Dictation (15 page)

Droplets of sweat erupted in a phalanx on her upper lip. She gave him the sour blink of an old woman; he glimpsed the Calabrian grandmother, weathered by the world's suspicions. "You think I no come?"

He would not tell her that he thought she had stolen.

"No belief! " Out tumbled her hot laugh, redolent of his bed in the Little Annex. "When
questo bambino
finish"—she pressed the cushion of her belly—"you make new
bambino,
O.K.?"

In Milan in the evening (his fourth in Italy), in a cramped cold chapel in the cathedral, within sight of the relic, they were married by a priest who was one of Caterina's special friends.

Caterina herself surprised him: she was dressed like a businesswoman. She wore a black felt hat with a substantial brim; she was substantial everywhere. Her head was set alertly on a neck that kept turning, as if wired to a generator; there was nothing she did not take in with her big powerful eyes. He perceived that she took
him
in, all in a gulp. Her arm shot out to smack Viviana, because Viviana, though she had intended never to tell about the cobbler, on her wedding day could not dissemble. The arm drew back. Caterina would not smack Viviana in front of a tourist, an American, on her wedding day. She was respectful. Still, it was a slander—the cobbler did not go putting seeds into the wombs of innocent girls. Twisting her neck, Caterina considered the American.

"Three days? You are friend of my Viviana three days, Signore?" She tapped her temple, and then made circles in the air with her forefinger. "For what you want to marry my Viviana if you no put the seed?"

He knew what a scoundrel he seemed. The question was terrifying; but it was not meant for him. They went at it, the mother and the daughter, weeping and shrieking, in incomprehensible cascades: it was an opera, extravagant with drama, in a language he could not fathom. All this took place in Caterina's room in the Hotel Duomo, around the corner from a linen closet as capaciously filled with shelves as a library; he sat in a chair face to face with the wardrobe in which the bilingual dictionary was secreted. The door was at his right hand—easy enough to grab the knob and walk away. For nearly an hour he sat. The two barking mouths went on barking. The hands clenched, grasped, pushed. He was detached, distant; then, to his amazement, at a moment of crescendo, when the clamor was at its angriest, the two women fell into a fevered embrace. Implausible as it was, preposterous as it was, Caterina was sending Viviana to America.
Un colpo di fulmine! Un fulmine a ciel sereno!

Just before the little ceremony, the priest asked Frank Castle how he would feel about a child that was—as he claimed—not his. Frank Castle could not think what to say. The priest was old and exhausted. He spoke of sin as an elderly dog who is too sick to be companionable—yet you are used to him, you can't do without him, you can't bring yourself to get rid of him. The wedding ring was Caterina's.

Frank Castle exchanged his return ticket for two others on the
Stella Italiana,
sailing for New York in ten days. It was all accident and good luck: someone had canceled. There were two available places. That left time for the marriage to be accorded a civil status: the priest explained to Caterina that though in the eyes of God Viviana was now safe, they had to fetch a paper from the government and get it stamped. This was the law.

There was time for Milan. It was a curiosity: Viviana had been brought to this northern treasure-city as a girl of thirteen and still did not know where the
Last Supper
was. Caterina knew; she even knew who had made it. "Leonardo da Vinci," she recited proudly. But she had never seen it. She took Viviana away to shop for a trousseau; they bought everything new but shoes, because Viviana was stubborn. She refused to go to the cobbler.
"Ostinata!"
Caterina said, but a certain awe had begun to creep into her fury. Viviana had found an American husband who talked on the radio in New York! Il Duce talked on the radio, too, and they could hear him as far away as America. Viviana a bride! Married, and to a tourist! These were miracles. Someone, Caterina said, had kissed a saint.

The
Last Supper
was deteriorating. It had to be looked at from behind a velvet rope. Viviana said it was a pity the camera hadn't yet been invented when Our Lord walked the earth—a camera would get a
much
better picture of Our Lord than the one in the flaking scene on the wall. Frank Castle taught her how to use his camera, and she snapped him everywhere; they snapped each other. They had settled into Caterina's room, but they had to come and go with caution, so that the manager would not know. It cost them nothing to stay in Caterina's room. Caterina did not say where she went to sleep; she said she had many friends who would share. When Viviana asked her who they were, Caterina laughed. "The priests!" she said. All over the Duomo, Frank Castle was treated with homage, as a person of commercial value. He was an American with an Italian wife. In the morning they had coffee in the dining room. The waiter gave his little bow. Viviana was embarrassed. At the Villa Garibaldi she had deferred to the waiters; no one was so low as the
cameriera.
It made her uncomfortable to be served. Frank Castle told her she was no longer a
cameriera;
soon she would be an American. Unforgiving, she confided that Caterina had gone to stay with the cobbler.

He took her—it was still Nightingale's itinerary—to see the unfinished
Pietà
in a castle with bartizans and old worn bricks; schoolchildren ran in and out of the broad grassy trench that had once been the moat, but Viviana was unmoved. It was true that she admired the luster of Our Lady's lifelike foot, as polished as the marble flagging of the Villa Garibaldi; the rest was mainly rough rock. She thought it ridiculous to keep a thing like that on display. Our Lord didn't have a face. The Virgin didn't have a face. They looked like two ghouls. And this they called religion! What sense was it that the
muratore
who made it was famous—his sprawling Jesus was no more beautiful or
sacro
than a whitewashed wall falling down. And without a face! She let Frank Castle take her picture in her new bird-speckled dress in front of all that rubble, and meanwhile she described the statue of Our Lady that had stood on a shelf in her own plain room at Fumicaro. The Madonna's features were perfect in every detail—there were wonderful tiny eyelashes glued on, made of actual human hair. And all in the nicest brightest colors, the eyes a sweet blue, the cheeks rosy. The Holy Bambino was just as exact. He had a tiny bellybutton with a blue rhinestone in it, to match Our Lady's blue robe, and under his gauzy diaper he even had a lacquered penis that showed through, the color of a human finger, though much tinier. He had tiny celluloid fingernails! A statue like that, Viviana said, is
molto sacro
—she had kneeled before it a thousand times. She had cried penitential floods because of the bleeding that did not come. She had pleaded with Our Lady for intercession with the Holy Bambino, and the Holy Bambino had heard her prayer. She had begged the Holy Bambino, if He could not make the bleeding come, to send a husband, and He had sent a husband.

They walked through rooms of paintings: voluptuous Titians; but Frank Castle was startled only by the solidity of Viviana. Ardor glowed in her. He had arrived in Italy with two little guidebooks, one for Florence and one for Rome, but he had nothing for Milan. Viviana herself was unmapped. Everything was a surprise. He could not tell what lay around the corner. He marveled at what he had done. On Monday, at Fumicaro, Augustine and philosophy; on Thursday, the chattering of a brown-eyed bird-speckled simple-minded girl. His little peasant wife, a waif with a baby inside her! All his life he would feel shame over her. To whom could he show her without humiliation?

Her ignorance moved and elevated him. He thought of Saint Francis rejoicing in the blows and ridicule of a surly innkeeper:
Willingly and for the love of Christ let me endure pains and insults and shame and want, inasmuch as in all other gifts of God we may not glory, since they are not ours but God's.
Frank Castle understood that he would always be mocked because of this girl; he went on snapping his camera at her. How robust she was, how gleaming, how happy! She was more hospitable to God than anyone who hoped to find God in books. She gave God a home everywhere—in old Roman tubs, in painted wooden dolls: sticks and stones. He saw that no one had taught her to clean her fingernails. He puzzled over it: she was a daughter of a trader in conveniences, she was herself a kind of commodity; she believed herself fated, a vessel for anyone's use. He had married shame. Married! It was what he had done. But he felt no remorse; none. He was exhilarated—to have had the courage for such a humbling!

In front of them, hanging from a crossbar, was a corpse made of oak. It was the size of a real man, and had the head of a real man. It wore a wreath made of real brambles, and there were real holes in its body, with real nails beaten into them.

Viviana dropped to the floor and clasped her hands.

"Viviana, people don't pray here."

Her mouth went on murmuring.

"You don't
do
that in a place like this."

"Una chiesa,"
she said.

"People don't pray in museums." Then it came to him that she did not know what a museum was. He explained that the pictures and the statues were works of art. And he was married to her! "There aren't any priests here," he said.

She shot him a look partly comical and partly shocked. Even priests have to eat, she protested. The priests were away, having their dinner. Here it was almost exactly like the
chiesa
at Fumicaro, only more crowded. At the other
chiesa,
where they kept the picture of the
Last Supper,
there were also no priests to be seen, and did that prove that it wasn't a
chiesa?
Caterina had always told her how ignorant tourists were. Now she would have to put in an extra prayer for him, so that he could feel more sympathy for the human hunger of priests.

She dipped her head. Frank Castle circled all around the medieval man of wood. Red paint, dry for centuries, spilled from the nail holes. Even the back of the figure had its precision: the draw of the muscles elongated in fatigue. The carver had not stinted anywhere. Yet the face was without a grain of devout inspiration. It was as if the carver had cared only for the carving itself, and not for its symbol. The man on the crossbar was having his live body imitated, and that was all. He was a copy of the carver's neighbor perhaps, or else a cousin. When the carving was finished, the neighbor or cousin stepped down, and together he and the carver hammered in the nails.

The nails. Were they for pity? They made him feel cruel. He reflected on their cruelty—piety with a human corpse at its center, what could that mean? The carver and his model, beating and beating on the nails.

In the streets there were all at once flags, and everywhere big cloth posters of Il Duce flapping on the sides of buildings. Il Duce had a frog's mouth and enormous round Roman eyes. Was it a celebration? He could learn nothing from Viviana. When he asked Caterina, she spat. Some of the streets were miraculously enclosed under a glass dome. People walked and shopped in a greenish undersea twilight. Masses of little tables freckled the indoor sidewalks. Mobs went strolling, all afternoon and all night, with an exuberance that stunned him. All of Milan was calling out under glass. They passed windows packed with umbrellas, gloves, shoes, pastries, silk ties, marzipan. There was the cathedral itself, on a giant platter, made all of white marzipan. He bought a marzipan goose for Viviana, and from a peddler a little Pinocchio on a string. Next to a bookstore, weaving in and out of the sidewalk coffee-drinkers
—"Turista? Turista?"
—boys were handing out leaflets in French and English. Frank Castle took one and read: "Only one of my ancestors interests me: there was a Mussolini in Venice who killed his wife who had betrayed him. Before fleeing he put two Venetian
scudi
on her chest to pay for her funeral. This is how the people of Romagna are, from whom I descend."

They rode the elevator to the top of the cathedral and walked over the roofs, among hundreds of statues. Behind each figure stood a dozen others. There were saints and martyrs and angels and gryphons and gargoyles and Romans; there were Roman soldiers whose decorated sword handles and buskins sprouted the heads of more Roman soldiers. Viviana peered out through the crenelations at the margins of the different roofs, and again there were hundreds of sculptures; thousands. The statues pullulated. An army of carvers had swarmed through these high stones, century after century, striking shape after amazing shape. Some were reticent, some ecstatic. Some were motionless, some winged. It was a dream of proliferation, of infinity: of figures set austerely inside octagonal cupolas, and each generative flank of every cupola itself lavishly friezed and fructified; of limbs erupting from limbs; of archways efflorescing; of statues spawning statuary. What looked, from the plaza below, like the frothiest lacework or egg-white spume here burst into solidity, weight, shadow and dazzlement: a derangement of plenitude tumbling from a bloated cornucopia.

A huge laughter burst out of Frank Castle's lung. On the hot copper roof he squatted down and laughed.

"What? What?" Viviana said.

"You could be here years and years," he said. "You would never finish! You would have to stay up in the air your whole life!"

"What?" she said. "What I no finish?"

He had pulled out his handkerchief and was pummeling his wet eyes. "If—if—" But he could not get it out.

"What? What? Francesco—"

"If—suppose—" The laughter felt like a strangulation; he coughed out a long constricted breath. "Look," he said, "I can see you falling on your goddamn knees before every
one
of these! Viviana," he said, "it's a
chiesa!
The priests aren't eating dinner! The priests are down below! Under our feet! You could be up here," he said—now he understood exactly what had happened at Fumicaro; he had fixed his penance for life—"a thousand years!"