The Road to Damietta Read Free Page B

executioner wields a sword and blood gushes out—the red, red wine from Santa Lucia. Women wrap him in winding cloths and bear him away while the throng laments.
    Only then did Francis Bernardone appear, striding forth in shiny black boots that reached above his knees and a sendal cloak of many colors. He cleared a place to dance and dancers formed circles, held hands, and went round and round singing, my father and brother Rinaldo among them. (Mother, who thought that dancing was a pagan sin, had left the square.)
    As I watched Francis Bernardone flashing around, the wind
whipping his cloak, revealing stripes of green and yellow, as I sulkily counted the days and weeks, realizing that another year would pass, another June would come, before 1 could dance in Piazza San Rufino, I was shocked to see him dancing in the same small circle with my closest friend, Clare di Scifi. Clare was only two years older than I, scarcely that, and yet there she was below me in her white dress trimmed with lace, floating about like a snowflake.
    I fled the balcony. I closed the door tight and flung myself on the bed and stopped my ears with pillows against the sound of the brazen drums and the wild songs of the
tripudianti.

3
    For weeks for weeks, I closed my mind to every thought
of Francis Bernardone.
    Even when Raul brought his name up or his latest escapade was mentioned at table and no one defended him except my mother, I remained silent. If he appeared in my dreams, as he often did, sometimes as a horseman fleeing from me as he had fled from the leper, other times as a troubadour beneath my window, praising the charms of Clare di Scifi, not me, or as a clown in a parti-colored cloak leading a rout of revelers, it was not my fault.
    Like lightning in a cloudless sky, these peaceful days came to an end on the first day of the feast of San Niccolò. On that day the youth of Assisi elected from their ranks a
podestà,
five judges, five counselors, and a bishop. These mock officials took over the management of Assisi and thus, by raising the lowest to the highest, the powerless to seats of power, they gave the mighty a
taste of how it felt to serve and not be served and above all to learn the art of humility.
    Francis Bernardone, chosen as the youthful bishop, was to take the place of Bishop Guido. Served by his companions, who were posing as acolytes, he would celebrate the evening Mass.
    I never had gone to the
festa,
but on this occasion Clare di Scifi and some of the other girls who lived in Piazza San Rufino banded together against our parents and wrung from them permission to attend the Mass, provided we were accompanied by five watchful servants.
    It was a cold night when we hurried through the streets to the cathedral, wrapped in our heavy cloaks, everyone twittering like birds, except me. The thought of Francis clad in a bishop's fine vestments, of possibly touching the hem of his robe, awakened all the old dreams. Most of the girls wished to remain in the back, where small fires in iron buckets fought the cold, but I prevailed upon them to press on until we came to the altar.
    Francis appeared to the sounds of lutes, a wide smile on his face, dressed in a violet-colored robe that didn't fit, since Bishop Guido was much smaller than he was. His hair curled out from under the rim of a purple miter cocked sidewise, and in his pleasant baritone he sang the hymns and antiphons and jauntily celebrated Mass.
    I watched and listened, so enthralled by every word he uttered, every movement he made, that Clare, thinking I was
asleep, kept nudging my arm. And after Mass ended and Francis went tripping through the crowd, I followed him.
    Before we reached the door he had disappeared, and when I saw him again, outside on the cathedral steps, he had shed his bishop's garb and was dressed in an outlandish costume, one half of which was red silk from head to toe and the other half a coarse green fabric used in the making of horse