M I R A C L E N U M B E R 1

A Galilean Transformation

'You see how he glances furtively over one shoulder, as if . . .as if he were escaping from the scene of a crime.' It was Charlotte's first rehearsal to camera, and the unforgiving television lights revealed her to be more nervous than the young man in the portrait she was describing. 'But is he the perpetrator of the crime or just a witness?' she went on. 'I believe the artist wants us to ask such questions, feel ourselves part of the plot. The picture, you see, represents a window into another space and time --- in this case the fifteenth century. Everything in the painting is designed to reinforce the fiction that this young man, with one hand apparently on the picture frame, is about to vault from his world into ours.'

'To me he looks like Paolo,' said Donna. 'The same sexy mouth.'

Ignoring the girl, Charlotte continued, 'Another example of this arresting device is Raphael's portrait of La Muta, the "silent" or "mute" woman, a title acknowledging that she could, if she wished, speak to us of what she has seen, cross the boundary of the picture plane and --- '

'Give each of us fair warning when our time is up,' finished one of the Italians on the film crew, tapping his watch. 'Lunchtime, in thiscase!'

For Muta, the first warning came in the shape of a wolf. The mute woman was near the ruined bell tower picking dandelion leaves for her lunch when an old thin wolf loped into San Rocco, a wolf who must be desperate or sick to come so close in broad daylight. Years ago Muta had seen wolves dancing together like gawky young partners at their first country fair, but this wolf was long past dancing. The animal stopped in the shade of the tower only metres from her, its tongue lolling dry between black stretched lips. The weary eyes cleared and widened as they caught sight of Muta and she saw the tongue curl back like a chameleon's and the jaws snap shut in a spray of bloody froth.

So they took each other in, the last survivors of what the world had been. Muta was close enough to see the clawmarks raked across the wolf's hindquarters and the ragged furrow ploughed by a bullet down its flank. One ear was ripped almost in half and flapped like the sail of a broken windmill with every heave of the creature's lungs. When some distant sound brought what was left of its torn ears to attention, Muta followed the old wolf's gaze and saw a pack of dogs appear on the horizon from the direction of the Villa Rosa. Too worn out to run far, the wolf swung its wedge of grizzled head, scanning the ruined hamlet for shelter, and before she could do anything it had made a dash for the bell tower, passing not more than an arm's length from where Muta stood.

She had to watch its fall. One of the weak places in her cellar's roof gave way and she stood to watch the wolf falling, kicking, scratching, its black-rimmed yellow eyes fixed on her, neither asking for help nor expecting it. Muta knew how that was.

The pack was closer now. In the lead was a long-legged veteran who had lost an eye and half his jaw three winters back defending his master from a wounded boar. Muta had seen that same dog take on a viper as thick in the middle as the dog's own head and grip that snake and shake it straight as a walking-stick. That dog would track the devil into Hades and back, Muta knew, and she knew too that the pack it led didn't hunt alone; the men must be close.

She turned to run for her cellar, but the wolf was there, wounded or dead, and even a dead wolf could give away her secrets, and so as the pack of baying dogs streamed over the ruined vineyards towards San Rocco, she acted against her instinct to hide, and ran not away from the pack but towards it, back and forth across the wolf's trail, her own rank underground smell disguising the wolf's as she waved her arms in their flapping dead men's clothes at the half-wild dogs, some of them even wilder from an earlier kill. When that failed to scatter them she threw stones, handfuls of turf, firewood. As the old one-eyed boarhound leapt up and caught a branch mid-air, snapping it in two with his misshapen jaws, Muta saw the hunters not far behind, approaching on foot. Her need to escape grew desperate. She kicked dirt in the dogs' faces, raged silently at them, turning her own face into a snarl and her hands into claws. Offended by the strange half-human's unwarranted attack, the dogs split from a pack into individuals and, wagging their tails in puzzlement, drew away from the mixed-up smell of woman and wolf to flow together on the far side of San Rocco.

Their masters were still some way off when Muta identified the man in front, a face she recognised, even now. She thought: Will he know me? Why has he come back after so long? Then she bolted, up towards the old road and all the other walking ghosts.

'Did you see that?' one of the hunters said.

The older man in the lead, closely watching the woman's progress up the steep hill, replied, 'You think she's living at San Rocco, Lorenzi?' The interrogator was a big, beefy animal in his early seventies, but fit, buffed up, expensively maintained, with a tone of voice that implied an infestation of vermin on his private property, vermin he had paid heavily to be rid of. He looked like someone who expected value for his money and had plenty of people willing to beat it out of you.

'I doubt it,' answered Lorenzi. 'She's more likely got a den up there where she joined the old German road. Those hills are riddled with caves, as you know.'

The older man leaned over to peer at something. 'She's lost a shoe.'

'Looks like a museum piece, something left over from the

War.'

'Something left over from the War . . .' He picked up the shoe by its laces and shifted his pouchy, well-fed eyes to the hill, where the running figure had disappeared. 'What's that scar-faced dog of Procopio's called? Baldassare? You told me he'd track anything?'

'Almost anything . . .'

But when they tried to catch Baldassare he refused to be caught. He stood back and looked at them and pulled the unscarred side of his face into a snarl to match the one given by the boar, then lit out on his own towards home. 'There goes our best dog,' said Lorenzi. 'Now what?'

Charlotte Penton, walking alone on one of the unmade-up tracks that circled and criss-crossed this tightly folded part of Italy like interlaced cobwebs, was contemplating the view from the crest of the hill back towards the Villa Rosa, the idyllic hotel where two hours earlier she had treated herself to a solitary and very expensive lunch. It was her first proper day off in six weeks, and with her restoration of the Raphael portrait nearing completion, Charlotte had vowed to allow herself a few treats before returning to London. There, as the result of her recent divorce, the solitude would be of a different, less voluntary kind.

She took a deep breath, enjoying the warm, sweet, afternoon air. Off to her right was a scene possessing all the orderly grace of a Raphael. In the foreground a corridor of painterly trees, groomed and plumed as feather dusters, led in a direct line of perspective up the hard white drive to the hotel gates, and beyond that to the spires and pantiled roofs of Urbino, rose-pink against the mauve of even more distant hill-towns. The light --- that splendid, golden Italian light which softened the edges of objects while at the same time mysteriously making them clearer and more resonant --- filled Charlotte up like a rich, heavy wine. She thought: I will always know this place; I have already known it. For as a student in Florence she had admired these same hills and castles in a portrait of Urbino's greatest ruler, Federigo da Montefeltro, so that even before coming here she had known this as a landscape she could love.

To her left was an equally familiar but altogether wilder view, of foothills rising steeply into the Apennines, only the odd ruined building holding back the encroaching woods and brush. It resembled the more grisly paintings she restored, early Flemish and German works of martyrs and crucifixions devoid of human optimism, their plunging chasms and savage torrents coded warnings for a violent or tragic life.

She thought of the hill she was traversing as the spine of a decision neatly splitting the country into before and after, either/or. As she mentally tossed a coin (ruins or civilisation: which should she choose?), her attention was drawn to the only movement in that divided landscape, a raggedy flapping figure running fast out of thick woods on the uncultivated side of the hill. About two kilometres away, perhaps less, the figure was barely identifiable as human, and what humanity it had was contradicted by the pack of dogs that appeared out of the same woods a few moments later. Straining against long leads, they dragged behind them five hunters with guns protruding stiffly from their silhouettes like the broomstick arms of scarecrows.

The baying of the dogs carried across the valley on an updraught of wind, so faintly that it seemed unconnected to the scene below. Charlotte at first imagined she was watching an Italian version of the mock hunts that took place near her parents' home in England, where the trail for the pack was laid by a sprinting man rather than a fox. But as the gap between the hunters and their prey closed, she saw the runner's movements become jerky, more inhuman; they conveyed a sense of urgency that negated any suggestion of play. The wedge of russet-coloured dogs and the hunters in loden green and brown were moving forward relentlessly, like part of the forest shifting itself, or a natural upheaval of the unforgiving earth.

Was it human or not, that solitary runner? Late afternoon sun flared in Charlotte's eyes, reducing the figures below to inksplashes drawn across a canvas landscape.

Were there still such things as manhunts with dogs? It didn't seem possible, not in 1993. Charlotte, accustomed to viewing herself as a spectator with little influence (except after the fact, where the damage was already done --- a restorer, a patcher-up), took several minutes to react. Even as she began to push her way downhill through the rough brush, and then, absurdly, to run, she had no faith in what she was seeing or doing. She was too far away to make any difference, and with her ungainly progress matched as if in a mirror by the awkward gait of the other runner, Charlotte felt she was watching herself lose a race that had been lost already, an artist's painted drama in which the lucid geometry was fixed, pre-ordained.

The figure stumbled and rolled over the edge of a steep incline, momentarily out of sight. Three of the hunters broke into a run and, urging their animals on, the men mingled their own cries with the dogs' baying until it was hard to tell the difference between man and beast. Charlotte was spurred to call out --- 'Stop! Basta! Enough!' --- words tossed back to her by the wind as if to emphasise the futility of her protest.

The pack reached the steep slope where the runner had fallen and pulled up sharply at the edge of the drop. Silent now, the dogs cast back and forth, tangling their leads into spaghetti. Two of them leapt off the bluff to be hung up yelping on the underbrush as the men tried with difficulty to unleash them.

Then all five hunters and their dogs scrambled over the edge and disappeared into the scrub.

Charlotte slowed to a walk and stared down into the valley, blinking her eyes rapidly as she waited for the hunters to reappear. She noticed the liquid sparkle of what might be a stream among the looming rocks and brush into which the hunt had vanished.

Five minutes passed. Ten. Her distance from whatever narrative had taken place below reduced it to a nagging memory, remote as childhood. She thought of her soldier-father's delight in hunting. How she'd hated being sent to fetch something 

from their freezer, a frozen zoo of hooves and beaks!

Another minute and Charlotte made up her mind that her first impression of the hunt must have been mistaken. What I saw, she insisted to her inner jury, what I saw was no more than another group of Italians after a boar or stag. Easy to attribute her blurred 'vision' to all the close, precise work she'd been doing on the Raphael portrait, especially as in these last weeks her eyesight had been playing tricks on her. Late at night she would imagine the painted woman's finger tapping, the stubbornly mute mouth trembling with an urge to speak.

Then there was the weather, unusually hot for October. I should have brought water, Charlotte thought, turning back towards the safety of the Villa Rosa, I probably had too much wine at lunch.

On the same ridge about a kilometre further down the path from Charlotte was a scientist, home for a short visit after many years away. Professor Serafini of the Italian Committee for Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal had a viewpoint almost identical to hers, he was looking at the same field --- yet saw nothing. Neither the hunters, nor their prey. Hearing Charlotte's story some weeks later, he would inform her that it was mathematically impossible to see what she claimed to have seen from her position at that time of day. On the back of an envelope he drew a diagram of the two hillsides, the angle of the sun's rays in relation to the deep valley and the fields between the San Rocco ridge and hers. Very precise, with dotted lines and angles marked a, b, c, etc. He said something like, 'With origin (you, Charlotte) at O and coordinates x, y, z,' and mentioned the Lorentz transformations, a set of equations for transforming the position and motion parameters from a frame of reference, 'which replaced the Galilean transformations.'

Charlotte didn't really understand the finer details of Serafini's explanation, but by then it didn't matter to her; she didn't need mathematical proof of what she had seen and turned away from in favour of the Villa Rosa. Nevertheless, she kept Serafini's envelope as a reminder of the limits of science, tucked into her old Raphael notebook next to the postcard of a cartoon by Goya whose caption seemed to sum up her experience: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.

M I R A C L E N U M B E R 2

To See the Wolf

Muta waited until sunset to ensure that the hunters hadn't followed her upstream, then made a long detour, miles out of her way, before doubling back towards San Rocco hours later. She felt safe enough, despite the sullen glow from a huge red hunter's moon, until she was passing the concrete pens where the pigs were slaughtered. Then less safe. An itch started between her shoulder-blades, a cold bristling up her neck, and about the same time she noticed the lights on, shining yellow when by this hour the only lights should be a pale fluorescent blue. The slaughter should be over for today. She crept forward into the scrubby cover above a pen where the pigs were massed in one corner, pressed closely together away from another slab of squealing raw pink flesh that seemed to spread or to be spread over their gate.

Silhouetted against the yellow light that should not have been on, there were men, shadowy and unrecognisable except for one, much older than the others, who stood apart and watched while the others stretched out something naked and boneless as a flayed hide not yet stripped.

Muta had time to recognise again this thing of her dark imaginings and as she saw the big skinning knife come out she knew it was all starting again and she began to back away on hands and knees through the broom and spiky juniper and over the tough cushions of wild thyme. Her palms were bleeding when she stood up at last, but the image of his face was still clear, confirming her suspicions that the killers were gathering again the way crows had been lately over Urbino's double hills (double-crossing hills, the mayor would say).

She made her way home on the old goat track through the scarecrow trees. At San Rocco she lit a branch of firewood, its flickering light guiding her over the fallen rooftiles of what had once been a kitchen into the shadows where the trap-door to her cellar was concealed. Twice she pushed her fingers under the moss that screened its door, her heart beating hard, and pulled them back, recalling the danger of a sick or cornered wolf, lessons taught by her father in the years when these mountains were full of wolves. She touched the knife in her belt, and, taking strength from the torch and the blade, finally heaved the door open and stood back.

When nothing happened, Muta cautiously moved round to where the ladder from below met the upper ground, inhaling the powerful smell of blood and wild animal urine. A real wolf, this time, although her inner demons often hit her with such force that she would drop unconscious and wake with a bruised skull, a twisted shoulder. She pulled the knife out and held the torch well in front. Pine resin caught in the flaming branch and for an instant a pair of yellow circles pierced the darkness at the base of the ladder like sparks cast from the resinous flames. Then the eyes flew towards Muta and the bloodied bristles on the wolf's jaws pumiced her face as it knocked her to the ground. She lunged out with the knife and the wolf grabbed her wrist the way the scarred old boarhound had grabbed the firewood, and she dropped the knife, waiting for the shake that would snap her wrist. The wolf's teeth pierced her skin, she felt its erring spirit pass into her, over her. Then she was free. The wolf was gone.

She picked up the knife again and climbed down the ladder into her cellar. The newspapers lining her walls from floor to ceiling were hanging in strips of half-words and fractured sentences where the wolf had torn its paws open scratching to escape. Blood had soaked into a rug, there was a new fall of earth from the ceiling, a toppled cupboard. None of her food was gone, though, not even the trout hanging up to smoke, and the water barrel hadn't been touched. Maybe the wolf was too frightened to eat and drink, or too sick. A fear of water, Muta remembered, was a sign of raging sickness.
 

M I R A C L E N U M B E R 3 

'Hey, Primo, you ever tell anybody what you think happened at San Rocco?' asked the bartender at Urbino's Bar Raffaello. He poured a second grappa for his friend Primo the mayor, who had come in to buy a weekly lottery ticket, one of his few nods in the direction of improbable faith. A former Communist converted to cynicism by his old party's failure to ignite the Italian workers, the mayor had been even more cynical since 1991, when the Italian Communist party split in two and he was persuaded to join the non-Communist-but-still-vaguely-leftish half, the PDS or Partito Democratico della Sinistra. 'A better balanced party,' his wife had consoled him, to which he'd responded, 'Better balanced, certainly, with a testicle on each side of the fence.' 

'Why, what happened at San Rocco, Franco?' he asked now. 

'Ah, Primo, don't be like that. You can trust me.' 

'You mean what happened a week ago at the pig farm?' 

'Nah, everyone can figure that. Guy like Domenico Montagna who works for the consortium, guy with a past who drinks too much, talks too much-an accident's bound to happen upon him sooner or later. I'm talking about, you know, what happened years ago.' 

'My wife. I told my wife.' 

'Sure, your wife, everybody tells his wife . . . nobody else?' 

'You know anyone who likes people who speak up, Franco, whomake a fuss? The meek shall inherit the earth, after all, isn't that enough for them?' Primo, who knew the perpendicular nature of this region, how barren some of the dirt was around here, saw this promised inheritance as the Old Man having the last laugh: Here you go, you meek and mild, the dust and stones are allyours! 'Judgement Day may be a long time coming, they're gonna to have to wait,' Primo added, 'but what more could they possibly want?' 

Franco poured them each another grappa. 'You think maybe it's different anywhere else?' 

'What do I know, a guy who's never been out of Italy.' 

'Me neither, except that one visit I made to Lourdes with my dead wife, may she rest in peace like she never did in life. But my brother Beppo who moved to Chicago, he's always saying-' 

'Don't give me one of Beppo's Great Sayings, Franco. It's too early.' 

'All I'm saying-' 

'Now it's you who's saying?' 

'All I'm saying is things can change, can't they, Primo? Like the Renaissance, for instance? I mean, when you-' 

'Like the Renaissance, he says. For instance, he says. You think the likes of you and me can change the world, Franco?' 

'Maybe not the world, but-' 

'Why, you've barely changed this bar since you took it over thirty years ago from your late not-so-lamented wife's widowed aunt. God help us if you ever change a thing barring the radio station! Anyway, some things are best left alone, things you can't change, like what happened at San Rocco. You think about San Rocco too much, Franco, and you'll think yourself into a state of disillusionment with the whole human race.' 

Charlotte Penton, trying and failing to concentrate on a letter to her ex-husband, felt no guilt about eavesdropping on the two Italians. These days she seemed to live most of her life through other people's eyes and ears. And if few people in Urbino realised how well she understood their language, even after six weeks of hearing her speak it, whose fault was that? 

Perhaps I have become inaudible, she thought, invisible, at least to men, pruned and thinned out by my divorce from John to the twigginess desirable only in very young women. She'd like to be different. Just for a day she'd like to be the kind of person who could lie easily; she'd like to write, 'Italy has done wonders for my love life, John! I never realised sex could be like this!' More exclamation marks in her life, that's what she needed, but she contented herself with scribbling a few bland words about her progress in restoring the Raphael portrait and a brief commendation of her young assistants, Paolo and Anna, the local restorers who had already been working on the painting before her arrival. 

'Paolo is a sweet boy who has a deep knowledge of the latest scientific developments in our field,' she wrote. Then added, with a sense of mischief: 'He is also very attractive and quite a rake-like Piero di Cosimo's wistful young satyr in the National Gallery.' Although she had no hope of inspiring jealousy in John these days, she was proud of herself for that last sentence. Perhaps its teasing spirit was the influence of this café next to the house where Raphael was born. She often came to read or write here in the Bar Raffaello, appreciating it for everything that in England would have made her hate it: the radio permanently tuned to Italian sports, the framed football shirts and ancient banners on the walls, the old ladies in blue-flowered housecoats who pushed through the beaded curtains every morning to read the local papers and exclaim with pleasurable dismay over the obituaries of friends and rivals. 

The raffish little place was empty now apart from the bartender and his friend the mayor, which might be why their discussion kept breaking through her concentration, the words 'San Rocco' tolling in her ears with the insistence of a distant church bell. She'd heard of San Rocco before, Charlotte was thinking, as she collected her things to go; but where? Why did the name make her feel uneasy? 

Primo watched the English woman leave, admiring her tall, slender figure-maybe a little bony for his taste, but he liked those startled blue eyes of hers that made you want to protect her. He liked, as well, her wide mouth and the milkand- roses complexion that no Italian woman of her age would have. Then again, most Italian women of her age and class would dress sexier, make more of their looks. 

'I tell you about that wolf at San Rocco last week?' asked Franco, not leaving the subject well enough alone. 'Wolf just vanished into thin air and left a woman in its place.' 

'Another one of your miracles?' 

'It's the truth I'm telling you! Guy I know took some hunters up that valley, told me this crazy gypsy woman sprang up out of nowhere, even scared that one-eyed boarhound of Procopio's-' 

'Procopio was there?' 

'He loaned them the dog-' 

'Never! That old one-eyed dog? Procopio wouldn't loan Baldassarre out to anyone! That dog is the greatest all-round hunter and truffler he's ever owned! Why, that dog saved his life!' 

'I know that, Primo, you think I don't know that? But one of these hunters was some big VIP Procopio owed a favour or something . . .' 

'Oh, a favour.' Years in politics had given Primo a precise notion of where favours could land you. 'Must've been some big favour he owed . . .' 

'You know Procopio's history.' From the shelf above his bar Franco took down one of the cups his local football team had won over the years. Polishing the electroplated gold with his cuff, he read his brother's name again. Maybe he should've followed Beppo to Chicago, like Beppo was always saying. Get away from this country to where the problems didn't smell so old and rotten when you turned them over. 'Anyway,' Franco said, 'makes you think, right?' 

'Only thing it makes me think is these hunters made a mistake. No one except ghosts hangs around San Rocco. Not even gypsies. Why would they? Sure, the map still reads Località San Rocco, but you know-everyone knows-there's no real locality there any more, not since the war.' No location there, Primo thought, only dislocation. Even here in Urbino there were no straight roads to the truth, while out there in the foothills beyond the city it was all ups and downs and dead ends and dying, dead mountain settlements, a home for wolves and vipers-and porcupines, decimators of the native iris rhizomes, which those spiky dinosaurs dug up with their leathery mitts like the hands of ancient plongeurs. As for the wild boar, they were always rootling out truffles and other mouldering, underground things. Primo had seen a few of those things himself, some he never wanted to see again, and these days he preferred to widen his horizons beyond places like San Rocco. He had a line worked out at various bars round Urbino, about Italy's long-standing political rot being just part and parcel of an inexorable cycle of ruin, renaissance and risorgimento: 'Reborn in the fifteenth century, resurrected from the ashes of the nineteenth and in a state of restoration ever since.' Catch him on his fourth grappa and he'd joke about how this phoenix nation he loved contained within its narrow boot such miraculous relics as the incorruptible tongue of Saint Anthony, the last breath of Saint Agatha, the gridiron on which Saint Lawrence was barbecued over a slow fire, the finger that Doubting Thomas poked into the side of the living Jesus after His Resurrection. ('It's true,' Franco had claimed last year. 'I saw it with my own eyes! The very finger! At Sante Croce in Rome!') And enough Feathers from the Wings of the Archangel Gabriel to make you awestruck by the sheer scale of angels. 

'Yes,' said Primo, 'when Lucifer was hurled from Paradise and stood, a stranger in this breathing world, there must've been a helluva crash, Franco. He must have left his mark.' 

'And you know where he left it, right, Primo?' 

What Primo knew was that to reveal the truth about San Rocco now would take a miracle and a miracle-worker-and he didn't believe in miracles any more, not even economic miracles. 

Excerpted from WAKING RAPHAEL © Copyright 2004 by Leslie Forbes. Reprinted with permission by Bantam, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.