I Know This Much Is True

by Wally Lamb

  “You said he left Pescara,” I protested.

  “I told you he left,” she said. “I tell you now he came back!”

  My heart raced; my hands were moist with sweat. “Sit, then,” I told her. “Sit and tell me the rest.”

  After she had seen the witch’s magical twinning of the rabbits, Prosperine devoted herself entirely to the old strega, whom she now both feared and loved. She begged Ciccolina to teach her the powers, but for weeks the old woman put her off with nods and smiles, pretending not to hear. Then, as the season of the Epiphany approached, the old hunchback began to hint that the time was drawing near—that midnight on Christmas Eve was the hour when mothers gave their daughters the gift of secrets.

  And that was when she taught her—on the last Christmas Eve of her life, before it was too late. At midnight, as the church bells rang in the village to celebrate the birth of the Christ child, Ciccolina began Prosperine’s lessons: how to diagnose and cure il mal occhio. The girl begged her to teach her the other, too—how to inflict the evil eye, cause suffering on those who had wronged her. She had enemies, after all: those villagers who had spat on her in the square and called her “little witch”; a father who had betrayed her for Gallante Selvi’s money; and, most of all, Gallante Selvi himself—he who had turned her friend Violetta against her and kidnapped her from her village! But Ciccolina refused to teach the Monkey the art of revenge. Maybe the old woman suspected she would use bad power against her godson. Maybe not. The world was already too full of bad intent, Ciccolina told her—already too full of prideful people wanting to take over God’s work for Him.

  On that Christmas Eve, Ciccolina took from inside her shawl a necklace of red chilis which she had strung and dried the summer before. “Wear this,” she ordered Prosperine. “The point of the corno bursts the evil eye and protects you.”

  She told the girl to take out olive oil and to draw three bowls of Holy Water from the cistern that Padre Pomposo had blessed on his visit the summer before. Into the night, the Monkey repeated the incantations that Ciccolina spoke, practiced the reading of the oil on the water. When the old woman was satisfied that the gift had been transferred, she spat into her hand and told the girl to close her eyes. She rubbed the wet from her mouth into the skin of each eyelid. “Che puozze schiatta!” she murmured—over and over she said it, not to Prosperine but to the darkness. Then she had the girl rub the hump on her back for good luck. “Benedicia!” she said. “Use what you know against evil.”

  She died the next month, beside the Monkey, on the bed where the two slept each night. Prosperine suspected it as soon as she woke in the morning. She jumped from that mattress of husks and feathers, trying to call and shake the old strega back to life. When she was sure she was gone, she poured Holy Water into a bowl, placed it beside the body, and sprinkled the oil on top. The beads did not spread but held firm on the surface, which meant that Ciccolina’s soul rested peacefully. The Monkey thumb-shut the old woman’s eyes and kissed her hands, her face, even the purple lump on her forehead. The butcher-woman had been kind to her, like a madre, and Prosperine had come to love even her ugly parts.

  The notary sent word to Gallante Selvi about Ciccolina’s death and the painter sent back instructions that Prosperine was to continue to maintain his godmother’s house and butcher business. He would return to Pescara after the solstice to pay her father for her services and to paint his colored glass in the summer light of Pescara. Nowhere else in all of Italy was the illumination so perfect for his work in vetro colorito. The visit would, as well, allow his little wife to enjoy a homecoming with her many admirers.

  His little wife! If he was not lying about the marriage, then he was a bigger figliu d’una minga than the Monkey had imagined. And Violetta D’Annunzio was a bigger fool!

  At this, I held up my hand to stop Signorina Monkey-Face. “Aspetti un momento!” I said. “Is this a riddle you tell?”

  “This is truth I tell!” she protested. “Why do you say ‘riddle’?”

  “It’s a puzzle to me to understand how your pretty friend had been a fool to trade her life of fish-cleaning and giggling at sailors for a life as a rich artist’s wife and model. Ha! What did you expect—that Selvi would have immortalized you in a work of holy art? Married you? And what’s this about your killing the poor man? How did you kill him—burst the blood vessels in his brain with il mal occhio?”

  Her fist banged the table, made me jump back. “I killed him with his own art,” she croaked.

  “What? Quit this fantasy, woman. My chianti has turned you lunatic.”

  “Your chianti has made me talk truth to a fool,” she snapped back. “You would be wise be keep quiet while I’m in the mood to tell my secrets.”

  “All right, then, talk!” I said. “Talk until the sun comes up. Talk until your tongue falls out of your mouth. How did you kill this poor painter? Tell me! Talk!”

  Gallante Selvi made a grand show of his return to Pescara. He and Violetta arrived at the square in a caravan of three horse-drawn carriages and one horse-drawn cart. The first carriage held the couple themselves and their fancy luggage. In the second were the finished pieces of Selvi’s precious “masterpiece,” to be pieced and soldered together later in Torino. The third carriage held Selvi’s crates of supplies. In the open cart sat the small kiln the artist used to bake his paintings onto glass. Each small glass section of the masterpiece-to-be was wrapped in buntings and blankets to guard against breakage. Ha! Violetta, too, was wrapped in packaging—a fur-trimmed red bolero with gold aigletti, a fancy fur toque on her head. She would have seemed quite the lady if she had not looked so shrunken and miserable in her fine new clothes.

  Naturally, their showy arrival at midday drew a crowd. Selvi was always happy to act the strombazzatore. He stood and made a speech about beauty and art. He and Violetta had returned, he said, to mourn at the graves of his beloved madrina and Violetta’s beloved padre, and so that he could capture in chiaroscuro for the Santa Lucia triptych the rich blue shades of the Adriatico as it looked only off the Pescaran coast. He described the terrible inconvenience of being so far from the glassworks at Torino and from his trusted glazier who bound together the pieces of his art with ribs of lead. But he had willingly taken on the trouble of doing his own firing and glazing to be in Pescara. His palette would not be limited by mere geography, he told the crowd. Only the hues found in Pescara would do for the cloak and the eyes of Santa Lucia, the Virgin Martyr!

  Here he took Violetta’s gloved hand and kissed it and the village women sighed. All but the Monkey! She spat on the ground at the lies of that faccia brutta.

  Selvi and the Monkey’s father decided that she should stay at Ciccolina’s house and cook and clean for the artiste and his “fine lady” of a wife while they visited. As usual, the macaroni-maker ignored Prosperine’s protests and told her that a complaining daughter was a howling dog begging to be beaten.

  On their first day in Pescara, Violetta and Selvi were polite and affectionate with each other—putting on a show for the benefit of Padre Pomposo and the other important visitors to Ciccolina’s little cottage. But that night, through the wall, Prosperine heard the first of the couple’s fighting and fisticuffs.

  The next morning, Selvi complained that the cornmeal Prosperine had cooked for his breakfast had no grit and was swill for pigs. He threw the cereal against the wall, barely missing the Monkey’s head, and then left to walk the seacoast.

  Violetta came into the little kitchen, hiding her swollen eye with her hand. She told Prosperine that she should forget about their past friendship. That was long ago, she said, and many things had changed. Prosperine would do well to remember who was the servant and who was mistress.

  “Smell your hands, Signora Aristocratica,” the Monkey retorted. “No doubt they still stink from fish.”

  A scowl overtook Violetta’s swollen and bruised face. “Prepare me a warm bath and then leave me,” she said. Prosperine did the first thing but not th
e second. From the doorway, she stood watching as Violetta disrobed, exposing the pretty pink flesh that that son of a bitch Selvi had marred with welts and bruises. Violetta flinched when she turned and saw the Monkey. “Get out! Get out!” she screamed. “I won’t stand for this disobedience!” But Prosperine approached instead.

  Violetta grabbed her nightgown and clutched it to herself. So many injuries, she could not cover them all. Prosperine’s heart ached to see the damage Selvi had done. “This would not have happened,” she told Violetta, “if you had not let him make you his puttana.”

  “How dare you call me names!” Violetta shouted back. “You, who let that old hag turn you into a witch-woman!”

  “Bah!” Prosperine answered. “Puta!”

  “Bah!” Violetta answered back. “Strega!”

  “Puta!”

  “Strega!”

  “Puta!”

  “Strega!” Violetta reached out and slapped the Monkey across the face.

  When Prosperine raised her hand to slap back, Violetta shrank with such fear in her eyes that her friend’s hand dropped down again. Gallante Selvi’s cringing wife was nothing like the saucy girl who had paraded on the docks for the fishermen and explained the “dancing” horses to Prosperine and her sisters. The artiste had beaten all that out of her. Now Violetta seemed as doomed as the rabbits outside in the old woman’s cages—as tethered to her fate as Ciccolina’s goat.

  The two women collapsed into each other’s arms, rocking back and forth and weeping. For the rest of that morning, Violetta told what her year had been. One beating after another, umiliazione upon umiliazione. Once, when she had refused Selvi in their bed, he accused her of being unfaithful—of being more slippery than the surfaces on which he painted. “Unfaithful with whom?” she had demanded, and Selvi had named half the drunks he’d invited into their appartamento, describing in detail the squalid acts she supposedly had performed on each. Then, as if she were guilty of those deeds of which he had wrongly accused her, he dragged her to the washing basin and held her head down in the water so long she was sure she would drown. Another time, when she had fidgeted too much while posing as Santa Lucia, he had thrown her against the wall and knocked her unconscious. Her left shoulder never worked right after that. “And he has a friend, Rodolpho, a dirty pig of a fotografo,” Violetta whispered, amidst her sobs and pauses. “Twice Gallante made me pose for that filthy man—ordered me to take off my clothes and spread my legs and worse while that other one took pictures. The second time, I begged him no. I was in the middle of miscarriage, Prosperine! That night, Gallante accused me of enjoying what he had made me do for that photographer and burned me on the back and legs. What kind of man makes his wife do such things and burns her besides? I tell you, Prosperine, I made a tragic mistake the day I left Pescara. Many times I have thought about ending my life to be rid of him. How much worse could Hell be than marriage to that monster who paints the saints but is himself the devil?”

  When Violetta had no more terrible stories left to tell, no more tears inside her head, Prosperine bathed her in almond water and rubbed olive oil onto those bruises and scars. Then she dressed her and brushed her hair as she had done before. Violetta still had the tortoiseshell brushes—that much was the same. She told Prosperine her touch was medicine and the Monkey put her to bed in clean clothes and watched her sleep.

  That afternoon in the village square, Prosperine killed and dressed many rabbits—a busy day. Never had butchering satisfied her more. Each head she hacked off, each body she watched twitch and bleed, belonged to that son of a bitch Gallante Selvi. He would suffer for what he had done to her friend. She promised herself that much. He would pay with his life.

  But it was not so easy. What could she do? Stick a knife in his heart while half of Pescara watched him paint the glass? Behead him in the village square with his madrina’s big cleaver? He deserved such a fate, but she would not live the rest of her life in a dark cell. Not with her beloved friend returned to Pescara—not with Violetta to care for and protect.

  At first she tried to inflict il mal occhio. Although Ciccolina had refused to teach her the art of vengeance, she hoped that, since she knew how to cure and diagnose the evil eye, she might also have the power to gaze with it, too—to give devils what they deserved when God Himself was too busy to do the job. For the next two, three days, she stared at Gallante Selvi with hatred in her soul. Stared at him while he slept and ate, painted and soldered. Glared back in defiance when he yelled out his list of complaints about her work: her sweeping raised dust and made him sneeze, her scowling face made his eyes hurt, the cornmeal she boiled for his breakfast each morning had no salt or grit.

  But her staring did no good. The longer and harder she watched Gallante Selvi with wicked intent, the more powerful and healthy he seemed to become. At night, Violetta’s begging and sobbing would wake her from troubled sleep. In the morning, the suffering wife would tell Prosperine her latest shame, show off her new bruises—teeth marks, once, on her leg, as if she had married a vicious dog instead of a man! But he was a dead dog, that one. That much the Monkey promised herself. And when she first whispered the word murder to Violetta, Violetta did not stop her. She listened quietly, her hands fidgeting. Fear and hope were in her eyes.

  The triptych—Gallante’s unfinished “masterpiece”—was not going well. He was a perfectionist when he worked, always painting small studies on glass squares before adding even a fingernail or a fold to the half-completed work. When these efforts displeased him, he would throw them against the wall or kick the goat or yank his wife’s long hair or slap her face. He would melt lead cable, soldering one finished piece of glass to another, and then hate what he had joined, pulling the pieces apart and smashing a day’s or several days’ work against the iron kiln. All of his attempts to capture with paint on glass the gloomy azzurro of the sea were failures to his critical eye. Over and over, he mixed his pigments and lead powders and tried the results on squares of milky glass. He wrote down his recipes and waited like an expectant father for the paint to bake itself onto the glass inside the kiln. Always, when he yanked it out again and held the result to the sun, he saw that it was wrong and flung the hot glass, shouting terrible curses: “I shit on the Virgin Mary!” he would say, or “May Jesus Christ fuck your sister!”

  Prosperine was expected after these tantrums to drop her work and sweep up his mess. Selvi liked the freedom of working barefooted and warned her that he would beat her blind if he cut his feet. And so, whenever she heard the smashing, she had to grab her broom and run. Each day she added new breakage, spilled paint pots, and jumbles of lead wire to the pile out past where the goats were kept. Then one morning, a kid chewed through its rope and helped himself to some of Selvi’s wreckage. Later that day, Prosperine watched the creature vomit up glass and wire. Before the sun set, that poor goat convulsed and bled and died from what was inside him. Then she knew how she would kill Gallante Selvi.

  They prepared for days, Violetta and she, whispering secretly when Gallante was near and hurrying to their preparations when he left. They decided they would do the job on Sunday—the only day of the week when Prosperine was not obliged to go to the square and butcher. She collected Selvi’s discards of colored glass, broke the shards into chips and crumbs, and ground these to a fine powder. Crunch crunch crunch—she could still hear the sound of the glass between the mortar and pestle, she said. In a pot on the stove, she soaked and boiled scraps of the cable he used for glazing. Little by little, they would poison him with lead and cut up his insides with glass. They worked when he went to the tavern to drink, or to the ocean to swim. If they could only get him to swallow the food they tainted, they would be rid of his tyranny. By Saturday Prosperine and Violetta had many handfuls of fine, glittering powder.

  “Tomorrow morning, his cornmeal will have grit, all right,” Prosperine whispered to Violetta. “More grit than he bargained for!” But she would take no chances: on that day, she would cook for his
afternoon meal some special braciola rolled with ground veal and walnuts and more of their special powdered glass. For dinner, she would roast him a chicken stuffed with cornbread and pignoli and plenty more of that powder! By nighttime or the day after, he would be as dead as Ciccolina’s little goat. That bastardo would die from his own digestione!

  Prosperine sat still in the chair and closed her eyes. Was she telling the truth? Telling a story to frighten me? Had she fallen into torpore from all that wine? Why had she stopped her story at this inconvenient place?

  “Wake up,” I said, and shook her sleeve. Her eyes popped open.

  “Tempesta,” she growled. “It worked!”

  That next morning, Gallante Selvi ate his breakfast with no complaints—two bowls of the gritty mush made with extra salt and grit and the lead-poisoned water. Violetta and Prosperine busied themselves, holding their breath until the last spoonful had been swallowed—until they heard the sound of Selvi’s satisfied belch. An hour later, he was already complaining of thirst and nausea and a strange taste that would not leave his mouth. If he could only shit, he said, he’d feel better.

  “One of Ciccolina’s laxatives will fix you,” Prosperine told him. “It tastes vile but it does the job.” She brewed him a tea of lemon-weed and fennel and lead water, with a big pinch of something extra. “Your madrina taught me this recipe,” she said, handing Selvi the tea. “The gravel in it will loosen you up. Drink it quick, not slow. Two cups of the stuff are better than one.”

  He swallowed it gratefully in long gulps that made his pomo d’Adamo go up and down, up and down. “Grazi, signorina! Grazi!” he told Prosperine, wiping his mouth and lying back on his bed. On that last day of his life, Gallante Selvi was the politest of gentlemen!

  By noontime, he was whimpering and moaning and pulling up his shirt so that Violetta and his servant-girl could watch the strange movements of his stomach. He complained that his insides felt hot, his head felt dizzy. His hands could not make fists. “A good big meal will settle that stomach of yours,” Prosperine told him. She helped him off the bed and to the table. But when she placed the plate of braciola in front of him, Selvi coughed a milky vomit onto the uneaten food.