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Marco said goodbye to me when we reached the dragon’s ear. “I don’t think I’m allowed to step beyond here,” he said with a smile.
He leaned down to kiss my cheek goodbye, his stubble grazing my skin, scraping my cheek in a way that sent an unexpected thrill through me. Did I imagine that his lips lingered a second longer than usual? I rarely thought about men, about their bodies, their hands, their lips. But suddenly every part of Marco was incredibly interesting to me and I could feel the heat moving from my cheeks down my breasts. I pulled away and thanked him for walking us this far, helped Liuni off his shoulders, and hurried to the witch’s house.
I must have been flushed when I arrived because she quickly offered me a glass of water before laying the boy on her bed for his treatments. While she did her work, she instructed me to chop the herbs on the table and then grind them into the olive oil to make a salve.
“Come here,” she instructed once I was finished. “I’ll show you how I rub this into his body.” She lathered the boy’s back and buttocks in the oil and then placed her hands on top of mine as she demonstrated how to knead it into his skin.
“The system that moves the blood around his body is still weak. It’s called his circulation,” she explained. “The massage helps get more blood to his muscles so they will grow stronger. You see, like this.”
Her hands, gnarled and knotty, were powerful on top of mine and I felt a similar exhilaration to the one I’d felt when Marco kissed my cheek. I enjoyed the small power of being able to help heal this child, to help him be able to move a little bit better in the world.
She left me to the massage while she went to check on a broth she was preparing over the fire.
When she returned, the boy was so relaxed he’d fallen asleep. His little tongue lolled out of the side of his lips.
“You are a natural,” the witch whispered as she watched my hands move across his limbs on their own. “I have thought this about you for a long time, since you first came to me as a girl when you lost out on the opportunity to go to the upper school, which you very much deserved. I knew that meant you were driven, but I also felt something when you helped me as Melina was dying. I believe you have a gift. Would you like to learn more?” the witch asked as she flipped Liuni over onto his back.
Yes. I couldn’t make my mouth form the word, but I was able to nod. Saying it out loud felt like a sin. Yes, I want to learn everything.
“Good.” She gripped my hands in hers and laid them on the little boy’s soft tummy and together we massaged him in a circular motion from his groin up to his chest and around and around again.
I kept kneading the boy’s belly, now feeling each of his little organs beneath my fingers but not being able to identify anything I touched. Still I knew I was doing some good.
I went back many times without the child. Cettina, delighted I finally found something that brought me joy, offered to watch my own children for me. What were three more when she had a whole house of them. Every time I visited the top of the mountain the witch taught me a bit more. I learned that ergot fungus mixed with parsley oil could help to push forward a woman’s labor when it stalled and also that it helped to stop the bleeding after a birth. But the amounts had to be carefully measured because even slightly too much caused a burning sensation of the limbs and more than that could be fatal. The juice of leeks dissolved in warm water and another woman’s breast milk could also speed up a delivery. I learned how to crush pennyroyal and mix it with pomegranate pulp and willow leaf to help hasten the menses for women who did not want to become pregnant and how much to deliver in the first month or two of pregnancy to open the womb.
“How do you know so much about healing?” I finally got up the courage to ask la strega one evening after we had coaxed a stubborn child out of its mother’s womb. The baby was in an unnatural position, and I’d helped the old woman turn it so it was facing the mother’s back and could be pulled out by its tiny ankles, much the way she had done for me with my first pregnancy.
“I was taught by my mother, and she learned from her mother before her. She always told me there are some things women know intuitively, especially poor women, the ones who are the most underestimated. We know our bodies better than anyone, but we are often afraid to embrace that knowledge. I also learned things, different things, from a man in Palermo whom I lived with for many years. The women from my family taught me the old ways and he taught me the new.”
“Who was he?”
“A doctor. I was sent to cook and clean for him when his wife died. My family sold me to him to be his house girl. He kept me maintained and gave me a fine room. But he noticed something in me, much like what I noticed in you. He began to teach me to read and to write, and when I excelled at both he taught me Latin. After that he taught me everything he knew about healing. In return I gave him what he needed. I made his meals and kept his house free of dust. When I got older, I took to his bed with him when he asked. He explained to me the real names for the systems of the body and how to use modern medicines, even though many of them are not as good as what I can make on my own.” She twinkled a little at the memories. “He showed me how to cut the body and how to seal it back up.”
“So, he taught you to be a doctor?” I asked.
“He taught me knowledge. I would not call myself a doctor. We must be careful what we call ourselves. When he died, I could not stay there. I was not his kin. I did not want to be a servant to anyone else, not after what he had made me into with all of his teachings. I came home, but there was nowhere for me to be in town because I had no family left and I was a strange unmarried woman. I moved to the outside of the town, and I did what I do today. I treated women and children when the midwives and doctors could not. The village never accepted me, but they would take what they could when they needed it.”
I could not believe I had never asked what I asked her next. It had simply never occurred to me and that felt like a wretched sin.
“What is your name?”
She hesitated. Perhaps it had been a long time since anyone had asked her this. “Rosalia.”
“After Saint Rosalia?” My favorite saint. We also called her Santuzza, or the “little saint,” because she was tiny, a dainty woman born to rich parents who chose to live as a hermit inside of a mountain in order to pledge her life to Jesus Christ.
A smile danced on this Rosalia’s chapped lips. “It is fitting, no? The little saint who lived and died in a cave? The patron saint of those infected by the plague.”
Rosalia. Would I ever be able to call her that? Would I ever be able to think of her as anything but la strega? She must have been able to read my mind.
“I do not mind what you call me, what anyone calls me. You may call me the witch. There is probably a truth to that too. The things we have to do to save lives feels like magic every day.”
“I would like to call you Rosalia.”
The ends of her mouth twitched upward. How long had it been since someone called her by her name?
“Someone will need to take my place when I am gone. I think you can be of service to the women in the village, and unlike me, you can do it in the light of day because you are a wife here and a mother, a woman with honor.”
We worked in comfortable silence for the rest of the day and for many days after that. It was the start of something, but also the end of something else. If I’d stayed ignorant, remained in the darkness of my simple life, could I have kept myself safe?
