Lambrusco by Ellen Cooney

open-front birdhouse, attached to a tree where low branches had been stripped away. In the box was a small, rough, wooden statue of the village’s saint, Guarino Guarini, the mathematician theologist who came from Modena, in the middle of the seventeenth century. He was a prototypical Jesuit, all brain and ascetics. He wandered the countryside, solving problems in geometry, certain that his shapes and equations would lead to, if not a direct encounter with God, some sort of approximation.
    I knew about the shrine because Aldo and Beppi and I had stopped there all those years ago, on the day we went to Etto Renzetti’s factory. We’d stopped because Beppi had to pee. The three of us went into the grove—this was Aldo’s idea—to say a prayer to Guarino for Beppi’s progress with arithmetic at school.
    It was cool and serene in the grove, I remembered. Guarino was said to have gone there one summer to wait out the harsh midday heat, and he’d worked a miracle. Some farmers came by, shuffling in the dusty road, bent low with despair. There’d been a drought; crops were failing; everyone was hungry.
    But they stopped to see who the stranger was and what he was up to. They looked at his parchments filled with figures and took him for a madman, although his education and his gentle, monkish austerity impressed them. They described their situation in great detail. As if he minded being bothered, and was having a tantrum, Guarino lifted the page he’d been writing on and threw it into the air. As it fell, it changed to a rabbit. When it reached the soft grass, it changed to two, then half a dozen, then twenty, thirty. The grove turned into a breeding hutch, and the rabbits just sat there twitching their noses, waiting to be scooped up and put into the farmers’ bags. When the last one was secured, it started raining; the fields were instantly brought back to life.
    â€œSee, Beppi?” Aldo had said. “Good things come from doing well in school.”
    â€œMarcellina, do you know if the saint’s shrine is still in those trees?” I said.
    She looked at me in a scowling, worried way. She didn’t care about a shrine. “What if Brunella is in the hiding place? This is the village she came from. Her dead father was a carpenter and I don’t know what I’ll do if I find out she’s there.”
    Brunella was the mother of a waiter, Ermanno Vizioli. Zoli, he was called. Was Ugo blowing the car horn? Were they calling? It was hard to make out sounds with the planes.
    Marcellina leaned in closely to be heard. “Don’t you remember? At Aldo’s funeral she said it was wrong how I was treated like family. She said I should have sat with the help at church. The help! You’ll have to go into the cave ahead of me, and come out and tell me if she’s there. Zoli is a treasure, he’s always been my favorite waiter, but she doesn’t deserve him for a son. I haven’t said a word to her in four years. If she’s in there, tell me the spot where she is, so I can go to the opposite side. In case you don’t remember what she looks like, she’s ugly. She’s all dried up, like a prune. You’ll pick her out right away, even if it’s dark in there.”
    The sound of the planes grew louder. Why were they circling?
    â€œLucia! Promise me you’ll go in first and check!”
    â€œStop shouting at me.”
    Then the bombs began falling.

I WAS UPSIDE DOWN, more or less. I took stock of my situation in what I felt was a rational way, and the slant of my body, I decided, was like the figure of an inclined plane in one of Beppi’s science books, or maybe the subject was mathematics. Sometimes at Aldo’s I threatened to go home without singing unless Beppi put some effort into his studies.
    I’d hover over him in Aldo’s office while everyone waited for me, Aldo in a fury, the waiters impatient, the customers