The Miracles of Santo Fico

by D. L. Smith

  “You had a friend once. You betrayed him. Carmen is his daughter. I want you to do this thing for Franco.” She turned and walked up the trail that would take her back to town and Leo was able to watch her shadowy form for a long time before it eventually disappeared into the moonlight.

  Why the hell hadn’t he stayed in Chicago?

  NINETEEN

  The next morning began, as always, with a pale glow over the eastern mountains, which quickly turned to crimson as the sun approached. When it finally peeked over Santo Fico’s edge of the world, the eastern half of the sky flared yellow-white and that brightness quickly spread as the sun climbed, until, at last, it lifted above the rim of the earth and rolled upward. Then the sky changed to a deep blue and all the fire was in the sun. It was a typical summer sunrise along this section of the Toscana coast. But those who rose to greet it found something new in the west. Clouds puffed slowly along the distant horizon, low and heavy. Also, the night before there had been a breeze that carried the smell of something new. Today there would be a heaviness to the hot air and for those who could read such signs, it was obvious that somewhere, not far away, storms were deciding which direction to go.

  Marta slept late. When she’d returned home from her moonlit dash down the coast, she was embarrassed to discover the way she looked and she was glad it had been too dark for Leo to see her like that—her wild hair, the scrapes, the torn nightgown, the dirt, and the tears. She sank into a warm bath and soaked much of it away. It was her mind that was still in torment as she slipped naked between the cool sheets. She was sure she wouldn’t sleep; she wondered how she would ever sleep again. Then her head was on the pillow and almost instantly she was unconscious. When, at last, she rolled over again the sun was already high. She felt as if she had been given a powerful drug and she had to force herself out of the bed.

  All the time she was dressing she wondered why she was hurrying. It was just another day. The regulars would be coming by for their morning coffee. She had enough fresh fruit. Nina was probably up and already at the panetteria picking up the breads. When she opened her bedroom door and smelled fresh-brewed coffee she knew that Carmen was up too and Marta wanted to go back inside her bedroom, close the door, and crawl back beneath the sheets. But she and Carmen were going to have to be around each other eventually. She prayed that Carmen would come to her first, and that she would say something that would make everything all right. It was unlikely, but it didn’t hurt to pray.

  The kitchen had been cleaned. It wasn’t as if the place had been particularly messy, but with everything going on the night before, Marta had left many small chores to finish in the morning. Now, they were done; it must have been Carmen. Marta knew her stubborn daughter probably wasn’t going to apologize, but the work she’d done in the kitchen said a great deal. Then the aroma of the coffee seized her and she poured a cup and was surprised to hear voices in the dining room. She slipped quietly through the swinging door and into a shadow at the back of the room.

  Sitting at a table near the verandah doors, Leo Pizzola was drinking coffee and picking at some fresh fruit. Carmen leaned against the wall with her arms folded across her chest, listening to whatever it was Leo was saying, but her face was an enigmatic mask of disdain. Marta stood silently in the shadows, watching Leo casually explain something to Carmen and she wished she could make out his words, but he talked too softly. Then he finished talking and sipped his coffee, waiting for Carmen to respond. But when she did, Marta couldn’t hear her either . . . so she slipped out of the shadow a bit.

  The swinging door behind Marta suddenly whacked her on the behind and she squeaked as hot coffee slopped out of the cup and across her hand. Nina came through the door carrying a plate of bread and jam and apologizing to whoever it was she had struck with the door. As Nina served Leo, Carmen approached Marta, looking uncomfortable— nothing like the picture of defiance she’d presented just hours ago.

  “He wants me to work for him.”

  “What?”

  “He says he needs to get his father’s house cleaned up so he can sell it. He wants me to work for him, cleaning the house. I told him it was stupid. I told him you wouldn’t allow it, but he said I should ask you anyway.”

  Leo sat at the table, spreading jam across the thick bread and pointedly ignoring them.

  “When does he want you to start?”

  “Today.”

  “Did he offer you a fair wage?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t care. It’s up to you. Do what you want.”

  Marta put on her best air of nonchalant indifference and returned to the kitchen. Carmen was beyond bewildered, but money is money, so she went back and agreed to his proposal. Leo only nodded and plopped some coins on the table for breakfast, picked up his bread and jam, and walked from the hotel.

  He crossed the piazza and was headed for home when something hissed at him. There was Marta, standing on the north side of the church, imitating a snake and waving him toward her. She pressed herself against the wall and refused to step beyond the corner where she might be seen from the hotel. It occurred to him that Marta must have run all the way from her kitchen, across the side yard, around the edge of the piazza, and circled around behind the church to have gotten there before him. She angrily motioned him to her again and he considered ignoring her and walking on home, but then she hissed once more— only a much more insistent sort of hiss this time. With a sigh, he walked to the corner of the church, but not quite close enough for her to actually get her hands on him and still remain concealed from the hotel.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she demanded in a harsh whisper.

  “Going home.”

  Although Leo was sorry about whatever Marta was going through, he was also in no mood to be upbraided yet again this morning and so his voice was just as brusque as hers, and Marta was startled by his curtness.

  “What do you think you’re doing hiring Carmen to work at your house?”

  “You told me to do something. I’m doing something.” “What? Clean your house for you? That’s not what I was talking about. What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know yet. I haven’t had a chance to think about it. I had a rough night.”

  “Did you say anything to Carmen about my coming to see you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, don’t.”

  “I wasn’t going to.”

  Behind Marta, down the north side of the church at the new break in the garden wall, an old gray head peeked out to investigate the snippy exchange. When Leo and then Marta turned and looked, Father Elio quickly ducked back out of sight, but after a moment he peeked out again. He was caught; there was no denying it.

  “Good morning,” he offered weakly.

  Leo and Marta returned a couple of feeble “Good mornings,” and Marta shot a quick glance around the corner. Across the piazza, Carmen was wiping the tables on the hotel’s verandah and chatting with Nina. Marta cursed to herself, hitched up her skirt, and ran back the way she came—hopping through piles of rubble like a rabbit. As she passed her uncle she couldn’t think of anything to say so she just grinned rather stupidly before darting around the corner. Leo wanted to shout something sarcastic after her, but he was too tired to think of anything clever.

  “Leo, could you help me with something?” asked Father Elio before disappearing back into the garden. Leo sighed again—he was never going to get home.

  Leo found that Father Elio had been busy in the garden. All of the collapsed stones and bricks were carefully stacked and sorted according to type and size; all ready for some handy mason to reuse. And other than the collections of stone and brick, the garden was spotless. The broken fragments had all been removed and the plaster dust had been either swept away or worked into the soil. All the plants had been watered. Even the Miracle looked as if it had received a proper dusting; maybe even a polishing. All in all, the garden was as serene and inviting as ever.

&nb
sp; But there was one sight that made Leo’s heart pound and his blood run cold. The transept still stood! The north wall was cracked and near the base it had buckled slightly—but it still stood. In fact, in the bright morning light it looked damn solid! Leo had counted on that transept collapsing and it hadn’t. Father Elio had gone inside and that meant that whatever he wanted Leo to help him with was inside the church. This was the last place he wanted to be and he was considering his chances of quietly slipping back through the broken garden wall when Father Elio called again from inside—“You need to come in here.” It was as if the old man was reading his mind.

  Inside, Leo was again astonished at how much Father Elio had accomplished. The church was spotless. If it weren’t for the broken windows and the enormous hole in the ceiling, you couldn’t tell that there had ever been a catastrophe. Father Elio was waiting for him in the damaged northern transept. The lights were on and in their glare Leo could see that the wall had been crushed at the base and the ceiling cracked, but the room was not going to fall. Father Elio had positioned a couple of two-by-fours at each of the corners to act as braces for a third two-by-four that was to span the top, in a puny attempt to hold up the sagging roof beams. All the boards were tilted at odd angles and Father Elio was obviously having trouble setting them in place.

  But it wasn’t the frailty of Father Elio’s bracing that disturbed Leo. It was the wall. He couldn’t recall ever seeing anything so markedly naked as the blank gray wall at the end of the transept. For all his life this wall had leapt out at him with colors and light and movement and faces and people he’d grown to know. He thought of them now—cramped and folded on top of each other, wrapped in an old blanket beneath a dirty cot in the shepherd’s hut. The gray wall was dead now and didn’t care anymore—that’s what he told himself. He tried instead to think of the money for those meaningless hunks of painted plaster, but the naked wall stared at him like an accusation. He assured himself, there was nothing anyone could do to stop him. All he needed to do was steal Topo’s truck and drive away. He could go to Roma or Milano—anywhere. Marta would have no way of finding him. It was so easy, all he had to do was leave. Why did he worry so much about Marta?

  “What do you need, Father?”

  Father Elio stood by one of the braces and tried to heft a short-handled sledgehammer.

  “Every time I try to drive one of these braces into place, the other one tips over and then that cross beam falls on my head.”

  “Here . . . You steady the other one.”

  Leo took the hammer from the weak old hands and with Father Elio holding the opposite brace in position, Leo drove each one into place with just a few blows. The transept wasn’t rebuilt yet, but the braces would help.

  Father Elio patted Leo on the back and thanked him. And Leo thought, since the old priest doesn’t feel the need to mention anything about the absent fresco, why should he? He tried to effect a good-bye, but Father Elio just kept following him—out the transept door and across the garden. Then the old man said something that caught Leo completely off guard.

  “Marta isn’t angry with you, you know.”

  Sometimes a thing can come at you so unexpectedly that you don’t have time to fashion a facade, and before you know it, the truth just spills out.

  “Yes, she is and I don’t care. A long time ago I did something stupid,” Leo confessed. “If she wants to hate me, okay, fine. But she hates everything. I’m sorry Franco died. Excuse me, Father, but to hell with her.”

  The old man sat down on one of his mounds of stones and scratched his head. “A lot of things happened after you left. What happened between Marta and Franco wasn’t good. Franco got everything he wanted. He got Marta. He got the hotel. He got beautiful children. And the more he got, the unhappier he became. Then, he got mean. He might have even hit her. I hope not, but maybe he did. He was cruel in many different ways—more painful, more lasting. I don’t think Marta wants to be unhappy anymore, but it’s become her way of life. It’s hard to watch her struggle, isn’t it?”

  “You’re her uncle, you’re her priest—there must be something you can do to help her.”

  “A long time ago, when I was at the university in Bologna, I took many wonderful classes. My favorite was the class about science. I wasn’t good at it, but I loved that class. It taught me all about plants and animals, water and fish, air and birds. It taught me about clouds and storms. It taught me so many things, but one thing that it taught me . . . maybe the most important thing of all . . . it taught me about butterflies.

  “God has a habit of working miracles all the time that we don’t even see. Like butterflies. God works such a miracle in butterflies. He teaches us about our lives through them. Have you ever watched a butterfly break its way out of its cocoon? Oh, it’s a terrible struggle. It appears to be agony . . . Maybe it is. Only the butterfly knows for sure. But one thing is certain—it’s an exhausting struggle. The butterfly must break through the shell of its old life—this thing that, at one time, was strong enough to protect it from other bugs, birds, and lizards . . . all sorts of dangers. And other terrors too, like wind and rain—all the things that would have destroyed it because it was so fragile. But one day it knows that it’s time to break through the cocoon. It wants to become a new thing, you see, and to do so it must break through that shell. But the cocoon isn’t like a room with a door. It’s something that the butterfly created herself, out of a single thread spun over time. Around and around herself the caterpillar wrapped that single thread, until it buried her. So, now she’s a butterfly and she wants to be free . . . but she’s trapped. And certain threads, threads that were spun with a certain. . . passion, they don’t want to break. They cling to her and entangle her. And her struggle to free herself can be both frightening and inspiring. But for the butterfly, it’s severe and unrelenting.

  “As I watch a butterfly struggling and I pity her plight, sometimes I’m tempted to play the hand of God and reach down and help her. I could so easily pull open certain threads—just a few. It would make her struggle so much easier and she would never know. But I don’t. Do you know why? Because I know it would destroy her. She would die. I learned this in the science class at the university. The butter-fly has a . . . a . . . thing in her stomach, I think. This . . . thing is full of a fluid that is meant to fill the veins of her butterfly wings. It’s the pressure of the struggle and the squeezing to escape this prison cocoon of her own making that forces the fluid out of this . . . thing in her stomach, and into the veins of her wings. Without the fluid her wings would never expand and she would never fly. She would drop to the ground and die.

  “Marta worked hard creating her shell. Now her time has come, and she will escape or she won’t. But she must do it herself. We all must do it ourselves. That’s God’s plan.”

  Carmen Fortino had been coming to the Pizzola farm for one thing or another all her life. Some of her earliest memories were of walking down the north coast road, holding her mother’s hand until they turned down through the opening in the old stone fence. From there, Marta was too slow for Carmen because she had to carry Nina, who was still a baby—and the little girl liked to race ahead to find the road’s deepest pools of fine dust to plop her bare feet in and pretend she was wading through warm puddles of her grandmother’s lavender dusting powder. The walk was beautiful in those days. The weeds were kept low, there were flowers everywhere and they were always well watered. Her mother told her many times that Signora Pizzola loved flowers and when Marta was Carmen’s age, she would often help her plant in the spring and fall. Signora Pizzola had been dead a long time, since her mother was a young girl, but her mother told her that Signore Pizzola would rather lose an arm than let his wife’s flowers die. Carmen found that gruesome image thoroughly strange—after all, they were only flowers, and an arm was an arm.

  Her mother was always respectful to Signore Pizzola, who was a tall man with a neatly trimmed white beard. He looked strong and he had a big laugh, but
he didn’t use it often and his eyes were usually sad. She remembered the old man’s eyes when she saw Leo for the first time. As a little girl she liked sitting on the porch, sometimes on the old man’s lap, and they would drink cold limonata. The old man liked it with a lot of sugar and so did she. She would sit and drink and her mother would talk to Signore Pizzola about people Carmen didn’t know and things she didn’t understand. Sometimes he would rock Nina and sing her funny songs that made her laugh or sleep and Carmen would go off and play with the goats. After Signore Pizzola died, she had no more reason to turn off the north coast road and wander down through the gate in the old stone fence.

  In fact, she’d only returned once, although she would never have admitted it if anyone had ever asked—she was that ashamed. It had been over a year ago that Solly Puce had brought a bunch of his Grosseto friends over to Santo Fico. He said it was so they could go for a swim, but they never did. Instead they just sat on the beach and drank wine and talked dirty. Carmen didn’t like them. She suspected they came to Santo Fico because Solly Puce had told them lies about her because they kept saying nasty things to her right in front of him and he let them. So she said cruel things about Solly’s manliness to humiliate him and the other boys laughed harder.

  When they’d drunk all their wine and run out of dirty jokes, they were at a loss for anything else to do, so Carmen suggested that they go to an old haunted house she knew about. She brought them to the Pizzola farm.

  It had stood abandoned for some years. This was the first time Carmen had visited since even before Signore Pizzola died. The flowers had been replaced by weeds. The tile porch was empty and covered with dead leaves. The windows were dark and looked haunted—Carmen thought they looked like Signore Pizzola’s sad eyes searching for a friend to come calling and drink some limonata and maybe make him laugh. But these were not friends she brought. Carmen hadn’t even thought of throwing rocks until she heard the first stone smash through a window. She didn’t like it. She told them to stop, but they wouldn’t. They kept throwing rocks and smashing the windows. She screamed at them and ordered them away, but they just laughed and broke more windows. They left only because Carmen started throwing rocks at them. They rode out of town calling her ugly, drunken names and mocking her. She knew everyone heard them and she was ashamed. She didn’t speak to Solly for two weeks.