I, Mona Lisa by Jeanne Kalogridis Page A

weight to Zalumma’s; together we fought to bring my mother down, but it was like trying to bring down an immovable mountain—one that trembled.
    My mother’s arms moved involuntarily from her sides and shot straight out, rigid. Her legs locked beneath her. “There is murder here, and thoughts of murder!” she shrieked. “Plots within plots once more!”
    Her cry grew unintelligible as she went down.
    Zalumma and I clung to her so that she did not land too harshly.
    My mother writhed on the cold floor of the cathedral, her blue cloak gaping open, her silver skirts pooling around her. Zalumma lay across her body; I put my kerchief between her upper teeth and tongue, then held on to her head.
    I was barely in time. My mother’s dark eyes rolled back until only the veined whites were visible—then the rigors began. Head, torso, limbs—all began to jerk arrhythmically, rapidly.
    Somehow Zalumma held on, rising and falling with the waves, whispering hoarsely in her barbarous tongue, strange words coming so fast and so practiced I knew they were part of a prayer. I, too, beganto pray without thinking in a language equally old:
Ave Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis pecatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae
 . . .
    I focused on the linen kerchief in my mother’s mouth—on her champing teeth, and the small specks of blood there—and on her jerking head, which I now held fast in my lap, so I was startled into fright when a stranger beside us began praying loudly, also in Latin.
    I glanced up and saw the black-frocked priest who had been tending the altar. He alternated between sprinkling my mother with liquid from a small vial and making the sign of the cross over her while he prayed.
    At last the time came when my mother gave a final wrenching groan, then fell limp; her eyelids fluttered shut.
    Beside me, the priest—a young red-haired man with pockmarked florid skin—rose. “She is like the woman from whom Jesus cast out nine devils,” he said with authority. “She is possessed.”
    Sore and halting from the struggle, Zalumma nonetheless rose to her full height—a hand’s breadth taller than the priest—and glared at him. “It is a sickness,” she said, “of which you know nothing.”
    The young priest shrank, his tone now only faintly insistent. “It is the Devil.”
    I glanced from the priest’s face to Zalumma’s stern expression. I was mature for my age and knew responsibility: The increasing number of my mother’s fits had caused me to act as mistress of the household many times, playing hostess to guests, and accompanying my father in her place on social occasions. For the last three years, I had gone with Zalumma to market in my mother’s place. But I was young in terms of my knowledge of the world, and of God. I was still undecided as to whether God was punishing her for some early sin, and whether her fits were indeed of sinister origin. I knew only that I loved her, pitied her, and disliked the priest’s condescension.
    Zalumma’s white cheeks turned shell pink. I knew her well: A scathing reply had formed in her mind, and teetered upon her rouged lips, but she checked it. She had need of the priest.
    Her manner turned abruptly unctuous. “I am a poor slave, with noright to contradict a learned man, Father. Here, we must get my mistress to the carriage. Will you help us?”
    The priest looked on her with justifiable suspicion, but he could not refuse. And so I ran to find our driver; when he had brought the carriage round to the front of the cathedral, he and the priest carried my mother to it.
    Exhausted, she slept with her head cradled in Zalumma’s lap; I held her legs. We rode home directly back over the Ponte Santa Trinità, a homely stone bridge which housed no shops.
    Our palazzo on the Via Maggio was neither large nor ostentatious, though my father could have afforded to adorn the house more. It had been built a century before by his great-great-grandfather from plain
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