a storm-damaged dock, and then waited until sundown — when he would take it to the field of wild thyme that grew along the north rim of the island, bury it, and then try to find a way to bring the spring.

“MAYBE YOU SHOULD try singing,” suggested the Vedova Stampanini.

“Singing?” said Gianluca.

“To the soil. To make things grow. You have an unusual voice, Gianluca.”

Gianluca lowered the last of his bread into his brodetto di pesce and watched as it absorbed the pale, greasy liquid.

“Albertino wouldn't like it. He hates when I sing. He says it reminds him of when we were little and I used to finish eating before him and I would sing and it would make him feel he had to hurry.”

The Vedova removed Gianluca's bowl and took it, along with her own, to the wooden wash bucket that sat beside the cutting table.

“A little singing would be good for Albertino. The next time he spends the night I'm going to insist on it.”

Since Albertino's room had no roof, he spent the cold and the rainy nights with Gianluca in the dark room he rented from the Vedova Stampanini. Gianluca wasn't exactly delighted with this arrangement, as there was hardly a night in the week he didn't bring someone home to share his bed. But Albertino was his brother, and Gianluca had given their mother his sworn promise, when she lay on her deathbed some ten years before, to “take care of Tintino with his heart, his knees, his tongue, his toes, and his liver.” Gianluca had no intention of either calling his brother “Tintino” or of honoring his deathbed promise, but when the rains came down in Riva di Pignoli, he allowed him to burrow into a ball on the floor beside his bed on another pile of the Vedova Stampanini's blankets and considered himself generous for the gesture.

“Maybe you could try flirting.”

“Flirting?”

“You know — the way you do. Women can't resist it, Gianluca. And don't forget that Nature is a woman.”

Gianluca, as the Vedova well knew, was a lover. Tall and handsome, with thick black hair and dark, glistening eyes, he strode down the Calle Alberi Grandi with a look of sated self-satisfaction on his face. One corner of his mouth was always inclined toward the slightest of smiles, one hand was always at his crotch: checking, shifting, squeezing a little life into its roots. Gianluca's penis was commonly referred to as II BastÒn, and everyone on Riva di Pignoli was familiar with its astonishing length. The men had seen it in summer when they went swimming in the cove behind Giuseppe Navo's boat — from the time he was twelve Gianluca had cowed them, from youngest to oldest, into a long, admiring line behind him. The women had seen it by candlelight in the tight quarters of his tiny room; none of them would admit to having been with him, but each communicated an embarrassed warmth when she passed him in the street. Most nights, however, Gianluca brought women from the other islands to his room. It was suggested by more than a few of his former conquests that, more than anything else, he enjoyed the fresh look of awe on their faces as they watched him disrobe.

“I don't think that can bring the spring,” said Gianluca.

“You never know,” said the Vedova. “With the right inflection, something just might come up.”

At eighty-three, the Vedova Stampanini had failed to taste Gianluca's charms herself; but she enjoyed the idea of all this lovemaking going on under her roof so much, she let Gianluca pay his rent in vegetables. Feathery cabbages. Sweet stalks of fennel. Crisp, crunchy carrots. It was common for most villagers to have a small garden of their own, but few could afford more than a little celery and a couple of cauliflower. Gianluca and Albertino fleshed out their meager yields with onions, turnips, parsnips, peas, broccoli, cabbage, eggplant, fennel, carrots, artichokes, and three kinds of insalata — not to mention strawberries, apples, pears, and figs on the fruit side of the ledger. The wetter, colder weather made it more and more difficult to work the land, but Gianluca persisted, eliminating asparagus (too reedy) and beets (too red) and keeping two small fields fallow each season to allow for rotation. After a couple of rough seasons things began to improve; the past three years the fruit and vegetable stand they ran at the village market had actually made a profit. But now it was almost May and the parched earth had not spit forth a sign of foliage nor the promise of a thing to come.

“On the other hand,” said the Vedova Stampanini, “a woman is entitled to her moods. I gave birth to ten and then buried every one of them. Believe me, Gianluca, it tires you out.”

Gianluca listened, but he could not accept the argument. There was another explanation for the spring's delay. There had to be. And he was determined to find out what it was.

The sun had risen just above the horizon when he left the Vedova Stampanini's hovel and took his boat to cross over to the tiny cemetery island; by the time he had docked, and had tied his boat up next to Albertino's, and had walked across to the roofless little room, it was just beginning to lift up high enough to cast its warmth out over the east wall and across Albertino's sleeping body. Gianluca stood there for a moment and thought of how many minutes — hours — days, it seemed — he had spent watching Albertino sleep. But thoughts of time brought thoughts of the reluctant spring, so he moved in closer to the wall and let his broad shadow eclipse the morning rays.

Albertino opened one eye and glared out of it at Gianluca.

“You stepped in front of my dream.”

“Get up, little brother. You dream too much.”

“It was a nice dream. I was enjoying it very much. You blocked it right out.”

“Get up,” Gianluca repeated as he stepped over the wall. “The spring is twenty-seven days late. There's no time to be lying in bed having nice dreams.”

Albertino rolled over onto his belly.

“Well, what else can I do? I can't work. And if I can't work, I might as well sleep.”

“Have you thought about it, Albertino? Have you thought about what it means?”

“I'e thought about it, Gianluca.”

“Then why don't you seem to understand? If the spring doesn't come, we'l lose everything we'e worked for. We can't just lie in bed. We have to do something.”

“All right,” said Albertino. “What should we do?”

Gianluca began to move about the room like one of Siora Scabbri's chickens. He knew what he was going to say, but he did not relish the thought of Albertino's response.

“I'e tried everything I can think of, you realize. And it's all been a waste of time. But this morning I thought of something I hadn't thought of before.”

“What's that?”

“Ermenegilda.”

Albertino sprang up like the hinge on a mold-board plow. “Ermenegilda!”

“I knew you wouldn't like it. But I think it's our only chance.” Gianluca, having reached the south wall, picked up one of Albertino's boxes and began fingering the ribbons that wound through its ornate clasp.

“Put that down, Gianluca,” said Albertino. “I told you never to touch my boxes.”

Gianluca returned the box to its corner while Albertino slid forward onto his knees. “Gianluca,” he said in a whisper, “do you think so, too?”

“Do I think what?”

“Do you think the spring hasn't come because of Ermenegilda?”

“Because of Ermenegilda?”

“Because she's so ugly. Because she's so fat.”

Gianluca remained motionless as he contemplated Albertino's words; then he burst into a great gale of laughter. “Don't be a fool,” he said. “Ermenegilda is rich, that's all. Enrico Torta is always telling everyone that the Torta money can buy anything. Well, let's put it to the test. Let's see if it can buy us the spring.”

Albertino flopped back on his bed. “That's ridiculous.”

“We'e desperate, Albertino.”

“Ermenegilda can't buy us the spring.”

“Do you know that?”

“It's the stupidest idea you'e ever had.”

Gianluca stepped closer to the pile of blankets and crouched down at its side. “Ermenegilda is rich. She'd do anything in the world for you. Tell her you need a spring.”

“You'e been drinking too much.”

“It's our only chance.”

“You'e been out too long in the sun.”

“Albertino…”

“No! I won't do it! And don't ask me again!”

Gianluca got down on his knees and leaned right into Albertino's face. “Do you want to spend the rest of your life cleaning coda di rospo for Giuseppe Navo?”

Albertino closed his eyes and drew his arms up over his head. Gianluca had to bite his lip a bit to keep from laughing — his little brother's earnest dismay always amused him, but he did not want to offend him when he needed his cooperation.

“Why is it I always have my arms down into the soil clear up to my elbows,” said Albertino, “and you'e a. . .