“Can you believe that, in the hundreds and hundreds of years that the Palio della Rana has been taking place, no one has thought to glue the frog to the inside of the vehicle?” the doctor marveled. “Either you are extremely clever, cousin, or your fellow townspeople are not very inventive.”
“Unfortunately, there was a great outcry over the incident, and I was plunged into considerable disrepute,” Pepe said glumly. “My fiancée’s father was so mortified that he broke off our engagement. Indeed, the Palio della Rana is the reason I left Fermignano altogether and sailed to Egypt with Napoleon.”
“It was during the Egyptian campaign that poor Pepe lost his leg,” the doctor told me.
“A camel fell on top of me,” Pepe explained.
“Does this sort of thing often happen in Egypt?” the Prior asked. “Camels falling on people?”
Pepe shook his head. “Very seldom. Of course, the Egyptians were firing on us at the time and aren’t terribly good shots. Do you have any idea how much a camel weighs?”
“A good deal, I should think!”
“Indeed, it does! Fortunately, I was able to salvage the leg itself. I take it with me wherever I go in a large carboy filled with whiskey.”
“It is most remarkably preserved,” the doctor interjected.
“Just a touch green,” Pepe said modestly. “By the time it was amputated, a bit of gangrene had set in. Just a bit.”
“The ladies tend to find it distressing, but you, Bacigalupo! You would enjoy it immensely.”
“What about me?” I asked. “Can I see it?”
“Alas, Signorina,” the doctor said. “I fear the sight of it might cause you to faint. For it is both terrible and wonderful to behold.”
“Not me. I’m as brave as any boy and a leg in a jar—that’s something you don’t see every day!”
But wonders, as it fell out, were far from ceasing, for the next moment we heard the loud clatter of a shovel thrown to the tile floor and a strangled cry from Giorgio. “Santo Iddio! What horror is this?” Everyone turned to look toward the front of the chapel and the boys with the wheelbarrows.
“What is it?” Pio called out.
“I cannot say,” replied Giorgio. “Just that it is the most terrible thing I have ever laid eyes upon!”
Pasquale laid down his shovel and came over to where his comrade stood. He took one look at whatever it was that Georgio had uncovered and staggered back a step, saying “Ooof!” as though someone had just punched him in the stomach.
“Let me see!” Pio pushed the two boys aside to have a look. Then he cried out, “Prior! Doctor! Come! This you have to see!”
Cesare and the doctor hurried down the center aisle of the nave to the chancel, followed by me and, at a short distance, Pepe, whose peg leg made a thumping noise against the floor tiles as he hobbled behind.
To the right of the altar and behind it lay what appeared to be a shallow vault. In it was deposited the strangest creature that I, at any rate, had ever seen—the body (not the skeleton, but the body) of what must have been a very tall person, composed entirely of a bleached, but somehow leathery substance. Its head was turned to the right and inclined downward. Its mouth was stretched open in an expression of anguish, its eye sockets yawned large and empty, as did the oval aperture where the cartilage that had formed the creature’s nose had once held sway. A dusty mop of matted hair still clung in patches to its head and scraps of clothing to its torso and limbs. Its fingernails were intact, long and curled like talons.
“Good heavens!” Cesare managed.
“My word!” Pellicola placed his monocle in his right eye and inclined closer for a better look.
Signora Assaroti laid down her broom and came forward. She peered at the creature. “All the angels and saints!” She crossed herself.
“You do know what it is, don’t you?” asked Pepe.
Mute with astonishment, Cesare shook his head.
“If I’ve seen one, I’ve seen a hundred,” Pepe boasted. “Well, I did spend the last twenty years in Egypt after all. It’s a mummy, of course.”
“You don’t say!” the doctor exclaimed. “But how wonderful!”
“A mummy!” breathed Cesare. “A real mummy!”
“But how did he come to be buried in this place, thus preserved?” the doctor asked. “Why here and not the cemetery?”
“Perhaps Padre Eusebio would know.”
“I’ll wager he does!” said Signora Assaroti. “I’ll wager he’s known it all along and that’s why he didn’t want Pio to dig up the floor all these years!” With that, she started off in the direction of the sacristy.
“Where are you going?” cried her husband.
“To fetch that old coot!”
“But he’s asleep!”
“He won’t be when I wake him up!”
“Caterina!”
But she was gone.
“Confound it!” said Pio. “I was going to ask her to fetch some water. This is thirsty work.”
“I’ll get it for you!” I volunteered and started off after Signora Assaroti, exiting the sacristy by a side door and walking next door to the rectory. I knocked on the kitchen door several times and said, quite loudly, “Signora Assaroti, it’s me, Mariuccia Umbellino, come to fetch water! Signora Assaroti!”
No response.
I slipped into the kitchen and peered about. Caterina was not there, but I could hear the sound of her pounding on a door on the same floor, crying, “Wake up, Padre! Wake up! Prior wants you. It’s nearly ten o’clock in the morning, Father! Time for you to wake up!”
“Who? What? Prior? Prior who?” came Eusebio’s thin bleat. “There have been so many Priors!”
“Prior Bacigalupo and Dr. Pellicola. They’re in the chapel. They want to speak with you.”
“They are young and I am old. Let them come here if they want to speak with me!”
“I’m coming in!”
“No! No! Don’t come in! Caterina!”
The sounds of a scuffle ensued, followed by Signora Assaroti’s exasperated, “Don’t give me any trouble now, Padre. On with that cassock. No, never mind. I’ll button it. Stop that! No, you’re not going back to bed! Don’t you dare!”
A few moments later, she appeared in the doorway with a disheveled Padre Eusebio in tow. “Ooch! Ooch!” he complained. “Where is the big toe of St. Alphonsus when you need it? Wait a minute! Mariuccia Umbellino! What are you doing here? Are you everywhere now?”
“They sent me for water. I knocked, but no one answered.”
“There’s a jug over there on the cupboard.” Signora Assaroti pointed. “I filled it this morning. Come along, Padre. The Prior is waiting.”
“Well, let him wait. What could be so important that he has to drag an old man out of bed?”
“Well, for one, a mummy has been discovered under the floor of the chancel!”
Eusebio stared at her, blinking. “What did you say?”
“I said, they’ve found a mummy under the floor of the chancel.”
“They? Who are ‘they’?”
“Pasquale and another boy.”
“And they’re digging up the floor? I told you not to dig up the floor!”
“It’s too late, Padre! The floor is dug up and the cat is out of the bag!”
“What? Is there a cat under the floor? In a bag?”
“Not an actual cat in a bag.” Signora Assaroti sounded exasperated. “A mummy!”
“A mummy?” Padre Eusebio pinched the loose folds of his forehead with his thumb and middle finger and squeezed his eyes closed. “Oh dear, oh dear!”
“What is it, Father? What’s the matter?”
“That this should have happened…I thought for sure…”
“That what should have happened?”
“I feel ill,�
� the priest muttered, looking vaguely around and patting his pockets haphazardly as though for something that he had lost—keys or some small object. “Please, Caterina, I must sit down.”
“What’s wrong, Father?”
“Dizzy,” the priest all but whispered. “Heart palpitations.” He lowered himself in jerky increments onto a chair.
“You’re shivering, Father!” Taking off her shawl, Signora Assaroti draped it over the old man’s shoulders.
As she did, the priest reached up and seized hold of her wrist with his bony fingers. “I don’t want to talk to them, Caterina! I can’t talk to them! You mustn’t make me!”
“I don’t understand. What are you afraid of?”
“Nothing! I’m afraid of nothing.”
Pio appeared in the doorway. “What’s taking so long? The Prior and the doctor want to get going.” He glanced at me. “And I thought you were fetching us some water!”
“Sorry!” I jerked to sudden life, retrieving the jug from the cupboard.
“You talk to him,” Signora Assaroti told her husband. “He’s being impossible.”
“Come on, Padre,” said Pio. “There’s a body buried under the floor. Do you know anything about that?”
“Nothing! I know nothing. Maybe it wandered in off the street, lifted the floor tiles and buried itself!”
“Now, Father!”
“Now, Father, what?”
“Now, Father, you’re not telling the truth!”
“How do you know?”
“Because you are not looking me in the eye,” Pio told him sternly. “And you’re twitching.”
“Tell them this. When my predecessor, Old Father…what’s his name?”
“Father Basil?” Signora Assaroti supplied the name.
“When Father Basil ran out of room in the crypt, he buried a number of bodies under the altar. What an idiot he was! No sooner had he done that than the magistrate informed him he was not in compliance with health regulations. So he had to move all those bodies to San Vivaldo. There were two, maybe three of them. I don’t know. Maybe more. Tell the Prior and Il Dottore that the fellow there must have been one Father Basil missed. The old man was practically blind! He could easily have missed a body. Or perhaps the doddering old fool forgot he was there. Most days he couldn’t remember his own name. Tell them I know nothing about it.” He stood. “That’s it. That’s all you’re going to get from me. I’m going back to bed and if either of you try to stop me, I’ll have a fit of apoplexy and die and it will be all your fault!”
He stripped Signora Assaroti’s shawl from his shoulders and flung it at her before hobbling defiantly off toward his bedroom. A moment later, we heard a loud creaking sound that signaled his return to bed.
“He’s hiding something,” Signora Assaroti said.
“I know,” Pio replied.
“What could it be?”
Pio shrugged. “Who knows?”
“Well, no point in trying to get him to talk now. His guard is up.”
“I suppose.” Suddenly Pio remembered that I was still there. “Signorina Umbellino, please!”
“Sorry!” I said and fled with the water jug.
“What did Padre Eusebio have to say about our friend here?” Cesare asked. In my absence, Pasquale and Giorgio had managed to load the mummy onto a stretcher and were standing ready to convey it to Dr. Pellicola’s laboratory.
Pio shrugged. “He says that Padre Basil must have missed this body when they made the transfer to San Vivaldo. Or perhaps he simply forgot about him. My own father served as his sacristan. When I was a boy, my mother used to send me out to look for the old man when he had wandered off. He’d get lost or tangled up in bramble bushes. By the end of his life, he was as guileless as a newborn baby.”
“Whatever the reason for this happiest of oversights, I rejoice in my good fortune,” said Pellicola. “I’ve wanted to get my hands on a mummy for as long as I can remember.”
“It’s true,” Cesare said. “I’ve known him since boyhood, and he has always been fascinated by mummies.”
“Ready, boys?” the doctor asked Giorgio and Pasquale. To Pio he added, “I’ll send them back as soon as we’ve got this fellow safely ensconced in my laboratory.”
Pepe tugged at his sleeve. “They’ll want to see my leg while they’re there, don’t you think?”
“Oh, yes!” said Pasquale and Giorgio, word of the leg suspended in whiskey clearly having preceded Pepe’s arrival in Casteldurante.
“May I come?” I asked. “I’d like to see your leg too.”
“Mariuccia!” cried Signora Assaroti. “Why would you want to see such a dreadful thing as a severed limb floating in a jar? Surely such a sight would frighten you and give you bad dreams.”
“Not me,” I assured her. “I’m very brave.”
“That’s settled then!” said Pellicola. “Let’s be on our way then.”
The boys squatted down, Pasquale at the head of the stretcher, Giorgio at its foot, and grasped the handles.
“Wait!” Signora Assaroti took off her shawl and draped it over the mummy. “If a woman with child looks upon this horror, she might give birth to a monstrosity.”
“Good thinking!” the doctor said. “Such things have been known to happen.” To the apprentices he said, “You know where my house is—down the Via Filippo Ugolini, across the bridge, and through the old Porta Celle. Just knock on the door and my housekeeper will direct you to my laboratory. The Prior and I must stop off at the tobacconist’s; we’ll be along shortly. Careful. Bits of him might be inclined to fall off and we wouldn’t want dogs making off with them.”
“Or rats,” agreed Giorgio, nodding sagely.
When the three of us arrived at the doctor’s house, the boys carefully lowered the stretcher to the ground and knocked twice on the heavy wooden door. This was eventually opened by Isabella. “And what is that?” She pointed to the shawl-draped object on the stretcher.
“It’s a mummy!” Pasquale replied and obligingly drew back a portion of his mother’s shawl, revealing the mummy’s hideous face.
The housekeeper squeaked once, very shrilly, and fainted dead away, just in time for the arrival of the doctor, his cousin, and the Prior, all three of whom were smoking big cigars.
“Not again!” the doctor sighed. Kneeling, he reached into his breast pocket for a vial of smelling salts, which he uncorked and passed under the housekeeper’s nose, causing her to sneeze and start. “Up you go.” He took hold of her forearms and hauled her immense pile to her feet, where she wavered and swayed. “There now. Are you all right?”
“First his leg!” Isabella glared accusingly at Pepe. “Now this horror! Are you trying to frighten me to death?”
“Not at all, dear Isabella! We only seek to expand the frontiers of science.”
“And where do you intend to do that?” the housekeeper demanded. “Not anywhere I need to dust, I hope!”
“Don’t concern yourself. We’re taking it out back to my laboratory. You shall never have to lay eyes upon it again.”
“If you gentlemen will excuse me,” Pepe said brightly, “I would like to visit with my leg now.”
“His leg!” complained Isabella, looking bilious. “His leg!”
“Now, Isabella,” the doctor reminded her. “He’s not asking you to visit his leg!” He turned to Giorgio and Pasquale. “Let’s go, boys.”
“But we want to see the leg,” they protested.
“You will. Rest assured,” replied the doctor. “After you’ve safely transported our friend to the laboratory.”
With that, we went our separate ways—Isabella, in a certain amount of high dudgeon, toward the kitchen, and the doctor, Cesare, the boys, and the mummy through to the back of the house and the stairs that led down into the garden. Pepe and I were alone in the shady corrid
or. “So, are you ready to see my leg?” he asked, rubbing his hands together in happy anticipation.
“I am.”
“Delightful! It so loves visitors. It gets very lonely without the rest of me. Well, then. Come along.”
Filled with equal parts excitement and trepidation, I followed a few steps behind the one-legged man as he hauled himself painfully up the stairs and lurched down the sloping hallway. He opened the door to his room with a flourish to reveal a large glass jar in which the lower portion of a leg amputated from just below the knee floated. The jar was set upon a small table before a fireplace and filled with a cloudy amber-colored liquid. The glass was smudged with fingerprints, presumably Pepe’s own, made as he hung onto the jar, staring, staring at his dismembered limb with its splayed toes and ragged top—the amputation had not been a neat one. Pepe drew a chair up to the table, lowered himself into it, and leaning forward, wrapped his arms around the bottle. Pressing his nose to the glass, he whispered, “How are you? Yes, I know I haven’t visited for a while. I’ve been away. Yes, of course. I’ve missed you too.”
I stood awkwardly in the door, not knowing how I was supposed to behave in such a situation. It felt as though I was intruding on an intensely private moment—a tender scene between a man and a cherished part of him—surely not intended for public consumption.
Pepe remembered he had company. “Come, girl! Draw close! Have a good look! It doesn’t bite. It has no teeth, as you can see.”
I swallowed and crossed the short distance to the table. I bent down and peered into the cloudy liquid. The leg was pulsating ever so slightly. As you can imagine, this was unnerving. “Is it…it isn’t…moving, is it?”
“It is!”
“But how…how can it do that?”
“I have no idea. I just know that it does. It beats like a heart. Put your hand on the glass.”
I did and, sure enough, I could feel a vibration in the glass. It felt like a pulse. Quickly I withdrew my hand.
“Do you want to know something even stranger? It beats in rhythm with my own heart. I’ll show you. Put one hand on my chest and one on the jar and you will see.”
I did as he suggested and found that he was correct. The vibration through the glass kept pace with the beating of his heart. I hurriedly withdrew my hands and wiped them on my skirt.
The Oracle of Cumae Page 16
