Free Simple Prayers by Michael Golding Page A

even more stunned by the richness and beauty of the landscape than he had been when he'd felt its first awakening vibrations. As he walked through the fields on his way toward market, he considered that there must have been a thousand different shades of green, each with its own power to soothe and cool and comfort. The butterflies alone were enough to amaze him: he'd never seen such transparency in their wings or such weightless ecstasy in their flight. Yet even as he marveled at these splendors, it never once occurred to him that the market would in any way be different from what it had always been before.
    The Riva di Pignoli market was a rather lazy affair. People came and went at a casual pace, buying a few carrots Monday, some eggs Wednesday, a nice fish Friday. There was never any hurry and never any wait; everyone knew that what they didn't buy today would always be there tomorrow. There were certain days on which certain stalls flourished — Siora Bertinelli's pastries did well between Christmas and Epiphany, Ugolino Ramponi could never stock enough pigeons at Easter, and Fridays were always good for Giuseppe Navo and Gesmundo Barbon — but most of the time the market was merely a slow parade of lookers and feelers, with more people coming to spin the island gossip than to actually buy anything. The stalls were set up in two short rows that faced each other: eggs, pastries, pork, and gowns on the north side of the field, fruit and vegetables, fish, game, and fowl on the south side. The stands were a combination of splintered casks and sawed-off tree stumps, laid over with torn-up planks from the storm-beaten docks. Spread out over the stalls to protect them from the sun were canopies made from the sails of Giuseppe Navo's boats and a few of Maria Luigi's less elaborate gowns. Spread out under the buyers’feet was a mixture of rotting fruit, matted chicken feathers, pig shit stuck to stale pastry, and fish heads grinning up at the morning sun.
    Albertino depended upon the market's simple and boring nature in the same way he depended upon the Swan to rise in the summer sky. So when he finally reached the stalls, in the field between the Guarnieris’smoke shed and Siora Scabbri's henhouse, he was thoroughly unprepared for what he found.
    Siora Bertinelli was wrapping up her pastries before they'd cooled. Maria Luigi was dancing with her gowns. The Guarnieris were slicing up soft pink mountains of ham; the fish stalls were brimming with catfish and sardines, with moon-surfaced crabs and dark black pools of
seppie.
But nowhere was the rapture more evident than at his very own fruit and vegetable stand. In one stunning stroke, the spring had delivered produce that usually took until June or August or October to ripen — every shape and variety and of the most glorious quality that anyone, from the Vedova Stampanini down, had ever seen. Radiant radishes with hot flushed cheeks and long pointed witches chins. Great knobby fennel with beefy thighs and veins the color of hope. Bruise-tinted eggplants, bound forests of broccoli; iridescent apples and dark, moody pears. They flooded out of baskets. They flowed over the sides of crates. They rose into lavish pyramids in the salty air.
    At the center of it all, moving like a highly varnished top, was Gianluca. Gianluca was not inclined toward tearing his hair, and he hardly ever put salt on his food, but he had been almost as upset as Ermenegilda at Albertino's disappearance. For close to a month they had waited for the slightest glimmer of the spring; then, when it finally burst upon them, full blown and practically dripping, Albertino suddenly vanished. Knowing his younger brother's diligence and his fierce dedication to the crops, Gianluca could only think that perhaps he really had drowned in the lagoon. So when he saw Albertino's blunt little body moving determinedly toward the stall, the only thing Gianluca could think to do to thank God for sparing him a watery death