Read Online Simple Prayers by Michael Golding - Free Book Online

stars almost as well as he knew the vegetables; he'd spent his whole life charting their gentle rotation across the sky. The Dolphin and the Hare. The Flying Horse and the Dove of Noah. The stars were friends to Albertino; it was one of the reasons he never felt lonely on his unpeopled little island.
    If spring hadn't come, the heavens didn't know it. Albertino could see the Bear, the Lion, and the Crow just as he had each April of his life. The Crab was receding side-ways into the east, and on the rim of the west the Virgin was just floating into view. Albertino had been born under the sign of the Virgin. She was a guardian to him, a protectress of sorts. Now, as he thought about his encounter with Ermenegilda, he half expected her to fall out of the heavens and splash into the waters of the lagoon.
    How could he have enjoyed it so much?
    How could it have been so ineffably, unutterably pleasurable?
    He recalled the night, years before, when Gianluca had returned home from his own first experience — abstracted, moonstruck, delirious. That morning, while he was trimming back the broccoli, Maria Patrizia Lunardi, whose father, Cherubino, grew the wheat fields at the east of the island, had sauntered into the garden, slid her hand between his legs, and whispered, “Ten o'clock.” Gianluca, who was only fourteen at the time, went instantly rigid and instantly limp; he could hardly keep himself from racing out of the broccoli patch and jumping into the lagoon. At ten o'k that night he slipped into Maria Patrizia's room; when he floated home at four in the morning he was so lit up with ecstasy that he could not keep from singing. He kept Albertino up until dawn with an explicit description of every position they had employed, using a list of adjectives that began with “paradisical” and then spiraled off into terms he'd created himself.
Spuntinodo. Incardelito. Stronzinfatagura.
Albertino was only eleven, but he never forgot the impression Gianluca had made as his spirit expanded over the joys of Maria Patrizia Lunardi. Now, after so many years of lying on the floor and listening to his brother howl, Albertino finally knew the truth: it was every bit as wonderful as Gianluca had said, and every bit as awful as he had feared.
    He tried to push these thoughts from his mind. He tried to concentrate on the stars. But everything in the sky seemed to remind him of his heated encounter. The Centaur. The Wolf. The Water-Snake. Suddenly the heavens themselves seemed to be mingling in a strange, degenerate spectacle: the Lion mating with the Bear, the Crow with the Crab. Albertino covered his eyes, but the images only intensified. So he burrowed down between the blanket and the rope and prayed for sleep to take him from the orgy.
    WHEN PIARINA EXITED the church, the streaming taper clutched between both fists, she was already in a trance. Without pausing, she walked straight to the eastern dock and then slowly began to trace a path around the outer edge of the island. Her eyes were wide open, but they saw nothing; only divine protection kept her from tripping over rocks, slipping on sod, banging into trees, and falling into the lagoon. She walked for hours, sketching a faint line of flame around the island. While Albertino and Ermenegilda caught fire in the graveyard. While Piero carried torchlight back from Boccasante. While the hearths of the huts and hovels smoldered down to a handful of glowing embers. The Vedova Stampanini glimpsed her briefly as she set out the scraps for the cats. Gesmundo Barbon saw her float past his
sandolo
as he left for his morning catch. Piarina just kept walking — arms extended, mind extinguished, heart receiving.
    By the time the moon had fallen she'd traveled the circuit nine times. Her hands were covered with candle wax, and her dirty tunic was damp from the wet night air. But just as she reached the point where she had begun, on the dock by the eastern shore, at the end of the ninth round, she