If she’d found the music to be healing, the Prayer to St. John the Baptist was sensory on every level. When the monks began to chant the Latin words, the air shifted. The room filled with light as if the sun had emerged from a cloud, and those dreamily calmed by the music just moments before seemed to awaken all at once. Not only was the air vibrating with the tones of the ancient scale, as Callie had expected, but the vibration seemed to bounce off her skin, starting with the scar on her palm, then raising the hair on her arms and the back of her neck, then moving on to the next person, that same tickling bringing everyone to life and tying them together with invisible strings.
She noticed the smell of jasmine first, then of pine, though neither had any logical presence. And just the lightest scent of oranges. She could taste nutmeg and cinnamon on her tongue.
Then something even stranger happened. The white walls, empty canvases just moments before, began to fill with color and pattern, like photos of water crystals she’d seen, or snowflakes, but with color and movement, mandalas being created by the notes themselves. She’d heard about people who could “see” sound, but she’d never quite understood it until now. As the tones shifted, the mandalas—for that’s what they were—changed as well, drawing and redrawing their patterns as the music of the spheres—which she sometimes heard faintly during her meditations—absolutely filled the church.
Then, in her mind’s eye, she saw Olivia and the others, as they had been on their last night. Dressed in their costumes. So young. Free. Not wise, maybe. Na?ve certainly. Unaware of consequences. And she knew something she hadn’t known before. They weren’t evil. They were full of life. They weren’t surrounded by death. And neither was Callie.
She opened her eyes. She looked at Paul. He was here, and so was she. They were together. They were both very much alive. It wasn’t twenty-five years ago. It wasn’t even a month ago. It was right now.
She was leaving the day after tomorrow, but it was the last thing she wanted to do.
“I don’t want you to go back,” he whispered in her ear. “Stay.”
She tilted her head as if to see him from another perspective to judge his sincerity.
“Stay with me.”
“Yes.”
In the weeks that followed, they began to talk seriously about staying long-term. The restoration was ongoing, and his adviser was talking about several other rock churches in the area that needed restoration and had begun raising more grant money. He’d already asked Paul if he was interested in continuing with the project.
Callie spent her days as she had before, wandering the deserted quarter of the Sassi. She took every winding staircase she came upon, each one revealing a secret treasure or view. Every pathway felt magical, as if it had materialized just as she’d reached it. The brightness of the light and the silence of the stone muted and then erased the past. She began to believe the old saying was right: The tufo really did dry tears.
If Paul had seemed as if he’d escaped the pages of GQ back in Pride’s Crossing, now he was Indiana Jones. The truth was, his appearance seemed to change a little each time she looked at him, as if he were a shape-shifter, or a chameleon changing color with his environment. She liked him best in this place.
She was so tired at the end of each day that she didn’t have time to think, which was a blessing. Most nights, when Paul got back from working, they would meet his friends for dinner or to share a bottle of Aglianico, and then tumble into bed together, their bodies both exhausted and electric. Her nightmares had disappeared; her memory dreams were forgotten.
She was aware that his friends thought she was strange, aware that she must appear so. She didn’t speak Italian, and her lone walks through the district did not go unnoticed. Paul confessed they had various nicknames for her: the girl with the rose on her palm, the wandering girl, the girl who’s afraid of trees.
In fact, the only tree Callie had looked at since her arrival was painted on the wall of the Cripta del Peccato Originale, the Crypt of Original Sin, one of the few rock churches that had been fully restored. True to her nickname, the first time she saw the Tree of Knowledge, she had been a little scared, but she’d quickly gotten over it. She had now visited the Crypt of Original Sin with Paul and his friends twice. The initial visit was to see the tree itself. The second time was to compare the artist’s work with that of the frescoes his team was restoring. There was little similarity: The artists’ styles and the colors used were very different, so they’d concluded that Paul’s restoration and the surrounding imagery were likely of an earlier period.
She had been to the cave Paul was working only once. They’d had to hike down the side of the ravine to get to it; there was no path, no handrail of any kind, and the cliffs were steep. She’d slipped and sent rocks tumbling below. Paul had caught her by the arm just before she would have tumbled after them. A few days later, crews were hired to create a better entrance path and put up a rope railing.
What she had seen of Paul’s work had been intriguing; three of the walls had been uncovered, revealing religious frescoes, but the east wall was unrestored. Water runoff from the hill above it had caused damage, and, when the team began to clean it, whole portions of the fresco crumbled away. They’d closed the cave until they could divert the water, which was why Paul had been able to return to Pride’s Crossing last Christmas. Though the cave was open again now, it wasn’t clear if this wall would ever be repaired. All of the walls had been covered with soot, which had to be removed carefully, but this one was particularly delicate.
“Is this from church candles?” Callie had asked, indicating the layers of filmy smoke residue the crew was so painstakingly removing from the other walls.
“Mostly it’s from shepherds,” Paul had responded. “They moved in with their animals after Christianity came out of hiding and relocated to grander quarters. Soot from their warming fires did this.”
Came out of hiding. Is that what I am doing? Callie wondered. Hiding? Yesterday she had visited the Church of San Pietro Caveoso, to see its portico of Our Lady of Sorrows sheltering those seeking protection under her cloak. The hooded suppliants looked like faceless children. She’d learned from Paul and his friends that the Sassi had a long history of hiding those not wanting to be found: from those persecuted for their religious beliefs all the way to Hannibal hiding from his enemies. Even the monastery where she and Paul were staying had once provided shelter for women who were running away from something. Am I running away, too? Probably. No matter, it’s working.
Paul had told her that the Italian government had been giving grants to people who wanted to move into the Sassi district and restore some of the abandoned houses. Not the caves themselves, but the structures built above them, just shells of former domiciles, most standing empty now.
“I could do that,” he said. “We could do it together. It would be fun.”
He certainly had the skills. He spoke fluent Italian, and his work in the caves had familiarized him with the bureaucracy of permits and government restrictions. “We could live here permanently if you like.”
He’d mentioned the idea so casually, as if testing her.