Ardor Read Free Page B

puzzles, and to add injury to insult, one of the young spiders lost a leg in Fedra’s attack, for which Arcadio Carnabuci was never forgiven. All was swept up and carried off in a little linen sack on the back of the destroyer. It was a terrible day.
    Fedra Brini, so full of joy, like a brimming jug, she could no longer contain it. Such sumptuous webs, she started telling people. Hadn’t been touched since the death of Priscilla Carnabuci, Arcadio’s mother, twenty-two years before. But why had Arcadio Carnabuci, who had resisted her requests for so long, finally given in? No one could say for sure. But clearly the olive grower was up to something, and Fedra, who luxuriated in the warm rays of her neighbors’ notice, did her best to fuel the fires of their curiosity.
    Fanning the flames further, the very same olive grower showed up one morning in the draper’s in the Via Colombo, asking for bedsheets. What could Arcadio Carnabuci want with new bed linen? The eyebrows of Amelberga Fidotti, the draper’s sour-faced assistant, immediately formed themselves into question marks. Soon the news was on every pair of lips in the town. It scarcely seemed possible. Or decent. He was a bachelor after all, and one with long teeth at that.
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    When he got home, he tried the sheets out on the bed. Just to examine the effect. Not to use, of course. They were almost too magnificent. Shockingly so. Crisp and fresh as fields of new snow. Yet he was troubled. He didn’t want to look as though he had tried too hard. He didn’t want it to seem that he had tried at all, in truth. Suppose he appeared calculating? Too self-assured? That he had planned the moment instead of allowing it to unfold in an impromptu way. Nevertheless, his worn and graying sheets were a disgrace. Painfully he refolded the new ones, matching the original creases like folding a map, and squeezed them back into the crunchy cellophane wrappers that were wonderful in themselves. He shut them up in a drawer. The next time he got them out would be for her. And he blushed a hot sticky blush that transformed him into a teenager.
    Arcadio Carnabuci never doubted for a second that his true love would come. He knew it as a certainty. As surely as the olives appeared on his trees. He could dig around their roots to give them air, fertilize them with dung, prune them, all on the given days set out by his forebears in the great Carnabuci Almanac, yet he knew that whatever he did, there would still be olives. There would be olives growing on the trees long after he would become the fertilizer himself. With the same certainty, he knew she would come.
    Arcadio Carnabuci checked on the progress of his seeds hundreds of times a day. He almost wore out the soil in the tray by looking at it. How he willed the slightest shard of green toprotrude through the surface! In the mornings, before even emptying his bladder, he would hurry to the windowsill while still bending the wires of his spectacles around the backs of his ears and examine the soil as though panning for gold.
    Finally, on a glorious Palm Sunday, a day that would be forever etched on his memory, three proud little protuberances were waiting for him as self-satisfied as schoolchildren who have answered every question correctly in a spelling test. How his heart leapt at the sight of them. He examined them so closely he soon knew the minutest characteristics of each individual specimen. His prayers had been answered. It had to be a sign, on this of all days, that the Lord was with him.
    Later that day, when he took up his accustomed place in the church strewn with palm fronds, he did not hold back his thanks for that small miracle. I was then, as now, a complete agnostic and so of course never went to church, but I clearly remember passing by there that morning, and I heard everything. Yes, his glorious baritone resounded with all the force of his passion, welling into a great bubble in the nave that