The Shoemaker's Wife(150)

Ciro smiled when he remembered the girls he would woo to walk with him along the cliffs, and how it was the perfect excuse to hold a girl’s hand where the road narrowed. He remembered the day Iggy had brought Eduardo and him down the mountain, how they didn’t say much, but Iggy let him smoke a cigarette. Ciro had been fifteen when he was sent away. One transgression against the priest in the Church of Rome had changed the course of his life.

As he walked in the grooves of the cinnamon-colored earth, he thought of Enza, and the life they would have had on the mountain. Maybe she would have been able to have more children here, away from the pressures of making a living. Maybe he would have built the house on the hill that he had imagined in his dreams.

It had been twenty years since Ciro stood in the piazza of Vilminore. As he surveyed the colonnade, he realized that not much about it had changed. Some of the shops had been handed down to the sons, but mostly the village was just as he left it, houses of stucco surrounding the San Nicola church and rectory, and anchored across the way by the convent. The chain of command appeared to be what it always had been; the feeling of the place was familiar.

Ciro rapped on the convent door, then pulled the chain to ring the bell. When the door opened, Sister Teresa gently took Ciro’s face in her hands. She still had the face she had twenty years ago; only a small web of lines around her eyes like spider silk betrayed her age.

“Ciro Lazzari!” she exclaimed. “My boy!” She threw her arms around him.

“I’m an old man now. I’m thirty-six years old,” he told her. “Look at my fingers. See the scars from the lathe? I’m a shoemaker.”

“Good for you. Enza wrote to me. She told me if she waited for you to write a letter, I would be waiting until Judgment Day.”

“That’s my wife.”

“You’re a lucky man.” She folded her hands into the sleeves of her habit. Ciro thought he was anything but lucky. Couldn’t Sister Teresa see that he was running out of time? The nun took him by the hand into the convent.

“Did you make me pastina?”

“Of course. But you know, I work in the office now. Sister Bernarda is the new cook. They brought her up from Foggia. You never met her—she came a couple years ago. She knows her way around a tomato. And she is so much better with the baking than I ever was.”

“You were a good baker!”

“No, I was good at the pot de crème and the tapioca—but when it came to cakes, they were like fieldstones.”

The nuns had gathered in the foyer. The young faces of the novitiates were new to him, but a few of the nuns who had been young when he was a boy were still there. Sister Anna Isabelle was now the Mother Superior, Sister Teresa her second in command.

Sister Domenica had died soon after Ciro left, and Sister Ercolina recently. The black-and-whites were family to him—a crew of dotty aunts, some funny, most well-read, some brilliantly intelligent, others survivors like him, who used their wits, their quick humor, or their stubborn natures, but all of them, unlike him, when they knelt before the altar, were pious. In hindsight, Ciro could appreciate their goodness and their choices. When he was a boy, he had been confounded why any woman would choose the veil over the expanse of the wide world, a husband, children, and a family of her own. But in fact they were making a family inside the walls of the convent; he just hadn’t recognized it for what it was when he was young.

“Ciao, Mother Anna Isabelle,” Ciro said, taking her hands and bowing to her. “Grazie mille for Remo and Carla Zanetti.”

“They said wonderful things about you. You worked very hard for them. They moved back to their village and had a happy retirement before they died.”

“That was Remo’s dream.”

Sister Teresa took Ciro down the long hallway to the garden and the kitchen beyond. Ciro remembered every polished tile in the floor and every groove in the walnut doors. The garden was covered in burlap for winter, the grapes having been harvested. When he looked ahead to the kitchen door, propped open with the same old can, he laughed.

“I know. We change very little here. We don’t have to.”

Sister Teresa took her place behind the worktable and threw on an apron. Ciro pulled up a work stool and sat. She reached into the bread bin and brought out a baguette, slathered it in fresh butter, and gave it to him. Instead of pouring a glass of milk, she poured him a glass of wine.

“Tell me why you’re here.”

“My wife didn’t say in the letter?”

“She said you needed to come home. Why now?”

“I’m dying.” Ciro’s voice broke. “Now I know in a convent, that’s good news, because you ladies have the key to eternal life. But for me, the skeptic, it’s the worst news. I try to pretend that the moment won’t come, and it buys me time. But then the clock ticks, and I remember what’s true, and I panic. I don’t pray, Sister, I panic.”

Sister Teresa’s expression changed, her face filled with a deep sadness. “Ciro, of all the people I have known and prayed for, of all of them, I hoped for you to have a long life. You earned it. And you always knew how to be happy, so it isn’t a waste for you to be gifted a long life. You would spend the time wisely.” And then, like the good nun she was, she wrapped the sad news in her beliefs like a warm blanket. Sister wanted to assure Ciro of the promise of eternal life. She wanted him to believe, hoping that faith would change his prognosis. “You must pray.”