Lives of the Saints Read online

  ‘I’ve had worse,’ my mother said.

  ‘Yes, Luciano bought it in Tornamonde, you can’t find good meat here in Rocca Secca anymore. But you should be careful how much you eat! A friend of mine ate tripe every day for a week, and she gave birth to triplets!’

  My mother forced a smile. Pig tripe was what people in the region fed to grooms on their wedding nights, to help them have children.

  ‘And did they have little tails, the children?’ my mother said, still smiling.

  The woman’s face darkened for the briefest instant before she let out a long falsetto laugh.

  ‘Oh, signora, always joking!’ She laughed again, wiping her hands on her apron. ‘Well, enjoy your meal, Luciano will be sorry he missed you. I’ll give you a good price on the wine.’

  ‘Eat your food,’ my mother said when the woman had gone, returning to her own meal with a vengeance. My appetite, though, had died, the wet texture of the pasta in my mouth beginning to make my stomach turn. But when I set down my fork my mother looked at me in irritation.

  ‘What’s the matter with you? Oh! Basta!’

  ‘It tastes like shit,’ I said.

  I had got it out now, spit out my resentment like something that had stuck in my throat. But an instant later my face was burning: my mother had slapped me, hard, against the cheek. A lump rose in my throat but I swallowed it, my lips sealed tight. There were a few people sitting at the tables around us now, but only the old thin man glanced over at us, peering up above the top of his newspaper for an instant before returning again to his reading; though almost at once I looked up through the restaurant window to see if the black-sweatered woman had been watching us. For some reason it was the thought of her having seen my mother’s anger that made me burn more than anything now, the thought of the large false smile she would light for us then if she returned, like someone who had won an argument; and when I could not make her out anywhere I felt a great relief, as if my mother’s slap had not been a punishment at all but part of some sin or crime we’d committed together, and which had gone undetected.

  In silence I picked up my fork and began to eat my tortellini, my eyes trained now on the slowly emerging bottom of the bowl. When we had finished eating, Luciano’s son came around to collect our dishes.

  ‘How much is it,’ my mother said tonelessly.

  ‘But my father told me—’

  ‘Never mind that,’ my mother said. ‘Just give me the regular price.’

  IX

  La festa della Madonna on the last weekend of September transformed Valle del Sole every year from a sleepy peasant village into a carnival town. Three days of festivities—music, dancing, processions, fireworks—to cap off the summer and to celebrate the harvest. People from neighbouring villages, from Rocca Secca, old residents from Rome and Naples, flocked into the village; day labourers working on distant farms took leaves of absence; migrants in the north, in Switzerland, in France, boarded crowded trains for the long journey home. Sometimes even a few Americani appeared, planning their return to their native village to coincide with la festa.

  About a month before the festival, members of lu comitato della Madonna went around to each household in the village for la questua, the collection taken up to pay festival expenses, arriving in twos in their Sunday suits and summoning up their most proper Italian to make their plea. The poverty of many of the villagers sometimes made their job an uncomfortable one; but village loyalty assured that even the poorest families would reach into the pot or jug in which they kept their savings and separate out the expected number of notes with little hesitation. During the course of the year each village in the area had its own festival, in honour of its patron saint, and ancient rivalries ensured that the peasants would go hungry before they would allow their village to be outdone by one of its neighbours. La festa della Madonna was tied up in these rivalries in more ways than one: Valle del Sole’s original patron was St. Michael, whose feast fell on the 28th of September, but once when a cholera epidemic had decimated the population of Valle del Sole but not claimed a single victim from Castilucci, the villagers, jealous that Castilucci’s patron, St. Joseph, had been more powerful than their Michael, had applied to Rome for a change of saints. As their replacement they chose the Virgin, who had a long history of successful intercessions with a God who was sometimes distant and unapproachable; and though Rome had denied their request, they had finally made the change on their own authority, though they had kept the last weekend of September as their time of celebration.

  These village rivalries, too, had led to a continual escalation in the lavishness of the festivities in the past few years, for though the peasants’ fortunes had not improved much, paesani who had had good fortune overseas had begun pouring their own wealth into the festivals. This year, in Valle del Sole, rumours were being whispered of a celebration such as had never been seen before in the region, because Salvatore Mancini, who had left Valle del Sole before the war to make his fortune in America, had sent the comitato a sum that would have made the Pope himself suck in his breath.

  But in my grandfather’s house no sense of excitement had been building. Our kitchen had been strangely silent for that time of year; for though my grandfather seldom sat on the comitato himself, as mayor he presided over its selection in the spring and was usually kept well informed of its activities as the festival approached and called upon to settle the committee’s internal disputes, our kitchen often alive with heated debate well into the night. But this year no one had come, to wrangle over the timing of the fireworks or the number of chairs that should be rented from Rocca Secca or the sum that should be paid to the band; and when the members of the comitato had come to our door for la questua, my grandfather, instead of inviting them in, as he usually did, for a glass of amaretto, had simply handed them the usual donation without fanfare, and they had come and gone without so much as seating themselves at our table. In fact my grandfather was seldom at home now, leaving the house early in the morning to go up to Di Lucci’s and coming back only for meals, when he seldom spoke, retreating more and more each day into his grim silence. Once when I crossed town to buy some milk, I saw him sitting alone on Di Lucci’s terrace, staring into space like an old man, as if he had been put there to be kept out of the way, like the ageing parents set out by their daughters or daughters-in-law on upper balconies during the day, left there to mumble to themselves in the sun and flies. Despite my grandfather’s infirmities, his stooped gait, he had always seemed a man who had loomed large, who commanded respect; but now suddenly he seemed shrunken and small, as if some aura around him had faded or died.

  My mother, too, had withdrawn into a shadowy silence. Since the day at the restaurant a veil seemed to have fallen between us, and for a while I had nursed this estrangement like a precious wound I could somehow turn to advantage; but the passing days brought only a growing awkwardness, as if my mother and I had suddenly become strangers, with no words now to bridge the silence between us. My mother had developed a sudden interest in our garden, staying out there sometimes from early morning till nightfall, hoeing, watering, coming in only to prepare our silent meals, smelling of dirt and sweat, her hands growing daily more calloused and rough. But though the garden, under her silent ministrations, grew daily more healthy and lush, watered carefully now and properly weeded, the lushness seemed more show than substance, the quick growth of leaves rather than the fattening of tomatoes and peppers and grapes which were already ripe or ripening by that late time in the season. The sese di vacca—Roman tomatoes, cow’s teats, as we called them—had opened some new flowers, small throbs of yellow in the garden’s green; but the fruit would have no time to ripen before the first frost.

  I spent my time alone now, waiting for something to happen that would restore the normalcy of things, for the festival, for school to begin in October. At school, at least, I could see Fabrizio, who was busy now helping his father in the fields. Fabrizio was really my only regular friend in the villa
ge, though he was a year older than me and wasn’t like me at all, wasn’t shy and could make people laugh. He always walked with an exaggerated swagger, belly protruding, knees pointing outward, nose and chin upward, a faded brown corduroy cap which he took off only in school and church, when he stuffed it into his back pocket, worn well back on his head, with an odd sideways tilt; and he had only two pairs of knickers, one green and one blue, which underwent a bimonthly rotation, like phases of the moon, two weeks green, two weeks blue, even in winter, when he came to school with his bare calves white and goose-pimpled from the cold, though he didn’t alter his swagger. His most prized possession was a jack-knife his uncle had brought him back from America, with a big blade at one end and a small one at the other; and sometimes, during our walks on the mountain, he would let me use it to whittle or to carve my name into a tree.

  Fabrizio and I had been friends since the summer before I’d started school, when he’d come out one day to the pasture where I was tending sheep to show me the welts on his back his father had given him for letting one of his sheep fall over a bluff.

  ‘Not bad, eh?’ he’d said, lifting his shirt. ‘He hit me fifteen times with his belt. I counted in my head to keep from crying. Then I said, “Now I’m just like Christ,” because they hit him too, and my father started hitting me again. If you don’t cry it makes them angrier, so I started crying to make him stop. Then my mother said, “Basta, Lui, you’re going to turn him into a cripple!” ’

  That was the day, too, that Fabrizio had taught me to smoke, pulling two crumpled cigarettes from his shirt pocket and guiding me through my first puffs until the smoke began to pass down my throat with little resistance, the world slowly starting to orbit around the rock I was sitting on; and afterwards we’d spent an hour or so rolling and wrestling in the grass, laughing because sheep fell off cliffs, because fathers beat their sons, and because the world, for all its seeming stability, was actually spinning around at a tremendous speed, which only became apparent when you’d had a smoke. After that whenever Fabrizio saw me in the streets of Valle del Sole he’d call out ‘Ho, Vittò!’ in a husky bass and pat his belly, mimicking the bonhomie with which the men of the village often greeted each other.

  I was surprised at first that Fabrizio attached himself to me — I had thought of him as someone who belonged to the gangs, those coteries that seemed always to form outside the world I lived in, as if they had secret meetings in the night. But I had figured him wrong: in fact he didn’t belong to any gang at all, only insinuated himself into this group or that, usually of younger kids, serving as ringleader for a few hours but then saying to me suddenly, in the middle of some game or exploit, ‘Come on, let’s go,’ and the two of us would wander out alone to lie in some pasture or wade along the shore of the river. With older boys he was cocky and defiant, and would get into fights, fights he didn’t win very often, since he wasn’t very big; but he’d pick himself off the ground, wipe off his knickers, and then walk away as if nothing had happened, not caring finally whether he’d won or lost.

  Now, though, with the harvest, Fabrizio was out in the fields from dawn to dusk. I’d been out a few times to look for him, had shown him the one lira coin I’d gotten from Luciano, which I carried with me always now. But Fabrizio’s father, who was known in the village as Facciabrutta, Uglyface, would always find some reason to deliver a blow to the back of Fabrizio’s head whenever I went around; so I stopped going around. I spent my time instead closed up in my room, pretending to look over my schoolbooks in the hope that my mother would come up to check on me. I’d watch her sometimes through my balcony doors as she hoed in the garden, her hair pulled back now in a scarf, her breasts straining against her blouse as she bent forward to pluck out some weed; but then I’d retreat again to my bed and the silence of the house would wash over me, filling my head like a scream, crowding out my private thoughts. The silence seemed to issue from every nook and cranny of the house, to dissolve furnishings and walls and leave me suspended in a pure, electric emptiness, so volatile that the crunch of my mother’s hoe threatened to shatter the house to its foundations. Then at night, as I lay in the dark staring up at the cobwebs on the ceiling, I’d hear my mother’s quiet sobbing mingling with the sigh of the wind like something inhuman, as if the air could no longer carry any human sounds, all of them smothered into the earth by the silence.

  X

  On the Saturday afternoon of la festa, while the church bells tolled, my grandfather and I made our way under a grey sky to the service that marked the festival’s true beginning. We were dressed in our best Sunday clothes, my grandfather’s war medals pinned in an even row to the breast pocket of his jacket. The streets were filled already with small crowds of men talking and joking in front of doorways and families hurrying up towards the church. Some former villagers had arrived from Rome and Naples, their Cinque- and Seicentos parked beyond the village on the path that led up to the high road.

  ‘Oh, lu podesta!’ one of them called out when my grandfather passed.

  But then someone nearby whispered in his ear and he fell silent, and I knew he’d been told that my grandfather had resigned his position as mayor.

  It had happened the night before, at the festival’s official opening. The official opening had no entertainment or spectacle attached to it, but most of the villagers attended—not for the hour or so of speeches with which the various committee members opened the proceedings, but for the final tally of la questua, when the villagers learned whether anyone in the village had shamed them by giving an outrageously large sum, or they themselves had called envy upon their household by giving more than their neighbours. My grandfather had sat up on the festival bandstand along with the committee members, rising to speak in his turn, his voice dry as winter.

  ‘It’s not for an old cripple like me to be involved in politics,’ he’d said. ‘There are plenty of young men anxious to take my place. Let one of them step forward.’

  The bells had stopped tolling by the time my grandfather and I arrived at the church, the last pews filled and newcomers spilling into the porch, no longer able to reach the stoop to anoint themselves; but a small path was cleared for my grandfather and me, and I was surprised to see that a few spaces had still been left open for us in the front pew. The crowd kept swelling, reaching out finally into the church square, the doors propped open and a cool wind breathing into the church like a sigh, cutting wet and fresh through a heavy must of sweat and old wood and crumbling plaster.

  The church had no organ, the cue for the beginning of the service always the first quivering note of the Introit from Father Nicola as he entered from the rectory door at the back of the church and made his way to the altar. His voice announced him now, and we stood in our pews, though he came not from the rectory but from the church square, the crowd in the portico parting to let him pass. But today Father Nick, dressed simply in his usual black robe and white mantle, a small skull cap on his head, had been sent ahead merely to prepare the way; for behind him, dressed all in white, a short brocaded mantelet draped over his shoulders and a stole of white silk shimmering so richly around his neck and down the front of his vestments it seemed on the verge of bursting into colour, came Monsignor Felano from Rocca Secca, four cherub-faced altar boys flanking him and supporting a tasselled canopy of ornate purple brocade above his head. I had seen Monsignor Felano in Castilucci once, at la festa di San Giuseppe, but he never attended our festival, because the church in Rome had not forgiven us for our change of saints, people said; but today he had come, and in full regalia. Everyone had turned to watch his entry, and for an instant a chorus of murmurs and whispers cut beneath the trill of the Introit. There was a brief pause in the procession as the Monsignor’s canopy caught on the door frame coming in from the square; but in a moment he moved on again unperturbed, up the short aisle towards the altar, his altar boys, singing in honeyed sopranos, moving in synchrony with him, their small fists wrapped tightly around the metal poles that held
up the canopy. At the foot of the altar the altar boys withdrew and collapsed the canopy in a corner, and Monsignor Felano took a seat modestly in one of the chancel pews.

  Father Nicola took us through the first part of the service, Monsignor Felano remaining seated in his pew, hands folded neatly on his robed lap, raising his baritone only to join in plainsong with the congregation. Father Nick preached with an unusual fluency, each word rolling off his tongue with a flourish, as if frilled with elaborate swirls and curlicues; though the Monsignor’s presence at his side seemed to pull on him like an invisible thread, slowly inclining him in the direction of the chancel pews, so that a dozen times he swung suddenly in the opposite direction in compensation, preaching briefly above the heads of the congregation to the stations of the cross that hung on the far wall, until slowly he drifted back again in the direction of the Monsignor. Finally, at the homily, Monsignor Felano rose and Father Nick retreated to a chancel pew with a small bow, pulling a handkerchief from a pocket of his robe and patting discreetly at the small beads of sweat on his forehead.

  Monsignor Felano loomed over the church’s small lectern like a great mountain bird, his quiet presence seeming to force itself out over the pews, the church for a moment poised in an absolute stillness. He began quietly and calmly, in a polished Italian stripped clean of dialect, hard to follow at first but taking on more and more a clarity like glass, as if the words themselves had disappeared and only their meanings remained, hanging in the air like the wind.

  ‘Mary was a woman,’ he said, his long-fingered hands folded on the lectern, ‘inscribed with the grace of God. A woman for whom a virgin birth was merely the outward sign of an inner purity. But she was also a woman of flesh and blood, the wife of a simple labourer, such a woman’—and now he brought one hand up, two fingers extended, and gestured broadly across the church—‘as you might see walking down the streets of this village with a child on her arm or a jug of water on her head. The gospels tell us of a woman filled with goodness and grace. But there is a story that they don’t tell us. They don’t tell us’—stepping away from the lectern now, coming down towards the congregation—‘of the shame she must have endured from skeptics who did not believe in a virgin birth. They don’t tell us’—tempo and volume slowly building—‘of the hardships she and Joseph underwent to feed a family and raise it, the same hardships we all face, the hardships of the poor. They don’t tell us’—and now he was beating words out singly like bullets, one hand striking the palm of the other in time—‘of the mother’s pain she must have felt when her first born son was spit on by the crowds and nailed to a cross like a common criminal.’ Then a pause, like stormy waters grown suddenly calm, and a voice that was almost a whisper saying, ‘This, too, is the story of Mary.’