The Demon Catchers of Milan (21 page)

S
o those were the middle days of December: streets strung with lights that said
Buon Natale
; thick, freezing industrial fog that left my nostrils black on the inside; the smell of sweet breads baking, and the rustle of paper as I made the acquaintance of dead relations and their fellow dead Milanese, in the books I was able to read faster and faster. Some mornings I still woke up with my feet kicking together like they had when I was first recovering from my possession, but I had no bad dreams, and I hardly thought about my demon. I didn’t know how much I would need this peace and quiet, not yet.

I wasn’t looking forward to Christmas. Christmas meant tons of presents, a froth of wrapping paper around the tree in the morning, Mom’s special coffee cake at breakfast, and a huge
roast beef at dinner (I don’t know what family tradition that was from, since it didn’t seem very Italian to me, from what I knew now).

I have to admit my studies suffered during the holidays, not only the books and the meditations, but the time with Signora Negroponte. The nine days before Christmas, called the Novena, were full of family rituals, Masses, fairs, and parades.

Anna Maria showed up one morning in the most ordinary, worn-out clothes I’d ever seen her in, still looking perfect, of course, and also looking surprised that I was downstairs in the shop. Everybody thought someone else had told me that particular day was special. She chivvied me upstairs and shooed me into my own most worn-out clothes, telling me to come to the kitchen when I was done: when I arrived, I saw every baking bowl and pan out on the counters.

But all the bowls were empty. It took me a second to realize that everyone was waiting for me. Aunt Brigida motioned me to a chair at the kitchen table and passed me a metal bowl. Anna Maria took up a rolling pin and aimed it menacingly at the bowl in front of her.

“One, two, three,” counted Nonna, and on “three” they all banged their bowls hard on the table and shouted,
“VAI VIA, VAI VIA, VAI VIA!”

I nearly jumped out of my skin.

They all grinned at me.

“Mia, want to try it again?” asked Nonna.

“Uh, all right,” I said.

We did it again.

“One, two, three …”

“VAI VIA, VAI VIA, VAI VIA!”
we chanted. It felt good.

“One time for all, much louder!” commanded Nonna.

“VAI VIA, VAI VIA, VAI VIA!”
we roared, banging the pots.

“Excellent,” she said. “Now we begin.”

“What …?” I began when I got my breath back. Nonna shook her head.

“There’s time to talk once we get going,
mia piccola interrogatrice
,” Francesca said.

I translated in my head:
little question, maybe
? I stuck out my tongue at her, and she smiled. The recipe looked like it had been written on reused, re-scraped parchment, like some of the notes they’d let me see. Brigida pointed at it with one mauve-polished nail.

“Old family recipe from my great-great-great-grandfather. He was related to the Sforzas. Didn’t like the Della Torres. Would have been furious to know that his own children were going to pass this recipe on to them! I think he would have been angrier about the recipe than about my marriage a hundred years later. But then, panettone, it’s a very important thing, a special Milanese sweet bread. A nobleman who was in love with a baker’s daughter made it for her, that’s how the first one was made. Nobody makes it from scratch anymore.”

“Except the lunatic Della Torres,” Anna Maria put in, not very nicely. The others ignored her, and we set to work, measuring and kneading and mixing. As I said, panettone did seem like a lot of trouble. I couldn’t really see the point, but I liked sneaking
bits of candied lemon and orange peel. I took my sweater off as the room warmed, smelling of vanilla sugar, orange flowers, and rising bread. I listened while everybody gossiped.

Brigida told about her friend Sandra, who had announced at a family dinner on Sant’Ambrogio’s day that: 1) she was leaving her husband; 2) she had never liked his mistress; and finally 3) she was moving in with a university student less than half her age, and her family could just live with it or never talk to her again, she didn’t care either way; she was sick of cleaning and cooking for them anyway. She had then gotten up from the table, picked up a suitcase she’d had standing behind the door, and walked out of the apartment. Apparently in the stunned silence that had followed this announcement, her youngest son, who was still in school, had also stood up and said, “And
I’m
gay,” and followed her out the door.

While she measured flour, Anna Maria said coolly, “Gay is no big deal,” shocking her mother and aunt.

Everyone wanted to know how my family was doing: Had Gina done well in the play, and how was her boyfriend? Had my mother gotten over her cold? Did I think my father would ever come visit?

Francesca dropped a bowl—
bang, bang, bang!
—and I remembered the shouting that had preceded the baking.

“So how come we shout ‘out, out, out’?” I asked.

Brigida blinked. “Because we always have,” she said.

“Every little bit helps, in this house,” Francesca explained.

Everyone had stopped working to look at me.

“It reminds me of New Year’s, especially out in the countryside,”
said Anna Maria. “Out in the villages, people throw all kinds of crap in the streets—old dishes, bottles, even bicycles and bathtubs—and meanwhile it’s just like here, all these obnoxious little boys running around throwing firecrackers under your feet.”

“Yes,” said Nonna. “They do it for the same reasons, too, even if they don’t remember.”

“
I
don’t remember,” said Brigida, so plaintively we all laughed.

They never really answered my question, but I had plenty of time to think about it over the next few days while I helped in the kitchen. These women were up to something, I was sure of it. It wasn’t just about baking a bread that everyone else buys at the bakery or the grocery store because it’s such a pain to make, although that seemed a typically Della Torre thing to do. I was related to a bunch of baking nerds.

At least they warned me about the fast before Christmas Eve, where we didn’t eat anything between meals for twenty-four hours. The worst part was cooking all afternoon on Christmas Eve. Once I unthinkingly started to pop a slice of
grana
into my mouth. Nonna slapped my hand hard enough to make me cry. I stomped out of the kitchen for a minute and stood in the hall. When my hand stopped stinging, I went back in. I didn’t exactly apologize. Instead I said, keeping my voice steady, “What should I do next?”

I guess that was okay, because she showed me. It wasn’t that great an afternoon, because by then I was dizzy with hunger. Emilio showed up with a giant pot of
zuppa di pesce
—fish soup, though it sounds much cooler in Italian. It smelled gorgeous.
He said to his grandmother, “It’s not my best this year.”

I stared at him.

“You cook?” I asked.

He gave me his most condescending look, then turned around, rolled up his sleeves, and took over the tortellini making from Nonna.

Anna Maria arrived with a basket of frozen wild mushrooms from one of her lovesick boyfriends. As usual, she broke an unspoken rule about not complaining by saying, “
Ciao
, Mia! I’m so hungry I could eat an ox, couldn’t you?”

“Two,” I agreed, grinning.

“Enough, enough,” growled Nonna. “You’ll get your chance.”

Everybody was crabby by then, but at least we could distract ourselves with the arrival of more and more people with more and more food. Giuliano and Matteo appeared, singing loudly and carrying bags of seafood—different fish wrapped in paper, fresh mussels, shrimp, and scallops, all of which went straight into the sink, and then into pans, the scallops to bake with marsala and almonds, the mussels to cook with a bunch of leeks I’d been washing and chopping. Finally Égide arrived in a violently fuchsia silk scarf, carrying a case of wine. Francesco followed him in, singing too, and upset the first bottle to get opened.

“I’ll clean it up,” said Nonna, cuffing him on the shoulder. “You sit. We all need to eat.”

She pressed him into a chair, did something incredibly quick and complex with a towel, and at last, to my relief, we sat down to the feast.

NINETEEN

All Are Invited

I
’m not known for my love of fish. But I think that dinner is the one I’ll remember when I’m dying.

“Slowly, slowly,” Giuliano laughed; embarrassed, I took his advice. “This is a special goose, an old family tradition. Most Italians just have a lot of fish dishes. Always an odd number, that’s important.”

We had a lot of fish dishes, too. I used to hate fish when I was little, but I’d gotten over that; I think I would have loved it then if I could have eaten fish like this. Everything tasted heavenly, from Emilio’s
zuppa di pesce
, to the fresh mussels Giuliano had brought home, to the risotto with shrimp and champagne that Francesca conjured up at the last minute.

We feasted for hours, finishing with espresso after espresso, because although all anyone wanted to do was lie down and
sleep for a day, we still were going to ten o’clock Mass, even Francesca and Égide, who never went to Mass.

By then, I was happy again. We bundled out into the night air, stamping in the chill, and I could hear singing in the streets. We made the short walk to Santa Maria del Carmine and heard the bells swing above us just as we all lined up at the font. That’s the only moment I felt truly homesick, smelling the musty water and remembering my grandparents. Again I thought how angry my grandfather would be if he could see me here. I wondered if he had been right, after all, to leave this family and this place.

The whole church was filled with candles, and every altar was decorated with holly and mistletoe, just like every threshold in our apartment. A huge
presepio
, or crèche, full of shepherds and sheep, stood in an alcove. I settled down between Égide and Anna Maria to space out and look at the sculptures and paintings in the shadows. The priest started to drone.

I fixed my eyes on a Madonna in the corner. The sculptor had obviously tried to give her a thoughtful expression, but instead she looked like the Baby Jesus had been giving her a hard time that day. She had the usual starry robe, but I really liked her pedestal: a huge bear cut out of black marble. The bear looked like it could stand there forever without getting tired or, if anybody tried to get fresh with the Virgin, it could drop them with one whack of its huge, long-clawed paw. I couldn’t see its eyes under the dark shadow of its brow; I kept trying to make them out and fell into a kind of trance.

“Justice! I want justice!” someone screamed.

We all turned around to stare at the back of the church.

A young woman with dark hair, wearing a gray, cashmere, cowl-necked sweater, was standing and pointing—at us. Her voice dropped to a rolling growl that sounded too much like the voice that had come from Signora Galleazzo, but even more like the voice I had heard inside me. I saw that her eyes were rolled back in her head, and the skin of her face was rippling and moving.

“Justice, justice, justice,” she snarled, never lowering her pointing finger.

“It’s
him
,” I sobbed, knowing it as I said it aloud.

People were staring at us, too. An acolyte hurried up to her.

“You must come outside with me,” he said gently, but as he touched her sleeve, his face went white and he sank to his knees.

“Mother of God,” he gasped.

I needed to vomit. I needed to run. It was going to happen here. My feet were going to kick together, my body would rise—

“You’re not welcome here,” cried the priest, rushing down the aisle toward her. “You are not welcome here!”

She gave a hideous, high laugh that echoed back from the corners and the vaults.

“Your sign says all are welcome, all are welcome!” she shrieked. “I was
invited
!”

Signora Negroponte’s rules about houses flashed in my mind, and I understood.

“Justice!” she screamed.

Then she began to rise into the air. I heard her shoes scrape off the marble in the silence.

I screamed, too. People stood up, panicking. The acolyte struggled to his feet and started to steer them to the door. Anna Maria gripped my arm so hard it hurt.

No place was safe, even a church, warded by centuries of law.

“Stay still,” hissed Anna Maria. “We have to protect you.”

Giuliano, Emilio, and Matteo were up, watching, apparently deciding.

The priest stood in front of the woman, shouting, holding his Bible with both hands: at least he seemed to know exactly what he was looking at. The acolyte was vomiting on the marble floor. The woman spun slowly in the air, twisting her head to keep her eyes on me.

“You,”
she whispered harshly, and the whisper cut through the cries of the priest. “You are mine. To me you will come in the end. Let all here know it. You are mine!”

My mind froze. Everyone was staring at me, as I stared into the eyes of my enemy.

Then the oddest thing happened. As if they were right under my fingers, I could feel the doorknobs in my parents’ house. I could feel myself checking them like I used to do, so many nights. I thought,
How far I have come
, and my mind unfroze. I felt strength descend on me like a mantle.

“Let me go, Anna Maria,” I said gently, and to my surprise she did. I stood up and faced my enemy.

I don’t know what made me say it.

“Come and get me.”

She shrieked in triumph and came at me over the pews, her feet banging against the back of each one.

I thought,
All right, this is it. It was a good life. I hope I don’t hurt anyone
.

I felt my family pushed back down the aisle by the force of her attack. I didn’t see them push toward me again, once she focused completely on me.