The PowerBook by Jeanette Winterson Page A

square. Mothers and grandmothers were sitting chatting, while the men stood in groups. The children were playing some complicated version of hide and seek, using the church door as a touchline.
    An Australian in shorts and boots, and a sweat-stained shirt, walked into the square and pulled a Frisbee out of his backpack. He was slightly overweight, his girlfriend was tanned and rangy. They started surfing the Frisbee to one another, carefully, quietly, she darting about, he standing still, always catching it as though he called it to him.
    One by one the Italian children joined in, and then some of the parents, until the whole square was ringed with about twenty people playing Frisbee. The Australians couldn’t speak Italian and the Italians didn’t bother to speak English. The rules,the form, the technique, were all conducted in sign language and body language, with laughter as the interpreter.
    Imagine the square.
    On one long side is the Pizza Materita. On the short side is the church. On the other long side is a smaller restaurant and a few houses. The fourth side of the square opens onto the street.
    The church of Santa Sophia has a great door and niched on the right and left of the door, high up, are two symmetrical statues. One is San Antonio, the patron saint of Anacapri, and the other is the Madonna.
    Imagine the square.
    Excitement, laughter, the whizz-curve of the Frisbee, new people pushing in, tired ones dropping out, then suddenly a boy throws the Frisbee too high and too fast, and the purple plastic orb neatly hats the Madonna.
    Allora! Mamma mia!
    Nobody knows what to do.
    Suddenly a matron in black comes forward. She takes the Australian by the hand and standshim below the statue. She crosses herself and gestures to him to do the same. Clumsily, he does it.
    Then she shouts to her two sons—big heavy men in short-sleeved shirts. They too cross themselves before the Madonna and stand patiently on either side of the Australian.
    The matron fetches her teenage grandchildren, stringy as beans. They cross themselves and are gestured upwards onto the shoulders of the three men, now arms round each other’s waists, their feet braced apart.
    The matron whistles, and a little kid, about three feet tall, comes running, and climbs, monkey-footed, up the human scaffolding. The base sweats. The teenagers complain, as hair, eyes, mouth and ears, are tugged and pulled until the kid is upright. He leans forward to flip the Frisbee off the Madonna. There is an imprecation from the ground. He looks down to see the matron shaking her fist at him. Guiltily he nods, crosses himself and tries again.
    He has it at a grab and with a cry of pleasure turns round, his feet gripping into the shoulders of his cousins. Their hands clutch his thin ankles. Hesays something, they let him go and he jumps into space, both hands in the air, holding the Frisbee like a parachute. He jumps into the air as if he were a thing of air, weightless, limitless, untroubled by gravity’s insistence.
    In the second’s difference between flying and falling his mother has run forward. She catches him at a swing, taking both of them to the floor.
    There she is, scolding and praising at the same time, while everybody gathers round, and wine is fetched from the restaurant, and ice cream in a bowl as big as a font.
    Everybody salutes the Madonna. Madonna of the Plastic. Madonna of the Mistake. Madonna who sees all and forgives all. Madonna who can take a joke.
    Tonight maybe, when the blinds are drawn and the square is star lit and silent, the Madonna and San Antonio will laugh at the games, and talk over the events of the day, as they always do—watchers and guardians of the invisible life.
    There are so many lives packed into one. The one life we think we know is only the window that isopen on the screen. The big window full of detail, where the meaning is often lost among the facts. If we can close that window, on purpose or by chance, what we find behind