But Bianca always thought of it as a curved sheaf of lake, pleasingly cut from water and hung on the wall.
What they told her, what she saw
PRIMAVERA VECCHIA had once had sex with a squid. On washdays in high summer you could still see the marks like a row of puckered bumps that the squid’s passionate hold had left on her skin. They began beneath her right breast, circled around her ample hip, and closed in on her cloistered area.
“What were you doing with a squid?” asked Bianca.
“Everything a squid could manage to do,” said the cook. “Once you lose your husband to the wars, let me tell you, you become a fishwife in more ways than one.”
“What wars?”
“One or the other of them, I forget. I’m too old to remember what my feet look like, how can I remember my husband? Eat up your supper.”
Primavera was older than Gesù, or so she said. She knew how the world worked. She said: “You, my child, were conceived in a snowy dale. The forests had lost their leaves, and the trunks of the trees had gone black with the wet of snow. I know this because of how white-and-black you are, that skin, that hair. Eat up that bread, haven’t I told you already, before the mice get it.”
“What does conceived mean?”
Fra Ludovico wandered into the kitchen just then, sniffing for a shingle of ham. Primavera said, “It means thought up.”
“Are you corrupting the child?” asked the priest.
“I’m telling her of her origins.”
Fra Ludovico sat down at the table as if a symposium on the subject had been called. He said: “In the year of Our Lord 1495, on a bright autumn afternoon of stubborn winds and warm rain that smelled unpleasantly of salted cod and violets, the dark-tressed María Inés, originally of Navarre, gave you life. After her difficult miscarriages, you were her first child to come to term, and your mother lived long enough to name you Bianca and seal her devotion with a kiss on your bloodied hairless scalp.
“Oh, the love she had for you,” said Fra Ludovico. “I performed the christening with one hand and anointed the forehead of the corpse with the other. And then your saintly mother flew to heaven and became an angel. Now be a saint like your mother, will you, and fetch me a sip of wine to go with this ham. I’ve a twinge.”
Primavera, when the girl had gone: “You simple oaf, don’t lie to her.”
“Hush, you suppurating old boil of a peasant.”
“You weren’t present at the mother’s death, and you know it. You’re a priest, you aren’t supposed to lie.”
“I’m a priest, I know better than most when a lie is permitted. I would have performed the rites had I happened to be in the vicinity. You know I would.”
Bianca returned with the wine. The priest toasted his nemesis. “May you choke on your godless superstitions and spend eternity in coals up to your squid marks. Amen.”
“Bianca, the kitchen fire is failing, and I left the kindling on a cloth at the bottom of the steps. Can you bring it to the hearth?” asked Primavera. The girl, biddable enough, went off.
“I know you’re an old fool,” said the cook, “but really, I’m surprised you would lie to the girl.”
“My lie is a slender thing. It serves a purpose. Bianca should see that her birth ushered her mother into heavenly bliss. Isn’t it true enough? And isn’t it good for her to consider?”
Primavera: For all you know María Inés was a harlot. She may be writhing in hell or removing an ocean with the lid of an acorn in purgatory. How can you promise Bianca her mother is in heaven?
Fra Ludovico: The stories of heaven belong in the heads of children. If, as children grow, the stories evaporate?—oh well. They leave behind a residue of hope that changes how children behave.
Primavera: That stinks more than your chamber pot.
And are you going to heaven or hell, do you think, with your heathen tricks and legerdemain?
I’m not going to die at all, just to spite the architects of the worlds.
Fra Ludovico crossed himself and ate some more ham.
Bianca de Nevada returned with the kindling and helped Primavera stoke the fire. She didn’t ask more about her mother: What was there to say? But Fra Ludovico, warmed by the wine and the fire, talked about an arterial system of grace that webbed together human affairs. When he left, Primavera raked the embers again.
“Look, child,” she said. “Is this a kitchen fire or is it the fires of hell?”
“There is a pot on a chain for our broad beans,” said Bianca. “I don’t know if hell has such a pot.”
“Is your mother a dead woman or is she a broad bean?”
This was a harder question to answer. Once a mother started being dead, and was planted in the ground, what was to say she didn’t emerge, eventually, as a broad bean? “I’m not sure,” said Bianca.
Primavera said, “You’re young enough to be ignorant, but you are not a fool like some I know. Of course your mother isn’t a broad bean.”
“They say you are an onion,” said Bianca, snuggling toward Primavera’s lap.
“That only refers to my distinctive and refreshing odor. Now, listen to me. When your mother died, she died. Maybe the saints came and put her in a sack and took her to visit with Saint Peter. Or maybe the worms broke their Lenten fast to chew on her delicious lips. Nobody knows, but what’s done is done, and your job is to be clever and not to listen to nonsense. Do you understand me?”
“How do I know what is nonsense and what isn’t?”
“If you’re ever in doubt, throw a pepper up in the air. If it fails to come down, you have gone mad, so don’t trust in anything.”
She made a supper out of peppers and broad beans, illustrating her point obscurely. Bianca ate heartily though she wasn’t sure she understood the lesson.
She would ask her father, though, when he returned.
When Don Vicente arrived home a few days later, some latest necessary negotiation with the Papal legates having broken off unsatisfactorily, Bianca greeted him with the question. But Papà, is Mamma an angel or is she a broad bean?
For once Vicente was in no mood. “Who puts a notion like that in your mind?”
He fired the corrupt old matron, but Primavera refused to leave the kitchen. “It would take me half a day to walk to the village, and you’d just have to send for me again when you changed your mind, and my hips aren’t what they were.”
“They never were anything much like hips,” sniffed Fra Ludovico in passing. But Primavera’s point carried the argument, and Vicente relented.
Is Mamma dead? Is she really dead? Or is she an angel, or a bean, or something else?
“I’m surrounded by simpletons,” said Vicente.
But he remembered his daughter’s birth—in a nook in a tavern on the road from Rome, when María Inés’s water broke without warning. The baby came twisted and ought to have died, but the mother died instead. For a payment of florins her corpse was allowed to share a churchyard grave with a local merchant who conveniently had died the same day. (The merchant had been a widower and his dead wife wouldn’t know he was buried with another woman until purgatory, when everything was too late to change anyway.)
Whether Vicente began at once to love Bianca in place of her dead mother or whether he had to learn not to despise her for causing his wife to bleed to death, Bianca lived a lifetime without finding out. Fra Ludovico was wrong: Truth is as evanescent as lies, and dissolves in time. But as a father will, Vicente had taken Bianca in his arms, and he continued on the road through Spadina toward Spoleto.
Except for that which pertained to the confusing and contradictory legend of her birth, Bianca de Nevada had been told little about María Inés de Castedo y Nevada. The flattering characteristics that memorialize the person who dies too young aren’t altogether convincing. María Inés had been a saint, an angel, a paragon. But Bianca had to wonder. Had her mother never thrown a stone at a cat, or peed in the vegetable garden, or stuck out her tongue at the Archbishop
of Pamplona? On these matters neither Primavera nor Fra Ludovico would comment.
So Bianca came to consider her mother something like the stark unsmiling icon of the Virgin that Fra Ludovico kept propped up on a shelf in his cell. In the severe older style, unpopular these days, the piece showed judging black eyes, lips pursed as if reserving a mother’s kiss for someone more worthy than Bianca.
“Papà?” said Bianca, the question mark carried in the set of her small shoulders. “Where is Mamma now?”
He couldn’t answer her inquiry. He held her instead and walked to the steeper side of the mount, where the wind raced up the east face of the slope with such speed that it could carry a piglet from a barnyard below and brain it against one of Montefiore’s protruding roof beams.
Vicente regarded his Bianca. Of her beauty there was no doubt, and no description would serve. But the name was correct. Bianca, a name referring to the polished whiteness of her skin, almost a marble from the Carrara region; and de Nevada, the father’s family name, betraying his own humble status in the outlands of Aragon, but pertinent here: of the snowy slopes.
And Bianca saw her father too, his wavy chestnut hair standing almost straight up in the wind. She couldn’t see her mother in him, but she could see something that she guessed he might have learned from poor dead María Inés: a habit of love. So maybe growling Fra Ludovico was right about the contagious quality of blessings in human affairs.
Don’t leave, don’t follow
CAN’T I go with you? I’ll be still and say my prayers.”
Her exposure to other girls limited, Bianca nonetheless had learned to sulk prettily enough. It didn’t work, though. Her father wouldn’t let her off the property. She could go no farther than the orchards and the higher of the hay meadows. Only as far as the bridge, and onto it, but not across it.
“The weather is terrible,” he said, and shivered, though it was high summer and the goats sat panting in the shadows, too tired to bleat. “Beyond the bridge a dreadful snow falls. My beard crusts over and in minutes my cloak is stiff as a cuirass. I can’t turn at the waist. If you were walking behind me and you fell and called my name, I wouldn’t hear you: plugs of ice form in my ears.”
“You would always hear me,” she said, laughing. “You hear me when I wake up to go in the night, though my water is less than a spoonful.”
He tried again. “I tell you, the world is a terrible place to be. I don’t want you to come with me until you’re older, for if something happened to me, what would become of you?”
“What could happen to you?” she asked.
“Well, a tree might fall on my head and turn my brains into whisked eggs.”
His drollery was ineffectual. “Papà, really.”
“Look,” he told her, “here at Montefiore, Fra Ludovico and Primavera Vecchia can keep you safe. But should anything ever happen to me, you are not to come looking.”
“I don’t understand why.” She lowered her chin and glared at him with a severity uncommon in a child.
“Because anything that could happen to me could happen to you. If I was in trouble somehow, it would be a comfort to know you were safe here, and not getting into mischief on my behalf. I lost your mother, through no fault of my own.” His voice was stern. “I won’t lose you too, nor even waste my time worrying about it, providing you obey me.”
“You go and come, and go and come, and nothing ever happens to you.”
“I go and come, and play my games, and stroke my beard and nod my head and hold my tongue, all to keep us safely overlooked up here. These are boisterous times, and too many men are greedy for everything. You stay here. You give me your word?”
She wouldn’t.
“Bianca,” he said, “this bridge on which we stand. Up there is Lago Verde, and the stream runs out, beneath this bridge, to water our lower fields, and eventually to join the other rivulets and power the mill at the edge of the village. You can see the noisy stream, the rushes, the wrens at their work, the hills beyond. But what don’t you see?”
“I don’t see why you have to leave again,” she said.
He snapped at her, “You don’t see men thieving for riches. You don’t see the cavalry or the foot soldiers. You don’t see”—here he lowered his voice, trying another approach—“you don’t see the ornery creatures who live under the bridge.”
She looked at him with suspicion and mock contempt, but he could tell he had found his weapon.
“If you come down here alone, a little slip of a thing as you are, one of them will leap from their damp burrow and snatch you away. And then I’ll come home, and cry, Bianca, Bianca! And you’ll be gone, and no one to tell me where you went. But I’ll know, Bianca. I’ll know. You disobeyed your father.”
“What do they look like?” she asked.
“Scarier than Primavera,” he said. “I don’t want to terrify you, so that’s all I’ll say. Now kiss me, and let me be on my way.”
She kissed him and let him go. And, more or less, she believed him that the weather in the world was brutal. Every time he came home, it took longer and longer for him to shake off the frozen look on his face, and thaw at the sight of her. Then, when summer had passed and the autumn rushed goldenly in, he was gone again, and this time for a long time—more than a week. Long enough for the staff to relax into mild disbehavior.
“The wall by the back stairs wants a coat of lime wash,” said one of the maids. Someone had been drawing instructional diagrams for the others and the male figure looked rather too much like a naked Fra Ludovico for anyone’s comfort.
“You’re lucky the old fool doesn’t take this staircase,” muttered Primavera. “He’d collapse in mortification and brain himself on the stone landing, and go on to swell the community of souls in heaven and bore them eternally. No, Bianca, you are forbidden to go look. When the time comes to tell you the glorious nonsense of sex, I’ll do it with the help of a carrot and a soft loaf of bread folded in two.”
“I know about sex,” said Bianca. “I’ve seen the ram and the ewe.”
“And what precisely can you see about the romance between the ram and the ewe?”
Very little, as it turned out. But Bianca was crafty enough to disguise her ignorance and wouldn’t say.
The girl had all too few amusements, sequestered as she was. The gooseboy was friendly but vague, and preferred the company of geese. The servant girls from the village thought Bianca was too young for her friendship to be worth cultivating. So needling Primavera or Fra Ludovico was one of Bianca’s rare entertainments. At lunch:
“I want to see the funny drawings. Why can’t I?”
“What funny drawings?” asked Fra Ludovico.
“Someone has sketched schemes of sex between whores and morons,” said Primavera.
“Only a moron would have sex with a whore,” said Fra Ludovico. “Bianca, I forbid you to examine these diagrams. You would weep with fright and grief.”
“I can see her laughing herself sick,” said Primavera. “Or getting ideas. Usually, for the sake of honesty, I have to chop the carrot in half so as not to get a young girl’s hopes up.” A pause. “There’s really nothing to compare to a squid.”
“I see a horse,” cried the gooseboy, who frequently cried what he saw, though most often it was shapes in the clouds. But today he was right, and Don Vicente would arrive by nightfall.
Fra Ludovico posted himself in a chamber to pray that Don Vicente might bring good news to their windswept perch, though he would never elaborate the nature of the hopes he had; his was too lofty a station for him to descend to common gossip. “You don’t know what you pray about,” snorted Primavera, “that’s why you won’t tell us. You pray for a reason to pray, that’s all. And it doesn’t come.”
“It’ll come soon enough,” said Fra Ludovico bitterly. “I’ve been to Rome, after all; I know how quickly peace concludes.”
“If I fell asleep into my grave now, I’d have nothing to think about but the children war
has taken from me,” snapped Primavera. “No one survives in times of war unless they make war their home. How did I get so old and wise, but for welcoming war into my house and making friends with him? Better to befriend the enemy and hang on. Something worse might come along, which might be amusing or might not.”
“Something worse always comes along. That’s what I’m praying about.”
Primavera left to supervise the preparation of the evening meal. Bianca followed her and mooned about the kitchen, getting underfoot and upsetting a pot of broth, till Primavera scolded her and sent her off.
Fra Ludovico, to Bianca’s knock, replied yawnily, “I’m deep in prayer, child. Go away.”
She threw stones in the well, but the well didn’t throw them back, and she went to the top of the back staircase, where the local girls had begun covering the offending images with lime wash.
“What is that supposed to be?” she asked, pointing.
The girls had no use for her. Had she been the sister of one of them, they might have been kind; but they were always serving, and had few advantages, and the pleasure of sisterhood among them was more luxurious than the appeal of being kind to a younger child. And the girls could see that as the lone child of the local landholder, Bianca was far more likely to attract a desirable husband than they, which made them less than sympathetic to her loneliness.
So the drawings they were covering up were especially galling, and they had to choose their strategy of cruelty. In the end the puddle of soapy water on the top step did their work for them. Down she went, three steps at a time, while the girls laughed.
“Nobody pushed her,” they agreed, affronted, when Primavera arrived.
Bianca bled a little and cried, but she cried less than she bled, and then she stopped bleeding, and went to wait for her father in the apple orchard.
The orchard was gently terraced into four broad earthwork steps, each one lined with a double row of trees. The time of apples was nearly here; the first windfalls were jeweling the ground with carmine and green. Bianca knew her father, who was kind to his animals, would bring his mare here, once she’d been unsaddled and watered. He would let her take advantage of a few apples.