Sunday Mass
The air conditioning has been broken for days. The fan pushes the hot air around, stirring the dust beneath the pews. The candle flames and the pages of open Bibles move to the slow rhythm of its blades, under the watch of saints, demons, and angels. Don Antonio sweats beneath his long cassock and feels the stole grow heavier by the minute, as if it had soaked up the humidity in the air. He feels nausea rising, climbing all the way to his throat, but swallows it down with his eyes closed.
In the second row, Maria fans herself with the parish bulletin, its front page showing a photo from the summer camp: two children throwing water balloons at each other. Behind her, Domenico is locked in battle with a tiger mosquito burrowing into the hair of his ear. From the pulpit, Don Antonio watches Luisa, Domenico’s wife, kill the mosquito with a slap and wipe the blood from her hand with a tissue, just in time to offer a clean hand to her neighbor for the sign of peace.
Whispers of peace, peace drift through the church’s naves, carried off by the fan.
BAM.
The door slams against the white marble holy water font. Giangi bursts in out of breath, waving his hands as if fending off a swarm of wasps. He stops in the middle of the nave, doubled over, his calloused hands braced on his trembling knees. Maria has stopped fanning herself and Domenico’s hand hangs frozen mid-air, in a suspended sign of peace. Giangi leans against the pew of the second-to-last row and Luisa steps back, struck by his sour sweat and frightened face, treading on the new Converse of her half-asleep grandson Fabio.
“What’s all this about?” asks Don Antonio, still at the pulpit, chewing a candied ginger when no one’s looking. Giangi tries to catch his breath, fanning himself with his hands.
“A dead man,” he answers, panting. The whole church gasps. Some clutch their chests, some their mouths, some shake their heads, uncomprehending. Maria has gone back to fanning herself with her bulletin, and another mosquito is tormenting Domenico.
“In the fields, there’s a body,” Giangi continues, and Luisa takes another step back, pushing Fabio against his grandfather. Now they’re both wide awake. Don Antonio comes down from the pulpit to approach Giangi, driven more by gravity than by will, scratching at his forearms.
“How?” he asks, once he reaches the man who tends the irrigation channels, checking the flow of the Consortium’s water through the fields. Giangi begins his story, his eyes fixed on a small yellow stain on the priest’s cheek.
Normally, he doesn’t work on Sundays. But with the heat and the farmers up in arms over the water, that Sunday morning he’d been out, astride his yellow Ciao moped. He’d gone to check that the channel at the edge of town, near the railway, was running properly. From a distance he’d noticed a strange shape lying in the grassy field, and a sharp, chemical smell. He’d crept closer, his heart pounding, toward a charred body. Before he vomited bile among the wheat stalks, he’d had time to notice a red gasoline can, still open, and a green plastic lighter.
Legs shaking, he’d shot off on the Ciao, pushing the little machine to its limit.
“I thought it was a doll,” Giangi says, his dark eyes fixed on Don Antonio’s suddenly white ones. Domenico lets the mosquito bite him on the pinky finger, not even feeling the sting. Luisa has covered Fabio’s ears, though he’s heard every word. There’s a lifeless person on the irrigation channel, a burned person. Fabio heard it all, and looks at his friend Andrea — he knows they’re thinking the same thing: no water balloons today.
Don Antonio, still scratching his arms, is the first to snap out of the stupor.
“Maria, call the police,” he says.
From the square, the faithful hear the sirens of the fire brigade and the carabinieri. They’re all gathered in front of the church, not knowing where to go or what to do. Giangi has gone back to the field to speak to the first journalists arriving on the scene, and Domenico drove him there. Don Antonio leans against the columns of the church porch, the nausea growing stronger, cursing himself for not bringing his medicine. He’d left it on the nightstand, sorted by day and hour in the blue plastic pillbox his oncologist gave him.
Everyone looks around to see if anyone’s missing from the roll call. Some have already sent messages to relatives and friends, to see who answers. Don Antonio looks at his flock, more lost now than ever. He’d barely had time for a hurried blessing, and feels exhaustion take hold of him from the gut all the way up to his temples.
“Don Antonio, are you all right? You look… yellow,” Maria asks, worried.
“It’s just the heat,” he answers with a strained smile, popping a candied ginger into his mouth. He chews slowly, hoping the nausea will pass. From the window of her room on the second floor, sitting in her wheelchair, Agata watches the villagers standing frozen in the square. She watches Domenico point toward the fields with an outstretched arm. Everyone is talking, but no one seems to know where to look.
The first to move are the Zanins, who walk toward their bicycles in silence. Slowly, the crowd disperses. As soon as they get home, they turn on radios and televisions: who had found the body? What had happened?
In his room, Don Antonio counts his pills and washes them down with a glass of ice-cold water. He lies down without lunch, because he wouldn’t manage a single bite. He falls asleep holding his stomach, listening to Giangi’s interview, in front of the cameras in a white T-shirt, his hair slicked with gel.
“I pass by there ten times a day,” he says into the microphone. “I saw this black patch this morning on the channel. And I understood, unfortunately, it was a person.”
Don Antonio dreams of a lavish banquet, with a plate of frico, tripe simmered in the sauce his mother used to make, and Signora Luisa’s wild blackberry tart. At the head of the table sits a black, faceless body.
Stay tuned for part II: Summer Camp.
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