John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

“I know you,” she said. “You were there that first morning.”

The woman’s smile was the last thing Barbara expected, a grin straight off the playground. “Yes, si.” Her nod came from the waist. “I was there, I was. After that I am having this new position.”

She hoisted the camera, the light briefly blinding. “Yes,” she went on, “your son does good for many people that day.” And she introduced herself, Maddalena.

“Really? You’re saying, you got this job because…?”

“Oh yes. Before then I am always looking, looking, with my little camera. But that morning, colpo d’oro.”

A stroke of gold. And if anyone seemed made for media work it was Maddalena, chic and electric right down to her cobalt fingernails. “Beato lei,” Barbara said, blessed are you. Blessed was any woman who knew what she wanted.

“Beato lei, Madonna Americana.”

Barbara wasn’t that bewildered. “The American Madonna,” she said evenly, “is someone else. She’s a pop star.”

Maddalena showed she deserved her job, recovering fast. “But the mother of jesus,” she declared, “she too is a pop star. The American Madonna, she takes for herself what is already for a pop star. La Madonna dijesu , for two thousand years she has all the songs. She has the merchandise. In Naples you see her ojetti votivi.”

Barbara dropped her gaze. “Listen, all right but…listen. I can’t do this, all right? I didn’t come here for an interview.”

“Per carita . You didn’t come here simply to pray.”

What’s your answer to that, Owl Girl? As Barbara slid her beads over her open palm, she was relieved to hear a different voice in the tent.

“C’e qualcuno? Is there someone to help the girl?”

The voice was a man’s, vaguely familiar, but the mother couldn’t see through the light from the video-cam.

“To help the girl, someone?”

It was a pair of men, coming around the rows of chairs. One wore a coat and tie, he had a goatee, and the other wore all-purpose khakis and revealed a shiny bald dome. After a moment Barbara recognized Dottore DiPio.

“Please,” the doctor said, “wait for me for the girl.” Then, blinking at Barbara blinking at him: “Ma si! Signora Lulucita. Where else would I find you?”

The other man was the first to extend a hand. Still young for someone so hairless, he had a German name, something like Interstate, and he served as the Center’s chaplain. “Well,” he said, “chaplain, schoolteacher, bookkeeper, and general errand boy for that force of nature you call a husband.”

His English smacked of Middle America. Around his neck hung the Franciscan T, the italicized wooden capital, very different from the doctor’s elaborate silver clatter. Also the chaplain kept calling everyone a saint, first the Jaybird, “a saint of energy,” and then DiPio, “very generous, a saint.”

The doctor bent over the girl, shining a penlight into her black eyes.

Interstate went on, “If I weren’t able to stay with the doctor here, who knows? I might be living in a tent myself.”

He was setting up the altar, lifting the oil lamp, tossing a purple cloth across the tabletop. There didn’t appear to be a cross. Maddalena withdrew up the aisle between the chairs, trying to get a shot of the group. Barbara closed in on the chaplain.

“You live with him?” she asked. “With DiPio?”

“Yeah. He’s got a big old place up on the hill, in the Vomero. You know the neighborhood?”

“I — know it, yes.”

‘Yeah, you take the funiculare. The doctor’s family has lived up there for a hundred years. He’s got a garden out back, a veritable hermitage.”

But Barb didn’t want to hear any more about saints. “The Vomero, this was the doctor’s idea? It was him who set it up?”

“Sure it was him.” The chaplain circled the altar, adjusting the cloth cover. “Who else could’ve arranged something so comfy?”

“But there’s the UN relief—”

“Oh, the UN, Lord no. That housing stipend of theirs, huh. Most of the staff live two to a room.”

“Niente,” the doctor said, pocketing his light.

“Housing stipend?” Barbara asked.

Behind the altar, the riser, Interstate squatted to unlock a trunk full of Bibles. “It’s peanuts I know, but then, after all.” His long face regained its smile. “None of us came to Naples for the money.”

His arms full of the floppy black books, he strode back past Barbara. He lay one on every fourth or fifth chair. “This isn’t about having a nice apartment.”

As he angled between the rows of chairs, in limp khakis, his body language seemed to call the Center’s flock to worship. Refugees began to duck in under the far tent flap. They came in respectfully, buttoning their thin shirts or pulling off their spangled caps. A couple stopped to brush daubs of the reeking pesticide out of their Afros. Barbara hadn’t expected this, and there in Maddalena’s spotlight she couldn’t do anything about the sham of her good dress and morning makeup, settled and bourgeois. A Vomero mother. Under the surface of course she remained another business altogether, a feral clawing for scraps. She wondered how much she should tell the chaplain about his Saint of Energy.

“Signora Lulucita?”

This was DiPio, fingering his neckwear. “Signora, perhaps the sympathy of a mother. Perhaps if you held her hand for the, the messa.”

It came to Barbara that he was speaking about the crippled gypsy.

“Well,” the chaplain put in, “it’s not a Mass, strictly speaking.”

“But for the service,” DiPio said. “Would you come hold the girl’s hand?”

Interstate (was his accent from Missouri?) had no objection. He handed a Bible to a refugee woman a good three times his size, an African Fat Venus, tucked sausage-tight into a t-shirt that bore the words Lido Parthenope . She had a chest scar — though nothing ritual, no mark of initiation. The wound on this obese clandestina had left a ridge of tissue clearly visible under the fabric, a line that cut down one breast in a jug-handle curve. It crossed and dented the nipple.

“Signora,” the doctor said. “You may help.”

Per carita , she hadn’t come simply to pray. Certainly the need in this crowd had touched her, chilled her; that dented nipple reappeared each time she blinked. But Barb doubted that she could deliver much at today’s service. The tent was filling, a sensation like children clustering under a beach umbrella, and she could feel already how distant the German’s prayers would seem. She’d have to squeeze into a packed row of folding chairs, and there wouldn’t be room for the spirit-muscle. There’d be nothing like that, the flex out of nowhere, despite the tremor Barbara had felt when she first stepped into this artificial twilight. There wasn’t even a crucifix.

But the doctor was only asking for, what, half an hour? DiPio wasn’t the one suggesting she spend the rest of her life in a lie. Besides, who could say what else Barbara might discover during the service? Interstate might poke another glowing peephole in Jay’s high moral screen.

The mother sidled past a few of the seated worshippers, holding her breath against the worst of the pesticide. She settled into the chair the doctor had pulled up beside the gypsy. But when Barbara took the girl’s hand, the invalid responded with a squeeze. Her fingers found a good fit. Barb looked up startled, and the gypsy’s lashes fluttered.

DiPio didn’t miss a moment of it. “Yes,” he said. “Sympathy.”

Whatever that meant. The man had his crucifix in his goatee, picking, scratching, and Barb shifted her attention back to the chaplain. Pacing the riser, Interstate looked eager to start. The voices behind Barbara’s back sounded the same, and judging from the air the place was nearly full. For something like the fifth time the German adjusted the purple throw across his knee-high altar, then returned to the box that held the Bibles. He fished up a scarf, striking, Prussian blue.