But Father Elio wasn’t looking at the transept or the vanished Mystery. He stared straight ahead, lost in some thought and seemingly oblivious of Marta’s presence. She was startled at how small her uncle seemed and how his white hair shone in this light. She’d never noticed how translucent his skin looked, an unhealthy white-gray that almost matched his hair, and she wondered if it were merely a trick of the light or perhaps just the effects of a layer of dust that covered everything, including her uncle.
He smiled as she sat next to him on the worn bench and they sat for a moment in silence. Marta strained to think of something, anything she might say that would help. She knew he was going to be hurt again when she told him of Leo and Topo. She wanted to shout their names at him. She wanted to take him by the hand and together they could march down the north coast road to that shepherd’s hovel where she’d heard Leo was staying. Together they would beat him with sticks. They would bring the Mystery back home, and then Uncle Elio wouldn’t be sad anymore and he wouldn’t cry and Leo Pizzola would get what he deserved. But instead she sat in thick silence, unable to speak.
Father Elio spoke. His voice was raspy with fatigue and dry with dust and he had to clear his throat before any sound would even come out. Finally, he pointed in front of them and said, “I always love the way those windows look in the morning light.”
The undamaged leaded windows at the east end of the building shone like kaleidoscopes, tossing gay colors and prism rainbows on the walls and floor. Marta joined him in studying the way the morning sun made the colored glass sparkle with an almost painful intensity.
“It hurts my eyes sometimes,” said Elio and he rubbed his eyes in a futile attempt to mask the tears. Marta put her arm around his shoulder, but said nothing. After a moment she could feel his breathing return, and after another moment he found his voice again.
“It’s not right that others should be punished for my sin.” “No one’s being punished for anything. It was an earthquake, that’s all.”
“No,” he whispered firmly. “It was my sin. I knew I couldn’t escape it, but I don’t understand why . . . this?” And he lifted his arms and gestured toward the destruction around him, trying to express a confusion that was beyond words.
“Uncle Elio, you don’t have sins and you’re not being punished.”
“Not sins. Sin. One sin. One monstrous sin. You don’t know.” The old man watched his own hands being wrung together and barely spoke above a shamed whisper. “Many years ago . . . you weren’t even born yet . . . I did a terrible, terrible thing. I knew then I shouldn’t do it, but I wanted something. I wanted it more than . . . I wanted it too much. I thought it was a good thing, but I felt God turn away from me. This is my punishment.”
For the first time since Marta sat down, Elio dared to turn his eyes toward the sad gray wall and with her arm around him she could feel his breathing becoming labored again.
“Why would God take away such a thing as this? A painting does no harm. A painting cannot sin. A painting is innocent. Especially a painting like this, so . . . filled with His joy and spirit and . . . I don’t understand. Why would God take it away? There must be a way of punishing me without this. I can accept that God has turned His back on me. I deserve it. I knew what I was doing. It was my sin alone. But, why this? I don’t understand.”
Suddenly the old man sat up and gasped, captured by a moment of inspiration. “Perhaps . . . an act of contrition. Some . . . penance.”
Marta didn’t understand what he was talking about and tried to console him, but he only rambled more about “his sin” and what he had to do to keep God from punishing her, and the girls, and all his friends in Santo Fico. She felt helpless patting his shoulder and offering flimsy encouragement, and feebly denying what she thought were just exhausted ramblings. But Father Elio was adamant that every heartache and catastrophe in Santo Fico was solely his fault and that included the disappearance of the Mystery. But what especially alarmed Marta was that as his anxiety grew, he became more and more convinced that he needed to perform some desperate act of atonement for his strange dark sin.
Now, Marta had never heard her uncle talk like this and the thought of him committing a sin was absolutely preposterous, much less a sin so wicked that it would turn God away from him. That was inconceivable. But his despair was so deep and his resolve to atone burned in him so fiercely that he frightened his niece when he suddenly gripped her arm and sat bolt upright.
“A fast!”
“A what?”
“A fast. I need to fast and pray.”
“For how long?”
“As long as it takes.”
The thought of this gaunt old man going without food was so ridiculous that it was more than Marta could accept, but there was a gleam in his eye that was, to her mind, deadly serious.
“Uncle Elio, you can’t fast. You don’t eat enough as it is.” “An act of contrition!”
“But what’s it going to accomplish?”
“Atonement! Maybe . . . I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe it will bring the spirit of God back to this place, to Santo Fico. Maybe it will bring the people back to this church. Do you remember how this church used to be filled with people? You’re probably too young. Once, there was a time, every seat was filled, every candle was lit, and the music . . . oh, the music . . . Maybe it will bring God back here. . . Maybe it will bring back the Mystery. I don’t know. Maybe nothing. I don’t know, but I have to try.”
Marta could see that the old man was determined, and it was the kind of determination that could kill him.
“Perhaps the Mystery isn’t really gone.”
“No. It’s gone. I spent an hour searching through the rubble on the floor. I thought, maybe, if I might find enough . . . maybe, it could be repaired. But I only found a few small, broken pieces. No it’s gone. God has taken it.”
“Maybe it wasn’t God.”
“What are you saying?”
“Maybe it was a person.”
The old priest’s eyes grew wide, as he comprehended Marta’s point. For the first time in her life Marta saw something that she didn’t believe could exist. She saw anger cloud her uncle’s face. “A person took the Mystery . . . ?”
Marta felt on thin ice. She knew this was a moment that required artfulness. She didn’t want to dismay him too much, so she chose her words carefully, keeping her tone simple and blameless—speaking as if she were comforting one of her girls when they were little and frightened.
“Yes. Possibly while you were gone, in the middle of the night someone came in here and stole it. It wasn’t God that took it. It was probably a person. In fact, it was—”
Father Elio exploded at her, “What are you talking about? Of course it was a person! Do you think I’m simpleminded? Do you think I supposed God’s hand came down out of the sky when my back was turned and snatched it away to heaven through that hole in the roof? I’m old, but I’m not a fool! Do you think I’m a fool?”
His angry voice echoed around the sanctuary, bouncing off the stone walls, rattling the fragile windows, and disappearing through the cavity in the ceiling—then silence.
Marta was speechless and her uncle could see the fear and hurt in her eyes. In all her life he had never raised his voice to her. In all her life she had never seen him direct anger toward any living thing. The shock of his rage stung her and now she was the one who had trouble breathing because her heart was in her throat. She felt ridiculous and ashamed that she had treated him with such condescension, as if he were, indeed, simpleminded.
But Father Elio reached out and pulled her to him and kissed her tears and begged her forgiveness for raising his voice to her.
“I know that someone took the painting,” he said softly. “The other explanation would have been a wonderful miracle, but my life has not . . . Well, I’m not touched by miracles. But don’t you see? Whoever took the painting, they were only acting out God’s will. If God had not wanted them to take the Mystery from this place, from my keeping, then it wouldn’t have happened.”
“But sometimes people just . . . do bad things. Sometimes it has nothing to do with God.”
“I know that.” He chuckled ruefully. “I’ve done that myself and this is my punishment.”
“Uncle Elio, if we were to find the person who took it—” “No!” His voice was like the staccato report of a pistol. He caught himself, took a breath, and repeated softly, “No. . . To have to face one of my children, after they have done something like this . . . To look in their eyes and know that they stole from God . . . No. Whoever did this, God is working in their lives too, and . . . and I don’t want to know. I don’t want the painting back. I don’t want to know and I don’t want it back! All I want . . . is . . .”
His voice trailed off and he again became lost in the sparkling windows at the end of the church. Marta stroked his hand.
“What do you want, Uncle Elio?”
He continued watching the colored window, his mind wandering around his own disheveled thoughts, until at last he said softly, “I want God to love me again.”
“He does. God does love you.”
Elio smiled, and shook his head.
“Then He will,” Marta insisted. “I promise you, He will.” Father Elio’s voice was so soft that even sitting at his shoulder Marta could barely hear him when he whispered to himself, “Now, that would be a miracle.”
T
he shepherd’s hut was stifling. Leo sat on the room’s only chair, leaned his elbows on the only table, and let sweat drip off his nose and trickle through the bristles on his chin. He refused to open the door or the shutters on the windows to allow in the cooling sea breeze. That would be too dangerous. However unlikely, someone might pass by and look in. Better to swelter than run the risk of somebody accidentally discovering his crime. So he let his body slowly bake in the stone oven and his brain smoldered under the gaze of the saintly eyes staring back at him from the dirty cot across the room.
It was close to an hour since Topo had at last trudged back up the hill toward town. It had been over three hours since the two of them had fumbled awkwardly down the road, then huffed and puffed across the pastures with their prize. The trip had taken longer than either would have guessed. Loaded with broken plaster, the old door was not only heavier and more unwieldy than they imagined, but the discrepancy in their sizes became brutally wearing for both. To keep the sagging old door relatively level and prevent their delicate cargo from tumbling onto the road, Leo had to bend over at an angle that left his upper torso almost parallel to the ground and his knees oddly bowed. Topo, on the other hand, was forced to make up his portion of the discrepancy by lifting his end almost chest high and skipping along on his tiptoes.
When they had made their initial getaway, scampering across the piazza in the shadows of dawn, fear and a short-lived surge of adrenaline had given them the impression that they could carry their litter to Roma if necessary. But after a few minutes of maneuvering down the deserted north coast road, Topo’s arms were shaking like leaves and Leo’s lower back was screaming. They both wanted desperately to stop and rest, but for fear that someone might see them and guess what they had done, they kept up these contorted positions and hurried down the road as quickly as their mismatched legs could carry them.
It was only after they’d turned off the road at the opening in the old stone wall and disappeared onto the Pizzola “estate” that they dared to collapse behind a row of cypress trees. They lay exhausted in the dry grass, panting and giggling—giddy in the confidence that the caper had been a success. Though neither mentioned it, both men sadly realized that their bodies were no longer able to keep up with their boyish enthusiasms.
The rest of their journey was accomplished in a prolonged series of short, furtive bursts of energy—each a bit shorter than the last. They staggered and rested their way past the boarded-up old house, past the unpruned olive grove, past the overgrown vineyard, past the Lombolos’ curious horses, down the goat path, across the meadow, and all the way to the shepherd’s hut overlooking the sea.
When they finally arrived both were completely spent, but still Leo doggedly demanded that they immediately store all the fragments of their treasure beneath his cot— all, save the figure of Saint Francis reclining beneath the tree. For some strange reason that Topo neither understood nor liked, Leo insisted upon placing that particular fragment on his cot with its back leaning against the wall. Topo found the image of Saint Francis sitting on Leo’s filthy cot and staring back across the room at them unsettling. But Leo refused to move it; he just sat at the table and stared back at it.
It took over half an hour and a few liters of water for them to recover from their ordeal, but at last Topo had enough strength to pose a few questions he wanted answered. Like— How would they approach the selling of the fragments? Who should they contact? How much money were they going to get? Was this something they needed to mention in their next confession? Were they going to be dealing with criminals? Were they now gangsters? Where would they ever find an appropriate underworld person in Santo Fico? Would they have to leave the country or just the region? If they were caught, would they go to prison for a long time? Should the panels be sold all at once, as one fresco—or maybe individually, one at a time? Was it too late to take them back? Were they going to go to hell for this?
Leo was willing to weigh all of these questions, but any discussion would have to wait until Topo had worked his way through a series of alternating anxiety and exhilaration attacks. So Leo watched while the poor little fellow paced back and forth, his high-pitched voice questioning everything from their ill-conceived adventure to their ill-conceived births. He blasted Leo for ever going to America and then cursed him again for returning. He damned the two fat men from Roma who first mentioned the loathsome Giotto. He cursed, lamented, and repented, and all the while his arms flew about like lethal whirligigs, stabbing the air for emphasis. In the end, he just sat on the dirt floor in a corner, his back against the rough wall, knees pulled up under his chin, and rocked back and forth.