by Rosaleen Bertolino
Many years ago, in a poor village high in the mountains, a little girl by the name of Guilia Pirolo dreamed of a buried bell. She claimed that if the villagers found this bell the corn would grow tall and sweet, and people would be able to buy everything they’d dreamed of: sewing machines, thick coats, sacks of fine white sugar.
No one believed her. She was only a girl, skinny, with large ears and a thatch of unruly black hair—although she excelled at locating lost objects. When she wasn’t helping her mother with the house or the chickens, she often wandered alone through the village and into the woods. She discovered the priest’s onyx rosary this way, in a patch of moss, where he had dropped it while hunting for truffles with his pig.
That summer the creek that tumbled through the village dried into inky pools twitching with mosquito larvae. Although the villagers boiled the water, many people, including Giulia, fell ill. Day by day, she became thinner and weaker. She shivered under blankets and moaned about the bell, which she believed would cure her.
Her father, desperate, began to dig at the spot where Giulia said the bell was buried. The soil was as hard as a brick. He and her brothers worked all day and dug at night, too, by the light of torches.
Idlers in the village gathered round as they swung their pickaxes.
“Generally the Pirolos are only stupid, but sometimes they rise to the level of insanity,” one remarked, puffing on his pipe.
The hole yielded broken pots, an old-fashioned boot, and some mysterious bones, but no bell. They dug for three weeks, twenty-eight feet into the ground, until they hit solid rock and could dig no further. All fifty-six people in the village would have fit inside the hole—it was that big. Gray dirt towered around the pit in large heaps.
By August, the creek dried up altogether. People were frightened.
“That child should be exorcised,” said one woman.
“You have brought bad luck!” shouted another as he scurried past Giulia’s house. Finally, the townspeople stopped speaking to the Pirolos altogether.
“It’s there!” Giulia wept just before she died, “Can’t you hear it?”
The priest allowed her a proper burial, despite protests from some who felt that a witch didn’t belong in the village cemetery.
Time passed. Children played a game in the hole occasionally. A child would writhe on the ground and shout, “The bell! The bell!” Others would scrape at the rock with small knives and rusty pickaxes stolen from their parents. They would groan and faint. Then they would hold a funeral.
One morning the children playing in the pit noticed that it was damp, although it had not rained for months. Looking closer, they could see a hairline crack in the rock—from it trickled water. Putting their ears to the rock, they could hear it, too: deep inside the mountain, the tinkling of bells.
The water tasted as clean as rain. Weeks passed and the hole filled to the brim and spilled over, running in a stream straight through the middle of the village.
Everyone was in a state of terrible excitement. Some parents forced their children to drink sleeping potions, then hovered over them as they slept, listening for clues that would make them rich. A boy who had been stung cried out in his sleep, “Bees!” and his mother rushed off and spent all of her savings on twenty hives. Another child got herself a silk parasol this way.
Soon, while corn rotted in the fields and goats bleated crazily to be milked, the village was invaded by china dolls, cartloads of Roman candles, farmers trying to learn tightrope walking. Then people said that Giulia was a witch indeed.
