The Black Madonna Read online

  They never spoke. He asked her nothing. She took the kilo of rigatoni and hid it in a corner. He licked her body and bit circles into her shoulders. He burrowed into her from behind. He felt like a young man, young enough to work in Don Carlito’s fields.

  He sighed at the quiet. He thought about Guinetta finding out and sweat broke out on his forehead. But Guinetta slept like the dead, he told himself, and she was so set on the scheme to marry off Amadeo, to tie him to them and to Castelfondo, that she was blind to everything else, even his visits to the widow. He twisted his hands in Mafalda’s black hair. Amadeo never stopped making his life easy, he thought.

  At first he had worried all the time that Zia Guinetta would find out, that she would cast a spell, and his prick, which he loved, that waved like a flag for him every afternoon and night would never stand up again.

  After the first time with the widow, he had stopped eating for two days, sure that Zia Guinetta knew and would get her revenge with poison, but when he finally ate and didn’t die, he visited the widow again. One more time, he told himself, and then one more time after that. When he realized he would keep seeing her, that she was worth the risk, he gave her the money for the bed and the linen sheets. Every good thing in life had a price attached, he told himself, like the shellfish from Bari that carried the cholera.

  Zia Guinetta was in her kitchen garden every night picking herbs. Zio Carmelo heard her early in the morning, before the sun came up, boiling them on the stove, grinding them into powders, and even though he was convinced the magic was for Amadeo, when her back was turned, he moved the plates around the table, exchanging the one meant for him with Maria’s or Tommaso’s.

  He took Amadeo to the tailor to make him a corduroy suit and they went into the mountains to hunt for rabbits. Zia Guinetta made stews. Amadeo forgot about his business; he forgot his grief. He let them take care of him, feed him, plan his days. He sat in the coffee bar in the piazza and played cards. He waved to the peasants when they came back from the fields and he waited outside the post office for the mail to come.

  There were never any letters for him and he would wonder about it and ask Clemente the postmaster to check again. Clemente would flip through the envelopes a second time, wetting his thumb between each one, his lips moving silently, carefully, as he read the names and addresses. He would trace the ink with his finger. There were never more than three or four letters, but Clemente took a long time because Amadeo was an important person and postmaster was an important position. It was a perfect match, but still he would always get to the end, look up, and shake his head. “Niente,” he would say.

  Amadeo mentioned this at home, but Zia Guinetta cleared his mind. “A small village . . . stuck up in the mountains. You think it’s America? Here time stands still.”

  “But if something happens?”

  “Uffa! Bad news is the only kind that travels. Bad news always arrives.”

  So Amadeo listened to Zia Guinetta, trusted her, and drank his anisette with a black coffee bean the way Zio Carmelo ordered it for him and sometimes he sat back, leaned his chair against the wall, and closed his eyes.

  “He’s enjoying himself,” Zio Carmelo told Zia Guinetta.

  “Good,” she said. “But what are you doing? You’re no closer to the match with Magdalena than the day he came. He’ll leave one day and that will be the end of that. All you do is drag him around the countryside and sit him in the café.” She spat carefully into the herbs she was grinding. “I can’t do everything,” she said, turning her back to him. “I’ve even been paying Clemente at the post office to give me the letters that come from New York.” She went to a wooden box she kept in the corner and took out a packet tied with string. She threw it in his lap. “Every week they come.”

  Zio Carmelo took one out and looked at the envelope. “These are from the nutrice,” he said. “Teresa Sabatini. He’s told us about her. Why don’t you give him these letters?”

  Zia Guinetta pulled the envelope from Zio Carmelo’s hand. “I want him to forget New York. He might get homesick if he reads all these letters. And who is this woman? What is she to him? Do we know?” Zia Guinetta sat down and fanned herself with the envelope. “Ah, it’s very complicated. Anything could be. Anything could happen.”

  “This woman takes care of his son. He told me.”

  “And you believe him.”

  “Why not?”

  Zia Guinetta stood up and put her face close to Zio Carmelo’s. “Because I know men,” she said, and she pushed at Zio Carmelo’s shoulder in disgust. He thought of the silence of the widow, how she moved over him, mute and adoring.

  “Talk to him,” Zia Guinetta said. “Mention the girl’s name. Keep her in the conversation.”

  “And you think I don’t?” he said to Zia Guinetta. “Every day I lay the seeds. I’m always saying things, throwing hints. ‘Amadeo, how fine you look,’ I told him when I took him to the tailor. ‘You will have the women crazy.’ I said. When I take him hunting I tell him if he had a wife from the village, she would make him a stew, the best he would ever eat. Every chance I get I tell him he’s a young man, he needs a wife, more children. I tell him his baby son needs a mother. You think only you do anything? My mind never stops . . . all the time I’m thinking. It would be easier for me just to give it all up and go into the fields.”

  Zio Carmelo went out the door. “Patience, Guinetta,” he called out to her from the street. “The rest is fate.”

  Zia Guinetta believed in fate but she believed more in power. She went into the corner of the kitchen where she kept a small black stone that she had fixed with a picture of the Black Madonna of Viggiano. A candle in a red glass burned in front of it. “I am more clever than any man,” she told the image. “Why do my powers have to be dark and hidden?”

  She was terrified when the Madonna spoke. “Why complain to me?” the Madonna said. “It’s not enough that I find your lost children and cure your sick goats? What do I get? A festival once a year, some lira notes pinned to my robe, maybe a few American dollars. Don’t I do enough?”

  Zia Guinetta fell to her knees, stretched out her arms, and touched her forehead to the stone floor. She kept her face down, afraid to look up, and mumbled an apology into the floor, but she kept her ears open and listened carefully to the instructions the Madonna gave her. On the first night that there was no moon, she did what the Madonna had told her. She walked far out into the fields and sacrificed a black goat. She kept a sliver of the goat’s thighbone, polished it until it shone, and wore it on a black cord around her neck. No one was allowed to touch it, not even Zio Carmelo.

  Zia Guinetta kept reminding Zio Carmelo about the betrothal, about the wedding. The men in the coffee bar were starting to get restless, asking questions about the festa, when it would take place. It got so Zio Carmelo was not at all his usual self, but nervous and restless.

  He entreated Amadeo to stay at home. He would insist on going along with him for walks so as to keep him out of the town. He found some English books at the doctor’s house, Victorian novels with cracked spines and water-stained covers, and encouraged Amadeo to read them, “to preserve his English.”

  Giacomo Caparetti was pestering him, wanting to know what to do, when to tell Magdalena, how to tell Magdalena. Zia Guinetta was at him day and night, her voice a hoarse whisper. “When? When?” she said. She badgered him so much that he would arrive at the widow’s and lie across the bed, the sheets stiff from bleach and sun, he himself limp and useless. He bought candles from the widow to appease her and sold them to Giacomo Caparetti to light before the Black Madonna in the church.

  Giacomo Caparetti did everything he was told. He was determined now that his daughter should marry the American. He had handed over all his savings for her dowry. There was no choice. He kept Magdalena in the house. He was afraid if he let her go out, she might meet a boy and something would happen. He worried that something had already happened. When he left in the morning, because he was gone a
ll day, he tied her to the bedpost.

  “Why are you doing this?” Magdalena asked him. “You’ve gone crazy. Ever since that American came here, since his arrival in the piazza, you’ve been a madman, tying me like an animal.” She started to cry. “You can’t do this. I’ll go to the professore,” she said. “The doctor, the father. I’ll tell the head of the carabinieri. He doesn’t like you as it is. But he likes me, that one. I’ve seen him watching me. God knows what he’d do if he found me like this.”

  Magdalena narrowed her eyes, arched her back, and cried until Giacomo Caparetti worried that he was destroying her spirit and her beauty and ruining her chance of marrying the American and living in New York.

  “Stop crying,” he said finally. “You’re marrying that American, Carmelo Laurenzano’s nephew. It’s all arranged. Now do you understand? I’m only being careful. I’m protecting you.”

  “What? What?” Magdalena wiped her eyes with the hem of her dress. “The American?” she said. “The fat old American?”

  “Stupid,” her father said. “You don’t get fat for nothing. I told you that before. Here we scrape for everything. But you, you’ll be in America, silk dresses, a car, paint on your face, too, for sure.”

  “I’m not marrying a fat old man.”

  “He’s not old.”

  “He’s fat, then.”

  “He’s healthy. You know why? He’s rich. He eats meat every day. When he drinks coffee, he dunks cake in it. Listen to me. If you stay here, you’ll marry some cretino, some moron. Don’t I want the best for you? Aren’t you everything I have?” and Giacomo Caparetti started to cry, which made Magdalena cry, and they held each other and howled into the air. They threw back their heads like the wolves that came to the edge of the village in winter. They screamed and they shouted and when they were tired, when their throats were scratched and raw, Giacomo Caparetti kissed Magdalena’s face.

  “No,” he said. “You don’t marry the American. You stay with me. To hell with the dowry. I’ll find you a husband, a doctor, a lawyer, no, a prince. You don’t worry,” and he kissed her hair, her forehead, her nose. “My poor baby,” he said. “Your mother left you. How could I send you away?”

  “The dowry . . .” Magdalena said. “You gave away the dowry?”

  “I’ll get it back.”

  “You gave away the dowry?”

  Giacomo Caparetti hit his head against the wall. “Carmelo convinced me it was a good match.” He hit his head again. “He said you’d wear diamonds the size of the Madonna’s tears.”

  Magdalena put a hand on her father’s shoulder. “I will, too,” she told him. “Diamonds the size of hen’s eggs. I’ll live in New York. I’ll be la signora di New York,” she sang, and she danced in a circle as far as the rope her father had used to tie her to the bedpost would let her.

  Her father continued to bang his head against the wall. “But you said he’s fat, that he’s old.”

  “He’s not so old. And if he’s a little fat, so what? It’s all that meat and cake. I’ll get fat, too.” She put her hands on her hips. “Look at me,” she said. “How will I look wide like this”—and she stretched out her arms, her hands open as though holding her flesh—“my hips out to here.”

  “Covered in silk,” her father said.

  “Don’t forget the diamonds.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “When is the wedding?”

  “I don’t know. Carmelo said to wait.”

  “There must be something we can do.”

  Giacomo Caparetti took out the votive candles Zio Carmelo had bought from the widow. “We can light these.”

  “I’ll do it,” Magdalena said. She took her father’s hand. “The priest will open the church for me.” She put a black scarf over her hair as though she were in mourning for her mother, who Magdalena sometimes pretended had died.

  The church was closed when she got there and she went to the priest’s house and knocked on the door. The housekeeper told her to go away. She blocked the door with her body and told Magdalena the priest was asleep but Magdalena pushed past her and when he saw who it was he put on his shoes. He touched the braid that hung down her back and called her his child. He took her arm on the walk to the church, his hand pressing against her breast.

  Inside, Magdalena lit the candles in front of the Black Madonna of Viggiano and asked her to help her marry the American. She made promises she could keep only if she married the American. She wanted the Madonna to understand this.

  She spoke in a whisper so the priest couldn’t hear. When she knelt down, she raised her skirt and showed her legs to amuse him. He walked her to the end of town and kissed her very close to her mouth. The housekeeper was waiting for him, scowling and angry. That night he slept alone.

  In the church, Magdalena had asked the Black Madonna to bless her marriage with the American and she had asked for a son. She had done this quickly and under her breath because the old priest was waiting. When she got home, she told her father that she had taken care of everything.

  Giacomo Caparetti was relieved at first, then terrified. Magdalena’s ambition, her fearless nature . . . not desirable characteristics in a woman, he thought, and she was still so young, only a girl. When his wife was pregnant for the second time, he had asked the Madonna for another son, this one strong and handsome, not like the first, small and sickly, gasping for breath. He had thought when Magdalena was born that his wish had been denied, but now he knew he had gotten the strong and handsome child he had asked for, only the child was a girl. The Madonna had played a trick. He had thanked her anyway.

  Giacomo Caparetti put his head on the pillow that night and had trouble sleeping until he heard a voice in his ear. He felt a touch on his shoulder. He squeezed his eyes shut, afraid to look. “Sleep, Giacomo,” the voice said. “She’s under my protection. You don’t worry.”

  The village was filled with gossip. Zio Carmelo could hardly go near the piazza without everyone who stood there and sat there wanting to know when the wedding would be. Had he made the arrangements? Hired the band? Ordered the fireworks? the food? What was going on? They demanded to know. They had waited long enough. And where was this nephew? Never with the men anymore but always at home with the women. What kind of a man was this?

  Among the women, there was some speculation as to his suitability as a husband. The noose of tales and promises wound more tightly around Zio Carmelo’s neck. Someone called him a wind-bag, and wondered aloud if there would ever be a wedding.

  In the home of his aunt and uncle, Amadeo was getting restless and bored, tired of hunting rabbits with Tommaso. He said he was thinking that he should go back to his business and his baby son. He had been here almost two months. Zia Guinetta patted Amadeo on the shoulder. “Ha, in Castelfondo time means nothing. Two months is the flick of an eye.”

  Zio Carmelo poked Zia Guinetta in her side. “Now what?” he said. “Now how will we keep him here?”

  Zia Guinetta gave him her look, the one that silenced him and sent him out to the street and into the fields. She went to see Clemente and sighed when she handed him the extra coins, but she came back that morning with a telegram for Amadeo from Teresa Sabatini in New York that said that Salvatore was fine.

  Stay as long as you like, the telegram said, but Amadeo was still restless. Zio Carmelo and Zia Guinetta talked and argued endlessly about how to bring Amadeo and Magdalena together, how to be sure the thunderbolt would hit its mark. Walks in the countryside, they decided. Long walks that would wind past Magdalena’s house, and every time they came near, Zio Carmelo would spin another tale about the beauty that lived inside. “Is that her in the window?” he would say, poking Amadeo. “Could we be so lucky?” Zio Carmelo would shield his eyes from the sun. “Look! Look! Do you see?”

  Once in a while something would move inside the house and Zio Carmelo would insist that the two of them had seen a vision, that they should keep it secret, because every boy and man in the village would be
out here, would be consumed with jealousy. “This girl,” Zio Carmelo told Amadeo, “this Magdalena, does not belong on earth, but in heaven with the angels. What else is there to say?”

  One afternoon, Amadeo woke up and he couldn’t get back to sleep. The heat in the back room was suffocating and the flies were buzzing and settling on the figs Zia Guinetta had strung outside the door. He got up and pulled on his pants and not to disturb his aunt and uncle went out the back way and walked into town.

  When he reached the piazza, Natale, the bartender, was closing down for the afternoon. He saw Amadeo come into the square, take off his hat, and wipe his forehead with a large white handkerchief. Natale called to him to come over and he pulled a small table and two chairs into the shade of the awning. He took out a special bottle of homemade grappa and two glasses and invited Amadeo to sit down.

  “So,” Natale said, “where have you been? Getting ready for the wedding or are you getting cold feet?”

  “Wedding?” Amadeo said. He scowled. His eyebrows met across his forehead. “I’m in mourning,” he told Natale. “My wife and baby son are in each other’s arms in a box under the earth in America.” He drank his grappa and Natale poured another.

  “But you’re betrothed . . . to Magdalena Caparetti . . . the most beautiful girl in Castelfondo. Your uncle promised us fireworks, the brass band from Matera. The whole village is waiting to dance at your wedding.”

  “Natale, please. What wedding? I don’t even know this girl you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, you met her. I saw you. The day you arrived. Your aunt brought her over to you.” He filled Amadeo’s glass. “There are no secrets here. Everyone knows. The women are sewing dresses. The mayor is ready to declare a holiday. We only want to know when.”