The Oracle of Cumae

by Melissa Hardy

  “Umberto Umbellino,” someone cried out. “You tell it best!”

  “Yes, Umberto tells it best! He shall be our storyteller!”

  “Go on, Umberto!”

  Papa demurred. “Let someone else tell it. My throat is dry!”

  However, his fellow Montemonaci were not to be dissuaded: “Umberto! Umberto! Umberto!”

  “Take this to wet your whistle!” Bruno said, uncorking a fresh bottle of wine.

  “Oh, all right!” Papa succumbed. “But only because we are here to honor the Oracle of Cumae and this story that I am about to tell of poor Enzo the Tinker speaks to how much she has helped our little village over the centuries.” He cleared his throat, took a swig of wine, and began:

  “Once upon a time, thirty-seven years ago to be precise, when your parents were your age and I was a boy of eight, along with my friends Pacifico, Bruno, Gian, and Tomaso, a tinker came to town. His name was Enzo and he was passing through on his way to Casteldurante and Fossombrone from Umbertide in far, faraway Umbria beyond the mountains. He was a tall, lanky fellow with big hands and knobby knuckles and enormous feet with splayed toes the size of sausages. I think it’s fair to say that Enzo the Tinker had the biggest feet that any of us here in Montemonaco had ever seen.

  “How old the tinker might have been no one knew, for, though his gait was swinging and easy, his hand steady, and his voice unclouded by age, his skin was tanned to leather by a life lived largely outdoors, and his hair, which he wore long and loose, was as gray as gunmetal.

  “But the most extraordinary thing about Enzo the Tinker, more extraordinary even than his enormous feet was that, like a pirate, he wore a patch over his left eye and this struck us all as quite remarkable. Now the grownups, your grandmothers and grandfathers, they were polite. They didn’t inquire after his patch, believing that to do so would be rude. If Enzo the Tinker wished them to know why he wore the patch, they said, he would tell us.

  “The boys of Montemonaco, on the other hand…we were a curious lot and couldn’t rest until we knew why. So, one day we asked him, ‘Enzo, why do you wear that patch?’

  “And he replied, ‘Well, when I was a little boy, just a little younger than you, I fell on a stick and put out my eye.’

  “And we said, ‘We’ve never seen a gouged-out eye. Please, just lift your patch and show us how it looks.’

  “But he shook his head. ‘It is too gruesome,’ he replied. ‘The sight of it would curdle your eyes.’

  “Naturally we were not satisfied with his answer. What did he mean by it? Wasn’t curdling the magic by which milk became cheese? How were eyes like milk? However, we knew that, if we pressed him, our mothers would cuff us alongside the head for rudeness, so we refrained from pressing him further.

  “However, there was one boy among us who was not shy, a very bold boy who would do anything on a dare. His mother was a widow so lost in grief over the death of her husband years before, that in truth, she paid little attention to what her son did, but only doted on him. He could get away with anything.”

  “Who was the bold boy?” the children wanted to know. “What was his name?”

  But Papa only shook his head—as they knew he would. The identity of the bold boy had never been revealed in any recounting of the story they had heard. “That I cannot tell you. That is a very great secret.

  “So, we said to the bold boy, ‘We dare you to go up to Enzo and tear off his eye patch.’ Naturally, he agreed.”

  “What happened next?”

  “Not long after that, on Market Day just as they were closing down for siesta, our gang of boys collected on the church steps to watch while this bold, bold boy snuck up on Enzo, who lay curled, fast asleep, under a tree next to the church. Our hearts were pounding with excitement at the prospect of finding out the truth about the tinker’s eye; in addition, we were overcome by guilt—we had neglected to tell the bold boy the potential consequences of looking at Enzo’s eye, thinking that this might put him off the dare.

  “And right before our eyes he bent over the sleeping tinker and tore off the patch. He had intended to take off running at this point. Instead, he made the mistake of looking into the tinker’s naked eye. What he saw mesmerized him; it rooted him to the spot. For, according to the boy, it was not gouged out at all; neither could it be said to look in any way normal. In the first place, it was blue. No one in Montemonaco had ever seen a person with blue eyes before, let alone one brown eye and one blue eye, as was the case with Enzo. But it was not just the eye’s color, according to the boy. It was its size and its appearance, for it seemed to be much bigger than his other eye, swollen, straining in its socket, lolling almost. Indeed, according to the boy, it looked more like a blue egg than it did an eye!

  “Enzo lurched to his feet, blinking. It was a moment before he realized what had happened, that his patch was gone, but, when he did, he clapped his hand over his blue eye and let out such a howl of despair as I have never heard since.” Papa turned to Pacifico and Bruno. “Indeed,” he said, “the mere recollection of that howl sends shivers up my spine. The bold boy took off running. As for Enzo, he grabbed the battered leather satchel that he was never without (it contained all his worldly possessions, including the planes and scrops, froes and tongs that were the tools of his trade) and took off at a loping run over the mountain. He was never seen again.

  “Over the next several days, two previously healthy babies developed colic, a two-year-old began to vomit continually, and a five-year-old developed such terrible diarrhea that it was all his mother could do to keep him from dying of dehydration. Two nanny goats’ and three cows’ milk dried completely up, as did the milk of four of the village’s nursing mothers. Olive trees withered, fruit spoiled on the tree, and grapes turned black on the vine. As for the bold boy who had torn off the patch and exposed the tinker’s eye, guess what happened to him.”

  “What?” asked the children.

  “His poor eyes curdled.” Papa nodded. “It happened just like Enzo had warned us it would.

  “Obviously for a small village such as Montemonaco so much illness and devastation all at once was a calamity of unprecedented proportions! In the end, the only thing for it was to consult our Oracle. So a group of women, led by my own sainted mother, may she rest in peace…these women made their way up the mountain to the grotto where Lady Sibylla, after quizzing them thoroughly, identified the root cause of all this woe: mal’occhio, the evil eye.

  “‘What I find strange,’ she told the women, ‘is that so many and such a range of creation—people, trees, animals—have been affected all at the same time. Usually cases of illness caused by the evil eye are the effect of envy or covetousness on the part of the caster. They occur individually and are unrelated. Is there someone among you whom you know to be envious in nature or covetous? Who are the childless women in Montemonaco? What about someone with blue eyes?’

  “When she asked this, everyone in the delegation turned to one another. ‘Enzo, the traveling tinker!’ they gasped. And they explained what had happened to the bold boy.

  “‘Well, no wonder!’ the Oracle exclaimed. ‘The tinker is a jettatore! Whoever and whatever he happened to have passed and so much as glanced at as he fled the village would have been affected by his jettatura!’”

  “But what’s a jettatore?” the children asked Papa. “What is jettatura?”

  “A jettatore,” Papa explained, “is someone who, without intending to or wanting to, casts the evil eye. He or she is born with this terrible capacity for creating disaster.”

  The children, who had been elbowing one another with increasing violence during the course of the story, now began to boo, hiss, and hoot. “Bad jettatores! Stone them! Stone them!”

  But Mama interceded here. “Stop! Quiet!” she told the children. “You must remember that there are very few jettatores in this world for this one simple reason�
�as infants they need only gaze upon their mother once and up her milk would dry. This is why baby jettatores rarely thrive and few survive to adulthood. Umberto is not saying that a jettatore isn’t to be avoided. No. Of course, you must avoid him. But you must never despise him, for he is the most unfortunate of unfortunates, a true wretch who is wanted nowhere—neither by his family nor in his village nor anywhere else on God’s earth. He is forced to wander the world, shunned and feared by all who know his terrible secret.”

  “That is why Enzo was a traveling tinker,” Papa said, “and why he wore the eye patch.”

  “He was trying to protect us from himself!” Mama told them. “We should be grateful to poor Enzo, not condemn him!”

  Chastened, the children settled down to random elbow pokes. “So what happened next?”

  “Lady Sibylla gave careful instructions to the women on the old way of curing the evil eye,” Papa continued. “If the victim was a tree or a bush, they should throw a whole egg against it. If the victim was an animal, they should collect the spittle of unaffected persons and make the goat or sheep or cow drink it. If the victim was a person, they should pierce a lemon with iron nails and place it under that person’s bed.”

  “This is how we have done it in Montemonaco ever since Enzo the Tinker,” Mama said. “In Amandola and Bolzo and Pretare, they do it the new way, using olive oil and holy water, but the old way works best for us in Montemonaco, and it was the Lady Sibylla who taught us how.”

  “But what about the bold boy’s eyes?” cried the children.

  Papa shrugged. “Sometimes there is no cure. This was one of those times. Remember, he had looked directly into the mal’occhio of a jettatore. The Sibyl could not restore his eyesight, but without her intervention, he would have perished. He is lucky to be alive and he knows it.”

  The stories continued, but, by this time, the Montemonaci were not remembering what had happened within their own lifetimes, but rather stories that their grandparents had told them and their great-grandparents before them.

  “Remember how desperate Tarquin the Proud, the last king of the Romans, was to know what had been prophesied about him in the Sibylline Leaves?” someone asked.

  The Sibylline Leaves constituted a record of the Lady’s utterances that had been written down on palm leaves and bound into nine volumes. Given the fact that there were only ever four Oracles in the world and that the volumes represented the utterances of one, the Sibylline Leaves were as rare as hens’ eggs and as precious as rubies. “Tarquin thought that, if he could but know his fate, he might be able to avert it. Provided it was bad, of course. Accordingly, he journeyed to Cumae where he proposed to buy the volumes from the Sibyl. However, he refused to pay the price she set. He declared that it was ruinously high. So she burnt the first three books. When he still refused to pay, she burnt the second three volumes. Finally, in a panic and convinced that, if he did not capitulate, she would burn the final three, he paid the price she had originally set for all nine. He found nothing in these last three volumes concerning himself—only riddles and conundrums regarding some Judaean carpenter. ‘Oh,’ the Lady said, ‘the part about you was in volume 5. Was that what you were looking for?’ A sly one, our Lady of Cumae!”

  “Did you know she invented the alphabet? What? Well! What do you mean? That’s what my grandmother told me!” someone else said.

  “Well my grandmother told me that, on her way from Campania and before coming to our beautiful mountains, Sibylla stopped off in Norcia, in Umbria. There she lived in a grotto right next to the very lake into which Pontius Pilate is said to have bled to death—the Lago di Pilato. Its waters, they say, are tinted red. The Norcians say that it was Lady Sibylla who gave them the recipe for Norcian pork!”

  “Marinades? That’s nothing!” announced Nonna Benita. “My grandmother, a great friend of the Lady Sibylla and her confidante, told me something very, very interesting—scandalous, actually—many years ago. She made me promise not to repeat it.”

  “What?” Everyone wanted to know.

  “I’m sorry,” replied Nonna Benita. “I promised not to tell.”

  “You can’t do that!” her audience objected. “Don’t be such a tease!”

  “A promise is a promise!”

  “Well, in that case, who else knows a story?”

  Nonna Benita, sensing that she was losing her audience, vacillated. “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to tell just a little bit of what my grandmother told me. Not the entire secret, but just a little.”

  “What is it then?”

  “Well,” began Nonna Benita, “It is not only the Lamiae who shape shift. It is also Sibylla. Yes. It’s true. On Saturday night she turns into a serpent! And she stays a serpent until the Pope says Mass. But only from the waist down. My grandmother was visiting her when it happened one time. That’s how she knew.”

  “That is not true!” a voice rang out.

  Everyone looked around to see from whom the objection had come.

  “That is most emphatically not true!”

  The voice was unfamiliar and the clipped accent distinct, foreign to these parts, more Latinate than the gritty, splayed speech of the upland Marches. It was clear, sharp, and resonant. Indeed, it rang as though it emanated from a jug—which, of course, it did.

  Mama’s eyes widened in horror. “Sibylla!” she hissed to Papa.

  “Shhhh!”

  “Emilio?” Mama identified the source of the “shush.”

  Sure enough, there stood Emilio, flanked by Rinardo and Carmine, cradling the Oracle’s jug in his arms. “What?” he demanded. “She made me do it! She did! She wanted to know what everyone was saying about her.”

  “And it’s a good thing I did!” the Sibyl fumed. “Spreading false rumors about me. About me! The audacity! The effrontery! No portion of me has ever turned into a snake. And as for that Rosalinda Stracchi woman, she was never my friend. I have no friends. I have never had friends. I am an Oracle. Oracles do not have friends.”

  There was dead silence for a moment as everyone blinked and shook their heads and looked to their neighbors to see if they had any idea what was going on. Then the Oracle snapped, “What? Will somebody say something? Has the cat got all your tongues?”

  Since it was generally agreed that Pacifico was in charge when it came to Montemonaco, he now cleared his throat and began, “Excuse me, but whom am I addressing?”

  “The Oracle of Cumae,” replied Sibylla magnificently.

  This revelation caused the assembled crowd first to gasp and then to mutter, “What? Could it be?” until someone cried out: “Don’t you understand? It’s the Sibyl! She lives! The explosion did not kill her! Montemonaco is saved! Praise be to all the angels and saints. Thanks be to Heaven!”

  “The heavens had nothing to do with it!” Lady Sibylla huffed.

  “But, Milady, where are you?” Pacifico glanced nervously around, for it seemed to him that the voice emanated not from one specific point but was diffused over a larger area, like something that has melted, spread, and stuck to what it encountered.

  “My current residence is a jug,” Sibylla informed him. “Emilio, my boy, show these good people my jug.”

  Emilio raised the jug high over his head for all to see.

  “Careful!” Mama cautioned. “Don’t break it.”

  “But, if I may be so bold, why are you in a jug?” Pacifico persevered. “Never mind why. How? And how did you come to be here and not buried in rubble inside the mountain?”

  “Esperanza and Mariuccia Umbellino rescued me in the dark of last night,” the Oracle said, “as well they might, considering all the good that has come to their family because they are my nearest neighbors. And you must forgive them for deceiving you; they were acting on my instructions. As for the story of how I came to be in this jug, it is a long and piteous tale, one guaranteed to illicit both pity an
d fear. However, seeing that tonight is a night for stories, I think I shall do you the extreme honor of regaling you with it. Emilio, climb up on top of that table so that everyone can hear me.”

  Emilio did as he was told, and the Sibyl began.

  “I was one of the only four genuine Oracles that the world has ever known. There was that girl in Delphi—Pythia, I believe her name was—and that miserable creature in Asia Minor—utterly incomprehensible, that one—and someone in India whose name eludes me at the moment. What has happened to them, I cannot say. We haven’t kept in touch. As to how we came to exist, I am unsure. Were we designated Oracles by some great power or created as such? Who knows? I do remember having something like a childhood, but such memories as I retain of that long-ago time are as fleeting and as unsubstantial as shadows cast briefly upon a wall. Perhaps I had a mother and a father and siblings…or were they servants assigned to me because of my great gift? I cannot say. It was a thousand years ago that I was a child and I mean that quite literally.

  “One thing I know for sure. I was very good looking—slender and dark with great green globes for eyes and long, silky hair that I wore loosely braided down my back. I was a slip of a thing and as graceful as a young deer with little feet and little hands and whoever it was that dressed me, clothed me in the finest linen, but very simply except for gold bracelets and clasps and earrings. I did not walk so much as dance my way through life. My laughter was like bells chiming, and I smelled better than anyone has a right to smell—like a whole field of flowers. And don’t think I didn’t know it. Don’t think I didn’t know it all—every bit of it. Oh, I knew it.

  “Given my preferred position as an Oracle and my heart-stopping beauty, it was only natural that a god should fall in love with me. In those days, such things were uncommon, but not impossible. Liaisons between gods and mortals happened. They did. Nobody liked to talk about it…but they did like to talk about it. You know what I mean. However, it was never good for the mortal involved. Never. In fact, it was the end. A moment of blinding ecstasy and then: poof! Transformation. One moment you were a pretty girl and the next moment you were, I don’t know, a swan, a laurel tree, a constellation. What I’m saying was that there was a price to be paid for being beloved of a god. And it was always paid. It was never not paid.