The dream seemed unending. Bartolomeo discovered his body twisting and contorting into positions and combinations with his dream lover that he had never imagined in his waking life. Ecstasy washed through him repeatedly, more intense than any he had ever experienced. Finally spent, his dream self collapsed back onto the bed, and the shadowy, mysterious figure of the woman who had so exhausted him faded and yet left him aching for more. He shifted and turned in the bed, unable to find any comfort in the sheets and blankets without her. Discovering Daniela there, he felt repulsed by her and turned away. “Ritorno!” he implored his vanished dream.
The next morning, waking groggily, Bartolomeo did not understand why he felt so exhausted after a sound sleep. Then the physical memory of his dream pierced him and he understood completely why he felt the way he did. He went about his morning ablutions as he normally did but could not bring himself to speak to Daniela in more than a monosyllabic grunt. The presence of his wife irritated him in ways that had he had never known before, even in the midst of their most intense arguments. He fled the house as quickly as he could, leaving Daniela to wonder if his drinking with Stefano had left him with a worse hangover than typical.
Bartolomeo stumbled up the steep lanes towards the castle, joining the throngs of other men on the cobblestones. Voices called out bon giorno! and conversations bubbled all around Bartolomeo, but he kept his head down and his shoulders pulled up around his ears. Since his wedding day, he had never desired another woman more than he had desired Daniela, but the faceless woman of his dream had excited him more than Daniela ever had and left him not simply uninterested in his wife, but disgusted at the thought of touching her.
“I do not understand,” he muttered repeatedly. “I do not understand.”
“Scusa,” a voice sounded in his ear. A shadow fell across his feet and Bartolomeo looked up. He had nearly collided with Angelina, carrying a large basket of laundry and obviously unable to see around the overflowing linens. Bartolomeo stepped to one side and gestured for the young woman to continue on her way. She smiled at him. “Grazie.” She nodded in acknowledgement of his courtesy.
Something stirred in Bartolomeo’s bowels. He peered more closely at Angelina as she passed, and she, noticing his attention out of the corner of one eye, smiled. It was her! The unclear face of the woman in his dream snapped into sharp focus. This was the girl he had spent his night with and whose body he had ached for upon waking. He saw the curve of Angelina’s breast with a clarity he had never noticed before and heard the lilt in her voice with ears that must have been deaf before to remain unmoved by the music of her words. He barely stopped himself from springing towards her in the street.
Angelina blushed. Then she shivered and glanced at his face.
Bartolomeo licked his suddenly dry lips, nervous and unsure of what to say or how to act. Standing before Angelina, who was radiant and beautiful in a way he had never appreciated or acknowledged before, he could not risk any action that might break the fragile, crystalline bridge that hovered in the air between them. He licked his lips again.
“Come speak to me later,” she whispered. “I will wait for you behind the church at Vespers time,” she instructed him. Bartolomeo simply nodded, as obedient and docile as a schoolboy instructed by his parents. Angelina continued on her way to the laundry, glancing back over her shoulder towards him. Her hips swung jauntily as she moved away.
Bartolomeo stood dumbfounded. “What transpired here, just now?” he asked himself. “Did Angelina truly promise to meet me behind the parish this evening? Was she the girl in my dream and has she become flesh before my eyes, waiting to be taken in my arms?” His heart raced and he gasped for breath.
Stefano came along and clapped his friend’s shoulders. “Headache from yesterday?” he asked. A jolly smile crinkled his face. He leaned in close to Bartolomeo’s ear. “Mine is one of the worst I’ve ever known,” he confided as he pulled his friend along the street and up past the castle walls to where bricks and stonework waited for them.
Bartolomeo struggled to keep his mind on his work throughout the day. Only with the greatest effort was he able to keep Angelina’s face from the forefront of his thoughts, caressing her body in his daydreams, and keep the rows of stones and bricks level in the rising wall where he worked not far from Stefano. As the sun climbed in the sky and the steady rhythm of picking up stones, adding mortar to the wall, placing the stones, adding additional mortar to the walls and then repeating the cycle seemed to encourage Stefano to sing, that same climbing sun and steady rhythm only increased Bartolomeo’s anguish. Every moment until the promised rendezvous with Angelina seemed an hour and the work that stretched the muscles of his arms and torso only reminded him of how he longed to embrace her.
Gradually, the morning became afternoon and afternoon slid toward evening. The sun began its descent to the west and Bartolomeo comforted himself with thoughts of meeting Angelina behind the parish. At last, crossing the plazas between the buildings within the castle walls and descending the lanes toward their homes, he impatiently listened to the workmen all wishing each other “Bon mangiare!” and promising to meet each other later in groups of two or three or four at one of the taverns in the neighborhood.
Bartolomeo peeled away from the knots and eddies of foot traffic and found his way to the parish church. Children played in the small plaza in front of the church and fragrant supper smells drifted from the nearby houses. He waved at the children he passed and tipped his head toward the wife or two who stood at their doors, waiting for their husbands to return from work. He made his way around the church, hoping that the few adults who had seen him assumed he was taking the back alleyway to vary the routine of his walk home or that perhaps he and Daniela had been invited to a supper in one of the other masons’ homes.
“Will she be there? Will she remember her promise? Or was she toying with me, knowing that she never intended to meet me here?” His frayed nerves and knotted stomach betrayed how he longed for even a few minutes alone with Angelina. He turned the corner and there, in a shadow that filled a crease in the wall along one of the stone supports of the church, stood Angelina.
Bartolomeo caught his breath. She was even more delicate, lovelier than he had remembered from their brief encounter that morning and the ache in his groin to unite with her was almost painful. The smile that flashed across her face when she caught sight of him told him that she was nearly as relieved to find him as he was to see her.
“I was afraid that you might not come,” she whispered as he stood close enough to touch. She rested her fingertips on his belt. “I was afraid you might be late or that someone would see me here and I would have to leave before you arrived or that you might decide to not come at all.” The words tumbled from her lips as she looked up into his eyes.
“How could I stay away?” he whispered in response, his lips daring to brush across her forehead. “Knowing that you would favor me with an audience, how could I do anything other than throw myself on your kind mercies and hope that you would deign to grant me some small boon, a gracious favor?” His hands, unbidden, found her waist.
Angelina glanced along the alleyway, then pressed her cheek against the rough shirt covering Bartolomeo’s broad chest. She looked up and he moved one hand from her waist to stroke a wisp of hair that hung along her cheekbone.
“I must have you,” Bartolomeo whispered and then corrected himself. “No, I must give myself to you and hope to serve you.”
“I must have you and give myself to you as well,” Angelina agreed. Bartolomeo felt relief and joy flood his soul. His love and desire for the young woman before him surged throughout his whole body. How could they wait for such a welcome consummation? He was ready to take her then and there, in the alleyway, pressed against the wall of the church. But even as he leaned closer to her, he knew that such a thing was dangerous here, where anyone might come across them and their affair would become known as quickly as brushfire could spread through the scruf
fy tangled hillsides of Tuscany. He took a deep breath to clear his head and tilted his head back to drink deeply of the evening air. Rosy hues and deep blues streaked across the sky. He turned back to Angelina and saw his own aching desire and yearning reflected in her eyes.
“Tomorrow?” he asked.
“Yes. No. I… do not know,” Angelina’s words stumbled out of her mouth. “Where? There is no safe place…” Angelina swallowed and shook her head. “Let me think and I will get word to you tomorrow or the next day.”
Tomorrow? The next day? Bartolomeo felt that waiting even one day for this brief exchange had nearly driven him mad. “How can I wait even another day?” he demanded gruffly.
“Bartolomeo, it is pain and suffering for me as well,” Angelina reminded him. “But with my father talking of marriage and of accepting whoever offers the next proposal for my hand, we must be careful that our love not be discovered and my chances for a good marriage spoiled. We must be patient… for at least another day or two.” She kissed his rough cheek and looked into his eyes, asking for his understanding.
He slowly nodded in agreement, realizing for the first time what her predicament was concerning their newfound love. “I will wait for word from you,” he told her. “I do not wish to jeopardize your future or the prospects of your marriage if your father is negotiating for your hand. Although the man that does marry you will be the most lucky man on the earth. I wish I could be that man!” He sighed. Looking along the alleyway, he stepped away from Angelina and wrapped his cloak tightly about him.
“I will send you word,” she promised. He bent his head, accepting his fate, and allowed her to slip past him and out the narrow alley before he turned and walked in the opposite direction.
How could he allow himself to be so swept along by passion and desire? How could he be so ready to jettison his marriage vows to Daniela? How could he wait even as long as tomorrow morning to know Angelina’s flesh even more intimately, as intimately as he had known her in his dream?
Bartolomeo did not linger over the delicious supper that Daniela had spent the afternoon preparing for him and rushed to the tavern. He sat in a corner with his ale. Stefano found him there, sometime later, already weepy and groggy from drinking. Unable to prod a coherent response from his friend, Stefano joined another group of workmen, jovial and talkative, across the common room. Bartolomeo buried his face in the crook of his arm.
Bartolomeo dreamed of Angelina as he sat in the tavern, mistaking his own snoring for the rumbles of her father’s arguments against his seizing the girl’s virginity. Daniela’s face swam before him in his stupor. He saw the priest who had presided at their wedding, receiving their vows and offering the Nuptial Mass on their behalf. He saw Angelina and felt her sitting on his lap even as Daniela’s voice reiterated her vows in his ears.
He had spoken honestly when he had insisted to Angelina that he had no intention of spoiling her opportunity to secure a future with a hardworking husband. He also wished to spare himself the guilt of violating the vow he had made to remain faithful to Daniela. “How can I enjoy the sweetness of Angelina while still honoring her father and keeping her prospects for a good marriage intact and keeping the vow I made to be faithful to my wife?” He could see no honorable resolution to his dilemma. No matter which direction he turned or what line of thinking he followed, there was disappointment and heartache. The ruination of Angelina’s marriage prospects. The violation of his marriage vow. The unconsummated passion that he and Angelina burned with for each other. “How can I achieve all three?” the bricklayer demanded of himself.
Angelina, less worried about Bartolomeo’s fidelity to his marriage vow, was equally plagued by how to achieve her twin goals of having Bartolomeo and yet making a good match that would secure her future. She was unable to sleep for the second night in a row, finally rousing from her bed and sitting at the family table, staring into the darkness. A coal buried in the ashes of the hearth winked at her.
“Could we run away together?” she asked the winking coal. “Perhaps if we left Prague and Bartolomeo found work in Tuscany or Calabria or Rome, we could be happy together.” But even as she formulated the thought, she knew that they would never be able to settle anywhere that her extended family could be found. The shame of living with a man known not only to be not her husband but also the properly married husband of another woman would be too much for her uncles and cousins to bear, and they would kill her to protect their good reputation.
“What if we run north? Or east?” Though she was unlikely to stumble across any dangerous male relatives in either of those directions, it would not be easy for Bartolomeo to find work in a place where he spoke few words of the local language and there was no large established Italian-speaking community to negotiate on his behalf.
“My mother would never forgive me, either,” Angelina realized there in the dark. Preventing her daughter’s going to some far-away European city where there were no Tuscans had been among the reasons she had wanted Angelina to marry Ruggero. Though her mother might forgive her for running away with Bartolomeo, she would never be able to forgive her running away to a place where there were no cousins or Italian speakers.
“She would curse me as surely as I have bewitched Bartolomeo,” Angelina acknowledged. “I could never live, never survive, knowing that she had cursed me.” A tear slipped down her cheek. Even if the curse of an angry mother did not destroy her, Angelina would feel the weight of her mother’s anger no matter where she and Bartolomeo fled, and bearing the brunt of her mother’s rage would make her life unbearable.
In Bartolomeo’s dream, he saw a winking coal in a fireplace set squarely before him even as he balanced the dream image of Daniela on one knee and dandled Angelina on his other. Then it struck him. He could offer a proposal of marriage to Angelina’s father and set aside his marriage to the barren Daniela. Surely the priest that served the Italian-speaking immigrants would know the proper way to phrase his request to the archbishop, but the apparent sterility of his wife would doubtless win him the annullamento of his marriage. Every man, whether the celibate Bohemian archbishop in his grand residence or one of the foreign workmen who visited the local prostitutes every week or even the Italian-speaking parish priest, would understand Bartolomeo’s desire for legitimate children to carry on his name.
“Poor Daniela might be heartbroken, but that cannot be helped.” Bartolomeo shrugged his shoulders in his sleep. “I have been patient with her and she must realize that. Do I even need to tell her that?” Without the support of a husband, and unlikely to marry again if she were known to be barren, it would be difficult for her to survive. Bartolomeo considered what to do with his wife once the marriage was annulled. Perhaps she could return to their Tuscan village and enter one of the many convents that dotted the Tuscan hillsides. “Yes, that will do nicely.” Bartolomeo congratulated himself for resolving all his difficulties and finding the way to achieve all his goals at once.
Now all he had to do was rouse himself, stumble home, and tell poor Daniela of his decision.
When Bartolomeo stumbled home, he rebuffed Daniela’s efforts to greet him as he entered the house and threw himself onto the bed. His sullen mood astounded her. She had never seen him in such a mood; he had always been a cheerful, happy man when he was drunk. She made the sign of the cross and asked the intercession of the early Roman matron and widow Fabiola, patroness of unhappy wives. Daniela had never before imagined that she might be in a position to require the intercession of St. Fabiola.
Finishing her prayer, Daniela picked up the mirror from the table where it had been sitting against the jug. She looked at herself in it and burst into a small sob. She had been so delighted to receive such an unexpected gift from Bartolomeo and now he seemed like another man, an unhappy bricklayer intent on making her miserable. She set the mirror face down on a shelf. “Santa Fabiola, ora pro mea.”
The next morning, Bartolomeo slipped out of bed and made his way out of the house qu
ickly. Drowsy from weeping much of the night, Daniela had cooperated with his ruse of not disturbing her and remained in the bed until he was gone.
“Guendalina! What do we do now?” Angelina burst into her cousin’s home the next morning. Without waiting for Guendalina to ask about what, Angelina hastily recounted the events of the last two days and the unexpected encounter with Bartolomeo that morning. He had waited for her near the place they had crossed paths yesterday morning and had nearly made himself late to the wall where he was working in the castle. His loitering might have also caught the attention of some of the gossips in the area, but he had lurked about there nevertheless and told her of his plan to ask her father for her hand, and that upon receiving her father’s approval, he would ask the priest for an annulment of his marriage to Daniela and urge her to enter one of the convents of Tuscany. There were always merchants going to and from the various regions of the Italian peninsula and he would doubtless be able to entrust her to a journey with one of them.
“Is not this the solution to all our difficulties?” Bartolomeo had seemed proud of arriving at such a resolution to their situation.
“It is wonderful!” Angelina agreed with him. But she felt pity for Daniela, whom she liked, and thought there might be a way to spare her the heartache of losing her husband and of being set aside for a younger, more fertile woman.
“Let me ask my cousin,” she told Bartolomeo. “My father is more likely to agree if Daniela is already out of the way,” she suggested, “and my cousin may know some faster way than by annullamento.” Seeing a look of perplexity cross his face, she reassured him. “She knows of nothing drastic. Nothing violent.” He looked relieved. “But there may be a way to convince her to leave of her own accord. My cousin is good at thinking about things such as this,” she explained to the ardent suitor she had not dared to dream about less than a week ago. “Let me see what she can suggest.” Bartolomeo had agreed and strutted off, happy and jaunty.
Come Hell or High Water: The Complete Trilogy Page 79
