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  As the truck coughed away, Fernanda Ponderosa was trying in vain to gain entry into the house. Built of the local pinkish yellow sandstone, it slumped as though hundreds of years ago it had grown into the ground and become a part of it. Even the roof of terra-cotta pantiles was crooked, fitting the shape of the house like a well-worn hat. At the front, the railings of the balcony sagged with age. The shutters, their dark green paint peeling, were all closed like eyelids. Every door around the property was locked.

  Darkness was beginning to color the sky gray and the spring air was rapidly losing its warmth. A slight shiver rippled through Fernanda Ponderosa. There was no sound, except for the erratic chiming of the great clock and the far distant sound of someone chopping wood. She put on her cloak and walked around again, testing the doors and trying to peer in through the slats in the shutters. Why had her intuition brought her here? What was this place? What was its connection with her?

  Suddenly, a shriek rang out, cutting through the stillness, causing the lonely dove on the roof to flap away in fear. A wild-looking woman had appeared out of nowhere, dropped the milk from the two pails she was carrying over her clogs, and fallen insensible to the ground. She had gone down as though shot. Was she dead?

  Fernanda Ponderosa looked around for snipers—there weren’t any—and flew across the yard to where the woman lay. No, she wasn’t dead; she was still breathing. When she opened her eyes, it was clear she had a pronounced squint, with each eye looking to its side of her head.

  “Holy Mother of God!” the woman cried. “The Undead. Silvana, what do you want with me?”

  “Silvana?” gasped Fernanda Ponderosa. “Silvana’s here? Where?” Suddenly she realized why she had been brought to this place. It was because of Silvana, her twin sister, whom she had not seen in the past eighteen years.

  “Up at the cemetery, where else?”

  Then, noting the bewildered look on Fernanda Ponderosa’s face, the woman added, “She’s dead.”

  “Dead!”

  “Yes, she’s dead. Been lying up in the cemetery more than six months. I thought it was her standing there in the yard. Made the hair on the back of my neck stand up on end. Never said she was one of twins…”

  “Silvana’s dead!” Fernanda Ponderosa’s voice cracked, and her face was racked with pain.

  “She’s dead all right,” said Maria Calenda bitterly, “struck by lightning. Singed to a crisp. Worst storm in the history of the region. We tried sending a telegram, but couldn’t trace her kin. Fidelio is probably dead, too. He just walked away, lost his mind, vanished from face of the earth. They’ve looked for him everywhere. Savaged by wolves so they say. Business going to ruin. I’ve everything to do here, all the cheeses to make, pigs to tend, seventeen sows in farrow, goats, cows, sheep. I don’t know and what all. Primo trying to do the work of all three of them up at the shop. Sausages. Can’t meet his orders. Hams. Spies everywhere. Trouble with the Maddalonis. Pucillo’s Pork Factory out to destroy us. Sinister goings-on. The business will be lost. We’ll all go to ruin.”

  Fernanda Ponderosa was stunned. Her sister was dead. She could scarcely breathe. Although they hadn’t met in all those years, she always believed that one day they would make up their differences. A shaft of sadness opened within her. Silvana had carried the feud between them to her grave.

  As soon as she felt able, Fernanda Ponderosa set out to the cemetery, seeking some kind of reconciliation. It was time to make amends. She left her belongings in the yard where they formed a room without walls or ceiling, inviting the passerby to stretch out on the chaise longue, read a book, pour himself a drink from the refrigerator.

  Though the place was unknown to her, she knew where to go without asking. The surrounding hills and mountains did not surprise her. It was as though she were revisiting the area after an absence of many years.

  As she walked along in the twilight, her body felt leaden. How could the sense of Silvana’s death have escaped her for so long? She, who prided herself on her sixth sense. She reviewed the events of the past six months. Looked back over her dreams, rummaged through her thoughts. Had there been anything that hinted at it, anything at all? She trawled her tired mind but it was blank. She just couldn’t explain it.

  Without any conscious decision on her part, her legs turned her off the road and through the gates of the cemetery. Instinct led her to the mausoleum, a small villa of rose-colored marble. Inside, a picture of her own face stared out from a round frame, a black-and-white picture she never remembered having taken. Next to it, black letters spelled out her sister’s married name, SILVANA CASTORINI, and the dates enclosing her life. She shuddered. She felt like a visitor to her own grave.

  Fernanda Ponderosa knelt down on the cold marble and spoke out to her sister, the words she wished she had been able to say to her in life; words that Arcadio Carnabuci, hidden behind the edifice of the Botta family—the nearest he could get while remaining screened—struggled in vain to hear. Although he was too far away to hear the content of her impassioned speech, by craning his neck and straining his ears forward he thought he could detect the cadence of her deep-sounding voice as it rose and fell like a magical fountain. How it thrilled him, like ice sliding down the neck. He basked in the velvet of her voice, and in his nearness to her, and in the tranquillity of the cemetery. He would have been happy to stay like that for the rest of his life.

  Although Arcadio Carnabuci had missed the appearance of the removal truck, he had soon been alerted to Fernanda Ponderosa’s arrival. Word travels fast in a small place, and the astonishing news that Silvana Castorini’s twin sister had come to help out in the midst of the family’s crisis was quickly broadcast on the grapevine.

  From the description, Arcadio Carnabuci knew, even before he saw her, that the beautiful stranger was his own true love. His Fernanda. She had come at last. He had never doubted it, not even when his situation had seemed hopeless and he knew everyone was laughing at him. And it showed him that the feelings he had had eighteen years ago for her sister, Silvana, were an understandable mistake. Temporarily, before she had married Fidelio Castorini, and, truthfully, for a short while after, he had felt that Silvana had come to the region for him and for him alone. But now he could see that he had simply mistaken one twin for another back then. The right twin had finally arrived. He was beside himself with passion and excitement. He threw down his ax, and went flying out of the yard only to find her already striding along on the way to the cemetery. He followed her there, not having the courage to approach her on the highway.

  Although it was practically dark, he studied her. He couldn’t make out much, but he loved the sound her feet made on the asphalt. He wanted to lie in the road and kiss the place where she had stepped, but he didn’t have time. She was moving fast and it was a struggle to keep up, yet keep enough distance so as not to alarm her. Although he wanted to declare himself immediately, he was grateful for the opportunity to familiarize himself with her in secret.

  As he hurried along the road, trailing in her wake, he enjoyed the thought that he was breathing some of the air that she had just exhaled. It had circulated in her perfect lungs, been issued by her adorable lips or nostrils, and had then gone into him. How wonderful. He breathed hard to draw the maximum benefit from this connection between them, though the pressure was about to trigger an attack of the asthma that blighted his life.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  When Fernanda Ponderosa had said what she wanted to say, she got up from the ground and stretched out her shapely legs. Her knees hurt. As she gave them a rub, she suddenly had the feeling of being watched. Nonsense, she reasoned.

  “Scared of ghosts, Fernanda Ponderosa?” she chided herself.

  As Fernanda Ponderosa retraced her steps to her sister’s house, Arcadio Carnabuci followed her, and I in turn followed him. I could not help myself. Where he was, I had to be.

  Somehow Arcadio Carnabuci and his love fruit had upset the delicate balance of nature in the region, and I w
as one of the first casualties. Yes, I, Gezabel, the District Health Authority mule, fell in love with that man. Although he was ridiculous and puny to human eyes, he was a god to me.

  Before last Tuesday I had not been aware of him. I had seen him, of course, tending to his olive grove, in the fields, and around the town in the course of my duties, but I had never noticed him as a man. Yet, that night, I was racked by feverish dreams that left me weak and parched and wobbly on my legs. His ardent eyes promised me the passion I had never found in one of my own species. The touch of his hand upon my coat was a burning brand. I grew hot and uncomfortable, dewy and soft. We wandered together through the spring grass. We drank from the same crystal brook, by the banks of which he pressed his tiny lips against the soft folds of mine. Later, as we lay in the comfortable bed in his cottage, he kissed my dainty hooves, tickles that sent ripples through my four legs to meet in a fusion of sparks in the long-slumbering layers of my loins. We loved one another through the long, slow hours of that sultry night, and when morning came, I was his, and his alone.

  When I awoke, roused cruelly by Concetta Crocetta with my oats, I was exhausted and heavy and bathed in a white foam of perspiration that caused her to check my temperature. I could not do justice to my breakfast because of the butterflies that fluttered in my stomach, thousands of them, tiny ones with the palest yellow wings.

  From then on I was struck with a passion bigger than I was. I was a foal again. I began to smell roses in the air everywhere I went. I was jumpy, giddy, excited for no reason; I flushed hot and cold, I trembled, I sweated, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep. I lived only to see him and took many a detour past his cottage, which the nurse did not seem to detect, lost as she usually was in her own thoughts, just to catch a glimpse of him that sent my pulse racing and my heart thumping.

  My long ears heard music in the wind rustling through the wheat fields. In the sighing of the doves. In the whispers of the night. Above all I loved Arcadio Carnabuci’s singing, for his voice could bewitch the leaves on the trees, the rocks on the mountains, the river racing through its course.

  When my work for the day was done, and I did not anticipate a night call, sometimes in the dead of night I came quietly out of my stable and tiptoed to Arcadio Carnabuci’s cottage to watch him through the windows. I wasn’t peeping, really. I just wanted to see him. I couldn’t bear the thought of a day passing without feeding my hungry eyes upon him. Then, the glow of warmth from the candlelight indoors melted my heart, and I would imagine myself tucked up cozily inside with him, just as I was in my dreams.

  But outside of my glowing fantasies it was cold. I knew that he did not notice me. Would not even consider me. And this made my despair bitter as lemons. On the outside, yes, I had the appearance of a mule, but inside, couldn’t he tell I was a beautiful woman with shapely limbs and glossy brown hair? Yet how could I get Arcadio Carnabuci to notice this, when, even if he looked at me, he saw only the dusty gray fur, now shabby and a little bit moth-eaten, the mealy mouth, the oat-stale breath, the yellowing teeth, and the broad nostrils of a mule? This was my misery. My cross to bear. And now that this glamorous stranger had come amongst us, a real woman, what chance did I stand now?

  And so our little procession followed in Fernanda Ponderosa’s footsteps back to the house of the Castorini. He walked in step with her, matching right, left, and right again, trying to feel as close to her as he possibly could. And I did the same with him.

  Soon we arrived. The door opened and the house swallowed her up. A little time later a light appeared in one of the upper rooms, the one with the balcony, shining out through the chinks in the shutters. It was a bright night, there was a full moon, a good omen for lovers, and the sky was peppered with thousands of tiny stars, bright worlds millions of miles away, some of which had by this time already ceased to exist. It felt like the most romantic night that had ever been invented.

  By the light of the moon and the stars Arcadio Carnabuci noticed a roomful of furniture out in the yard. It seemed strange to leave furniture out, with those thieves the Nellinos down at Folpone, who would take anything that wasn’t bolted down and guarded by a vicious dog.

  Nevertheless he availed himself of the chaise longue and looked up at the window where his darling remained. He thought happily of how the pink plush had brushed against her bottom as it was now brushing against his. Then, under the influence of the moon and the stars and the singing of the night creatures, the owls and bats and cicadas, the voles and the newts, it came to Arcadio Carnabuci what he should do. He should sing. Sing to Fernanda Ponderosa and thereby announce his love to her in the way he knew best.

  Trembling, he could scarcely believe this was happening to him. He knew that here, tonight, history was going to be made. The rest of his life depended upon the song that was about to burst from his lips. The object of a whole lifetime of feverish dreams was here, now, and he wanted to savor the moment, the final bittersweet moment of loneliness and heart-wrenching desire, now so close to being fulfilled, before unleashing the full force of their shared and beautiful destiny. Having waited so long, a minute, maybe two, was in many ways a self-indulgence, but one that Arcadio Carnabuci decided he could allow himself.

  With his eyes fixed on the twinkling stars far away in the night sky, he walked toward the front of the house, positioning himself below the balcony with the precision of an opera singer on a stage. Slowly he took a deep breath, then, deliberately, he licked his lips, and from them pored forth the pure notes that ascended to the firmament, causing people throughout the region to sigh and weep at their unbearable beauty. The whole world seemed to have gone suddenly silent, and the sound carried on the slender breezes over immense distances.

  Way up on the mountain, the hermit Neddo was roused from contemplation by Arcadio Carnabuci’s song, and with a rapturous expression on his face he truly believed he had found enlightenment. Nearby, Neddo’s friends, the brown bears, emerged from their caves and began dancing in time to the rhythm of the music that was falling from the stars. Lower down in the foothills, the shepherds stood in amazement amidst the flocks and the newborn lambs and wondered if the beautiful song heralded the Second Coming, and in vain they looked to the east for a star to guide them. Prowling in a circle at the edge of the flocks were the wolves, slavering at the sight of so many tender lambkins, yet so struck were they by the beauty of the song that they abandoned all thoughts of dinner and they, too, raised their voices to the skies.

  Closer to home, the citizens of the town threw open their windows or came to their doors enraptured by the sound. Even the baker, Luigi Bordino, broke off from kneading his dough, dusted the flour from his hands, and came to the door of his bakery. Fedra Brini stopped knitting. Speranza Patti stopped reading. My mistress was distracted from her fantasies about Dr. Amilcare Croce.

  What could be the meaning of the angel’s voice filling the air?

  The widow Maddaloni chose to interpret it as a requiem for her husband, who had died in mysterious circumstances earlier in the week.

  “Clearly that angel is lost on earth,” said Teresa Marta, whose blindness had endowed her with the best hearing in the region. “Can’t you tell that from the plaintive beauty of the song? We must help it to find its choir.”

  But although an extensive search was carried out, the lonely angel could not be found. The baffled citizens stood in the streets with their heads bowed as though in silent prayer, and Padre Arcangelo wandered amongst them uttering benedictions, firmly believing they were all participating in a miracle.

  Truly, the only person in the entire region who was not caught up and swept away by the haunting melody was Primo Castorini. Indeed he didn’t hear so much as a note of it. He was as usual secreted in the cold room at the Happy Pig working throughout the night to prepare his secret sausage recipes. The concentration while he worked was such that nothing could penetrate his consciousness. All his senses shut down, and he put all of himself—and a lot of him there was—into hi
s sausages. Incredibly, in the past, Primo Castorini had neglected to notice the earthquakes that had rocked the region while he was working, until the roof had fallen down around his ears. So no song, however miraculous, could distract his attention from the serpents of pork that were his life.

  Arcadio Carnabuci’s song was echoed by the frogs in the lily pads, by the swans on the distant lake, silver in the moonlight, and by the waterfalls cascading in the mountains. It was taken up by the swallows soaring amongst the notes of the melody, and by every humble creature in the region, even the field mice and the naked worms. The almond trees wept a carpet of fragrant blossoms. The statue of the goddess Aphrodite, shoved rudely into the yard by Ambrogio Bufaletti, was silently sobbing, and marble teardrops fell amidst the dust. Just beyond the yard, hidden behind the hazel hedge, I was quivering. My long eyelashes were strung with tears, like crystal beads on an abacus. In them I counted the cost of my hopeless love.

  Eventually the shutters were thrown open and Fernanda Ponderosa emerged cautiously onto the balcony. “Who is there?” In her resonant whisper the magic of the night was liquefied.

  Arcadio Carnabuci stepped forward into the light thrown by her lantern but did not cease singing for a second. The song had taken him over, he was its servant, its instrument, and he had no choice but to obey its command.

  Fernanda was not exactly as in his dreams. She was a little older than the maiden he was expecting. So much the better. It would be well if at least one of them knew what they were doing. Though more mature, she was much more beautiful than his imagination could render her. The eyes of his heart had drawn her but imperfectly.

  Her voluptuous body was dazzling; how much better to sink into her softness like whipped cream, like a goose-down-filled mattress, in place of that slight and angular form he had anticipated. She was bigger than him for sure, but he liked big women. More to cuddle up to. More to keep you warm on a winter’s night.