MAMMA
29. EXIT
They crowd in under the overhanging ridge of the Nuns' Choir at the back of the little Santuario di Santa Maria dei Miracoli, gazing in awe, their senses still somewhat bedazzled, at the fabulous scene before them, which reminds the much-traveled old wayfarer of nothing so much as his visit to Attila's innards. The sheer marble walls, pale as old bone and glistening dewily, seem to be pulsating with the strange pumping music, as do the softly clashing gold-framed Pennacchis, arched above them like the plated back of a prehistoric beast. As, cautiously, the puppets port him down the aisle between the ribbed pews, they are assailed by the delicate aromas of frankincense, ambrosia, and myrrh, along with something headier, reminiscent of the sweet decay of wens and bogs, which may be the odor of the throbbing music. In all the church, except for the celestial gallery of portraits in the gently billowing vault above, there is only one painting, a Quattrocento Madonna and Child, mounted on the high altar standing atop broad marble steps crisp as vertebrae and surrounded by balustraded galleries and filigreed marble carvings delicate as living tissue. Two hanging Byzantine lamps swing at either side of the altar like blood red pendulums under an expanding and contracting cupola, and the crimsoned painting itself seems to glow from within as though the Virgin, robed in midnight blue and holding the haloed child like a ventriloquist's dummy, were standing in the midst of a blazing fire. "Gentlemen, I should like you to tell me," the painted Madonna calls out to them in that whispery otherworldly voice they have heard before, "I should like you to tell me, gentlemen, if this unfortunate puppet is dead or alive!"
The Burattini pull up short, wooden mouths gaping from ear to ear, their knees knocking in the sudden silence like a whole marching band's drumsticks being rapped together. "Who-who said that — ?!" they gasp severally.
"O Fatina mia, why are you dead? Why you, so good, instead of me, so wicked?" squeaks the long-nosed deadpan creature the Madonna is holding, its right hand rising and falling mechanically. Her hands deftly but in full view work the marionette from underneath, pulling the wires down there, and her lips move perceptibly as the wooden-faced baby's lower jaw claps up and down: "If you truly love me, dear Fairy, if you love your little brother, come back to life! Aren't you sorry to see me here alone and abandoned by everyone? Who would save me if I were caught by assassins? What can I do, alone in a world like this?" Then, though the little figure continues its singsong recitation of the famous "Puppet's Lament," the text in this century of tragedies, operas, and countless requiems throughout the world, the Madonna's cheeks puff out, her lips pucker up, and between them a shiny pink bubble emerges, slowly filing with air until it is as big as the talking infant's mouth, its head, its halo. "Who will give me something to eat? Where will I sleep at night? Who will make me a new jacket?" continues the whining voice, the hinged jaw clopping up and down like slapsticks, even as the bubble expands until only the Virgin's right eye peeks slyly over the top of it. "Oh, it would be a hundred times better if I died too! Yes, I want to die! Ih! Ih! Ih — !
The crescendoing sobs are interrupted by a sudden bang as the bubble explodes like a firecracker, splattering the faces of the Madonna and Child, and indeed some of the painting's fiery background as well, with pink bubble gum. A breathless quivering hush seems to grip the little wedding chapel. Even the music has stopped. The Virgin, blinking through the impasto of gum as though through thrown pie, pushes her hand deep into her son's body, then pokes out the eyes from within, waggling two long rosy fingers at her awestruck audience like insect feelers. Her own mouth gapes, webbed by moist streaks of gum, and the damp windy voice wails: "Birba d'un burattino! Are you not afraid to die?"
"That does it! I'm off!" cries Capitano Spavento del Vall'Inferno, letting go his side of the gondola chair and wheeling round. "You can only carry friendship so far!"
"No! Stop!" the old pilgrim gasps, twisting around in the dropped chair, heedless of the wrenching and splitting within, but the mercurial Captain, sword drawn and striding as though into battle, is not to be held back. He charges full tilt at the doorway, now overgrown with blue brambles, slashing at the wiry thicket with his sword, and — FFRISST! — there is a sudden brief blaze in the shape of Captain Spavento, gone before seen. His ashes hang like a shadowy afterimage for a moment, then settle silently to the floor.
Everything is changed. The curtain of blue bramble has vanished. The door is closed. The smooth bare walls, encrusted with precious marble the color of fresh air on a dull day, are merely walls now, holding in the solemn silence. The fifty Pennacchi portraits gaze down from above like the sober voyeurs they have always been, the altar lamps have stopped swinging, and the ancient painting displayed there is once more flat and lifeless, the Christ child's stare a bit askew perhaps with two dark holes where the fingers poked through, but otherwise, except for a streak or two of sticky pink, a work abused only by the passing centuries. Slender white tapers have been lit in front of it and throughout the chapel, and there is everywhere a great profusion of fresh-cut flowers, in all the pews and on the walls and statues and columns, in the pulpits and windows, and heaped up on the high altar like whipped cream and spilling into the choir galleries and through the ornamental balustrades and down the stairs and center aisle to where, clustered around the ancient figure in the gondola chair, the puppets press together in benumbed terror, their collective gaze riveted upon the strange person in the snowy white shift, her azure hair flowing down her back like a bridal train, sitting now, her back to them, on one of the two carved and upholstered stools before the altar. The other stool is empty.
"Su da bravi, Burattini!" comes a voice from the front of the chapel, a voice he knows all too well, soft as canary down and sweet as panna cotta. It is the voice that changed his life, and its seductive power is undiminished. He feels his resolve crumbling like hot favette dei morti, the favette she always baked for him when he came home from school or mischief, saying tenderly as she popped them in his mouth: "You see how I love you, ragazzo mio? But if you want to stay with me, you must always obey me, and do as you are told!" With pleasure, mammina mia! Oh, with pleasure! Che bello! Che bello! "Do you see that poor half-dead puppet there?" the voice continues now. "Take him up gently, bring him to me, and sit him on this cushion here beside me. Do you understand?"
"No!" he rasps, shaking off the terrorized puppets when, as though spellbound, knees rattling and eyes popping, they reach for him. It takes all his courage not to surrender to her immediately, such is the lure of her great power to one so powerless as he, and so desperately lonely, but he knows that, having lost everything else, the withholding of that surrender is the only expedient left him if he is to attain the end, or ends, he seeks. Or indeed any end at all, beyond abjection's shoddy but, alas, appealing joy
"What are you muttering between your teeth?" asks the voice up at the high altar. "What is the matter now?"
"So you lied to me again," he wheezes, speaking up as best he can. "You are not dead, after all."
A deep echoey sigh flutters through the little church, making the flower petals tremble and the candles gutter briefly, and setting the stupefied puppets' knees to clicking like wind through a cane brake. "It seems not," admits the voice, so wistfully affectionate he almost cannot bear to prolong his separation from her.