Read an Excerpt
1
Father Azetti was tempted.
Standing on the steps of the parish church, fingering a rosary, he gazed across the empty piazza in the direction of his favorite trattoria—and looked at his watch. It was 1:39 in the afternoon. And he was starving.
Technically, the church was to remain open from eight until two, and then again from five until eight. That’s what the plaque on the door said, and Father Azetti had to admit that the plaque had a certain authority. It had been in place for nearly a hundred years. Still . . .
The trattoria was in the Via della Felice—a grandiose name for what amounted to a medieval alley, a cobbled lane that twisted away from the central square to dead-end at the stone wall that defined the town’s outer limits.
One of Italy’s most remote and beautiful hill towns, Montecastello di Peglia rested on a dome of rock, a thousand feet above the Umbrian plain. Its crown and glory was the Piazza di San Fortunato, where a small fountain bubbled in the cool shadow of the village’s only church. Quiet and pine-scented, the little square was a favorite place for lovers and art students, who came to its ramparts for a panoramic view of the countryside. High above the quilted landscape, they gazed out at Italy’s “green heart,” and swooned to see the sunflower fields, trembling in the heat.
But not now, not at the moment. At the moment they were eating.
And Father Azetti was not. A soft breeze turned the corner and took him prisoner with the smell of baking bread. Grilled meat, and lemon. Hot olive oil.
His stomach growled, but he had to ignore it. Montecastello was, above all else, a village. There was no real hotel, only a small pensione run by a pair of expatriate Brits. Having lived in the town for less than a decade, Father Azetti was an outsider, and would remain so into the next millennium. As such, he was suspect, and, being suspect, he was under constant surveillance, watched by the town’s ever vigilant older residents, who pined for his predecessor. (Or, as they called him, “the good priest.” Azetti? “The new priest.”) If, during the hours of confession, Father Azetti should close the church a minute too soon, someone would certainly take notice and Montecastello would be scandalized.
With a sigh, the priest turned from the piazza and slipped back into the gloom of the church. Built in an age when glass had been a treasure, the building was condemned from conception to perpetual twilight. Apart from the dim glow of electrified candelabra, and a bank of guttering candles in the nave, the structure’s only illumination came from a line of narrow windows, high on the west wall. Though few and small, the windows sometimes had a dramatic effect when, as now, they shaped the afternoon sun into shafts of light that tunneled down to the floor. Passing the mahogany tableaux that marked the stations of the cross, Father Azetti saw with a smile that the confessional waited for him in one of these pools of natural brilliance. Stepping into the light, he relished the effect, even as it blinded him. Hesitating, he imagined the scene as others might see it, and then, embarrassed by his narcissism, stepped into the confessional and pulled the curtain shut. Seating himself in the darkness, he began to wait.
The confessional was a wooden booth, a very old one, partitioned down the middle to separate the priest and the confessor. In the center of the wall between them was a screened grille that could be opened or closed by a sliding panel on the priest’s side. Below the grille was a wooden shelf that ran the length of the partition. Father Azetti was in the habit of resting his fingertips on this narrow ledge as he inclined his head to hear the whispered confessions. It was clearly a habit that he shared with many priests before him: the little shelf was worn into faint scallops by centuries of pious hands fingering the wood.
Father Azetti sighed, raised the back of his hand to his eyes and squinted at the luminous dial on his wrist. It was 1:51.
On those days when he had not missed breakfast, the priest enjoyed the hours that he spent in the confessional. Like a musician playing Bach, he listened to himself, and heard his predecessors in every changing chord. The antique booth was resonant with old heart-breaks, whispered secrets, and absolution. Its walls had listened to a million sins—or perhaps, as Father Azetti thought, to a dozen sins, committed a million times.
The priest’s musing was interrupted by a familiar noise from the other side of the partition—the sound of a curtain pushed aside, followed by the grunt of an old man sinking to his knees. Father Azetti composed himself and opened the grille with a brush of his hand.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned . . .”
The man’s face was in shadows, but the voice was familiar. It belonged to Montecastello’s most distinguished resident—Dr. Ignazio Baresi. In some ways, Dr. Baresi was like himself—a worldly outsider transplanted to the stifling beauty of the provinces. Inevitably, each man was whispered over, and just as inevitably, they’d become friends. Or, if not friends, then allies, which was as much as the differences in their ages and interests would allow. The truth was, they had little in common beyond too much education. The doctor was a septuagenarian whose walls were crowded with diplomas and certificates, attesting to his achievements in science and medicine. The priest was somewhat less distinguished—a middle-age activist on the back burner of Vatican politics.
And so, they came together over a chessboard on Friday evenings, sitting in the piazza outside the Caffè Centrale, sipping Vin Santo. Their conversations were spare, and absent any intimacies. A remark about the weather, a toast to one another’s health, and then: pawn to king’s bishop four. Even so, after more than a year of idle remarks and occasional reminiscences, they knew one or two things about each other. It seemed enough.
Lately, however, the doctor’s comings and goings had been less regular. The priest knew that the old man had been ill, but now, listening to him, he realized that Baresi had taken a turn for the worse. His voice was so weak that Father Azetti had to press his temple to the grille so he could hear.
Not that the priest was particularly curious. As with most of those who made their way to his confessional, Azetti barely needed to listen. After ten years he knew their weaknesses. At seventy-four, the doctor would have taken the Lord’s name in vain, he would have been uncharitable. Before he’d taken ill, he might have lusted after a woman, might even have committed adultery—but all that was over for the poor man, who now seemed weaker by the day.
And, in fact, there was an unsavory air of anticipation in the village about the doctor’s coming end, an avid expectation from which even Father Azetti was not entirely free. After all, il dottore was a wealthy, pious, and unmarried man. He’d been generous to the town, and to the church, before.
Indeed, Father Azetti thought, the doctor—
What?
The priest focused his attention on the doctor’s faltering voice. He’d been rambling in the self-justifying way that confessors often did, avoiding the sin while emphasizing his intentions (which were, as always, good). He’d said something about pride, about being blinded by pride—and then, there was his illness, of course, and the realization of his own mortality. He’d seen the error of his ways. There was nothing remarkable in that, Azetti thought: the prospect of death had a way of focusing one’s sensibilities, and in particular, one’s moral sensibilities. Father Azetti had been thinking about this when the doctor finally got to the point and began to describe the sin itself: what he’d actually done.
The priest listened, and the word burst from him in a gasp:
“What!?”
