The Black Madonna Page 13

  “Can you help me?”

  The woman lay back. “It won’t be easy. I can’t promise you anything.”

  Amadeo stood up. “Maybe I should go somewhere else.”

  “Please, sit down. Did I tell you no? You Americans. So nervous. Of course, I can help you. I just have to be careful. Your poor wife. You have to understand this won’t be easy. I’ll need some money.” She paused. “Five hundred lire.”

  “That’s a lot of money, signora.”

  She shrugged. “Nothing’s free,” she told him, “and nothing’s easy. Women who run away don’t like to be found or they wouldn’t be gone in the first place.”

  Amadeo counted out the lire. The woman’s eyes followed his movements. “How do I know you’ll do what you say?” he asked her.

  “You don’t,” she said. “It’s the way of the world, vero?” She took the money neatly from his hand. She licked her thumb and counted it carefully. Then she stood up. “Signore . . . ?”

  “Pavese.”

  “Signore Pavese.” She bowed. “Piacere.” She held out her right hand, the money was clutched in her left. “You come back in a few days. You ask for Signora Carnevale.”

  Amadeo bowed and he turned to go. Signora Carnevale held him back. “Liana!” she called, and the young girl who had let Amadeo in came down the stairs. “See the gentleman out,” Signora Carnevale told her. “A few days,” she said to Amadeo’s back.

  Out in the street, Amadeo questioned what he had done—giving five hundred lire to an old painted whore in the first brothel he had come to. He might have gone to the police. Maybe Magdalena’s mother had come to the city and gotten a job as a maid, maybe she’d married, but these were fairy tales, he knew. She’d had a baby with her, no money, no experience. He stopped for an anisette before he went back to the hotel. He told the bartender to put a coffee bean in the glass.

  Magdalena wanted to know where he had been. She said she was lost without him. She closed the curtains and wrapped her arms and legs around him. He told her that he had been looking for her mother. He forgot all his thoughts about sending her back to Castelfondo. He forgot everything except that she was with him now.

  “Forever,” she told him.

  After a week, Amadeo went back to see Signora Carnevale. The cabdriver knew the place. “A good clean house, nothing to worry about,” he said when Amadeo tipped him.

  This time the young girl did not answer the door. It was later in the day. There were sounds coming from upstairs and two men waiting on the couch. The girl who let him in put an arm around his waist. Amadeo told her he was there to see Signora Carnevale, and she knocked on a side door and opened it.

  “Come in,” Signora Carnevale said when she saw him. “Would you like a drink? A cup of tea?”

  “Did you find out anything?”

  “I need more money . . . three, four hundred. Five hundred would be better. Then I wouldn’t have to bother you again.” She crossed her legs, pulled the silk kimono over her knees. “It’s expensive to make inquiries.” She twisted the curl at her temple around her finger while he counted out the money.

  “I’ll be back only once more,” Amadeo told her, “in one week.”

  When Signora Carnevale heard the outer door slam, she leafed through the bills with a wet thumb. One week was enough time for what she had to do. She counted the bills again. Five hundred lire . . . if it hadn’t been for the arthritis in her knees or if she had been ten years younger, she would have had him for herself.

  At the hotel, Magdalena was waiting for him. She went out every day and filled the room with things she had bought: plaster saints, ceramic bowls, sugar-covered almonds. Today she had bought cosmetics, and she sat at the dressing table, drawing the line of her mouth with a red lipstick.

  Her skin was pale from the weeks in the city. Amadeo thought she was more beautiful than ever. She looked fragile, but this was only visual. Every day, he could feel her more confident, more sure. In the late afternoons she would cover him with her body, pull him into her, lure him with the excitement she had built up during the day, the excitement she had absorbed from the city, from her new life. Amadeo would see the colors of the sunset through the window. She had stopped drawing the curtains.

  She would laugh at him, make him get up, take her out for dinner. She would sit close to him, her hips and shoulders against his, and she would touch him under the table. She would flirt with the waiter and leave the top of her dress undone.

  Back in the hotel, she would take off her clothes standing by the window, looking out. He would watch the curve of her back as she pulled her dress over her head, and wait for her to come to him. He would never be finished with her, she told him, never have enough of her. He believed what she said.

  The week passed, and again Amadeo stood at the door of the casa di tolleranza and rang the bell. Liana answered it without a smile and led him to the side room. Signora Carnevale was sitting in a chair, her legs crossed. She swung her foot, her backless slipper slapping against her heel. She adjusted the bracelets that ran up her arm to her elbow. “I think I’ve found her,” she said.

  “Are you sure?”

  Signora Carnevale looked smug. “I think so. A big city, Naples, but small if you know where to look.” She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth and looked distracted. “She’s from Lucania. There might have been a baby. The beautiful eyes? I don’t know the details, but I hear there was an incident . . .”

  “When can we see her?” Amadeo was getting impatient.

  “Be calm. You are too nervous,” Signora Carnevale said. “If you’re not careful, this young wife of yours will kill you off before your time. Don’t think she wouldn’t be happy to do it.” Signora Carnevale laughed. “I know life and I know young girls.”

  “This woman . . .” Amadeo said.

  Signora Carnevale settled back. “If you want a meeting, I’ll have to arrange it, won’t I?”

  “Tell me where she is. I’ll go see her myself.”

  “It would be better to have me do it,” she said.

  “For a small fee?”

  “What price can you put on a mother? We each have only one.”

  Amadeo was beginning to enjoy himself, caught in the web. From the moment he arrived in Italy, he had been caught. Pointless to struggle. Bow to the greater power. He took the glass of sambuca Signora Carnevale held out to him. At the bottom of the glass were three coffee beans. “I’m listening,” he said.

  “I’ll go to see her. I’ll talk to her, explain things. Who can know how she’ll react? After all, this is a woman who left her family, her village, everything. Why should she want to see her daughter now?”

  “Do it then, but soon. I can’t stay much longer.” Amadeo put his hand in his pocket.

  Signora Carnevale kept her eyes steady but her hands fluttered in her lap like pale yellow birds. “One thousand,” she said.

  The next time Amadeo went to see Signora Carnevale, her door was open. She was sitting in a chair, her feet up, doing a needle-point pillow of Adam and Eve in the Garden. “I love this story,” she said. She held up the pillow to show him where the snake would go.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Your prayers are answered, signore. The woman has agreed to a meeting, and like I thought, she was very reluctant.” Signora Carnevale sighed. “Fairy tales, that every mother loves her child. What does a child do for a mother? Make her fat? Take away her dreams? I had a child once, a boy. He’s gone now. Good for him, I say.”

  “When can we see her?”

  “She doesn’t want to see you, only the girl. Tomorrow afternoon, at the Church of San Gennaro. There’s a café across from the cathedral. She’ll be there at three o’clock. She said she would be wearing a red felt hat with a black veil.”

  I’ve found your mother,” Amadeo told Magdalena that evening when she came back from shopping.

  “Ha, I knew you would. You can do anything.” She dropped the packages on the floor and
put her arms around him. “Where is she? When can I see her?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Where?”

  “She’ll be waiting for you in a coffee bar near the cathedral.”

  “Ah, Amadeo,” she said, “the Madonna did send you to me. You’re my miracle.”

  She made him afraid with the things she said. He worried again about taking her to New York, that it wasn’t fair to her, that she would never be happy there. “Maybe,” he said to her, “after you see your mother, you should think about going back.”

  “Back where?”

  “To Castelfondo . . . to your father.”

  “You’re crazy. I’ll never go back there.”

  “I’ll give you money for a dowry. You’ll get a husband, a young, handsome one this time. You’ll have a good life.”

  Magdalena’s eyes darkened, the points of gold disappeared. “How can you say this? You still don’t know,” she said, “that I’ll leave you only when I’m dead and maybe not even then?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She waved away his words and started opening the packages she had bought. “What should I wear?” she said. “This . . . or this . . . Which one?” She held the dresses up.

  “Put them on,” he said. “And let me watch you.”

  They took a taxi to the cathedral. There was a coffee bar across the street, tables in the street filled with people. Magdalena pulled at Amadeo’s sleeve. “We’ll never find her. There’s so many people, so many women.” She yanked at her dress like a little girl and leaned against him.

  “Wait, let’s look carefully, one table at a time.”

  “There’s too many. Too many people. Never, we’ll never find her. Maybe she isn’t even here.” Magdalena bit her lip. There was lipstick on her teeth, Amadeo saw, and he took his handkerchief and wiped it off. He wiped the lipstick off her lips, too, and she slapped his hand. He caught hers and kissed the inside of her palm, but his thoughts, his eyes, were on the people sitting at the tables in the street outside the coffee bar. He moved closer. He looked harder, and in a far corner, under the canopy that jutted out from the building, a woman in a red felt hat sat alone. He watched her take out a cigarette from a case on the table in front of her and when she turned her face to light it, Amadeo saw that the top half of her face was covered with a black veil.

  “There,” he said to Magdalena, “in the corner.” Magdalene stood up on her toes and leaned over his shoulder to look.

  “Come with me.”

  “No, she only agreed to meet you.”

  “What do I say to her? Now I feel stupid. Tell me, what do I say? Come with me. She won’t mind.” Magdalena held his arm.

  He took her hand away. “I’ll be inside the cathedral. When you finish, come and look for me.”

  Magdalena put her head down, like a child, and he came close to her and touched her face. “This is the last thing you will ever have to do alone, I promise you.” She turned and walked away from him, angry, he thought, and he let her go. He watched while she went over to the table and when he saw her sit down, he left and walked up the steps to the cathedral. He sat in a back pew to wait. It was dark, cool. There was no image of the Black Madonna here. She was in the mountains taking care of her people. He hoped she was with Magdalena in the coffee bar across the street.

  The woman in the red felt hat raised her face. “It’s you,” she said when Magdalena came near the table and then she smiled, her mouth wide and red below the black veil, which ended at the tip of her nose. The veil was thick, hemmed in black grosgrain ribbon, but still Magdalena could see the disfigured eye hidden underneath. The woman gestured for Magdalena to sit down. She wore black gloves with black pearl buttons at the cuff. Magdalena pulled out the chair across from the woman and sat, her back straight. She folded her hands on the table in front of her. Her tongue was swollen in her mouth. The woman laughed at her.

  “So, you wanted to meet your mama. Here I am. Do you recognize me?”

  “I was very young . . .”

  “Well, what do you want from me? What can I tell you?”

  Magdalena narrowed her eyes. She leaned forward. “Why you left us . . . me . . . what you’re doing . . . how you are . . .” She reached out her hand to touch the woman’s cheek but the woman pulled back and Magdalena’s hand grazed the black veil. “What happened to your eye?” Magdalena was crying. “How, how could you leave me? How could you do that? For what? Why?”

  The woman stubbed out her cigarette and reached for another. “Desire . . . ,” she said, “fate. It’s always fate.” She lit her cigarette, blew smoke rings at Magdalena, and laughed at her again, this time deep in her throat. “What did you expect?”

  “That you would be glad to see me, that we could be together. I’m married, to an American. I’m going to New York. You could come. Amadeo wouldn’t mind. I know it.” Magdalena touched the black-gloved hand that rested on the table. She traced the black pearl with a finger. “Your eye . . . In America, they could fix it. You would be beautiful again.”

  “You little fool,” the woman said. She flung her cigarette into the street and grabbed both Magdalena’s arms. “I’m not your mother. A whore in a brothel paid me to come here, to masquerade as your mother. The money was good. ‘Easy,’ the signora said. Since this,” and here she touched her face near her left eye, “I don’t work much anymore.” The woman looked away. “I don’t even know your name,” she said and she pulled at Magdalena’s arms for emphasis. And she waited, for tears, for cries, but she was surprised.

  Magdalena took back her arms, folded them across her chest, and leaned back. Her eyes were dry. “So, you’re not my mother.”

  “No, I told you that.”

  “But you could be, couldn’t you?”

  The woman smiled at Magdalena, a crooked smile. Whatever had happened to her eye had also affected the left side of her face. It was a face without symmetry. “You’re a clever girl, and a lucky one. Going to America with a rich husband.”

  “How do you know he’s rich?”

  “Who do you think paid the signora?”

  “So you think I’m lucky?”

  “I think fate is smiling on you.”

  Magdalena spoke slowly, carefully. “What’s your name?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I am not going to tell you but I am going to give you something.” From around her neck the woman took a black silk cord. It was very long and had been hidden underneath her clothes. From the cord hung a piece of bone, polished black. She put it into Magdalena’s hand. “I also come from Lucania,” she said. “If I had had a daughter I would not have left her, and I would have given her this.”

  Magdalena closed her hand around the polished piece of bone. “Will I have a son?” she asked the woman, who stood up and rearranged her hat. The woman stepped back and fixed her veil so that it stood out stiff from her face. She smiled at Magdalena. “Yes . . . and no,” she said.

  Magdalena found Amadeo in the cathedral and touched his shoulder. She said nothing and he asked her nothing. They went back to the hotel and she slept until dusk, when she dressed and he took her out to dinner. She drank too much wine and when he asked her about her mother she held up her wrist to show him a gold bracelet she had bought for herself in one of the jewelry shops near the cathedral. “She gave it to me this afternoon, my mother.” She touched it with her fingers. Amadeo said it was beautiful. He watched her eyes. She didn’t cry. She shook her wrist and watched the bracelet move. “The friar gave it to her when she left. She said she’s kept it all these years for me.”

  “Ah . . .”

  “The baby died.”

  “Well . . .”

  “She said she was so happy for me. Maybe, she said, she would come to visit us in New York.”

  “Magdalena . . .”

  “She wished me, us, a good life.” Magdalena poured herself more wine. She emptied the glass and poured another. “She kept kissing me. She held my hands, and kissed eve
ry finger, one by one, like this,” and she took Amadeo’s hands to show him, kissing each of his fingers, one by one.

  “So,” Amadeo said. “You’re happy now that you’ve seen her.”

  “Oh yes. She told me how she had to leave Castelfondo. It was terrible for her, she said. She wanted to take me with her but she couldn’t. The memory made her cry.” Magdalena lifted her glass. Amadeo paid the check and they walked back to the hotel along the waterfront. He held her under the arm and she leaned against him.

  That night Amadeo woke up and saw Magdalena on the balcony overlooking the sea. She turned when he sat up in bed and called her name. She stood there facing him, her arms folded in front of her. Then she walked across the room and got into the bed next to him. “I told you,” he said. “Today was the last time you will ever have to do anything alone. I promise you,” he said to her.

  Amadeo meant to hold her in his arms like a child but she wouldn’t let him. The polished black bone that the woman had given her in the café hung from her neck. Magdalena held her hand over it. She knew, now, she had the power. She wasn’t afraid.

  “Are you sorry you found her?” Amadeo said. “Was it a mistake?”

  “No,” she said. “It was fate, like us, no?” She put her head on his shoulder. She put her mouth on his collarbone.

  “Tomorrow,” he said in her ear, “I’m going to buy you a bracelet.”

  “But I have this one.”

  “Another one, a more beautiful bracelet than this one.” He touched her wrist. “So you’ll remember me forever.”

  She pulled away. “You’re still thinking again to send me back?”

  “Never,” he said.

  “We go to New York?”

  “On the first ship.”

  “You swear?”

  “To the Black Madonna.”