A Candle for Rosa
In Italy, there is an ancient custom which dictates that when someone wishes to give thanks to the Virgin Mary for her forgiveness, a candle is placed in the local church. The candles serve not only to remind Italians of their commitment to rectify their shortcomings but to clearly show all Christians that no one in the community was without sin.
Caru was a small Italian farming community just beyond the metropolitan confines of Torino, a village set in the very heart of Piemonte. It was an isle of discreet beauty, this village Caru.
Dominating the highest hillock in the region, the citizens of Caru had an unrestricted view of the surrounding valleys. In fact, from the highest mound of dirt in the village, the church courtyard, a repentant could see as far north as the haze of Torino and seventy kilometers beyond where the stark walls of the Italian Alps rose to the heavens like a stone wall guarding the Italians from the French. To the west, on an exceptionally clear day, the sparkle of the Mediterranean danced like a diamond above the dull, brown of the hills and valleys of Northern Italy.
A modest collection of stone-cold, medieval summer homes which had been converted to barns and stables, Caru was blessed with rich vineyards on its southern slopes. To the north, fruit and nut trees dominated the rolling hills to the Po River far below. Though it was small in size and isolated by geography, the heart of Italy beat strong for Caru controlled one of the main thoroughfares which linked Rome, the seat of the Papacy, with Torino, the throne of the kings of Italy. In fact, it was often stated that Caru lay conveniently equidistance between Church and State. Historically, raiding armies from both directions had sacked Caru, raped its women and plundered its wealth. Times had changed, however, and in l939 Caru was no longer a way station for marauding Italian armies. It was the heart of the Piemonte, the agricultural breadbasket of modern Italy, the cultural buffer between the sophistication of Florence and Rome to the south and the quaint barbarism of the French who historically looked south with a hunger for land, women and Catholic corpses.
For the Piemontese, Caru meant fecundity in its most licentious form for it was here that the rich from Torino came for their discreet weekend affairs: balding employers with their plump secretaries, professori escorting seductively shaped studente, and Fascisti with their superiors’ wives. Arriving by railway, the surreptitious couples would flood the only hotel in the village, Hotel Roberto, by day and the sidewalk ristoranti by night, their demands for ‘cognac!’ breaking the silence of the otherwise quiet village streets.
While the rich dawdled in their chambers of tryst and ristoranti, the farmers of Caru shouldered their shovels and rakes each morning and trudged heavily into the fields to root out the weeds that threatened to strangle the vineyard their great grandfathers had planted. There was no leisure for these Italians. For them, Caru never changed. Seasons just passed. Sons and daughters grew older, had sons and daughters who, in turn, had sons and daughters of their own. The village was ageless, men and women living and working as they had for generations. Plodding to the same fields by the same roads with the same tools. Their bodies were their beasts of burden; their minds as dry and convoluted as walnuts that cracked open in a hot August sun. Only electricity had changed Caru but it just made the dull day longer.
Caru was all Catholic. There had been some Jews in the village; in fact, one of them had even been the Mayor. But the Fascisti had changed that, driven the Jews north, to Torino and beyond. Some had gone to Germany. Maybe they wouldn’t return. The others went elsewhere. Maybe to England. Or Antarctica. The Synagogue had been stripped to the walls of its relics and usable windows. The rough wooden pews had been ripped out and used in the makeshift movie theater in the back of the Grieco barn. Then the temple had been converted into a dairy. The gaping holes where windows had once been were covered with crude planks to keep out the bats; but the cracks between the timbers were needed to allow the zephyr to whisk the stench of the manure and spilled, souring milk out of the building. This new dairy stood sturdy against the freezing winds of winter. Built with the strength of two foot pilings sunk deep into the loam of Caru, it would have taken a cataclysm to move this building.
Rosa Parducci had been born in an old farmhouse beyond the Rosetti vineyard where Via Garibaldi disappeared around a bend before it straightened out and headed for the rickety bridge crossing the Po fifteen miles away. She had been born on the same day that Mussolini declared himself il Duce, though no one attached any meaningful connection to the two events. She grew up in the squalor of poverty and had gone to the one room schoolhouse on Via Garibaldi, the longest street in Caru, until the basic needs of four younger brothers and two sisters forced her into the white uniform of a chambermaid at the Hotel Roberto. Sometimes, as she was lugging the dirty laundry down the back stairs of the hotel, she could hear the excited squeal of her brothers and sisters cascading through the iron trellis that ran along the top of the three-meter cement wall which ringed the schoolyard. The sounds were joyous and taunted Rosa as he rubbed the sweat from her brow and contemplated the three or four rooms she would have to clean and freshen before supper. Whenever she rested on the back stairs and heard the sound of children at play, there seemed to be more distance between they and she than the scant twenty meters to the schoolhouse.
Rosa was no different than any of the other young women in Caru. She was expected to marry a local boy and raise children, which, in turn, would trudge lockstep with their older siblings in the unending march of tradition and mediocrity for which Italian farming villages were infamous. At fifteen, Rosa’s engagement was arranged to a local lad by the name of Giorgio who was lacking in intelligence but not in finances. Giorgio’s lack of mental faculties was so well known that even his mother, a relic from the era of Vittoro Emmanuelle, was rumored to have warned her son never to sit too long in a single location or he might be mistaken for a cabbage: a rich cabbage albeit, but a cabbage nonetheless. Rosa Parducci, the village wags noted, did not seem too distressed with her father’s choice for Giorgio was too slow to be much of hindrance around the house and too stupid to realize when he had horns growing on his head.
For the women in Caru there was but one path: marriage and family. Women married young, raised many children and spent their declining years in service to the church and community. There was no other way. Marriages were arranged by parents, girls usually married at sixteen to boys several years their senior. Affairs of the heart, or body, were forbidden, strictly for the visiting abbienti, not for the women of Caru.
But, . . . , if one were a woman in Caru, and single, and living alone in the servant’s quarters on the top floor of the Hotel Roberto, there were many advantages to having a passkey to all the rooms. And if one were discreet — very discreet — there were Lire to be made. But it was important that one be very discreet for in Caru even the walls had ears.
It did not take long for the women of Caru to note a change in Rosa Parducci. They had seen it before, a young girl in a big hotel with so many men from which to choose. The village men noticed that the well-proportioned l6 year old had added a new jaunt to her walk. The boys saw that Rosa did not care for them any longer but preferred to spend her time with magazines from Florence and Rome. And her family lamented that she did not come home every Sunday anymore but stayed in Caru rather than sully her new shoes with the red clay dust of Via Garibaldi.
Content with the adage that a little temptation is a good thing — as long as one repents — Rosa followed temptation as a sheep trailing a Judas goat. Guest by guest she traded favor for favor, building a stockpile of cut glass diamond jewelry, pressed cotton silk negligees and imported whiskey from France and Belgium. Room by room she prowled the hotel, her passion for adventure overtaking her sense of caution and propriety. Whisking out of a bedroom through a servant’s entrance she was sometimes barely a step ahead of a returning mistress. And once, when her patron’s paramour returned to the room unexpectedly, Rosa was forced to hide behind a set of drapes, naked, her buttocks clenching in excitement as she was seduced by the sounds of violent lovemaking on the bed she had so recently warmed.
It was all an adventure, an exercise in the arrogance of youth, a tempting of primal forces. In later years, psychiatrists would call this the “Icarus Syndrome,” the urge to self-destruction, the psychological yearning to traipse eagerly on the very lip of the abyss, daring the gods to take their vengeance now: a wind gust at an inopportune moment, a loose rock in an otherwise secure foothold, the unexpected, disguised root cleverly camouflaged by the capriciousness of nature. Or it might have been called seduction by a false sense of invulnerability; like speeding a motorcycle down a rutted country road around unseen corners and across railroad tracks which would suddenly flash beneath the wheels between the hedgerows. Rosa was a prisoner of opportunity, drawn by the forbidden fruit, seduced by the exclusivity of the moment. Using her body as a wedge she tried to lever herself in a bedroom door at the hotel and out of Caru with a rich husband — even if he might be a little old and corpulent.
It didn’t take Roberto long to realize that Rosa occupied herself with more than laundry. He had been a hotel owner for too many years not to know what was happening in the rooms of his establishment. It had happened before and it would happen again. It usually happened with poor farm girls like Rosa. It was a brief fling, tender words and some cheap costume jewelry to fill a young girl’s heart with hope. “Somehow,” these young girls would reason, “I should be able to use my body to catch myself a rich husband, to take me away from Caru, far from Caru, never to return to Caru.” And, without exception, each of them had been abandoned at the end of the holidays, sometimes pregnant, always heartbroken, kneeling in the confessional with her purity in shreds. But they could not be dissuaded for hope thrives most bountifully in the saddest of hearts and a quick taste of the rich side of life has been known to eviscerate years of the most meticulous religious shepherding.
All this Roberto knew but kept to himself. He was a reasonable man — no complaints, no difficulty. If Rosa could snatch herself a rich husband, all the better for her. If she became pregnant, well, such were the wages of coquetry. If abandoned, she would have learned a lesson. Besides, any peasant girl had the opportunity to better herself and Roberto — Communist in ballot, Capitalist in spirit, Catholic in flesh — was not to be the one to stand in the way of a worker trying to better him or herself.
Thus Rosa stumbled forward with no impediments. Roberto knew all but said nothing. Her paramours were silent. Her family suspected but said nothing. Her schoolmates gossiped behind her back but did not urge a return to the path of righteousness. The priest did not hint for he felt it was too early to draw attention to her transgressions. Rosa thus bathed in the psychological calm before the storm with her sense of the impunity of youth pressing her on to greater dangers still.
Disaster did come, though not unexpectedly.
Roberto was busy rolling pasta for the evening meal in the fading sunlight of a summer afternoon on a table at the back porch tastefully sheltered from the manicured garden where his guests would roam and occasionally be captured by the bliss of the moment. He had just deposited a fat roll of dough into a porcelain bowl which he was about to slip into the icebox when a blood-curdling scream rent the garden. A couple standing arm-in- arm beneath the manicured arch of the hedge at the far side of the garden halted for a moment in astonishment and looked up to the third floor of the hotel where a veritable rain of undergarments was floating downward into the rose bushes like so many silken parachutes. Thereafter a servant’s apron and a black dress were tossed out of the window followed by the bowl of flowers which generally sat before the window in each guest’s room. All the time the high pitched, violent voice of the middle aged Greek ‘Countessa” in room 306 was bellowing in a most unladylike manner.
Though none of the guests gathered in the garden knew a word of Greek — save, perhaps ‘ouzo,’ — there was no question as to the content of the Countessa statements and the probable intent of her dire threats. Roberto made it up three flights of stairs and into Room 306 just as the hefty Countessa had hoisted a struggling, naked Rosa over the balcony railing in spite of the young girl’s desperate thrashing and the pleading arms of the Countessa’s ‘uncle’ who, naked as well, had the Countessa’s neck in a Herculean lock and was pulling with all his might. Alas, had he been kilos heavier or she substantially lighter it might have made a difference for though he had his mistress in a sturdy arm lock, she stood as Atlas while he helplessly gripped her neck and swung as though he were simply a necklace uncomfortably heavy gold ingots.
It took several hours to calm the Countessa who alternately swore and threatened in broken Italian that she would sue the town of Caru and was bold in the mention of the fact that she intended that her brothers, of which she had many, would pay a rather short but memorable visit to the Hotel Roberto. Roberto, used to the proclivities of his clients, waited until the Countessa’s fury had subsided and then pulled the woman aside, cautioned her as to intelligence of involving outsiders — most specifically her husband and her paramour’s wife — in what was purely a ‘personal’ matter and after a modest sum of money changed hands — “for her discomfort in this unfortunate affair” (and the cost of the hotel room) — the Greek matron recovered her serene composure, badly manhandled her paramour and within the hour was hailing a cab for the railway station — alone.
Rosa, however, was another matter. There was no question that she would have to leave the service of Hotel Roberto. She could not even stay at the Hotel; there were too many guests who would snicker when she passed, too many men who would be tempted, too many women who would not trust their men alone. Worse yet, for Rosa, was the fact that as she was clinging to the balcony for dear life, nude, she had stopped all activity in the schoolyard across the three-meter concrete wall.
Within an hour of the time the school let out, everyone in Caru knew of Rosa and the Greek Countessa. Caru was a small town and small towns are notoriously unforgiving and, in a small village, there is nothing more unforgivable than to be different from one’s neighbors. Adultery was a serious matter. In a Catholic community where the virginity of women was valued higher than the lives of men, even the wisp of impropriety was treated as a brand of shame. Caru was symptomatic of a nation where the sanctity of the family was historically and traditionally assured by the virginity of its daughters, the fidelity of its spouses and the cantankerous chaperonage of its aging matrons. Men were allowed certain latitude in their monogamy — as long as their sense of discretion was greater than their hormonal imbalance — and certain marital disharmonies were expected in every relationship. But the women were the rock of stability upon which each home was established and to which each man was anchored, reluctantly or otherwise.
While Rosa knew instantly the price she would have to pay for her transgression, her husband-to-be was left in an untenable position. Though Giorgio was undeniably dull, he was not so stupid as to misunderstand the predicament into which he had been so suddenly and abruptly shoved. Although he savored the thought of his naked body sliding between the bed sheets next to the seductive frame of Rosa Parducci, a fantasy of which his schoolmates were jealous beyond description, he was unwilling to weather the brunt of his mother’s demands to break the engagement and seek a more suitable wife. Most difficult, however, was going into the vineyards one morning engaged to the village sweetheart and returning that evening to find that he had been cuckolded even before his wedding.
Somewhere within his head of bone, Giorgio stumbled across the insurmountable fact that his reluctant separation from Rosa had best be quick, final and not without a certain sting. He had the greatest regret for the abandonment of his sexual fantasy but had a greater fear of being forced to leave Caru and seek his fortune in Torino. Well advised that he would have difficulty finding the train station in Caru much less a safe haven in Torino, Giorgio finalized his estrangement with the Rosa Parducci by calling upon a local candle maker. At his request, the candle maker created a pristine, white, wax pillar of monumental proportions. It stood a meter and a half high with a diameter of a meter at both base and lip. This he placed in the anteroom of the church at the foot of the cast iron frame in which the candles of all other repentants were placed. A gaggle of local boys and mock serious padrones watched in silent amusement.
The candle burned for five years, long enough for Giorgio to marry and raise three children who threw dirt clods at him as he trudged homeward each evening, exhausted, up Via Garibaldi from the vineyards on the southern slope of town, day by day, his spirit broken by the gnarled stumps that had been planted by his great grandfather.
Rosa saw the candle only once, at her last confessional in Caru, on her way to the railway station to take the first train in any direction.
[Steven Levi’s mysteries can be found at www.authormasterminds.com. His other books are available from Kindle and ACX.]
