Адриана Трижиани – The Shoemaker's Wife / Жена башмачника. Книга для чтения на английском языке (страница 11)

Enza couldn’t imagine their home without Stella, who had always been special. Stella wasn’t named for a saint or a relative like the rest of the children, but for the stars that had shimmered overhead on the summer night she was born.

Enza pictured Stella healthy, but she could not maintain the image, her mind filling with doubt. She battled helpless feelings of injustice through the night. In her mind, Stella’s dilemma was unfair. After all, her family had paid their marker in this life. They were poor, humble hard workers who helped others and lived the gospel[87]. They had done everything right. Now it was God’s turn to reward them for their piety. Enza closed her eyes and imagined the angels and saints surrounding her sister, making her well.

Enza even pictured her family in the future. She imagined her mother and father as grandparents and her brothers and sisters with families of their own. Battista would teach the children the trails, Eliana would show them how to balance on the stone fence on one foot, Alma would instruct the girls in sewing, Vittorio would teach the boys how to shoe the horse, Stella would show them how to paint, Mama would keep the garden, and Papa would hitch the cart and take the children for rides. Their lives on the mountain would go forward as they always had; they would grow old together and happily in greater numbers, with a homestead that they owned free and clear.

La famiglia èterna[88].

Enza was mystified as she watched Stella’s labored breathing. She had taken the medicine from the doctor. Why was her sister getting worse?

Stella’s color was all but gone, the pink of her cheeks now an odd gray and her lips turned chalky white. When she opened her eyes, they were unfocused, the pupils like two black rosary beads.

Giacomina dabbed her daughter’s lips with a damp cloth and stroked her hair. Occasionally the soft din of Hail Marys said in unison was cut by a moan from Stella that sent a knife through Enza’s heart. Finally, unable to take another moment of watching her sister wither away, Enza stood and ran outside.

Enza ran to the end of Via Scalina. She buried her face in her hands and wept for Stella. There is no worse feeling than being unable to assuage the suffering of the innocent. Enza could not erase Stella’s expression of fear as she grew weaker, and the helpless look on her mother’s face. Giacomina had been through many fevers and long nights of worry for her children, but this time was altogether different; it had a velocity of its own.

Enza soon felt her father’s hands on her shoulders. As she turned, Marco took her into his arms and wept with her.

God had abandoned them, the angels had taken their leave, and the saints had turned away. Now Enza understood the truth of those terrible hours. They had not been waiting for Stella to get well; they were watching her die. For the first time in her life, in almost sixteen years of surviving blizzards, spring floods, and want[89], Enza was unlucky. The strong arms of her father could no longer protect her, and her mother’s touch had lost its power to heal.

Enza and Marco returned to the house. The fire had all but died out, and the morning sun was pulling itself up over Pizzo Camino, flooding the room with light. Eliana and Alma stood at the head of the bed, Vittorio and Battista on either side. After hours on his knees, the old priest stood up and kissed the silver cross on his rosary for the last time.

Giacomina draped herself over Stella’s body as she wept into her daughter’s hair. The mother then lifted her child into her arms, pulling her close and rocking her as she had done every night before the child went to sleep. Stella’s lifeless arms dangled outstretched from her mother’s body, palms up as if to be received by the angels who were nowhere to be found in the hours before her death. Stella’s brown eyes were open, her thick eyelashes framing her vacant stare. Her lips had turned pale blue like the underside of a shell.

Marco leaned over his wife and put his arms around her, unable to comfort her. He felt the strong hand of miserable failure upon him. Not only had the doctor in Lizzola, the priest, and the church failed him; he had not been pious enough in the eyes of God to spare his own daughter.

There was a sacrament happening in their midst[90], the uninvited moment of complete surrender to the spirit world, as life passes and death takes its hold. It was a sacred pause, a swinging bridge over the most perilous chasm, a moment that lasted only a second or two, where Stella was still theirs before she was gone to God. It was in this moment that Enza screamed, loud enough for God to hear, «No!» But it was too late; the little girl was gone, her soul returned to the stars she had been named for just five years ago.

Was all of this somehow her fault? Enza had planned the picnic that day. As the eldest, she had packed the hamper and led them up the mountain. She had wanted to read a book in the bright sun. She had allowed the children to play in the pond under the rush of the spring waterfalls. She had failed Stella, and now she had failed the whole family. Now Enza looked around for someone to absolve her of her irresponsibility, to forgive her for the mistakes she had made, but no one stepped forward to break the bondage of her massive guilt. She needed the arms of her mother and father around her, but they were filled with Stella.

Giacomina’s pain was so deep that her back began to heave, her entire body to rise and fall, just as it had when she birthed this child. She cradled her daughter’s lifeless body, feeling the last warmth of her. A father mourns, but a mother, whose child is born of her body, remembers the soft kisses that become the act of two loving bodies joined together in sweet privacy, which begets the first flutter of joyous pregnancy, to the soft, slippery kicks as the baby grows in her belly, to the moment when her body opens up to bring a new life to the world, and yields to a despair that will never leave her.

Stella was Giacomina’s winged angel child, quick to laugh, impertinent with facts she learned from her less wise older siblings, and in total tune with the magic of the world, a curly-haired fairy who danced on the surface of life, soaking up the details of the world around her with a sense of wonder, identifying the possibilities in everything she touched, as she examined glittery mountain grass, hummed along with musical night winds, or embraced the miracle of water at every opportunity, to splash, bathe, and revel in it. And, as fleeting as a sun shower that moves through quickly on the sweet breath of a summer breeze, she was gone.

The hand-painted statues of Saint Michael the warrior, Saint Francis of Assisi with the lamb, Mary the Mother of Jesus crushing the green snake, Saint Anthony holding lilies in one hand and the baby Jesus in the other, Saint Joseph in a carpenter’s apron, and the Pietà, a grieving mother holding her dying son in shades of gray, were lined up in the bright sun in the garden at the church of San Nicola for their annual bath.

Ciro imagined that this was what the devout think heaven will be. Upon their deaths, they will proceed to a garden, filled with a seraphim of perfect saints[91], with unlined faces and thick hair, waiting to greet them in white light, wearing robes of purple, blue, and green, their smooth, long-fingered plaster hands indicating where to go.

Don Gregorio may have found Ciro’s lack of devotion odd, but Ciro thought the believers were the strange ones, with their relics, incense, and holy oils[92] whose mystical powers did more to raise questions in his mind than provide answers.

Ciro mixed the special cleaning paste he had invented in an old tin drum. Through trial and error, Ciro had created this paste to clean and polish the statues and delicate ornamentation of the church. For this special chore, Ciro mixed a cup of fresh, wet clay from the riverbed of Stream Vò, a few drops of olive oil, and a handful of crushed lavender buds in a drum. He put his hands in the mixture and squeezed it through his fingers until it became a soft putty. After rinsing his hands in a bucket of cold water, he picked up a moppeen, twisted the end around three fingers, and dipped the cloth into the paste.

«Va bene[93], Saint Michael, you’re first.» Ciro made small circular motions, gently rubbing the paste onto the base of the statue. The gold lettering, «San Michele,» gleamed as Ciro polished the surface.

Of all the statues in San Nicola, Ciro felt the closest kinship with Saint Michael. His strong legs, broad shoulders, and silver sword raised high to battle evil appealed to Ciro’s sense of adventure and aspirations for courage. Plus, Saint Michael’s sandy hair and blue-green eyes reminded Ciro of his own. As he buffed the golden jaw of the saint, he decided that of all of God’s army, this was the man who could win Concetta Martocci. The rest of the male saints, holding doves or walking with lambs or balancing a baby on one arm, would not be as effective. Saint Anthony was too gentle, Saint Joseph was too old, and Saint John, too angry. No, Michael was the only warrior who could have wooed a beautiful girl and won her heart.