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fresh
sogliole
to express his thanks. From then on, whenever the people of Riva di Pignoli felt ill, they called on Piarina. She cured the Vedova Stampanini's rheumatism and the Vedova Scarpa's gout. She removed Fausto Moretti's limp, and she diagnosed Anna Rizzardello's bloated stomach as twins. There was never anything logical about Piarina's cures, they simply worked: physical or mental, terminal or temporal, there was nothing she couldn't fix. She could even tell a bluff.
    “Crush five rotten olives in six spoons of lard. Add four pinches of wormwood, two
sarde,
and three beads of coriander. Grind together. Swallow morning and evening.”
    This was what she prescribed for Brunetto Fucci when he came to prove her a fraud. Brunetto Fucci was the island's apothecary. He never cured anyone of anything, but without a surgeon, or even a barber-surgeon, to tend their ills, the people of Riva di Pignoli had no choice but to go to him. When Piarina's powers came to light, however, Brunetto Fucci's livelihood became endangered. So he feigned a strange malady of the stomach and set out to prove her magic useless. Piarina wasn't concerned. She merely prescribed the worst-tasting thing she could think of and let Brunetto Fucci try to cure a real stomach malady. After a week of acute diarrhea — and no improvement in business — he purchased a new sign for his shop and went into spice selling.
    When Piarina began her cures, Valentina stopped beating her. For a while. But the habit was too deeply ingrained; she could hardly look at the glow in the dizzy girl's eyes without wanting to give her a good wallop. So despite the fact that Piarina's cures brought in a little extra money, Valentina soon began her old, familiar violence. Neither of them ever knew when the dark passion would come over her; neither of them could ever guess whether it would be a slap to the back of the head, a jab beneath the rib cage, or a blunt kick in the shins. But to Piarina it was all equal. Soon the witchcraft became just another chore: wash the clothes, weed the garden, cure Maria Luigi's sciatica. Her spirit curled up like a lemon rind in the sun, and her voice, when she used it at all, shrank down to a faint, embryonic whisper.
    The situation might have stayed that way if Ermenegilda hadn't become ill. Even with the renown of her cures, the Torta family had stayed away from Piarina's door. If Maria Prima had the grippe, or Maria Seconda an inflamed foot, Orsina would order in a specialist from Padova and pay whatever price was asked to be certain that her daughters got the best treatment in Italia. That the best treatment in Italia was often nothing more than guesswork didn't bother Orsina; the prestige of the physician's degree was what mattered.
    The finest physicians, however, could not help Ermenegilda. They tried bloodletting, phlebotomy, cautery, and cupping, but she just continued thrashing in her sleep and sweating through her bedclothes as her skin turned a scaly green. Finally, after several months of pain and at least two dozen physicians, her condition was diagnosed as “untreatable, incurable, and basically hopeless.” It was only then, in a dramatic burst of Sicilian despair, that Orsina allowed Romilda Rosetta to take her to see Piarina.
    To Piarina it was just another diagnosis. She was surprised at how fat the girl was, and how finely dressed, but otherwise she took little notice of her. She promptly prescribed ten drops of agrimony, two eggs laid precisely at midnight, a few, black mustard seeds, and a fistful of fresh earth. These were to be blended together and tied into a poultice, which was then to be tied securely over her buttocks. Piarina went through her usual process — the closed eyes, the palms at her temples, the momentary trance. But something unexpected happened to Ermenegilda. In the midst of her excruciating pain, as she watched the cock-eyed waif press her fluttery eyelids tight and sift through the field of images