[COPY] Elisa

A Short Short Story

This story comes from an image I saw in an Italian cemetery some years ago. It speaks of death, birth and transcendence and it seemed perhaps needed for the times.

This is no ordinary woman in the photograph, her head slightly to the side, those clear dark eyes looking at you, the small, closed-lipped smile. She has bread in the oven, this woman, and she doesn’t want it to burn, but she is humoring the photographer and her husband, who asked for the picture. Her little boy is outside with the 12-year-old girl from next door. Perhaps she is wheeling him around in the wheelbarrow or placing a roly-poly bug in the palm of his hand. But she’s only a child herself, and the garden is full of distractions--like the raspberries clustering against the wall and the voices of neighborhood boys drifting in from the street. Just the day before, the woman found a cracked green bottle on the flagstone path—someone had tossed it over the wall. What if there’s a similar danger today? So she smiles at the photographer and accedes to his request for “Just one more,” while all the time wanting to jump off the chair and bolt back into her day.

Elisa Peretti had always been a good girl. She sat in the corner and watched and didn’t disturb the grown-ups. She kept herself tidy; she ate what she was offered. She did well at school, and she had a pleasing way of playing the piano. We realized early that there was something healing about her hands. Other children came to her with their bruises and scraped knees. She couldn’t make these hurts go away, but her touch had a way of calming pain. Or they brought her fallen nestlings, a half-crushed snake, a duckling turning crazed and damaged circles. No one could recall exactly what she’d done with these creatures, though Gina remembered a sparrow eventually being set free and a burial service for the duckling.

When Elisa reached her teens, we realized she had the power to help women in labor. Expectant mothers began sending for her—even those who chose to give birth in the shiny new hospital in the city—and she’d sit beside them, talking or remaining silent, stroking their rippling bellies. After the birth, she’d hold the baby in her arms and kiss his wet forehead before placing him on his mother’s body.

There was the time that Gina Serantoni’s boyfriend left her, and she turned into a stick. They begged her to eat, but when she put bread in her mouth you could see her jaw tighten and her throat muscles strain; she’d make choking sounds and vomit. But there was nothing to vomit, and the effort almost turned her inside out. Gina’s grief was like a fever. She wouldn’t go outside. She stayed in her room and rattled backwards and forwards until her mother thought she’d go crazy with the footsteps. Finally, someone thought to send for Elisa and there she was standing at Gina’s door, that voice of hers, smooth as cream, saying “Gina,” and the poor grieving girl jerking her splotched triangle of a face around.

No one knows what was said between them. When Gina’s mother peeked in later, she saw the two girls sitting on the floor, Elisa holding out little pieces of bread and Gina opening her mouth like a hungry bird. And swallowing. Eventually, Gina and Elisa were in the kitchen, cooking eggs and calling the boyfriend a brain-addled pig. Perhaps it was the food that brought Gina around, but we always thought it was Elisa saying her name.

There were things about Elisa we didn’t know. People sometimes saw her walking through the fields toward the woods at night, or coming out of them in the morning, disheveled and with scratches on her legs. The crickets chirred, the brown water glided over the stones in the stream bed and she smiled and said nothing. And no one understood why she married Roberto, the pasty, perpetually blinking little shopkeeper.

By then she had matured into a solid young woman. She pulled her hair back taut from her face though there was always a whisper at the hairline, hazing her forehead. You can see it in the photograph. She waited on customers or sat in the doorway of the shop watching people come and go. It was nice visiting her house—the shiny wooden floors and dark furniture, the blue curtains at the window and always the smell of something baking.

But her waist never thickened. Elisa Peretti could not get pregnant. She who had helped so many children into the world and was everybody’s favorite aunt.

She still went out at night sometimes, crossing the stream that separated the clear green fields from the woods and vanishing among the trees. They weren’t safe, those woods. There were occasional wolves. And Gilberto once heard a chuffing, panting sound at six in the morning, at the place where forest meets town, and came on three wild boar poking in garbage. He’d never seen beings so ugly and alien, he said. Their legs were long for fast running, their eyes were vicious and their tusks could root out your heart.

Looking back, people remembered a particular morning, Elisa walking slowly back into town, her hair a rich maze down her back, the smell of truffles drifting in the folds of her skirt.

You’re looking at the photograph. You think you see something? You think you know her? We thought we did too.

Elisa finally conceived at the age of thirty-three. Everyone was happy. Well, there were those who said her egg must have been old and withered, but no one listened to them. You could tell when the baby was kicking by her smile. The Holy Virgin must have smiled like this, knowing she had the entire world—sky, tree, stone and stream—inside her body. After nine months, Benjamin tumbled out, round and laughing and solid as an apple.

When he was three he caught a cold. She made him vegetable soup and fed him pieces of chicken, but he was slow to recover. For a time he’d seem better, but then the smudgy blue circles would re-appear under his eyes and he’d flop onto his chair as if there were no bones in his legs. The doctor had no diagnosis. She drove him to the big hospital in Rome and they gave her a word: neuroblastoma.

Benjamin had surgery. She told us how they took out the tumor and irradiated the gaping space in his belly. They got it all, she said. Then they closed him up and dripped chemotherapy into his veins to take care of any cancer cells that might have escaped into his blood.

It was a very hard time. She took him back and forth to the hospital for treatment. She learned to clean out the tube in his chest; she studied what foods would strengthen him. Eventually he was well enough to stuff himself with raspberries and shriek happily when they trundled him round in the wheelbarrow.

In four months, the neuroblastoma came back. Roberto began drinking. I visited once and saw Elisa leading Benjamin to the bathroom. He was hunched up, taking tiny steps, his face old with pain. And Elisa—she smelled bad. Her eyes were unfocused and she stumbled when she walked.

Gina visited. The house was stale and tumbled. Benjamin was sitting on the sofa in his yellow pajamas with a licorice candy in his hand, too sick to put it in his mouth.

Roberto told us what happened after Gina left. Elisa stood up suddenly, scooped Benjamin off the sofa and carried him upstairs, his head hanging over her shoulder. You will sleep on the sofa she said to Roberto.

Roberto tried, but he couldn’t sleep. At three in the morning he crept upstairs and creaked open the bedroom door. It took a few seconds for her form to come to him out of the darkness, the outline of her shoulder, her hip. He heard her breathing, deep and regular and he strained to hear the breathing of his son. He thought perhaps Benjamin was dead; perhaps he’d already been dead when Elisa carried him up the stairs. He stood for a long time, listening, trying to bid his son goodbye.

The window turned milky. Gray shapes pressed against it, slowly gaining definition; the full bright blues and greens of morning returned. Elisa stirred and Benjamin stirred with her.

Benjamin recovered. That was our miracle. She had taken his sickness into herself as they lay coiled on the bed. In a few days he could walk upright. His color returned. He began to eat, talk and run. And as he recovered, his mother sickened. It took her only five months to die.

Look at the woman in the photograph. The dark, unreadable eyes and the patience of her lips as she sits in her well-ordered house. She wants to see about her bread, this woman. She wants to go into the garden and find her laughing child.