The Warrior and His Bride

 

by Emilio De Grazia

 

I first heard the music when Mamma and I were on our way to the fountain with our water jar. I looked up to the sky as it passed—hun­dreds of bright birds in flight, their feathers soft and shiny in the sun, the flow of their wings so smooth I sat in the middle of the Piaz­za to watch. “Stand up, Lizetta,” Mamma said. “I can’t carry you ev­erywhere.”

I refused to budge and started to cry, the music flying away as I raised my voice. “The birds,” I cried, “the birds are gone.”

“What birds are you talking about?” Mamma asked as she lifted me into her arms.

“The birds, the birds,” I said, pointing at the window high in the house next to Don Ciccio’s. “The ones that come from there.”

“Oh him,” Mamma replied. “You don’t need to worry about him. That’s Maestro Benvenuto. He’ll make music until he dies, but no need to worry about him. He’s so old even Death isn’t interested in him any more.”

“I want it!” I screamed as Mamma picked me off the street. And I screamed all the way home because Mamma would not let go of my hand.

I kept hearing the music after that. I heard it whenever Mamma took me to the fountain and when I stood alone on the balcony of our house looking out. Sometimes I heard it when I played circles around the olive trees and fed Don Barba the goat. And I heard it at night when I lay in my bed watching my mother’s shadow on the wall, the music flowing in through the windows like water under a boat, I lying there amazed as I swirled away and down, the boat’s sails lifting me off the water and sending me far away to a beautiful heavenly place.

“America,” everyone said. “It’s heaven there, and someday your father will come back for you.”

I kept waiting for my chance, the time when my mother would turn her back.

It happened on the way to the fountain one day. Mamma had not yet put the water jar on her head because Maria Lupi was trying to sell her a piece of cloth. I could see that Mamma wanted the cloth, that they would be going back and forth. So I slipped away from her, making sure she saw me holding hands with Giulietta Molinari, a girl who always tried to tell me what to do. The minute Mamma turned her back I slid my hand out of Giulietta’s and told her to close her eyes and count to ten. The next moment I was flying away, seeing, without even looking back, my mother checking the cloth for flaws. I had to hide in a doorway for a minute, my heart beating because the music had stopped and I did not know which way to run. I smelled fresh coffee brewing and bread baking in somebody’s house. Then it began again, slowly like a sad man’s voice, my papa’s, saying I’m sad and lonely, I’m lost, walking the streets alone in a faraway place, looking for someone, a beautiful woman, a girl. Papa, I cried, I am your little girl. So I ran from my hiding place toward the voice, not looking back when breathless and trembling I came to the doorway of Maestro Benvenuto’s house. Above me I could see the window of the sad man’s voice.

I pushed on the door and like magic it opened for me. Inside it was dark, but I saw rooms on both sides and steps leading up and up. There, at the top of the stairs, the door I was looking for.

I was afraid. “Papa,” I said to myself as I started climbing the stairs. “Papa, are you there?”

The music was different inside, slow and low like a man asleep on a bed. I smelled the fermentation of new wine. I held my breath as I came to the final step, my head dizzied by what I saw through the small opening the door made for my eyes. An old man sat on a wooden bench in front of a strange machine made of brown wood, a wide slanted board propped up by a stick over the top of the machine like a lid open to let all the birds fly away. The machine had a row of white and black things that looked like long even teeth, and the old man, his head bent and swaying to one side, was running his fingers over the teeth.

I sat on the step watching his hands, how the birds flew out of the machine into his body as his fingers ran like me chasing birds through the fields then out the window to everyone walking below. I was happy and scared. When I put my hand to my mouth to keep from screaming he turned and saw me through the crack in the door, his fingers still running even as his smile revealed to me his brown uneven teeth, small pointed beard, and eyes glazed but wide behind specta­cles that seemed to be falling off his overripe nose. He winked.

“Lizetta!” my mother screamed down below. I turned and ran down the stairs. She was waiting for me with a stick in her hand. I tried to run but she quickly caught up with me. “Never,” she screamed as she rained blows on my behind, “never leave my side again!”

What was wrong with me, I asked myself that night. Why did I disobey my mother? Why did I run away and hide? I said my prayers three times over, begging Jesus and Mary not to send me to hell. Mary turned her back and said nothing while she sat in her chair sewing the holes in my socks, but Jesus called to me from the old fig tree, whispering come, come, holding his arms out to me from underneath his long white dress, his face small and pretty like mine.

But now I knew where the music was, and it was mine whenever I wanted it. All I had to do was stand in my window and look out. I heard it as Luigi Ferrina, his donkey loaded down with a heap of faggots on his back, wound his way down the mountain trail, and as Maria Bruno carried bread from the oven behind her house. And I heard it mornings when the workmen, their hammers chipping away at stone, repaired the west wall of St. Bartolomeo’s Church. The mu­sic was there, rising from the window of Maestro Benvenuto’s house, morning, noon, and night.

But who was this old man, Maestro Benvenuto? Whenever Mamma took me to the fountain I looked for him. “Oh him,” Giulietta said, “he never comes out during the day. He plays the piano in his room and at night he sits by the fountain until dawn. He’s only awake when we’re asleep.”

It was a very hot day when Tullio and Concetta got married, and I started to cry in the church. “Quiet,” Mamma said, “or I’ll make you stay home all alone tonight. I bit my lip and closed my mouth. More than anything I wanted to go to the wedding reception at Tullio’s fa­ther’s house.

Everyone was there, even strangers from Amantea, Lago, and Reg­gio. I had never seen so many people before, all the food, even the women drinking wine, and the confetti, all I could eat. Uncle Carlo and his son were playing their horns, and Tony Sesti his mandolin. Everyone danced, even Mamma who kept whirling around the room with Pina Saveria, the old lady who lived alone on the edge of town. Some of the men looked dizzy, but they never seemed to tire. Mamma let go of my hand as soon as we arrived. I found Giulietta right away and we ran between the dancers whenever the music started up.

I was tired, ready to go to Mamma’s lap, when Maestro Benvenuto appeared in the door. He took short steps like a man unable to see, found his way through a crowd of dancers, and approached a table where men were drinking wine. I wasted no time. Twirling across the floor like a dizzy little fool, I scooted under the table and hid at his feet. I heard every word.

 

“How goes it with you, Maestro Benvenuto?” asked Michele Posa.

“There is no hope,” the Maestro replied. “I go, you go, we go, and they all go too. And when the women are all gone, then what’s the use?”

Giacomo Storto lifted his glass. “I say when the wine is gone, what’s the use?”

“The use is in the head,” Maestro said, “because that’s where the women go when we’re drunk.”

“Mine goes crazy,” said Marco Guido.

“In bed?”

“No, in his head,” Giacomo replied, tapping his brow. “How can she be in two beds at once?”

“Ah yes,” said Maestro, “that’s the sin of it, the terrible waste, the flaw of all married life. If more than once a woman can be found in different beds, you’d think that maybe once she could be in two beds at once.”

“Mine sleeps on both sides of the bed.”

“Only when you’re so drunk you’re blind to what she’s doing on the other side,” Giacomo laughed. “She’s not sleeping there.”

“Better not to see. When your eyes are closed you can have a hun­dred women in your bed.”

Maestro’s left knee twitched as he lifted his glass. “Then maybe we should drink a little more. When we’re almost blind maybe wine will help us see just one or two.”

I heard the glasses come together over my head, and Michele Posa’s burp.

“Now, Maestro Benvenuto, tell me, how goes the world?”

“Eh.”

“That much I could have said myself. Eh. That is my own eloquent conclusion every night just before I sleep. But you are a doctor and pro­fessor. You’ve been to Bologna and Rome. I am a poor fool farmer tied to a mule. I want a lesson from you before I go to my bed and die.”

“You give me no rest,” the Maestro said, “and no escape. If my les­son is too short, you will die before your time. If it goes on and on, then surely you will leave us for your home, your bed, and your certain death.”

“Then make it just right by leaving the lesson out.”

The Maestro lifted his glass to the light. “The wine is good, so I see some truth in it.”

I smothered my laugh when Michele Posa burped again. “Never mind about the truth. Leave that to the priests. Tell us something that really happened.

“Ah,” Maestro Benvenuto said, “you want a history.”

“An Italian history.”

“What else would it be? You think my history would make any sense in German or French?”

“Italy will win the next war!”

“Do you think there will be another great war?”

“They can shove their great war up their great ass, but nobody ever asks me.”

“We should join the Americans next time. Everybody there owns a car.”

“And we need a strong leader this time, someone who will bring or­der and law to the young.”

Maestro Benvenuto silenced them by lifting his hand. “A professor of history must be allowed to profess.”

“Bravo, Maestro Benvenuto. Let him begin.”

He cleared his throat and his knee twitched again. “My history goes like this: Pepe cried, ‘Mamma mia!’ as he ran out of his house, leaving behind him the dirty dishes, the pile of old clothes he had not washed in thirty weeks, the chicken feathers in every corner of the room, and the droppings of the twelve cats that slept in his bed. And he never came back. Now he lives alone in a cave, eating nothing but worms and dirt, while Donna Giulia, his one true love, waits in his bed for his return, having experienced one moment of love.”

“Then what happened?” Michele Posa asked.

“Eh,” the Maestro replied, “they’re still there.”

“What about the beginning?”

“I’m old,” the Maestro said, “but I don’t go that far back.”

“What about the conclusion then?” Marco Guido asked.

The Maestro blew his nose and held up his empty glass. “You all want lessons, professional opinions from me your doctor here. But no­body ever pays.”

“I don’t know what you can expect,” he went on as Michele Posa filled his glass, “from somebody ancient like me. If the old are so wise, why don’t they all die young? They should know better than to grow so old they keep losing their way. The lesson of my little his­tory? I forgot. See how it goes, even at the very end? No good way to conclude. So I suppose you have to start anywhere and take it from there.”

He took a long drink.

“Pepe was eighteen when he first saw the girl. She was a dream, a lovely light with many moons and rainbows in it, a beautiful tree decked out in a flowered dress, her shape more perfect than a water jar. She was too much for his young heart to endure. He had to close his eyes and hold his breath until she disappeared down the Via del Popolo.”

“You mean Pepe lived here, in San Pietro?”

“Of course he lived here. In the house my Uncle Carmine built. Where else? And he worked in the fields all day, hoping for a chance to see her again. By and by he found out her name. Giulia. A name li­quid enough to keep all his thoughts afloat in the blue sky of his mind, deep enough to plunge his hopes into a hopeless black well, musical enough to stir him to listen to the songs of birds, trees, clouds, grass, grain, grapes, pine nuts, pebbles, salamanders. He was in love.”

The Maestro paused. I could feel the men leaning in, the silence hovering over the table like that in the church whenever I sat under­neath the dome. The music started again and dancers rushed to the floor.

“Then what?”

“Eh,” the Maestro replied, “what do you expect from me?”

“Finish it.”

“Eh. You think history finished itself just like that? You think it’s the end of the world? Pepe was young, only eighteen. He had a long way to go before he abandoned my Uncle Carmine’s house to live in his cave where day after day, day after day, all he ate was worms and dirt, dirt and worms. Do you think it was easy for him? But don’t say what you think—how that poor boy should get a taste of how hard you work every day, with no Giulia anywhere to lighten your load as you trudge home from the fields, no dream to face on your pil­lows when you’re too weary to fall asleep. Leave him standing there looking at her. You’ve got enough troubles of your own.”

“He’s being reasonable,” somebody said, and everyone murmured in agreement.

“Ah Pepe, Pepe, you poor boy,” the Maestro went on, “what can you do but go to your mother every day? She’s the only one there for you. Your father—he’s gone. Off to fight the war in Abyssinia for the greater glory of our nation and state. Who sees him ever again? Pepe’s mother cannot imagine it, her husband there among the brave battal­ion that conquered the Amazon queen and all her slaves, how they fi­nally captured her, her eunuchs and savage entourage in chains, the soldiers waiting, waiting in some desolate jungle hut for the official order to return to their beloved land, houses, fields, chickens, wives, sea, hoes, sons whose names they can’t recall, mothers lighting can­dles in the churches morning, noon, and night. Is there really a God? If there’s a God, why doesn’t he answer all these mothers’ prayers and bring Pepe’s father home safe? There are some mysteries we cannot explain.”

“I don’t really believe there’s a God.”

“So what does our poor Pepe do? When his mother has her back turned he begins following his love. When she walks into town to fill her water jar, he hides in doorways along the way. He finds the fields where she and her mother work, and he stands behind the clos­est tree holding his breath. When Giulia is feeding the pig caged next to her mother’s house, he is there too enjoying the aroma of her out­stretched hand. And when Giulia enters the church he hunches his shoulders as she walks down the aisle, prayers suddenly coming to his lips, the words skipping over the beads of the rosary like water rushing over rocks. Who can say what he really feels? Who knows how many nights he stands outside the window of her house, some­times in rain, sometimes in snow, the cold freezing his hands and feet, he night after night returning alone to his mother’s house, defeated, exhausted, humiliated, wet, crouching beneath a back window, his ears and eyes alert as a hunted animal’s, he afraid to breathe, afraid to waken his mother’s wrath, waiting sometimes until dawn to climb through the window into the bed where finally he can put his head down on a pillow again, see her face one final time, and catch one hour’s sleep.”

“Doesn’t he ever talk to her?”

“Talk to her? How could he ever talk to her?”

“Why not?”

“Giulia is seven years old.”

“Ah,” said Marco Guido, “now everything is beginning to make sense.”

“Finally,” the Maestro said, “he won her hand and found himself walking down the aisle of St. Bartolomeo’s to marry her. Who can tell how long these things take, how many long chapters there had to be in their romance, how many times he had to walk accidentally by her house, let himself be seen, how impossible it was for him to speak to her the first few years, how his throat suddenly went dry and tightened so that he could not eat, let alone utter a word, his love for her twisting and turning inside, strangling him, turning his face gray as ashes, his lips dry, his cheeks and eyes as hollow as those of a man starving to death. He ate only bread and water for seven weeks, his poor mother wringing her hands as her fingers groped toward the next bead of her rosary, one prayer always on her mind as she moved her lips through the string of Hail Marys that finally lulled him to sleep every night: ‘Oh my God, forgive my son whatever terrible sin he has committed against you. Forgive him, my God, for he is still just a lit­tle boy’.

“Pepe, meanwhile, stood on many precipices, that boy Pepe, look­ing down on the swirling waters on the very night he turned twenty-nine years old. And he did not know how to swim. More than once he made up his mind to take his eternal plunge, but each time his moth­er’s face and voice, speaking sternly to him from the waters below, re­quired him to go home at once. Nights he dreamt of leaving San Pietro forever, abandoning Giulia, his mother, everyone. With his goat he would walk to Rome, living on the goat’s milk until he saw Garibaldi’s monument. Then he would turn the goat free to find his own way in the world. He would find a place on the streets and sing songs for a crust of bread. Toscanini would hear him sing, take him to La Scala in Milan, and just before he died he would return to San Pietro to sing his last song. Better yet he would join the army in Africa, lose a leg and arm, and return one day to weep with Giulia’s husband at her grave.

“How does a man like Pepe prove his love? He did everything in his power. When he hoed the earth he thought of no one but her. When he thought of no one but her he required his thoughts to be pure. When all his thoughts were perfectly pure he hoed the ground like a wild man. After he tired of hoeing the ground like a wild man, the hoe in his hand seemed natural, moving from plant to plant of its own accord. Afternoons passed rather pleasantly this way.

“‘Pepe’, his mother called to him one afternoon. ‘I have something to say to you. You know that Donna Anna, the one with the daughter named Giulia who raises chickens by the cemetery. Donna Anna says she will give me twenty chickens if you marry her Giulia. What do you say’?

“What could he say? Years later when he was alone in his cave eating dirt and worms, worms and dirt, he had nothing more to say to anyone, even to himself, as if he had made up his mind to swallow all his words forevermore because of the response he made to his mother that day. Picture him there—he well into his twenties, his young flesh gorged with blood, Giulia by now almost thirteen, he carefully grooming the furrows he made every day with his hoe, stepping softly between the tomato, pepper, and eggplant rows, the pasta, hard bread, cheese, and wine his mother set in front of him making his mouth water for more, especially the cheese. Could he say what he really thought? Wasn’t his mother ever content with what she had? Twenty chickens running this way and that, their shit-splattered eggs impossible to find, their deep-throated necks perpetually bobbing forward with hunger that never ceased. Twenty more chickens to take care of. Oh how he already longed to choke the hunger out of their necks with both hands. What could he say?

“Yes, Mamma, I’ll marry the girl.”

“‘Then clean out the barn’, his mother replied. ‘We can’t all live in the house. I suppose I’ll have to move in there’.

“The preparations for the wedding began at once. Pepe’s mother brought forth secret treasures from a buried past—linen her grand­mother had embroidered by hand, an ancient coffee grinder with a hand-crank still shiny and unused, many-colored pieces of hard French candy her grandfather had brought back with him after Garibaldi’s victory over the Bourbons in Sicily, a pair of shiny black leather shoes his father left behind when he left for Africa—all these, one by one, she gave to him with tear-filled eyes. She spent whole days and nights baking little breads with thin crusts that melted in your mouth like communion hosts, and little cakes filled with sweet cream, and small pigtailed pastries powdered with white sugar. Pepe’s father’s suit was too big for him, so she shortened the sleeves and pants, and when she ironed it one last time so that it looked as shiny and stiff as a black leather hide, Pepe knew it was almost time.

“Early the next Saturday morning Donna Anna arrived, the chick­ens following her in a row.

“‘There are only nineteen’, Pepe’s mother complained.

“‘Take it or leave it’, Donna Anna replied. ‘One died on the way’.

“The wedding procession began on the far end of the Via del Popolo. It was a sunny day, blue as the ocean itself, the young couple walking nervously side-by-side without once glancing at each other’s eyes. Who can say what was in their hearts at a time like this, how their affections swelled with every step that brought them closer and closer to the church that began looming over them like a mind al­ready made up that their marriage was inevitable, secure. And when he entered the portals of that church Pepe did not feel what the priest had preached for years, that the Church was Christ’s Bride, that no feeling could be more gratifying, more sanctified, than the one he felt shuddering through his body as he approached the altar. His knees trembled as he stood with his Giulia in front of the priest, poor Pepe still too afraid to glance at the veil covering her face.”

Maestro Benvenuto paused in the middle of his history, and even I could feel the sadness weighing him down. Everyone was silent, afraid for him.

“Then what happened?” somebody finally asked. “Did the priest marry them?”

Maestro Benvenuto stared into his glass and shifted in his chair in a way that reminded me of how I liked to sleep curled in a ball in my bed.

“Thank God his mother was there,” the Maestro said. “That was the common miracle that took place that day right after the priest pronounced them man and wife and motioned for Pepe to lift the veil from the bride’s face. Thank God she was there to take care of him.

“And thank God for the chickens too. They were a bother for the next twenty years, but they provided an opportunity for revenge. Pepe spent years quarreling with them, especially when they refused to swallow the little stones he threw at their heads. But when one by one his mother served him up a leg or foot, he was gentler with them. And it took twenty years to finish them and their progeny off—twenty years of stealing eggs from underneath their breasts, grinding corn into meal that exploded into little puffs when they attacked it with their beaks, twenty years of wringing their necks one by one. It also took twenty years for Giulia to reappear.

“Yes, she disappeared for twenty years. Not at the altar as some of the old people still believe, but it was, as most witnesses agree, outside the church right after the ceremony, her veil still unlifted as she melted into the waiting crowd and ended up God-knows-where.”

“When did he start eating worms and dirt?” Michele asked.

“Ah,” the Maestro replied, “worms and dirt, dirt and worms. Ev­ery day the same old thing. Can you imagine it? No. No worms and dirt for many years to come, for when Giulia deserted him that was not the worst thing by far that ever happened to him. Remember, he lived in his mother’s house, and every day she prepared his food. More than he could eat. There was pasta in tomato sauce, pasta in pesto, pasta and beans, pasta with sausage more than once a week, with every kind of cheese, and the nuts on the trees by his house sud­denly began to fall like rain into his open mouth, and every other day some chicken part—a leg, a wing, a foot, the head—and there was always a big pot of chicken soup on the stove, and milk. She brought him milk every day and set it in front of him. ‘See’, she said, ‘nobody loves you like me’.

“The milk, of course, did not mix well with the wine. For a time all he wanted was revenge. I’ll kill her, I’ll kill her, I’ll kill her, he said over and over every night until he cried himself asleep, his mother always next to him in her chair rocking back and forward with her beads. Then one morning he made an announcement to her: ‘I want to go to war’.

“She threw herself on him, digging her nails into his flesh, plead­ing, begging, screaming no, not you my son. He half-dragged her down the Via del Popolo to the mayor’s house. ‘I want to go to war’, he said to the mayor, ‘to Africa—like my father. I want to kill savages—for the greater glory of all Italy’!

“The mayor looked at the ground and sadly shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Pepe, but the war ended three years ago. We don’t need any more men right now’.

“Pepe’s heart sank. ‘No war anywhere’?

“‘It’s not my fault’, the mayor replied.

“The poor boy tore out his hair on the spot and bit his arms until blood flowed. ‘There, there’, his mother said as she took him by the hand. ‘Let’s go home and I’ll fix you something to eat’.

“He ate. For twenty years he ate until he wrung that last chicken’s neck and picked his teeth with a sliver of bone from its wing. You could say that he ate his heart out for those twenty years, gorging himself at his mother’s table on the delights stolen from him when Giulia disappeared on his wedding day. You would think that self-consumed as he was by his desperate love, he would grow weak and frail. But not so, for the food had a strange effect on him. He grew, he swelled, he expanded like a yeasty dough left in the sun, his legs disappearing beneath a body so round and full he had to widen the rows between his pepper and tomato plants to keep from burying them when he rolled through with his hoe. Everything grew—his finger­nails, the hair on his head, chest, face, and palms, even the moles on his back. This was not easy for his mother to watch. She spent more and more hours each day preparing his meals, food taken from her mouth to satisfy his enormous appetite. While he swelled into a bar­rel, a mountain, a whale of a man, she shrank into a string of small bones rattling about in her black dress, a bag with openings only for her skinny hands and grizzled face showing a permanent toothless grin. Let’s not even talk about it any more—the sadness in his heart! How every night when he lifted his legs into bed he felt weighed down by his grief. His mother just across the room still awake, wait­ing for him to weep his tears of bitterness, she finally closing her eyes when he began his quiet litany of words that eventually sent him sinking toward sleep: ‘I’ll kill her, I’ll kill her. Someday I’ll kill her, I will, I will, I will’.

“Oh how he prayed for her return, how many times he saw her at the altar again, then walking up the aisle of the church, she his bride, he this time not making the mistake of letting go of her hand when they arrived at the church door and the crowd waiting outside. And how many times he saw her returning to him, repentant, dragging her bleeding knees on the stones leading to his house, weeping, plead­ing, begging him to take her back. ‘Some day’, he kept saying to him­self as he curled his tongue around his lips, ‘some day she’ll come back to me on her knees’.

“The condition of his house did not improve. As his mother grew more frail she forgot to wash the pots and pans. He developed the habit of leaving his dirty clothes on the floor. When they killed a chicken nobody carried the feathers outside. His mother brought him more milk than he could endure, so it soured in the heat. And one by one the cats moved in, taking up residence on his bed and curling up close to his belly, between his legs, under his armpits, and on his face when the nights grew chill. A certain odor surrounded the house. The neighbors turned up their noses when they passed. Pepe sat counting the hours. ‘Maybe I’m still not too old to go to war,’ he said to him­self.

‘Then one evening, just as the sun was going down, Giulia returned. Pepe was already sound asleep, carried away by the ocean-swell sounds of his snores but not deaf to the soft rapping on the door. His mother, sitting in the corner peeling potatoes, was deaf as a stone, so it was he who stirred. Can you imagine what happened to his heart when he opened the door? It stopped entirely. He grew dizzy and turned white and his legs curled like noodles under him as he fell to one knee.

“‘Giulia’, he said.

“‘Yes’.

“She stood there in the full white bloom of her wedding dress, her veil, as if still untouched from that moment when they stood together at the altar of St. Bartolomeo’s church, hanging like a white mist be­fore her face.

“Pepe felt his mother’s presence at his side. ‘Ah,’ the old woman said, ‘I knew this moment would someday come. Now I’m no good to you any more. The house is finally yours, she said as she took hold of a broom standing next to the door. ‘I’m moving into the barn’.

“‘Mamma’, he said weakly as she, turning a deaf ear his way, brushed past.

“If you ask me again when he first began eating dirt and worms, I would insist it was the very moment his Giulia stood before him at the door. Already he had that taste in his mouth—his lips suddenly dry, his mouth caked with a chalky film, his tongue rolling around inside as if trying to swallow the impossible. Swallow he could not. He looked around for help, but his mother was gone.

“‘Giulia’, he said.

“‘Yes’, came the reply from behind the veil, a sound like that of a kitten squeezed.

“‘So you did come back. You may enter my chamber now’.

“Did he kill her?” Giacomo asked. “Did he give her what she de­served?”

“Did he wring her neck?”

The Maestro lifted his hand to calm the men now crowding closer to him. “Do you think Pepe was uncivilized? Do you think he was an animal? Try putting yourself in his place as his bride took her first small steps into the house, pausing to survey the scene long enough for him to imagine the debate stirring in her mind—Should I stay or should I go? Is this the place to spend the rest of my life? He saw her make up her mind and proceed . . . where?”

“Right out the door again.”

“No. To his bed. Even while he, still down on one knee, felt all his animosity draining from him the way wine flows from a barrel of wine when we forget to screw the spigot tight.

“So imagine if you can—the cats scattering every which way as she approached, Pepe suddenly bursting into an Ave Maria even as he kicked the door shut behind him with his foot, and the chicken feathers dancing like flower petals as Giulia’s wedding gown passed over them.

“Later, when he was alone in his cave, one moment kept returning to him whenever he lifted a worm out of the mud. It was when Giulia, without looking over his shoulder at him or uttering one single word, pulled in the train of her wedding dress, spread it out carefully on the bed, and laid down on it. Oh what a beautiful bed it suddenly was, she all motionless and white, even the rise and fall of her breathing imperceptible in the dim evening light.

“He approached her lovely form and stood over her. And again his heart stopped, forcing him to drop to one knee.

“‘Oh Giulia’! he said.

“The saddest part of this story,” the Maestro said in hushed tones, “is that it was at this very moment that Giulia experienced the love that would sustain her the rest of her life. The twenty years she spent away from him—it is useless to tell about what she lived from day to day: Whether she fell in with brigands who made her their queen, or if, as some say, she entered the convent at Paola, or if she traveled by train to Turin to join a carnival—who knows? We know only that she returned to her Pepe—out of loyalty, out of need, out of love that stood still in that moment when Pepe loomed over her ready to lift her veil away with his trembling hand, a love whose expectation of fulfillment eventually inspired her to haul the manure out of the barn so Pepe’s mother would have somewhere to sleep and to scrub every corner of the house so clean that the cats, no longer able to recognize their own scent anywhere inside, abandoned the house forevermore.

“Yes, his hand paused over her before he lifted the veil, and his heart stood still a dramatic third time.”

“‘Mamma mia’! he cried as he lifted the veil. Then he ran scream­ing from the house into the mountains, and never returned.

“Eventually he found his cave, and to this day you can find him there eating worms and dirt, still willing to tell this story to anyone passing by and still confessing his one terrible regret in his heart, the one opportunity missed that made his whole life seem like a waste: That he did not join the army when there was a war going on, that he had been born too early or too late to experience what mothers in oth­ers parts of the world—Spanish mothers, mothers of Moors, Greeks, Turks, Protestants, Syrians, Moroccans, Muslims, and Americans—never denied their sons, the chance to wring at least one Abyssinian neck.

“And now I suppose you still want to know more. How many worms each day, how many kilos of dirt. How long his mother lived in the barn until she died. Whether his mother and Giulia ever spoke to each other after he left. Why Giulia waited day after day, year after year, for his return—how that moment just before her unveiling sustained her through years of loneliness, drought, plague, and poverty. And just what exactly it was that confronted when he lifted the veil. In one word what it was he saw.”

I twisted my neck up to see what the Maestro would say.

“Hair, that’s what it was. Hair under her nose like a thin mus­tache. Her eyebrows as thick as horses’ manes. A few long ones curling out of moles on her cheeks, and a dark fuzziness covering her chin. Hair. Hair everywhere. ‘Mamma mia’! he screamed again as he ran out of the house.

Maestro Benvenuto lifted his empty glass to his lips. “My story’s done.”

I, unaware that I had a strangle-hold on his leg, loosened my grip.

“I don’t like it,” Michele Posa said. “You said you would tell us a history, an Italian history. I think he should have gone to war.”

“Couldn’t he just shave her beard?” asked Giacomo.

The Maestro stiffened. “No,” he said, “it all happened just like I said. He never even dreamed of shaving her beard. If he shaved her beard, the story would no longer be true. This story is true—every word of it.”

“But what is the lesson of this history?”

“Ah,” the Maestro replied, “the lessons of this history. So often so difficult to see. So often hiding behind some curtain of words. If Pepe’s purpose was to provide love for his wife, comfort to his mother, and joy to himself, then what can we learn from his example other than that contempt is the logical conclusion of affectation, disgust the nat­ural consequence of cowardliness, and revulsion the renegade spouse of reality. Certainly we learn that many things difficult to imagine prove easy to avoid. And consider it also true that if the blaze in Pepe’s heart was brightest and the heat in his bride’s bosom most constant, the touch of his mother’s chilly hand had the most lasting effect. We speak of the war Pepe never saw until we begin seeing the war you never speak about. Such a war requires a certain kind of man, and a certain kind of man requires a certain woman to give him heart. If the Romans were strong, they had a Greek precedent; if the prece­dent was weak, so was all their strength. So the lesson of my history should be clear enough: Long life to all love, and long live Italy!”

With that Maestro Benvenuto pulled his leg free from my grasp, rose from his chair, and began limping toward the Via del Popolo.

Such beautiful words, I said to myself as I curled up under the table and fell asleep, though to this day I’m not sure what they mean.