to hold a broom or help out a bit on market day. Her spirit, however, never recovered. Neither did her tongue or speech, and Mari knew why. What retarded her mother’s recuperation was not solely the misfortune of her past, but the reality of her present. One day shy of the four-month anniversary of Mari’s father’s death, her mother remarried, to a man so rotten and heinous that Mari imagined her mother wished she were blind and deaf too. God knows, Mari often wished she were.
Quickly, Mari now knelt down and gathered up the bottom of her mother’s gown. “Ay!” Mari joked as she rose up and lifted the soiled garment off her mother’s body and over her head and then tossed it toward the door. Mari knelt back down, wet the bar of soap, dunked the washcloth into the bucket, then worked the one against the other to create a lather—the soap’s smell of bay laurel thankfully scenting the air. Her gaze traveled from her mother’s bare, puffy feet and swollen ankles all the way up to her backside—once farm-strong skin, muscle and bone, now a travesty of weathered and atrophied naked flesh. Mari set the soapy cloth upon her mother’s left leg and moved it in an upward motion, cleansing the leak of excrement that stained her thigh and wondering how a just and good God could heap one more indignity upon a woman already so buried in grief?
2 Pozzo Menzogna [b. 1247-d. 1311): Scholar, composer, actor, playwright and mentor of Dante Bocchino Alighieri. Born to an illiterate cobbler in the village of Cacasenno. At the age of twelve, Menzogna was sold by his father into servitude in the Court of Salvestro de’ Meducci. Young Menzogna had nimble fingers and a keen ear for music, learned to play the lute and mandolin, and by 1268 attained the position of Court composer—a post he held with distinction until his untimely death. Self-educated, Menzogna taught himself Latin, French, Greek and Spanish and became a prolific writer of plays and essays. He is universally recognized as the creator of dramaturgy. His great treatise on theatrical and narrative philosophy, Il Trattato Definitivo sul Dramma, was completed in 1301 and became the formative text upon which the Renaissance theater and modern novel were largely based. Tragically, during a visit to Bagni di Lucca with a troupe of thespians, Menzogna overindulged in the region’s renowned grappa while soaking in one the village’s famous hot springs. The combination of relaxing geothermal water and alcohol proved fatal, as Menzogna fell asleep and drowned.
In which We Learn
the Recipe for
Melanzane con Pesto di Erbe
The late-morning sun poured through the stained-glass window of the village’s medieval church and seeped through the tight weave of the confessional’s lattice. Inside the small wooden abode the light dripped a bluish hue upon the rather concerned countenance of a pudgy twelve-year-old altar boy named Bertolli. The boy was panting, overwrought with anxiousness, and squeaked a pathetic-sounding “Ay” as he laid his hand upon his heart. It had all happened so suddenly. Up until a few moments ago, it had been a pleasant morning, a morning in which Bertolli had been feeling especially proud of himself. He had been diligently attending to his morning chores and, more important, he had not committed a single act of mischief for three full days. In fact, since meeting the Good Padre some six months ago, Bertolli had begun to feel that his lifelong fascination with disobedience was waning. That was, at least, until the exotic trio came riding in and laid temptation in the palm of his hand.
Inside the confessional, Bertolli knelt and removed a rather formal-looking letter from inside the fold of his simple cream-colored cassock. The boy’s pale and chubby hands trembled as he ran his fingers across the letter’s fine parchment and over the intricate indentations of its crimson wax seal. “Oh,” groaned Bertolli as he mulled over the events that had transpired only a moment earlier, “merda.”
It all had started innocently enough. Bertolli had been busy sweeping the front steps for the imminent Sunday evening mass when he heard the clatter of hooves and looked up to see a Corriere di Vaticane, escorted by two Guardia Nobile di Meducci, gallop through the village’s open gate and halt their stallions before the church’s entranceway. Mio Dio, thought Bertolli, Meducci guards, a Vatican courier, here?
“Ragazzo,” said the severe-looking courier with deep-set eyes and a turtle-like nose, which bent disturbingly to the right. “Come here.”
“Eh? Me?”