Ardor (5 page)

E
ventually, drained to exhaustion by exaltation and despair, I gave up waiting outside Arcadio Carnabuci's cottage for him to come out and claim me. His every thought was of the stranger. My own situation was ever more hopeless. He would never notice me now.

I dragged my poor little hooves along the road to the town and entered the gate at Concetta Crocetta's premises with more misery in my heart than it was designed to contain. To my surprise and embarrassment, I found the district nurse pacing impatiently back and forth across the yard with a lantern in her hand.

“Where have you been?” she demanded, throwing my saddle over my back. “Maybe I should follow the advice of the District Health Authority and get a moped. Belinda Fondi has gone into labor. We must hurry.”

In spite of my exhaustion I allowed myself to be boarded by Concetta Crocetta, clutching her bag of medical implements, and we set off to the Fondi house. With every step I felt I was leaving a little smear of myself behind on the road: broken-
heart paste that would be mercilessly kicked over by other passing feet. My mistress continued to chide me for my late-night disappearances and expressed her intention of tethering me inside the stable by means of a rope. But no rope could keep me from my man.

The dark sky seemed scarcely able to support the weight of the swollen moon. The stars twinkled at our passing, and high up in the firmament the faintest echoes of Arcadio Carnabuci's song lingered still.

As we were so late, the labor was in an advanced stage by the time we reached the Fondi farm. No sooner had Concetta Crocetta scrubbed her hands and arms in a basin, donned her crisp white apron, and laid out her instruments than the baby, Serafino, made his entrance into the world. As Concetta Crocetta bathed him, she noted with medical interest the tiny imperfections on his shoulder blades, one on either side. Warts. Or so it seemed.

“Nothing to worry about, my dears,” she said to the anxious parents, “lots of babies have them.”

But Belinda Fondi could not feel entirely reassured. She wanted her baby to be perfect, and although she was trying hard to be delighted, she wanted to cry.

“It was that singing, wasn't it?” she asked Concetta Crocetta sadly. “That singing's what's made the baby go wrong.”

“No, dear,” said the nurse, giving her a hug, “superstitious nonsense that. It's warts, plain and simple.”

Her work done, Concetta Crocetta left the house and found
me grazing on some embryonic apples in the hedge bordering the yard. While she had been inside, the sky had changed from black to gray. The great butter moon had disappeared over the mountains and the stars were extinguished one by one. The air was warmer, softer. As she coaxed me to abandon my early breakfast, Concetta Crocetta felt something alight on her cap. The same little things began to land on my shaggy gray coat, on the pristine blue serge of the nurse's cape, and on the shiny shoes on her feet. They tickled past Concetta Crocetta's face as they fell to the ground. The nurse caught hold of one and looked at it. It was a feather; the tiniest blue-gray feather, soft as down.

The feathers fell thick and fast. They were raining from the sky. Soon I was covered in them, and I looked around at my back with interest. They were in my eyelashes, in my ears, and in my nostrils, causing me to sneeze. Concetta Crocetta, too, was swathed in them. Her uniform was dappled. Her cap was laden. They were in her hair, her face, her mouth. The ground around us was a snowdrift of down. It was incredible. Neither of us had ever seen anything like it.

At the same moment we both began to laugh. Although we had lived and worked together for twenty years, since the very day she had come to our region, Concetta Crocetta had never heard me laugh before. She was so surprised, and delighted, that it made her laugh all the more, and the more she laughed, the more so did I. We stood there in the humble yard of the Fondis united by the strange phenomenon and by a moment of the most perfect joy.

Still the feathers swirled like dancing snowflakes, and through them, blinking away the ones that had gathered in her eyelashes, Concetta Crocetta saw the approach of Dr. Amilcare Croce. Her heart rippled.

“Amazing!” he shouted while still at a distance, juggling piles of the fluff in his hands. “I've read about it, of course, rains of feathers, but never experienced it for myself.”

“Perhaps it's connected with that strange singing in the night. Did you hear it out at Montebufo?”

“Certainly did. Strange thing. Caused uproar.” Living practically as a recluse as he did, the doctor had somewhat lost the niceties of conversation, and until he warmed up and got going, he tended to speak in short, spiky sentences, reflectors of his impatient thoughts. “Beasts marching in a line along the hilltops; farmers struggling to turn them back; emergency Masses held in the fields. Superstitious nonsense of course. Must be a perfectly rational explanation for it.”

Dr. Croce's voice tailed off; the apple cheeks of Concetta Crocetta had never looked so lovely as they did then, glowing with joy and laughter and health in the rising light. Amilcare Croce, with a glimmer in his eyes, and feathers in his salt-and-pepper hair, seemed transformed into the medical student he once was, as captured in the faded photograph that had pride of place on his desk.

I had stopped laughing now, and looking at the doctor out of the sides of my eyes, I moved away, the clopping of my hooves muffled by the carpet of fluff. At my delicacy the doctor and the
nurse felt suddenly embarrassed and looked for the world like two gawky teenagers.

“Everything all right?” He nodded toward the house, predictably taking refuge behind medical matters when they were in danger of becoming personal.

“Fine,” she answered shortly, aware of the spell being broken, a snapped thread.

“Mind if I take a look?”

“Not at all.”

“Bye, then.”

“Bye.”

And he was gone. Wading though the swathes of feathers that were already beginning to melt into nothingness. Crocetta Concetta clicked open her bag, and taking a vial from within, she carefully gathered up some of the few that remained as a keepsake. As we rode back toward the town, the sun came up, and aside from the contents of the little bottle and the cherished memories of the three of us, no trace of the phenomenon of the feather rain remained.

 

Tragically, the doctor and the nurse had never been able to hold a conversation without the most terrible awkwardness on either side. And although in theory they had worked together for the past twenty years when both had arrived in the region, quite by chance on the same day, fresh-faced and freshly qualified, the reality was that they were never more than ships that passed in the night.

Dr. Croce lived alone at Montebufo, a distance of some twenty kilometers from our town, and although in the ordinary course of events this would not prove too significant a barrier to the successful execution of his duties, Dr. Croce was a singular man. His refusal to relocate to anywhere more convenient was coupled with another refusal that had the most profound effect on both his personal and professional life.

His distrust of any mode of transport other than his own two legs had led him to reject the services of the horse, pony, or mule, either alone or with any combination of cart, wagon, trap, or buggy. Neither would any other genus of beast do: he scorned the buffalo and the ox. A childhood accident had given him, along with a cracked head, a lifelong phobia of bicycles and scooters. He renounced the motorized vehicle, be it automobile, truck, or tractor. The sled was unpopular with him, as was the boat, not that the terrain of the region would accommodate these in any case. The helicopter was also ruled out, as it was unlikely the doctor would find one acceptable, and even if he did, the cost would be too high.

In short, the doctor was reduced to traveling on foot the length and breadth of the region, and depending upon the distances involved, a house call could take the whole day to perform.

For this reason the citizens had come to rely for their medical services on my able mistress, Concetta Crocetta, and Dr. Croce, who always arrived too late for everything, was regarded as something of an eccentric. If he ever did manage to arrive on time, it was an unexpected bonus.

While the doctor was nearly always late, we were always in the nick of time. The nurse never needed to be called out and somehow managed to appear at the very moment her presence was required most. Foresight seemed to guide her like a torpedo to the eruption of a boil, the appearance of a rash, or the unexpectedly early pangs of childbirth. With her customary good humor and comforting manner she would set broken limbs, treat the gorings of a wild boar, poisonings by fungi, snake bites, aneurysms, scaldings, drownings, heart attacks, fainting fits, jaundice, and apoplexy.

Her work done, she would move on to her next case, just as the doctor arrived at the house of the first patient, sometimes out of breath, depending on the distance he had traveled. All that would be left for him to do was to stick his head around the door, apologize for his late appearance, and through gritted teeth praise the work of his colleague.

The doctor had, it is true, grown increasingly nimble over the years and had acquired the hard, lean body of an athlete from running over the hills. But occasionally a muscle sprain forced him to remain indoors with his injured limb propped up on a pillow, gnashing his teeth in the knowledge that Concetta Crocetta was making herself even more necessary to the populace, and himself less so.

Yet, in spite of everything, it was widely known that the doctor and the nurse were deeply in love with one another.

The doctor's male pride was wounded at being supplanted by the nurse in the affections and service of the patients, and yet while he did not blame her for this, he could not blame him
self for it either. He could not move house. He could not take transport. These were the simple facts of the case, and he could not waste energy on those ephemeral fireflies termed “what might have been.”

As he ran across the lonely uplands, and through the wooded valleys, splashing through crystal brooks, and traversing the wide and fertile plains, his thoughts were invariably fixed on Concetta Crocetta, and in a sense he felt he was running for her, that she was the prize awaiting him at the finish line. And yet, when he got there and sometimes, but not by any means always, was fortunate enough to see her, and her every feature, despite their familiarity, he discovered anew, he was struck again by her beauty that was maturing with every passing year that she waited for him, and every time he fell in love with her again as at first sight.

If the nurse lingered a little longer than was necessary on departing from the patient's house; if she accepted an unwanted glass of lemonade or an almond biscuit in the kitchen; if, when we were riding the highways and byways of the region, her eyes had taken to scanning the horizon restlessly in search of a figure who sometimes, often, never came; if she allowed me to walk slowly, meanderingly, on the homeward journey rather than trot—did that make her foolish?

These small things they could do. He could accelerate. She could slow down. The law of averages or probabilities decreed that sometimes, yes, they would meet. And then what outwardly imperceptible but seismic flutterings would discompose
them. Yet, in spite of this enormous polyp of tenderness that existed inside each, they were never able to cross the gaping chasm that separated their professional relationship from the possibility of one that was personal. The same pattern was always repeated. There was never any likelihood of their deviating from the script. They had been playing the same game of chess for the past twenty years, and the game always ended in stalemate. And because each precious longed-for encounter was invariably so dissatisfying—stilted, awkward, frustrating—before they had even parted from one another, each was already yearning for the next opportunity when they would meet, and perhaps then things would be different.

The time of the rain of feathers was a defining moment. The conversation they had then was one of their most personal ever, and one that the nurse would always cherish as such along with her vial of down. Concetta Crocetta, an eminently sensible woman, had years ago given up hope of them being anything other than what they were to one another. Too many of her best years had been spent sighing over the doctor. She loved him yes, but she expected nothing.