by Lamb, Wally
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.
While he slept fitfully, Violetta paced the floor and the field outside, sobbing and muttering to herself. Prosperine stuffed and roasted Selvi’s special chicken.
But he never ate that bird. By late afternoon, he awoke with stomach pains that made him scream. An hour later, he was shitting bloody stool. As night fell, he slept so quietly, they had to put a goose feather to his nose to see the breathing.
Somewhere in the nighttime, his thrashing began. Strings of blood and drool came out of his mouth. His stench was foul, his eyes wild. A few times, he tried to speak—to pray, perhaps—but his lips only made movement without sound. By the candlelight, his green eyes seemed lit with the suffering of his painted saints!
Toward the end, Violetta could not look. She cried and said they had done a terrible thing—a thing that would damn them both in the afterlife. “You were damned in this one!” Prosperine reminded her. “Remember the evil he did—the evil he would have kept doing if we hadn’t stopped him! We did what we had to do!” Still, the Monkey took no pleasure in Gallante Selvi’s dying and death. All during that night, water poured out of the sky and she wondered if the rain was the old witch’s tears.
Gallante Selvi stopped breathing in the hour before the sun. Prosperine washed the blood away from both ends of him and Violetta combed his hair, crying and kissing his yellow curls. She kept begging that poisoned devil to forgive her and, finally, Prosperine had to slap her and cover the body with Ciccolina’s quilt to make her stop.
The Monkey told Violetta that to sit and do nothing—to fail to go for priest or dottore—would cast suspicion. But Violetta was afraid to stay alone with him—afraid Selvi might come alive again and strangle her, or that his unholy soul would suck the air from her mouth. She stayed outside while Prosperine walked to the village.
In town, the Monkey knocked on the door of the more stupido of Pescara’s two dottori—the one whose errors had killed more patients. “Hurry, please, while he is still alive,” she said. Together they rushed to wake up Padre Pomposo.
Through all the examination and prayer that followed, Violetta wailed her sorrow—a diva’s performance, or else real tears, Prosperine never knew which. That lazy dottore made a poke here, a prod there. “Appendice,” he said. “The poor man died of burst appendice.” Then he went to the kitchen while the padre gave that son of a bitch the Rites of the Dead.
Padre Pomposo—that lover of pageantry and stravaganza—advised Violetta that she must arrange a funeral
befitting the great religious artiste her beloved husband had been. With her permission, he said, he would contact Panetta, the impresario di pompe funebri, as soon as he returned to the village. Panetta would collect the body, prepare it, and transport it to the church where all of Pescara would come to mourn. Prosperine’s eyes tried to warn Violetta, “No, no!” They needed a fast burial. But Violetta’s eyes looked only at the priest, as if his foolish ceremonia could save her husband’s soul and hers. Padre Pomposo spoke on and on about holy music and special candles, a processione, perhaps, on Wednesday or Thursday morning, from the ocean where the genius had worked to the church where the High Mass would be celebrated.
Prosperine made her tongue click and shook her head in a futile attempt to capture the attenzione of her friend and accomplice. The padre looked at her, then back to Violetta. Perhaps, he said, if he could have a moment of privacy with the widow . . .
Then, a shock! A thing those murdering women had not planned on—the thing that ruined them! Banished by the priest from the room where the funeral arrangements were being made, Prosperine reentered the kitchen. At the table, that stupid dottore sat devouring the roasted chicken she had stuffed with bread and glass!
“Scusi, Signorina,” he told the Monkey, waving a half-gnawed leg. “I hope your pretty padrona won’t mind that I had a little something for my stomach in exchange for my troubles. Do you have, maybe, a bottle of vino to help wash down this bird?” In front of him was a pile of bones and a spoon. The bird’s carcass was half empty of the tainted stuffing!
Panetta the undertaker and his man came that afternoon to haul away the body. Violetta hugged Prosperine, sobbing, as the wagon drove away. That stupid dottore had not seemed sick when he left. He hadn’t eaten nearly as much of the ground glass as Gallante had. Perhaps things would be fine.
But that greedy fool was sick by the time the wagon had returned to the village! Sick for the rest of that day, too, and through the night. When he moved his bowels the next morning, he screamed from the pain of it. His wife carried his business outside and studied it in the sunlight. The bloody cacca floating inside the chamber pot glittered and told on Selvi’s widow and her murdering friend!
The dottore and his wife carried their smelly evidence to the magistrato and, together, the three visited Panetta the undertaker. Then the four went to the church to cut open Gallante Selvi’s stomaco.
It was Prosperine’s father who told all this to her, as he stood in his apron at Ciccolina’s doorway. His hair was dusty from macaroni flour, his eyes jumped with fear for his estranged daughter. Panetta the undertaker’s wife was Papa’s cugina. She had run to the macaroni shop and tipped him off and Papa had beaten his mule half to death to get to Prosperine before the polizia arrived. “Take this, whatever you have done, and run away,” he said. He put two fistfuls of coins into his daughter’s upturned apron, then hugged her hard enough to break her bones. That was the last she ever saw of her papa, but ever since, she had been comforted by her memory of him standing there in Ciccolina’s doorway. He had felt a father’s love for her all along, and even before his arms had let go of her that day, she had forgiven him for having sold her away.
They ran! Through the woods and then down to the docks—ran to those fishermen who had lusted after Violetta. They employed the charms of the beautiful one and the money of the ugly one and got away from Pescara. They did what they had to do. It was the only way.
From boat to boat, down the coast, they traveled. Prosperine had never before been out of Pescara, but now they sailed past Bari and Brindisi, and across the stretto at Messina. And that was how Prosperine became siciliana—she had gone there to hide from murder!
For a while, the two women lived in Catania, lost among the workers on a wealthy man’s olive farm. They were safe there until the farmer’s capomastro became curious about what was beneath Violetta’s skirts and his suspicious wife began questioning where two young signorini had traveled from and why. On the same night of that jealous wife’s interrogazione, Prosperine and Violetta stole money and escaped again, this time by train to Palermo.
Those were terrible months in that busy city where people came and went. Violetta found work as a servant at a busy inn, and Prosperine toiled as a laundress there. Although the Monkey could hide in the back with the hot water and soiled linens, Violetta was obliged to serve meals to travelers. Her heart stopped a little each time the door of the inn opened. Prosperine, too, was afraid—forever mistaking people in the streets for traveling Pescarans! Women and men and bambini all seemed to look at her with familiar faces—with eyes that knew what she had done. She was homesick. She longed to see the Adriatico, the Pescaran square, her papa, her sisters Anna and Teodolina. But a bigger part of her longed to be safe—to buy safety for herself and her friend Violetta. They could not be caught! They had to get further away!
One of Violetta’s regular supper customers was a fine and proper legale. On nights when the inn was quiet, he invited her to sit with him and talk and join him in a cognac. He was well traveled, this gentleman; three times, he told her, he had visited la ‘Merica. And it warmed his heart to think of the number of poor siciliani he had helped sail to that Land of Dreams.
Had he ever aided any poor souls, Violetta asked cautiously, who were, perhaps, in trouble with the law?
The legale leaned closer to the murderous widow and whispered si, he had from time to time assisted fellow citizens whose criminal records had needed a little whitewashing. He had a friend, he said, an ufficiale di passaporti. Together they sometimes made the dead come alive again, equipping them with traveling papers besides! They asked no questions of prospective emigrants, he said, except the one question they needed to know: how much was a fugitiva able to pay?
In the weeks that followed, Violetta began to grant her friend the legale certain favors. In exchange, he sent secret word back to a certain Pescaran macaroni-maker that the two fugitives were alive and well and needed money. Then they waited and waited—almost a year, long enough so that Prosperine was sure her father had disowned her for the shame she had brought on his head.
One day a young sailor came to the inn. He asked to see the laundress and was brought out back to her scrubbing tubs. Without speaking a word, he took out fotografia, holding it before himself and looking back and forth, back and forth, from the Monkey’s face to the likeness in his hand. Prosperine’s hands shook the water in the tub while she washed and waited. She thought, of course, that he was agente di polizia, but he was not. Here stood her sister Teodolina’s new husband. Her younger sister had married and it was her own brother-in-law who stood before her! The sailor handed her a leather purse. Inside was money from her father, the amount the legale needed for passage and counterfeit passports, and for the fugitives’ sponsorship once they got to America, plus a little more. Prosperine’s father had sold his macaroni shop—had sacrificed his livelihood for the daughter he had first rented away to an old witch, and then to her brute of a godson.
“And so, Tempesta, I became Prosperine Tucci, a girl five years my junior who had died of consunzione and whose mother had been sister to those stinking Iaccoi brothers—those goddamned plumbers who tricked you. They made a nice profit from their lies, Tempesta, and made you a fool as well. And here we sit, you and me, each a curse for the other.”
I reached over and grabbed her wrist. “What is your real name then, eh?” I said. “If Prosperine is a name stolen from a dead girl?”
“Bought, not stolen,” she said. “Paid for with a father’s sacrifice. My other name doesn’t matter. I am myself, Tempesta—the woman who watches what you do. That’s all you need to know.”
“And are you planning to feed me glass to tear up my insides? Stab me some night with your butcher knife?”
“I have no wish to watch another man die—to be twice damned,” she said. “Gallante Selvi was the devil himself. You’re only a bully and a fool. Keep your hands off her and you’ll be safe from me.”
&nb
sp; She stood, teetering, and then made her way to the bathroom. That one who had never drunk spirits in my house before had, that night, drunk nearly half of the jug. Now, from behind the door, I heard that witch turn her wine back to water. I heard her moan, too, and wondered if she had begun to sober herself—to realize that she had told too much.
When she came out again, I stood in front of her, blocking her way to her room. “Your friend,” I said. “Violetta D’Annunzio. What became of her?”
Fear crossed the Monkey’s face and left just as quickly. “Eh? Violetta? She stayed . . . stayed in Palermo. . . . She changed her mind and married that legale.”
“Eh?”
“He fell in love with her and turned her into a gentlewoman. Now she’s happy.”
“Happy to be dead?” I said.
“Eh?”
“Before, you told me she died. You said she was buried in the Old Country.”
The fear and confusion in her eyes spoke louder than her words. “She is buried there. I said she was happy before she died. . . . Maybe I misspoke, but that’s what I meant.”
“Ah,” I said. “And has her second husband maintained good health?”
The Monkey’s eyes could not look at me. “The legale? He was grief-stricken, poor man.”
“Si?”
“Si, si. He wrote to me with the sad news when I lived with the plumbers. Influenza is what took her, poor thing. She had a sad life.”
“Before, you said your father’s money had paid for ‘our’ escape. Did Violetta come to this country or not?”
“I said ‘my’ escape.”
“You said ‘our’ escape. Nostro. I heard the word come out of your mouth.”
“You heard wrong then,” she said. “Mia, no nostra. You must have potatoes in your ears.”
Now she looked at me and I looked at her. We stood there, watching each other, neither of us looking away. That’s when I saw the Monkey’s lip tremble. And then, in the other room, the baby cried.
