I took a false husband and you a false wife. Is this what God wants, is this religion’s point and forum, to deceive the heart and live by paltry decorum? Is this what it means to be an Ebreo, to be a Cattolico?”
Davido felt as if he were suffocating. A horrendous fit of images, real and imagined, spun before his mind’s eye. He saw his farm and the fruits he loved; his Nonno as a young man stealing away from Colombo’s ship with a sackful of tomato seeds; a memory of his sister as she left home for her Courtesane training; the skinny ankles of the girl he was arranged to marry; the children asleep between the rows of tomato plants; his father and mother lying in bed and dying of plague. He felt three thousand years of ancestors standing on his heart, and two awesome forces ripping him apart. Again he said, “But Mari, I am an Ebreo and you a Cattolico.”
“And so what of it?” Mari too said again. “Though it may seem so, in our hands does not rest our religions’ fate, one less will not make their numbers any less great. Neither does threat of hell seem such a curse. I’ll risk it in the afterlife rather than guarantee it here on earth. For what could be a more gruesome hellfire, than by cowardice to squander our true love, to waste this right desire. We have, Davido, only to live for ourselves. And folk and village will in time care not whether I went to your side or you to mine, but will see the truth my heart tells me looms above, that if we choose each other, God will protect us, for God is real and God is love.”
“We should run, Mari. This is not a battle any man was born to win.”
“I cannot, my love. Running before fighting would prove a double sin. Giuseppe would appear the aggrieved and keep my lands, and as vengeance, take yours from your kin.”
Davido felt a great weight upon his chest, ten thousand pounds greater than the weight of Mari’s body. He felt such the coward. He had never raised a fist, never fought for anything. The only fight he’d ever won, he won by vomit. “But so many will rise against us.”
“Not so, Davido. There is less here than you think to dread, the monster has but one head.”
“But what weapon would I wield?”
“Your heart! Your love, and if need be, your fists too.”
Davido looked desperately to Mari. His mouth fell open as if to speak, but no sound came out.
“Fear not, my love,” Mari said tenderly as she stroked his face. “I believe in you. You have more than enough heart to stand against this villain. I know this village. They may be cowards, but they are not killers. He is the coward, the petty tyrant who bullies and abuses, but he engenders the hidden scorn of all he misuses. If you stand against him and I stand with you, the villagers will choose and choose what’s true.”
“Do you think, Mari? Do you really believe so?”
Mari smiled at her lover, a smile so strong that it poured courage into Davido’s heart. “Oh, yes, my love, I do. It must be so. If not, what the point of life? How another moment proceed if not held by the secret belief that somehow, some way, good will succeed? Our love will win, Davido. It’s already done, my heart knows it as fact. For why would God make our love so perfect if God did not want us to act?”
Mari sunk her lips into his, and the lovers began to kiss fully, deeply, hopefully—tasting both the salt from their tears and the sweetness from their soon-to-come victory. Davido slid his hands down Mari’s back and once again was overcome by that sublime feeling that his fingertips were each a living and breathing entity. Her skin, how could he describe such a feeling? He let his fingers luxuriate in the detail and nuance of her flesh; the rise of her muscles that ran along her spine; the upward roll from her lower back to the mounds of her backside—mounds of heaven! The two most wonderful, ripe and luscious things he had ever touched. He would compare them to tomatoes, but no tomato could withstand the wondrous kneading and pulling like Mari’s ripe fruit.
Davido began to swell to life. A swell that pressed and parted the second lips of Mari’s love.