Ardor Page 2

  On land, her departure was greeted by many with relief. The morning’s events had reinforced her reputation as a jinx, and the Vasco and di Porzio families, despite their grief, felt it prudent to offer their friends a little wine and a few almond cakes in celebration of her going.

  Throughout the two days and nights of the passage, Fernanda Ponderosa refused to take any rest, and neither would she abandon her vantage point at the prow of the ship. She stood like a figurehead, wrapped in a black seafarer’s cape, which billowed out behind her in the wind. She seemed a sinister apparition to the other passengers, mostly commercial travelers with suitcases full of rubber gloves, hairpieces, or surgical prostheses.

  Was she a ghost? they asked Borrelli, the bar steward, who boosted his sales with blood-chilling lies concerning Fernanda Ponderosa, which left the customers in need of copious amounts of bottled courage to return to their cabins. Yet Fernanda Ponderosa was guilty of nothing more sinister than urging the vessel onward, and trying in vain to understand the cause of the grief in her heart.

  Eventually the Santa Luigia reached port, and Fernanda Ponderosa, the monkey, the family of turtles, and the goods that remained were bundled rudely onto another dock, this one on the mainland, far away from home. They made a forlorn little group, particularly when the heavens opened, and they found themselves submersed in a pool of water that lent them the picturesque aspect of a fountain. The turtles didn’t mind the damp, but the monkey hated it, and he was obliged to blot himself once more with the handkerchief, which had only just dried out.

  I know all of this because, by an amazing coincidence, my cousin Maria Grazia was herself being transported on the Santa Luigia, and she saw firsthand everything that happened.

  part one

  SOWING

  CHAPTER ONE

  The man who was responsible for this whole mix-up was our own Arcadio Carnabuci, the olive grower. Demoralized by the rejection he had suffered from every woman he had approached in the region, and exhausted by his debilitating loneliness, he grew desperate. At precisely the moment this happened, there was a knock on the door and he was seduced by the glib patter of a passing peddler. Within seconds he had purchased at great expense a handful of seeds the gypsy guaranteed would bring him love.

  Gleefully the peddler pocketed the cash and ran off before the olive grower could change his mind. But he need not have worried. Arcadio Carnabuci was delighted with his purchase and couldn’t wait to change his life. Nobody could have predicted the way things would turn out, but I will faithfully record it all in these pages, for I myself was intimately involved with everything that happened.

  Yes, responding to the irresistible surge of nature, Arcadio Carnabuci sowed the seeds of his love early in the spring, when the short days of fleeting February were hurrying into March, and already the earth was coming alive. Mists hung around the skirts of the hills like tulle, and on the plains tiny figures became visible, muffled against the cold, sowing the crops where the snow had melted.

  Arcadio Carnabuci spent the daylight hours on the rungs of a ladder, pruning the olive trees that had been in the care of his family for one thousand years. But his mind was not on his olives. No. It was on love.

  In the crisp air that clouded with his breath, he could feel the tension, taut like the twigs that snapped beneath his knife. Overnight, the almond trees poured forth their blossoms. Not to be outdone, the cherry trees followed; so, too, did the persimmons, the chestnuts, and the pomegranates. The sticky buds on the willows gave forth curly catkins, and the meadows exploded into a blaze of spring flowers: lily of the valley, dwarf narcissi, bluebells, crocuses, and irises formed a carpet of dazzling color. Wild asparagus and sweet-smelling herbs perfumed the newborn air, and up on the mountains, rhododendrons bloomed.

  Arcadio Carnabuci could feel the earth’s energy through the soles of his stout boots. This effervescence bubbled up into his legs and made him dance in spite of himself.

  “Look, I’m dancing,” he cried to no one in particular, all the more amazed because he had never danced a step in his life before. And he started to laugh.

  “I’m dancing.”

  And so he was. Slowly at first, but as his confidence grew, he threw himself into the rhythm of the dance. His arms joined in; his feet, usually leaden, became weightless. They bounced off the hardened earth and soared into the air. He dipped and dived like a swallow. He gyrated his hips. He flung his head about.

  Those that saw him turned up their coat collars and examined their mittens to cover their embarrassment. Arcadio Carnabuci, always strange, was growing stranger. That day my colleague Concetta Crocetta, the district nurse, received seven separate reports calling for Arcadio Carnabuci to be interred in the manicomio at Cascia for the benefit of all in the region. Yet when we trotted past the olive grove to witness Arcadio Carnabuci’s antics, we saw it was nothing more than high spirits connected with the coming of spring. Smiling indulgently, she gave me a tap with her little heel to encourage me. Back then she was never rough with my tender flanks, and we set off again for home.

  The impulse that was tickling away at Arcadio Carnabuci was not confined to himself and the plants. No. Animals felt it, too. The spiders in their spangled webs yearned for love and spun sonnets of a fragile and unbearable beauty, glazed with tears of dew. Scorpions in dark corners clipped their castanets in courtship, then curled up in pairs in discarded shoes, snug as bugs. The mice in the rafters scurried about gathering wisps of stolen cotton, torn paper, and bits of fluff and formed them into cozy nests from which they subsequently brought forth blind babies the size of peas. The humble newts in the waterspout sung out in deep voices. The frogs and the toads joined in with them, and soon a chorus of magical croaking was filling the air. The music they made was so beautiful it made those that heard it weep and yearn for the life of an amphibian so they could unlock the secret of the song. Already the beady-eyed blackbirds were busily building their nests, watched slyly by the cuckoos, who were broadcasting the news, for those that didn’t already know it: spring had sprung. Deep in the oak woods, the wild boar grunted his serenade, while, in the sty, his domestic cousins spooned. Deer frolicked, hares chased. High up in the mountains the wolf howled his suit, and the shy brown bears hugged in their caves.

  Arcadio Carnabuci could not help but succumb to the rosy glow that wrapped itself around the region, and his loins hummed with a cruel expectation that in his lonely circumstances he could do little to fulfill. But he had faith in his love seeds, and in this fertile climate their promise would surely come to fruition.

  It was then that he sowed them. He picked the moment with care. In the watery sunlight, frail but willing. Under glass. To keep them warm. They were more beans than seeds. Pleasantly plump, and a palish pink in color. Little crescent moons. He could feel a tingling in the beans; like jumping beans, they possessed the same energy as everything else around him. He held them for a while in the palm of his hand, familiarizing himself with them, scrutinizing them through his half-moon glasses, behind which his eyes seemed enormous, and every pore and hair follicle was magnified a thousand times. Even the beans could feel the strength of his hope, and the plucky little creatures were determined not to disappoint him.

  He tucked them up under the soil, as though tucking his mistress into bed. They were invested with the weight of so many hopes and dreams, little trickles, squiggles of beauty, and longing, trailing ripples of excitement. His slow movements were a symphony. In his hands, the fleshy spades of a farmer, the beans knew they were safe. The pads of his fingers, broad but gentle, pressed upon them, and in the sudden darkness and peaty warmth they fell asleep.

  Then, like the blackbirds in the hedgerows, like the mice under the eaves, Arcadio Carnabuci began to feather his nest. His bachelor home boasted few comforts. The stains on the walls cried out to him. The sun-bleached curtains embarrassed him. He began to clean. He swept up the piles of dust with a broom that had itself grown dusty. He startled the mice by reach
ing into long-forgotten corners that had ceased to belong to him.

  After many years he finally relented and allowed Fedra Brini into the house to gather the cobwebs she needed for knitting her sails. She was the only sailmaker in this landlocked region, and her sails were sent to the shores of the Adriatic, where they were highly prized among the fishermen for their fineness and durability. She regularly stripped all the other houses in the district, and the cobwebs of Arcadio Carnabuci left unharvested for so long were magnificent, like something from a fairy tale.

  Fedra Brini was ecstatic, the spiders less so. The heritage of generations was lost in a few deft swipes of her pruning hook. Folklore, legend, the family tree inscribed in curly calligraphic script, works of great literature, love stories, poetry, mysteries, whodunits, even recipes and crossword puzzles, and to add injury to insult, one of the young spiders lost a leg in Fedra’s attack, for which Arcadio Carnabuci was never forgiven. All was swept up and carried off in a little linen sack on the back of the destroyer. It was a terrible day.

  Fedra Brini, so full of joy, like a brimming jug, she could no longer contain it. Such sumptuous webs, she started telling people. Hadn’t been touched since the death of Priscilla Carnabuci, Arcadio’s mother, twenty-two years before. But why had Arcadio Carnabuci, who had resisted her requests for so long, finally given in? No one could say for sure. But clearly the olive grower was up to something, and Fedra, who luxuriated in the warm rays of her neighbors’ notice, did her best to fuel the fires of their curiosity.

  Fanning the flames further, the very same olive grower showed up one morning in the draper’s in the Via Colombo, asking for bedsheets. What could Arcadio Carnabuci want with new bed linen? The eyebrows of Amelberga Fidotti, the draper’s sour-faced assistant, immediately formed themselves into question marks. Soon the news was on every pair of lips in the town. It scarcely seemed possible. Or decent. He was a bachelor after all, and one with long teeth at that.

  When he got home, he tried the sheets out on the bed. Just to examine the effect. Not to use, of course. They were almost too magnificent. Shockingly so. Crisp and fresh as fields of new snow. Yet he was troubled. He didn’t want to look as though he had tried too hard. He didn’t want it to seem that he had tried at all, in truth. Suppose he appeared calculating? Too self-assured? That he had planned the moment instead of allowing it to unfold in an impromptu way. Nevertheless, his worn and graying sheets were a disgrace. Painfully he refolded the new ones, matching the original creases like folding a map, and squeezed them back into the crunchy cellophane wrappers that were wonderful in themselves. He shut them up in a drawer. The next time he got them out would be for her. And he blushed a hot sticky blush that transformed him into a teenager.

  Arcadio Carnabuci never doubted for a second that his true love would come. He knew it as a certainty. As surely as the olives appeared on his trees. He could dig around their roots to give them air, fertilize them with dung, prune them, all on the given days set out by his forebears in the great Carnabuci Almanac, yet he knew that whatever he did, there would still be olives. There would be olives growing on the trees long after he would become the fertilizer himself. With the same certainty, he knew she would come.

  Arcadio Carnabuci checked on the progress of his seeds hundreds of times a day. He almost wore out the soil in the tray by looking at it. How he willed the slightest shard of green to protrude through the surface! In the mornings, before even emptying his bladder, he would hurry to the windowsill while still bending the wires of his spectacles around the backs of his ears and examine the soil as though panning for gold.

  Finally, on a glorious Palm Sunday, a day that would be forever etched on his memory, three proud little protuberances were waiting for him as self-satisfied as schoolchildren who have answered every question correctly in a spelling test. How his heart leapt at the sight of them. He examined them so closely he soon knew the minutest characteristics of each individual specimen. His prayers had been answered. It had to be a sign, on this of all days, that the Lord was with him.

  Later that day, when he took up his accustomed place in the church strewn with palm fronds, he did not hold back his thanks for that small miracle. I was then, as now, a complete agnostic and so of course never went to church, but I clearly remember passing by there that morning, and I heard everything. Yes, his glorious baritone resounded with all the force of his passion, welling into a great bubble in the nave that almost raised the roof from its rafters. It outdid the organ, and as much as the prim organist, Speranza Patti, played up to try and drown him out, Arcadio would not be outdone.

  Taking their cue from Speranza Patti, the members of the choir inflated their lungs and puffed out their chests and cheeks, looking for everything like the lusty cherubs adorning the frescoes above their heads. They sang out with everything they had, their voices mingling together in one great evangelical soup. Teresa Marta, the blind carpet weaver, sang so fervently that had their been a God in heaven she should by rights have been given her sight back. Fedra Brini gave it her all, so much so that she began to hyperventilate and had to be led outside to breathe into a paper bag; it had been an emotional week for her after all. Malco Beato pounded out the responses as though his life depended upon it, which to a certain extent it did. This stupendous effort was thought by many to be responsible for the embolism he was to suffer later that day, which left the Beato front parlor looking like a war zone. Every last member of the choir was left reeling, dizzy, red-faced, and breathless by the grand finale, which rocked the little church and could easily have triggered an earthquake, yet Arcadio Carnabuci did not even break into a sweat, and his one voice still rose above those of the fifty trained choristers.

  Padre Arcangelo was delighted at the strength of Arcadio Carnabuci’s zeal at the sacred mysteries, but the other worshipers exchanged glances to show that the olive grower was once again up to his tricks. Those unfortunate enough to be sharing the same pew sidled away fearing for the effect on their eardrums, and sure enough a record number of cases of tinnitus were subsequently reported to Concetta Crocetta, all of them blamed on Arcadio Carnabuci.

  CHAPTER TWO

  During the following days the precious seedlings stretched and arched their necks and raised their heads above the soil, straining toward the sun that pored rashly through the windows. All work in the olive grove was suspended as Arcadio Carnabuci devoted himself to watching the progress of his plantlets, and as he watched, he spoke words of encouragement, tender phrases, lines of poetry, the language of love.

  Arcadio Carnabuci’s long-dead father, Remo, took a dim view of his son’s neglect of the grove and appeared to him in a dream urging him to return to work, for the olive trees were more important than the individuals born to serve them. But Priscilla, Arcadio’s mother, soon entered the dream to point out to her husband that if Arcadio remained a bachelor much longer, there would be no Carnabucis left to tend the grove, or to do anything else. The parents’ dispute raged over Arcadio’s head and he felt nostalgic for the days of his youth when they were all together in life, a happy family.

  When they took to throwing pots at one another and name-calling, Arcadio decided to leave them to it, and pulling the covers over his ears, he replaced them with a dream in which he was serenading his beloved. In the twilight she stood on a balcony, and he, in a magical garden below, was enveloped by the velvety darkness. His rendition of “E lucevan le stelle” was the most perfect performance he had ever given and was accompanied by an orchestra of frog song, and the cantata of the small, shy creatures of the night.

  The following morning Arcadio Carnabuci was mildly surprised to find his kitchen in chaos: broken pots were everywhere, egg yolks smeared the walls, jars of preserves were smashed, chairs were upturned. It even appeared that a flour fight had taken place.

  His immediate concern was for the safety of his seeds, and his relief was enormous when he found them undisturbed. If anything, they were more lush and verdant than the night
before.

  Throughout Holy Week the sprouts spurted such growth it seemed incredible. They were growing right before his eyes. If he turned his back for a moment, he could perceive a difference. If he went into town to run some errands, on his return he would see a fresh-formed inch of stalk, or a new little leaf unfurling its tender green flag.

  Arcadio Carnabuci was so excited he felt ready to explode. Truthfully, he was a time bomb waiting to go off. He couldn’t concentrate on any one thing. A sweat stood out perpetually on his brow. He kept doing stupid things, losing items, putting them in the wrong places. He spent hours looking for his socks only to find them in the refrigerator; the jug of milk stuffed into his coat pocket had curdled into yogurt. His taste buds were confused. He ate a slab of cheese only to discover later it was butter. The liver he fried for his supper was an old slipper.

  It was then, too, that the dreams started. Arcadio Carnabuci began to see Fernanda in dreams. The sweetest little ear would appear in the middle of a dream about something else entirely. Or a perfect nose. Just the kind of nose he desired her to have. Small, straight, narrow. Freckles. A scattering of fine freckles evenly distributed over the surface of her luminous skin. Eyes green, deep green, not pale, and ardent like a lake with splashes of sun on it. Her hair particularly distracted him, in dreams, and even when he knew he was awake, he saw it. Twisted into a corn plait, the color of the sunset on a field of wheat. It seemed so close, so real, he could almost reach out and touch it. He knew what it felt like, to the touch. Smooth, like a skein of silk thread warmed by the sun. Sometimes it was flung over his pillow, like a pool of molten gold. He could smell it, like a summer meadow when the grasses and the wildflowers were in bloom and their scent carried on the breeze. But when he reached out to it, it vanished.