Arcadia Burns

CERTAINTY


“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” Iole was hurrying across the inner courtyard of the palazzo in Rosa’s wake. She impatiently brushed the cobwebs that had been clinging to the toolshed door off her face.

Rosa went ahead to the gateway leading to the front of the house. Her footsteps echoed under the vaulted roof, hardly muted by the fluffy patches of mold hanging above her like storm clouds. She had a pickax in her hands, but she quickened her pace in spite of its weight.

“Rosa! I want to be there if you’re going to wreck something!” In the tunnel, Iole’s voice seemed to come from all sides at once, although she was several yards behind Rosa. She wore loose linen trousers and a white turtleneck, and looked more grown-up than she did in her usual summer dresses. Her short black hair had an almost blue sheen as she ran out of the tunnel into the open.

A glance over her shoulder confirmed Rosa’s fears: Iole had Signora Falchi in tow. That was no surprise. Iole had seen Rosa in the courtyard through the schoolroom window, and had stormed out despite her indignant tutor’s protests. She had trailed Rosa to the shed, where garden tools and other implements were stored.

“Iole! Signorina Alcantara!” The tutor was flailing her arms excitedly in the air as she followed Iole, some way behind her. “Just for once, will you please listen to me!”

Rosa hurried on.

“What are you going to do with that thing?” Iole demanded.

Rosa did not reply. She pressed her lips together firmly. She might change her mind if she said aloud what she was planning to do.

She went around the southeast corner of the palazzo, along the untended path that led to the side of the property facing uphill. Four months ago, when Zoe and Florinda were buried, the weeds and shrubs rambling all over the path had been removed. In the mild winter climate of Sicily, some of them had grown back, though not as wildly as before. At this time of day, the shadow of the chestnut trees on the outskirts of the pinewoods farther up the mountain didn’t reach the east facade. At eleven in the morning, the sun was still too high. It shone with a dull glow in the hazy February sky.

As she walked, Rosa turned the pickax around in her hands to avoid grazing her leg on its rusty iron point. The tool looked as if no one had used it for years.

“Signorina!” called the tutor again when she, too, rounded the corner of the wall. She was determined not to be shaken off. “What on earth are you doing?” And, most uncharacteristically, she added a half-swallowed curse.

Rosa stormed toward the entrance of the funeral chapel. The small annex huddled furtively against the facade as if it had occurred to the architects of the palazzo, rather late in the game, that they had nowhere in the house dedicated to prayer and devotion. In fact, Rosa doubted whether anyone in the palazzo had ever prayed. A cast-iron bell hung in a niche above the chapel porch, as black as if pitch had been poured over it.

Just outside the entrance, Rosa stopped. She heard Iole’s footsteps behind her and wondered for a moment whether to tell her not to come closer. But she lost patience and pushed both doors inward. All the doors in the palazzo squealed, this one loudest of all. Signora Falchi, still thirty feet away, sighed, “Holy Mother of God!” and slowed down.

Hands firmly clutching the pickax handle, Rosa stepped into the chapel. Inside, it smelled of dank masonry and withered flowers, although the floral arrangements for the last funeral here had been removed long ago. The odor seemed to have sunk deep into the walls and the faded fresco of saints under the ceiling.

The front and side walls were covered with a chessboard pattern of granite slabs, arranged one on top of the other in sets of three. Rosa didn’t know when the first of her ancestors had been laid to rest here, but she assumed that the family tree went back centuries.

Costanza’s tomb was on the far side of the room, beyond the altar in the front of the chapel. Rosa went up to the panel embedded in the wall and dropped the heavy end of the pickax. The metal crashed on the stone floor, and the sound vibrated through the high interior. The bell on the porch seemed to reply with a deep clang.

Rosa’s fingertips touched the lettering carved into the granite surface. COSTANZA ALCANTARA. Black dust had settled inside the characters. Instinctively, she wiped her fingers on her jeans. There were no dates of birth and death, same as all the other tombs. Just names. As if it made no difference when the family members had lived. All that mattered was that they continued the Alcantara line, ensuring the survival of the dynasty.

Iole stumbled through the door, the tutor close on her heels. They both stood speechless. Rosa could feel their eyes on her back.

She placed the palm of her hand on the stone slab, as if feeling whether anything was moving behind it. A little dirt was left under her fingernails. She could see it even through the black nail polish that she had to reapply after every transformation. For a long time she had been making an effort to stop biting her nails. The dirt from the inscription on Costanza’s tomb would certainly stop her now.

She withdrew her fingers, grasped the pickax again with both hands, and turned to the interior of the chapel.

Iole watched with bated breath. Signora Falchi’s eyes, behind the lenses of her glasses, looked anxious and simultaneously fascinated in a macabre way. “Signorina,” she began cautiously.

“Just keep it to yourself,” retorted Rosa.

“But—”

“Not now.”

Three or four steps, and Rosa was looking at her father’s tomb. Like Costanza’s, it was in the middle row of slabs. The one below it bore no inscription; the lettering on the one above it was faded. Curiously enough, no dust had settled there. As if only Costanza attracted all the dirt in this place.

Rosa took a deep breath and swung her arm. With an earsplitting noise, she drove the tip of the pickax into her father’s tombstone.

“Signorina!”

Steps behind her. Clattering heels.

Rosa struck a second time. A crack as wide as her finger ran across the surface like a flash of black lightning.

“Signorina Alcantara, I beg you—”

Spinning around, she let out a hiss that made the tutor flinch. Rosa felt her tongue split behind her teeth, but she took care not to open her mouth as the woman gave her one more dark glance, then turned and ran back to Iole, stationing herself protectively in front of the girl, as if seriously afraid that Rosa might go for her with the pickax.

When Rosa hit the tombstone for the third time, a gray triangle broke off the stone beneath the inscription. She had to strike the slab several more times before it crumbled away completely. The fragments fell to the floor, leaving only a few splinters in the open compartment of the tomb.

She could see the foot of a casket. The last eleven years had left it untouched. A gilded handle shone in the darkness.

Suddenly Iole was beside her. “Here, I’ll help you,” she said quietly. Rosa nodded gratefully, propped the pickax against the wall, and took hold of the broad metal handle on one side of the casket. It was cold as ice. Iole grasped the other handle, and as the tutor stood silently in the background, they gradually pulled the casket forward until the end stuck a foot and a half out of the wall compartment.

“That’ll do,” said Rosa.

Iole nodded and stepped back.

Out of the corner of her eye, Rosa saw Signora Falchi down on the floor beside the door. For a moment she was afraid that the tutor was going to faint, but she was wrong. Instead the woman frowned, leaned back against the wall as she sat there, and drew up her knees. “Nothing I can do about it,” she said, sighing. “I’ll just wait here until it’s over, if I may.”

Sweating now, Rosa raised the pickax. She hit the oak lid of the casket three times, until a hole the size of a human head gaped in the wood, and the pickax stuck in as far as it would go. With a gasp, she pulled the tool out, let it drop, and bent over the hole.

“Let’s just hope,” remarked Signora Falchi on the other side of the chapel, “that it really is the foot end you have there.”

Rosa peered over the splintered edge of the hole. Iole’s hand reached for hers and held it tightly.

“Makes no difference,” she said a moment later, straightening her back and standing erect as she breathed deeply in and out.

Iole looked at her, and then she too peered inside the casket.

“Oh,” she said.

Rosa squeezed her hand once more, then let go. She walked out of the chapel, stopped, and drew fresh air into her lungs. It smelled of the pine trees growing farther up the slope, of grass, and of the salty wind blowing over the hills from the distant sea.

Behind her in the chapel, she heard the sound of the tutor’s footsteps as she took her turn glancing inside the casket.

Iole came out onto the porch and stopped a little way behind Rosa.

“Where is he, then?” she asked.

Rosa shrugged her shoulders, and went back into the house in silence.