The Black Madonna (9 page)

T
erragrossa had run up to carry Amadeo's suitcase. He had insisted, pulled it from his hand. He ran to open the door of the car. He was confused when Amadeo resisted his attentions until he remembered that Americans were democrats. Terragrossa had smiled at his own intelligence.

“A long journey?” he said.

Amadeo nodded. He looked out at the countryside. He thought of the desert, the face of the moon. There were no trees, nothing. The town was set into the hill, bleached white, medieval. He could have been born here, he realized. He could have had another life. Part of the town had fallen into the ravine at the last earthquake, Terragrossa told him.

“My uncle lives in town?”

“In a palace,” Terragrossa said, “two stories.” He held up two fingers.

“You can take me to a hotel in town.”

“Hotel? What hotel? There's a widow who rents rooms but you couldn't stay there. The tax collector, the pig doctor, stays there. There's lice in the sheets. Your uncle gave me instructions. ‘You bring him straight here,' he told me. ‘Do you know how many years I've waited to see him?' He had tears in his eyes when he said it.” Amadeo thought he saw a tear in Terragrossa's eye and offered him his handkerchief. Terragrossa fingered the material and tucked it into his shirt pocket.

“There's things you should know,” he told Amadeo.

“Tell me.”

Terragrossa lowered his voice and covered his mouth with his hand. “This place is filled with
streghe
and you should be careful. They poison the bread and the sausage and the wine. They put things in the food, terrible things from their bodies, and they take over your soul. There was a man, Cosimo Carbone, who threw himself off this cliff, right here,” and Terragrossa pulled the car off the road and stopped it at the edge of the cliff so that Amadeo could see where it had happened. He shook his head and looked back over his shoulder at Amadeo. “They'll go wild for a man like you.”

He turned the car up the road that led to the village and drove into the center of town. A bright red banner with
BEN TORNATI
written in gold letters was strung across the piazza. The mayor had commissioned the banner for the soldiers returning triumphant from the war in Abyssinia, even though there had been only one volunteer from Castelfondo. The mayor had been glad to rent the banner to Zio Carmelo for the day. He had added a small fee for hanging it across the piazza. The red-and-gold banner hung in contrast to the black ones that flapped above every doorway. They marked death, and were left there until the wind and the weather tore them down.

Four musicians waited in the square, not from Matera as Zio Carmelo had promised, but peasants from the village. They played goatskin bagpipes and the children covered their ears. Zio Carmelo got mad when anyone asked about the brass band. “At the wedding,” he told them, annoyed. “You people always want everything right away.”

When Amadeo got out of the car, the bagpipes played “God Bless America.” Zio Carmelo came up to embrace him. “Look,” he said. “The whole town is here to welcome you. They should be sleeping. They should be in the fields.” Amadeo stood in the noon sun; he tipped his hat and thanked them all. He smiled and they smiled back except for some of the peasants who were disgruntled at missing a day of work for nothing, as far as they could see. Zio Carmelo had promised a spectacle. To save face, Zio Carmelo had to buy drinks in the café for the men and sweets for the women and children.

So the men drank and the women and children sucked on candies and the bagpipes played “God Bless America” over and over. Amadeo was made to sit in a chair under a makeshift canopy and the mayor made a vague speech of welcome in which he mentioned the glory of Rome and Zio Carmelo brought the residents one by one to meet Amadeo. The most important people of the town came first, the mayor, the doctor, the head of the carabinieri. They shook Amadeo's hand and kissed his cheeks. Amadeo would not let anyone kiss his hand although the peasants tried. The young girls hid behind their mothers, who offered Amadeo bits of sausage and bread and cakes on small plates. Terragrossa bulged his eyes at Amadeo from behind the women's backs and pointed to the food and sawed his hand across his throat in warning.

Magdalena Caparetti was there, leaning against a wall. Her father had brought her. He had not told her about the betrothal, but only that the rich and handsome nephew of Carmelo Laurenzano was coming from America and there would be a celebration in the piazza. She was very glad to end the year of mourning for her brother. She had brushed her hair into a long braid and put on the necklace her mother had left for her. “He's fat,” she told her father when she saw Amadeo.

Giacomo Caparetti pinched her arm. “Of course he's fat. In America, everyone's fat. They have plenty to eat, not like here, where everybody starves.” Her father thought to introduce her but he didn't know how, so he went over to Zio Carmelo and pulled at his sleeve. Zio Carmelo turned angrily until he saw who it was. “Giacomo . . .
Paesano
. . .” He embraced him. “What do you think?” he said. “A fine man, eh?”

Giacomo Caparetti nodded. “Should I bring Magdalena to meet him?”

“Of course, why not?”

“I haven't told her anything.”

“So what? There's always time. Patience gets you through this life. Fate decides the rest. Bring her here. Guinetta will introduce her.”

Zia Guinetta took Magdalena by the hand and brought her to meet Amadeo, who was sitting under the makeshift canopy drinking the local wine. He smiled at her and shook her hand, and she went back to stand against the wall.

“Beautiful, no?” Zia Guinetta put her face down to Amadeo's ear.

Amadeo laughed. He had been traveling for days and days. His head was light from the wine. His stomach felt strange from the food. “Zia,” he said, “she must be twelve years old.”

“No, no, much older. It's the mountain air. Women here always seem young. Look at me,” she said, and she moved her hands down her body suggestively.

A
s it got dark, everyone started drifting home. Amadeo was asleep in his chair and Zio Carmelo had to shake him awake. He and Zia Guinetta walked up the street to their house with Amadeo between them. They paused in front of the door, to give Amadeo time to appreciate the varnish and the brass doorknob that he had seen only in photographs.

Inside, the first thing they showed him, before they even showed him his bed, was the toilet bowl with the porcelain seat. They wanted him to understand, to know that they were a family he could be proud of.

“But Zio,” Amadeo said. “There's no water. How can you use it?”

Zio Carmelo stood in the doorway with his arms folded across his chest. “What does that matter?” he said. “It's the only one like it in the province. It's famous.”

Amadeo agreed it was magnificent.

In the mornings, Zia Guinetta made Amadeo a bowl of coffee and milk with an egg beaten into it. She put the jam on his bread herself. She cooked pasta for his lunch and turned down the bed for his afternoon nap. They had given him the back room and set up their cots in the kitchen. Amadeo had protested but Zia Guinetta wouldn't listen. They preferred sleeping in the kitchen, she said.

“Ha,” Zio Carmelo said to her. “At least now that he's here we eat decent. No bread and oil . . . not with him here. We eat pasta . . . with meat in the sauce.”

“Shhh.” She put a finger to her lips and pointed to the back room where Amadeo slept. “You want to look like a peasant in front of your nephew? Go cut holes in the elbows of your sweater then. Just the kind of man he will trust to find him a bride, a
cafone
who eats bread and oil.”

“But if we can eat like this now, why don't we always eat like this?”

“Because we have to be careful. I save for bad times . . . the next earthquake . . . the next war. Who knows? If it was up to you, we'd have nothing.”

Zio Carmelo put a hand under her dress. She turned and hit him with the wooden spoon. He pulled her into his lap and bit the tip of her ear. Tommaso called from outside and Zia Guinetta pulled away.

Zia Guinetta doted on Tommaso. He was, after all, her only son, and if he spent his days in the piazza telling stories, she didn't mind, but was proud that people listened to him. And they did. Someone was always willing to buy him an espresso or a grappa to have him tell his stories of New York. Everyone who could had already left this place, for Rome, for Naples, for New York. Those fated to stay were glad to listen to Tommaso. He told them that the streets were paved with gold, but there was nothing like the simple life of Castelfondo. Hadn't he returned? And they would nod, all too happy to believe that they were the lucky ones.

Once in a while Tommaso was hired to go into another village or to Matera to attend a funeral and present himself as the rich nephew of the deceased who had made a fortune in America. Tommaso would wear the suit he had bought in New York and carry the cardboard suitcase. Terragrossa would drive him to his destination and Tommaso would pay him when he returned.

Z
io Carmelo folded his hands in his lap and thought about slipping out to see the widow while the others slept. Zio Carmelo put a kilo of dried pasta, rigatoni, the widow's favorite, into his sack and made his plan.

In the afternoon, when he and Zia Guinetta lay side by side in their underclothes and he heard her snores, he pulled on his shirt and pants, picked up his sack, and left the house. Even the flies were asleep. He made his way out of the town, past the shuttered houses, to follow the path to the fields and the stone shed where the widow lived. It was a place the peasants had built to keep their tools in but it had been abandoned when part of a wall fell down. The widow had fixed the wall and moved in. When the tax collector came by once a year, she would take down the wall and hide in the fields. Everyone else left her alone.

Zio Carmelo came to the stone shed and opened the door. He called out her name. “Mafalda,” he said into the darkness, the taste of it sweet in his mouth. It was cool inside and she straddled him across the big bed she had gotten with the money he had given her. “We're not animals after all,” Zio Carmelo had said to her, pressing the money into her hand after he had taken her on the dirt floor, in the hay. He gave her money for linen for the bed and set up a goatskin to catch the rainwater so she could wash, but she never washed, and she only slept in the bed when he came to her. After a while, he forgot about her washing, and the smell of her, the memory of the smell of her, made his heart bang in his chest.

They never spoke. He asked her nothing. She took the kilo of rigatoni and hid it in a corner. He licked her body and bit circles into her shoulders. He burrowed into her from behind. He felt like a young man, young enough to work in Don Carlito's fields.

He sighed at the quiet. He thought about Guinetta finding out and sweat broke out on his forehead. But Guinetta slept like the dead, he told himself, and she was so set on the scheme to marry off Amadeo, to tie him to them and to Castelfondo, that she was blind to everything else, even his visits to the widow. He twisted his hands in Mafalda's black hair. Amadeo never stopped making his life easy, he thought.

At first he had worried all the time that Zia Guinetta would find out, that she would cast a spell, and his prick, which he loved, that waved like a flag for him every afternoon and night would never stand up again.

After the first time with the widow, he had stopped eating for two days, sure that Zia Guinetta knew and would get her revenge with poison, but when he finally ate and didn't die, he visited the widow again. One more time, he told himself, and then one more time after that. When he realized he would keep seeing her, that she was worth the risk, he gave her the money for the bed and the linen sheets. Every good thing in life had a price attached, he told himself, like the shellfish from Bari that carried the cholera.

Z
ia Guinetta was in her kitchen garden every night picking herbs. Zio Carmelo heard her early in the morning, before the sun came up, boiling them on the stove, grinding them into powders, and even though he was convinced the magic was for Amadeo, when her back was turned, he moved the plates around the table, exchanging the one meant for him with Maria's or Tommaso's.

He took Amadeo to the tailor to make him a corduroy suit and they went into the mountains to hunt for rabbits. Zia Guinetta made stews. Amadeo forgot about his business; he forgot his grief. He let them take care of him, feed him, plan his days. He sat in the coffee bar in the piazza and played cards. He waved to the peasants when they came back from the fields and he waited outside the post office for the mail to come.

There were never any letters for him and he would wonder about it and ask Clemente the postmaster to check again. Clemente would flip through the envelopes a second time, wetting his thumb between each one, his lips moving silently, carefully, as he read the names and addresses. He would trace the ink with his finger. There were never more than three or four letters, but Clemente took a long time because Amadeo was an important person and postmaster was an important position. It was a perfect match, but still he would always get to the end, look up, and shake his head.
“Niente,”
he would say.