The Botticelli Secret - By Marina Fiorato Page 0,60

The place was lawless, noisy, confusing, menacing, a city of thieves. Yet we were embraced by the residents as they waved us into their shops and even homes. Once the Capitano led us into a dark doorway and bought a skin of wine for a coin. As we drank in turn (Brother Guido refused as I knew he would), I looked about me. The whole family, six of them and a babe, were there in one room—bed, earthpit, cooking pot, everything. ‘Twas so dingy it was a relief to get outside. “Do they all live there?” I bawled at the Capitano, above the noise of the populace. “Yes,” he bellowed. “It’s called a basso. The whole house in one chamber.”

Madonna. To cook, shit, fuck, and sleep in one room, with the babes looking on? Even Enna and I had lived better. I strove for something nice to say, remembering that he was a local. “Good wine though.”

The Capitano nodded. “White wine, called Lacrimae Christi, tears of Christ. The grapes are grown in the shade of the volcano”—he pointed up to the hunched blue mountain above us—“and the precious salts that come from its belly flavor the wine.” I had heard, of course, of such mountains that breathe fire and molten rocks. I cast a nervous glance at it, but the volcano was a sleeping dragon today, smoking calmly into the blue sky.

Down below, there was no such peace. There was noise everywhere; music could be heard constantly, in a cacophany of styles. With every step we heard the drone of popular songs, sung in nasal tones. One particular song I heard everywhere, perhaps a dozen times on our short journey.

Jesce, jesce, corna;

Ca mammata te scorna,

Te scorna ‘ncoppa lastrico,

Che fa lo figlio mascolo.

Peer out, peer out!

Put forth your horns!

At you your mother mocks and scorns;

Another son is on the stocks,

At you she scorns, At you she mocks.

The Neapolitan tongue was near incomprehensible to me, especially as ortolans and gaudy parrots screeched from the eaves in competition. The song seemed to be about snails—that couldn’t be right. “What are they singing about?” I asked our captor.

“Cuckold,” he said briefly. (I knew what that meant—it was when a woman fucks another man behind her husband’s back.) The Capitano made an odd symbol with his hand, with the first and little fingers extended like horns while the middle pair of fingers were held down by the thumb. “Here, we make the sign of the Devil’s horns. It wards off bad luck,” he said.

I began to look, and I saw the symbol being made everywhere, all around me—by the black-clad widows who sat three-deep on a crumbled wall, to the olive-eyed babes spinning their tops in the dust. I noticed Brother Guido saw it too, and he crossed himself in reply. Thus the sign of God negated the sign of the Devil, as if to ward off such heathen beliefs. I smiled at him but got nothing in return, so turned again to the Capitano. “Why, what bad luck are you expecting?”

“I’m hoping that when I marry, my wife won’t cuckold me.”

I could not wish him joy in any future union, but since Brother Guido was not speaking to me, I carried the conversation on. “You’re not married then?” said I, trying to sound surprised.

“No, but I’ll take you, honey tits, if you’re asking. If Don Ferrente doesn’t want to suck on them himself, that is.”

I shot him a look of loathing, sorry I had bothered to converse with him, but he merely laughed.

“Come on. You can’t hate me that much. You woke first in the boat, did you not? You could have tipped me over the side while I slumbered, and been rid of me for good.”

Damnation, that’s what I should have done! Fuck, fuck, fuck!

He saw my expression and his grin widened. “Why didn’t you?”

“Because I didn’t think of it in time,” I admitted stiffly.

He laughed again. “Well, at least you’re honest.”

I looked to Brother Guido to see how he would react to this exchange—the casual contemplation of murder. But he had drawn into his shell as completely as the snail of the song. I saw him telling his rosary beads through busy fingers as we walked, his mouth moving constantly in prayer. Huh, I thought. Probably trying to pray the taste of me away from his lips. Good luck. A kiss from Chi-chi is not so easily forgot. I felt sad though—in our time of danger we had never been closer, and