I Know This Much Is True

by Wally Lamb

  “Look,” the innocent Teodolina said. “Those two cavalli are doing a dance.”

  “Si,” Violetta said, “the dance that puts a baby inside the mother. All men like that dance!” Then she had her pupils draw nearer and squat to the ground, the better to see the stallion’s thing slamming in and out of the mare, whose flank shook with each thrust, who stood and took whatever he gave her.

  “Aspetti un momento!” I told the Monkey, stopping her. “I tell you to explain how those plumbers from Brooklyn played me for a fool and you talk about fungol between two horses in the Old Country. Make sense, woman, or else put the cork back in the wine jug and shut up your mouth and go to bed.”

  “I tell you my story the way I want to tell it,” she said back. “Or else I don’t tell it at all. Which shall it be, Tempesta? Eh?” I sighed and poured myself some of the wine and waited. She was pezzo grosso that night—that skinny bitch.

  Having attracted the fishermen’s attenzione, Violetta, Anna, and Teodolina began the practice of grooming themselves before they took their noonday strolls. Teodolina and Anna rubbed olive oil into each other’s hair and skin to rid themselves of the accumulated flour which had settled on them all morning and which made them look like old women; the anointing turned them back into flirtatious girls. As for the Monkey, she wanted none of primping and preening. With a face like hers, what good would a little olive oil do? But Violetta, who spent each morning cutting fish for her father, wanted the dried scales and flecks of flesh cleaned from her long dark hair. She kept two tortoiseshell brushes in her apron and always insisted that Prosperine do the brushing—only Prosperine knew how to do it right, she insisted. Some days Violetta snitched a lemon or two from a fruit cart on her way to the macaroni shop. She would cut the fruit and wash her hands with the juice to take away the stink of fish. Sometimes, too, she rubbed lemon against her neck and squeezed the juice between her pretty breasts. Violetta’s naughtiness would have shocked the older people and sometimes shocked the three sisters, too!

  In the summer of the year when Violetta was fifteen, the village padre selected her for the honor of crowning the statue of the Blessed Virgin at the Feast of the Assumption. The custom of Pescara dictated that the heavy statue of the Holy Mother be carted by horse and carriage from the church down to the shore at low tide. There, the waters of the Adriatico would lap at the Virgin’s feet and the sea would be made safe for sailors for the year to come. After ceremonial blessings by the village priest, the statue would then be hoisted by the men of Pescara, sailors and others, and carried in a procession back to the village, through the square, and up the steps of the church. There, parishioners would leave their offerings to the Holy Mother and say prayers, entreating the Vergine to keep their families safe. At the climax of the festivities, the fortunate village girl chosen to crown the Blessed Virgin would emerge from the crowd, dressed in ceremonial bridal gown and veil, and climb the ladder to place a crown of flowers and periwinkles on the top of the statue’s head. The priest’s selection of Violetta for this important honor was a shock to the townspeople and a sweet victory for the quartet of friends! Usually a rich girl was chosen.

  It was during the men’s holy procession through the village that Violetta first saw, from behind the lace of her bridal veil, the face and figure of a blond, lynx-eyed devil named Gallante Selvi. Selvi was a famous stained-glass artist from Milano. He had traveled to Pescara that summer to visit famiglia, bathe in the Adriatico, and draw inspiration from the spectacular Pescaran sunshine. The Monkey’s eyes spotted Gallante Selvi, too, that morning. From the start, she knew that son of a bitch would bring trouble.

  As Violetta slowly climbed the steps with the Virgin’s crown, the faithfully devoted dropped their heads in submission and made the sign of the cross. Not Gallante Selvi. The Monkey watched as that dog stroked his waxed mustache, took a little sip from a silver flask, and eyed Violetta. Violetta, who should have been concentrating on the Blessed Virgin, got to the top step of the ladder and turned to have another peek at Selvi. It was then that she lost her balance and fell, crashing onto the offerings below and demolishing several of the more fragile gifts. But even in the midst of her terrible humiliation, Violetta was distracted with her staring after Gallante Selvi. From the start, her passione for that no-good glass painter was a sickness and a consumption, the Monkey said.

  Selvi entered the macaroni shop the very next morning in the midst of the bustle of pasta-making. “Fetch your father,” he commanded Prosperine, as if he were the king of Italy himself. The Monkey’s sisters stopped their work to stare at him. Not Prosperine! She was not hypnotized like the others by those pretty looks of his. She told him to come back later, after the dough had been kneaded and cut but before her father’s nap. But the great Gallante Selvi would have none of waiting. Like Garibaldi commanding his troops, he ordered Prosperine to do as he said or he would reach across the counter and twist off her nose!

  Selvi told Prosperine’s father that several townspeople had advised him to seek out the macaroni-maker with the shortage of money and the surplus of daughters. He would be leaving Pescara soon, he said, to begin an important commission in the city of Torino. An earthquake there had loosened from its frame an ancient stained-glass triptych at the Cathedral of the Virgin Martyrs and sent it shattering to the ground. What worse tragedy than the loss of great art? But who better than he, Gallante Selvi, to replace it? He would be a year or more designing and executing the new triptych, which would honor Santa Lucia, who had gouged out her eyes in an effort to fend off a rapist—who had made herself horrible to look at so that she might remain pure. On and on and on, that puffed-up painter talked until her father finally interrupted.

  “Scusa, signore,” he said. “I mean no disrespect, but what does all this have to do with me and my surplus of daughters?”

  Gallante Selvi told the Monkey’s father that he had been staying during his visit with his old madrina, who had grown feeble now and needed a housekeeper. He wished to arrange for one before he left. Did the macaroni-maker think he could spare one of his unmarried daughters? The commission in Torino was a generous one. He could make it worth his while.

  Although the three sisters stood side by side, Papa looked only at Prosperine. “Come into the other room, Signore Selvi, come in and sit,” he told the artiste, and Prosperine’s knees knocked together from what the two men might be planning.

  By the time Gallante Selvi left the shop, the Monkey had been hired to sweep and gather firewood for the painter’s old godmother, and to feed her goats and chickens and help with a small business she maintained. In exchange, she would be provided a place to eat and sleep. Her father had received a small first payment and would get the balance at Christmastime, when Gallante Selvi returned to Pescara. Prosperine’s father told her he was sorry to lose a good daughter and macaroni-maker, but that he could not afford to pass up the money Gallante Selvi had offered him. Business had been worse than ever that year, he said, and such opportunity did not often walk through the door of the macaroni shop.

  Prosperine dropped to her knees and begged her father to void the agreement he had made. In her mind, she saw Teodolina, Anna, and Violetta strolling through the village without her. Who would keep those silly girls in line as they paraded themselves on the docks? Who would comb the fish scales out of Violetta’s hair? Only she could do it properly! “Why choose me?” she sobbed.

  “Because you are the homeliest and most responsible,” he answered. “My selecting you is a compliment to your seriousness and your domestic abilities.”

  “If this is my reward, then I fart on such flattery!” she shouted back.

  Her father reached back and let fly his open hand against her face. He had hit the girl before, but never this hard.

  “You’ll see your sisters every day in the square if you like,” he told her later, after she had quieted again and her face had swollen up like macaroni in the pot. “The old woman’s business brings her into town each d
ay. You know who she is: the butcher-woman who sits in that little space near the church, across from the trattoria. The poor hunchback.”

  “Ciccolina?” Prosperine screamed. “You’ve given me away to that crazy witch?” When she heard this terrible news, the Monkey wailed loudly enough for Heaven to hear. She hugged her father’s knees, calling on the saints and the apostles to end her life and save her from this terrible fate. Now what she dreaded most was not separation from the others, but that ugly witch’s vengeance. Surely Ciccolina would recognize the mocking voice of the girl who had so often insulted her! Surely Prosperine would die from this arrangement her father had made, or go bald, or discover that her blood had curdled!

  But her father showed her no mercy.

  When Violetta D’Annunzio heard of Prosperine’s fate, she shed fat tears and hugged her friend and volunteered to walk with her the next morning to the strega’s house near the woods and to carry her basket of belongings, the better to give her a sad and proper goodbye.

  Along the road the next day, the Monkey’s steps were slow and heavy, but Violetta seemed, almost, to race toward their destination. How much longer did that haughty painter say he was staying in Pescara? she asked Prosperine. What had his voice sounded like the day he had entered her father’s shop? Were those eyes of his green or blue?

  As Ciccolina’s thatched roof came into sight between the trees, Violetta insisted that they stop first and wash their dirty feet in a nearby stream in case the old woman had visitors. Violetta produced the familiar tortoiseshell brushes and insisted, too, that her friend brush her long hair one last time. On that day, Violetta was wearing her prettiest blouse—the one that Prosperine herself had sewn, embroidering the bodice with wildflowers and cutting the neckline an inch or two below the clavicola. As Violetta bent over, the Monkey brushed and peeked inside that blouse at her friend’s pretty tette. Her tears fell into her friend’s long brown hair.

  I drank some wine and laughed at her. “What does one girl care about peeking at another girl’s ‘pretty tette’?” I asked. “You sound like a man!”

  She stood and went to leave the room.

  “Where are you going, eh?” I said.

  “To bed,” she said. “Where no one laughs at me and calls me uomo.”

  “Stay,” I said. I pulled her by her sleeve back to the chair. “Sit and finish your story, Signorina Hothead. Finish my jug of wine, too, what the hell! Don’t walk away now that I’m interested.”

  “Interested?” she asked. Her eyes were stupid from the wine.

  “Si,” I said. “I want to find out what happened to you and the witch. . . . Tell me more about your friend’s ‘pretty tette.’ “

  She sat. “If you’re interested,” she said, “then show some respect. Keep your mouth shut while I speak. Now where was I?” I told her where and she went on.

  * * *

  Just as Violetta and Prosperine reached the clearing where Ciccolina lived, the Monkey said, they stopped, suddenly, and gasped. There, in the adjacent field, stood Gallante Selvi, barefooted, his hair crazy, his body covered only by a nightshirt too short and flimsy to serve the cause of decency. The girls stood frozen for several minutes and watched as the artiste painted the air with invisible brushes, arguing with himself, bending to scribble on a tablet on the ground. “Demente!” the Monkey whispered, but Violetta was too mesmerized to hear.

  “Ah, so here you are, you lazy girl,” Selvi said when he eyed his employee. “Lucky for you my work has put me in a good mood, or else I’d slap you for your tardiness.”

  Prosperine told him she was not late—that she had arrived earlier than expected. (This was because of Violetta’s eager pace along the road!) She looked to Violetta to confirm what she had said, but that naughty girl was paying no attention to words. She was too busy watching the place where Gallante Selvi’s nightshirt ended and his privacy began.

  Oblivious, Selvi began babbling about his work—about a vision that had come to him as he woke from a dream that morning. “This will be my masterpiece—my legacy to all of Italy!” he boasted. Then he turned to Violetta, noticing her for the first time.

  As Selvi looked her up and down, Violetta blushed and turned away. “And what wind carries you here, pretty one?” he asked. “I don’t remember bargaining with the macaroni-maker for two housekeepers for Zia Ciccolina.”

  “Sir,” Violetta said in a squeaky voice. “I’m just escorting my friend.”

  “Sir,” Gallante Selvi repeated, “I’m just escorting my friend.” He put his hands against his hips and wiggled girlishly as he mimicked her words. Shameless, he was, that one! Those coglioni of his flopped back and forth beneath his nightshirt.

  Then, without warning, Selvi snatched Prosperine by the hand. She let out a little scream. “See her tragic story with me, little housekeeper!” he said, dragging the Monkey through the field, pointing here and there at nothing. “See my vision! In the first panel, on the left, Lucia the Innocent prays piously! Opposite that, on the right, she’s a saint in Heaven, the holy patroness of sight. In the middle—the largest window—she rips her eyes from her head! Embraces her debasement! Blood streams down her face! Her tormentor recoils as the angels bear witness! Oh, such a tragedy to make you weep, the story of the brave little saint! I will paint my Lucia so that her sacrificio, depicted there before you in vetro colorito, will make you drop to your knees and howl with grief for that saintly girl!”

  Here, that figliu d’una mingia of a crazy artist stopped abruptly and jerked his head back at Violetta. He circled her, making the sign of the cross and staring rudely. His breath blew against her face. “I have seen you before?” he asked.

  Violetta was too afraid to answer.

  “Sir,” Prosperine said. “You saw her in the village at the Feast of the Assumption, but her face was veiled. She was the clumsy girl who crowned the Holy Mother and fell off the ladder.”

  He ignored the Monkey and spoke directly to Violetta. “You are the one. Yes?”

  “Which one is that, signore?” Violetta squeaked out.

  “The one delivered to me by divine intervention.”

  “Delivered, sir?”

  “The saints have sent you to me, have they not, Santa Lucia?” He reached over and fingered her hair, kneaded her cheeks as if they were bread dough. “Such eyes! Such facial bones! Perfezione! . . . Have the saints willed you to me, Lucia? Has Heaven itself commissioned my work?” As he stared and touched and circled her, red blotches appeared on Violetta’s face and neck. The girl was breaking out in hives!

  “I must begin sketching you immediately—capture you in case you are a spirit who will dissipate.”

  “A spirit, signore?” Violetta asked. With the sailors on the docks, my friend had a voice as loud as the fire bell that shouted to all Pescara. But with Gallante Selvi, she could only squeak like a mouse.

  “Come with me,” he said, taking her hand in his. “Come down to the sea this instant. I must study your face in brilliant light—must let the sun be my collaboratore! Inspiration is a fickle mistress, after all—keep her waiting and she may desert you for another!”

  He leaned forward and kissed Violetta’s eyelids—made, with his thumb, the sign of the cross on her forehead. Reaching behind her, he gave her cula a little squeeze, as if she were a melon instead of a “saint.” “My sweet Virgin Martyr,” he whispered, sniffing the air around her. From the start, Selvi acted like the dog he was in Violetta’s presence. “My Lucia, who has been sent to me by the saints themselves!”

  “Her name is Violetta D’Annunzio,” the Monkey said. “Her father sells fish.”

  “Shut up and go inside to your work!” he ordered, without looking away from Violetta. “Catch up on all you’ve missed by being late!”

  “I was not late, sir,” the Monkey reminded him again. “Violetta has to walk home now and make the baccala. And as for you, sir, you should put on your pants.”

  “Scusa, Lucia,” that figliu d’una mingia said t
o the fishmonger’s daughter. He took her hand and kissed each finger. “Un minuto, un minuto.” He approached the Monkey and boxed her ears so hard that they rang like the church bells at Easter. He yanked her nose, too, and gave her a shove toward the old woman’s house. Then he turned back to her best friend and dropped to his knees.

  “Santa Lucia, my blind patroness of vision, help me see! Help me see!” That crazy artiste was begging Violetta, praying to her as if she was a statue! Then he got up and took her hand again, leading her past Ciccolina’s goats and chickens. Over an embankment the two of them ran, that crazy painter hurrying Violetta toward the sound of the sea.

  Prosperine stood staring at the place where they had disappeared, tears falling from her eyes. Should she run for Violetta’s father? For her own? She listened for Violetta’s screams, her cries for help that did not come. And when she looked back at the hut again, the old hunchback was out in the yard, standing stooped among her chickens, beckoning her.

  * * *

  Prosperine pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and blew her nose. I had assumed that hard little stone incapable of tears. She had shed none over Ignazia’s troubles the day and night before—no tears for the death of my infant son. She took a gulp of wine. Another. A third. She was talking like a husband who wears the horns! But I held my tongue and waited. Then she blew her nose again, pushed the cloth back into her sleeve, and sighed. Continued.

  If the old witch recognized Prosperine as her tormenter from the village square, she said nothing, took no revenge. Compared with macaroni-making, the work was easy. Ciccolina demanded little and taught the girl much: how to peel back a rabbit’s skin in a single, untorn sheet, how to make a soothing bath of almond water, how to fashion a pipe from clay and smoke. It was from Ciccolina that the Monkey learned the comfort and pleasure of tobacco.