“What did he say?” she asked nervously.
“Nothing,” Dimitri replied with forced casualness.
“If it was nothing then you can tell me,” she persisted.
“‘He’s coming,’ that’s what he said. You see? The man has mental problems.”
“Who did he mean by ‘he’?”
“I really have no idea. Stavros is our local idiot prophet, some people listen to him, some don’t. Forget it happened, please.”
But on the way back up the mountain Clarissa couldn’t erase the image of the man’s face, the ferocity of his features as he made his prediction. He’s coming. Who? she wondered. Who would be visiting me in this remote spot? Her father, perhaps? The idea of her father arriving at the dock in his suit and holding the ever-present mobile phone seemed absurd. No, it had to be someone else, someone she didn’t know yet who had searched her out, chosen her…for what?
I’m a fool to take the babblings of the local village idiot seriously, she told herself, grappling with her newfound cynicism and a yearning still to believe.
Clarissa continued counseling the village women, but her lack of faith spread like a cancer. Every morning she found it harder to drag herself out of bed and kneel on the freezing chapel floor with the other sisters. When she gazed up at Jesus’s face she no longer felt the rush of inspiration. “What is it all for?” she murmured under her breath.
In the midst of her anguish she failed to notice that her period didn’t come that month, or the next or the next.
One morning she checked the calendar and realized that she hadn’t bled for over four months. She wondered if she was anemic; remembered reading that a change in diet or even a change in drinking water could alter the menstrual cycle. She vowed to concentrate on improving her nutrition. Yes, the change in diet had to be the cause. Relieved she spent the rest of the day on a fishing boat with Georgio.
For the next few weeks she cut down on dairy products and daily forced down a local meat dish. Her stomach grew swollen, but when the end of the month came still Clarissa hadn’t bled. That day at the cannery she kept imagining the onset of period pains but nothing happened. In the evening she wept with frustration.
The next day she decided to visit the island’s herbalist. He lived in a cottage sandwiched between the bakery and the tannery. The scent of freshly baked bread competed with the sickening stench of tanning fluids and Clarissa thought she might throw up as she ducked through the low doorway. The décor looked as if it hadn’t changed since the sixteenth century and the tiny room was more like a cupboard, with hundreds of bunches of dried herbs hanging from the ceiling. Nailed to the wall next to the long wooden counter, next to a 1956 calendar featuring Sophia Loren in a spotted bikini, were several shrunken goat and sheep heads. Clarissa reeled back in disgust.
“So, holy woman, what can I do for you?” The herbalist spoke in a strange American-accented English. He barely reached her shoulders and his face was so wrinkled that it was difficult for Clarissa to see whether he was smiling or frowning.
“I’m ill, I have problems…down below.” She placed a hand on her womb awkwardly.
He looked her up and down, then sniffed reflectively. “I can see, even with my eyes. Lie down on the counter, I will tell you what is wrong.”
Clarissa swung herself up onto the long table and lay down. With her habit draped over the sides she felt a little like a giantess trapped in a mouse hole. In an effort to ward off panic she stared up at the ceiling and watched a lizard stoically crawl across the wooden roof beam toward a struggling moth. Please make him not be a total fraud, she prayed to herself, trying hard not to feel ridiculous.
The ancient herbalist climbed up onto a stool and pulled down two dried chicken claws from the wall. He hobbled over to the table and waved them slowly over her stomach, mumbling an incomprehensible incantation under his breath. Finally he laid the claws carefully in a cross across her abdomen then produced a tuning fork from one of his pockets. He banged it against the wooden bench, placed it end down next to her, and listened to the high-pitched note for a few seconds. Suddenly he clapped his hands as if to disperse the air above her.
“Get up,” he said brusquely. While Clarissa rearranged herself, he concocted a mixture of herbs, pouring a little from one jar and then a little more from another until he had created his own foul-smelling blend.
“I have seen this condition only once before, when I was four. The victim, she too was the attendant to the holy relic. Maria Stelopolis, that was her name. A beautiful woman.” He paused for a second. “You touched the nipple, didn’t you?” he asked, not unkindly.
Startled, Clarissa tried to gauge his reaction but there was nothing judgmental in his tiny buried eyes. She started to stammer but silencing her he pushed the jar of herbs toward her.
“I cannot promise I can stop what has begun, but this tea might help. You must drink it each day before the sun is in the sky and twice on a full moon.”
“What happened to the other woman—Maria?”
“I cannot remember. My mother took me to the mainland and I was not here to see the results.”
“You must have heard something?”
“It was over ninety years ago. I tell you, I can’t remember!” His face closed over and she could tell that he was lying.
For a week she drank the tea every morning before dawn. Its flavor was what she imagined horse piss might taste like and the only effect it seemed to have was diuretic. As the days passed Clarissa waited anxiously for her period to appear, but nothing happened except that she continued to gain weight.
Her distress did not go unnoticed. One morning the nun woke to find the abbess perched on her bed. She was so frail that she seemed to float above the sheets.
“You have lost your faith,” the abbess said softly. Clarissa looked at her in surprise.
“Your Mother Superior told me all about it.”