From the Fire Hills

Ossi di Morto

IV 49 OSSI DI MORTO Hungarian-born Laszlo Toth took a hammer to the Pietà in St. Peter’s Basilica, disfiguring the face of the Madonna and shattering the left arm. The assailant spent two years in an insane asylum, and the reconstructed Pietà is now shielded behind protective glass. —New York Times Consider the irony: bones of the dead as confection, cookies piled behind panes like those that separate the Pietà in St. Peter’s from the rest of the dying. Because mostly in Rome, it is 1972, as the hammer of a crazed geologist fell on Mary, as he shouted, I am Jesus Christ— believable in a country of children craving bone-sweetness as prize for sitting still as marble in the army of Sunday chairs. When Laszlo Toth struck the Michelangelo, shards scattered the floor, while gawkers, the penitent, and even meek atheists in attendance swabbed to catch a sliver quick under the skin. They believed, for a moment, the flaw—their hands snatching some flake of resurrection, mouths in search of sugar they swore they tasted. Some, like great palmers of the salad days, brought back the forbidden rocks. Geologists could understand the pressure, enormous weight of splinters propped on mantels 50 in otherwise legal homes. Others never. (Mary’s nose, they say, recarved from a chunk in her back.) I like to think I would be different, could never even pocket a piece. Once tempted, don’t those witnesses still dream of the radiant spark, like crushing peppermint in the dark? On the other hand, to eye the sweets in café glass, the drums of children’s fingers, some hardened part of me wants denial, burial, each name returned. But how anonymous that grate of teeth on bone and aching flare of indulgence igniting everything my mother swore would be the death of me. ...