Lives of the Saints

by Nino Ricci

  The front steps and balconies along via San Giuseppe were lined now with women and children. As Di Lucci tried to manouevre through the narrow street some of them crowded up to the windows to find out what had happened.

  ‘Out of the way, per favore!’ Di Lucci shouted, leaning on his horn. ‘Can’t you see we’re in a hurry?’

  By the time we had reached my grandfather’s house we had a crowd in tow, women dropping their knitting or their washing to fall in behind us, diapered toddlers waddling after them, bawling at being left behind, older children running ahead and mimicking Di Lucci’s curses. Even my old aunt Lucia, my grandfather’s sister, who seldom moved out of the comfort of her kitchen, had come out to her front door to see what the commotion was, her club-footed daughter Marta staring out of the shadows behind her. But when we pulled up in front of my grandfather’s house the noise of the crowd fell down to a murmur, because there was my mother sitting calmly on the stone bench as if nothing had happened, one leg crossed over the other, her hands folded neatly on her lap. She had put on a new dress, a sleek flowered one she had bought in Rocca Secca when some money had come from my father, and had combed out her hair. Di Lucci pulled up his brake.

  ‘Vittorio said you’d been bitten by a snake,’ he said, suddenly peevish.

  The village women hung back, keeping the car between themselves and my mother.

  ‘Yes,’ my mother said simply, rising. She came around to the driver’s side of the car, the women opening up a path for her.

  ‘Well aren’t you going to let me in?’ Di Lucci, struggling to reassert some dignity after his excitement, collected himself slowly and heaved himself out of the car.

  ‘You’d think you were just going to the market,’ he said, pulling back his seat. Before letting my mother in he leaned inside. ‘Vittorio, you get out and wait at home.’

  ‘No,’ my mother said behind him. ‘I want him to come with me.’

  ‘Ma Andò,’ my grandfather said, ‘per l’amore di Dio, just let her get in the car and let’s go.’

  ‘Anyhow it seems funny to me,’ Di Lucci muttered, still put off by my mother’s unexpected calm; but finally we ground into gear and moved up towards the high road, leaving the village women behind us. A few of my schoolmates ran alongside us before being discouraged by the dust. My grandfather and Di Lucci rolled up their windows, the car rattling wildly now from the ruts and gullies in the road; and finally my grandfather shifted in his seat and turned with a grimace to my mother.

  ‘Where did it bite you?’

  ‘On the ankle,’ my mother said.

  ‘Why didn’t you tie something around your leg?’

  ‘I didn’t think of it.’

  ‘Vittorio,’ my grandfather said, ‘take off your shirt.’ My mother helped me with the buttons, then peeled the shirt off my back and over my arms the way she did when she got me ready for bed.

  ‘How long ago were you bitten?’ my grandfather said.

  ‘Ten minutes or so.’

  ‘Tie it a little ways up from the bite.’

  My mother twisted the shirt into a half-knot part way up her calf.

  ‘Vittorio, help her to pull it tight. You take one end while she holds the other. Pull until it hurts.’

  I pulled on my end with all my strength while my mother pulled on hers. The cloth sank into her leg and the skin around it turned white, but my mother did not wince or grimace. In the village, my mother was famous for her indifference to pain: everyone told the story about my own birth, how for three weeks I didn’t want to come out, but my mother still went down to the river with the other women to do her washing, and how when the day finally came my mother didn’t make a sound, and the midwife thought she had fallen asleep. At home, when she was baking bread, I’d seen my mother pull hot bricks from the fireplace with her bare hands, lifting them in one smooth motion into the oven.

  ‘Pull harder,’ my grandfather said.

  We pulled on the shirt ends again, the cloth burning against my palm. My mother took up the loose ends and tied them neatly into a knot. The snake’s poison hadn’t changed the way she acted as I thought it would, wasn’t making her groan or swoon, her eyes still bright and alert, and her lips stretched into what seemed the faintest hint of a smile, as if she was remembering something pleasant; but her ankle now had begun to swell visibly.

  ‘You have to stop the blood,’ Di Lucci said. We had pulled onto the main road, and Di Lucci was picking up speed. ‘Remember when Giuseppe lu forestier was bitten down by the Valley of the Pigs? He was hoeing his vineyard, I remember it like yesterday—they had to cut his leg off because the poison had spread too far.’

  ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ my grandfather said. ‘They cut off his leg because some fool tried to get out the poison with a rusty knife. And slow down. These roads were made for mules, not cars.’

  The main road was less pitted and scarred than the trail which led into Valle del Sole: work crews came through after the spring rains and smashed up rocks and stones from the countryside into coarse gravel which they used to fill in gullies and potholes. But the road had been carved straight out of the mountainside, and followed every one of the mountain’s erratic curves, with little margin for error if you met a car or cart moving in the opposite direction, only a few feet of clearance between a solid rock wall on one side and a steep slope on the other. Di Lucci, though, was taking the curves wide and fast, my mother and I swaying against each other in the back seat.

  ‘For God’s sake, Andò, there’s no need to kill us all,’ my grandfather said, but Di Lucci did not let up on his speed, relying on his horn to warn in time whatever lay in wait around corners. He brushed off now a close call with a peasant and his hay-laden mule.

  ‘Damn peasants,’ he said. ‘Most of them have never seen a car before.’ Through the back window I saw the mule’s wizened owner raise an angry fist after us.

  Di Lucci took his eyes off the road now to shoot a quick sidelong glance into the back seat.

  ‘What colour was the snake?’ he asked, a little breathless.

  ‘Green,’ I said, without thinking.

  ‘Green? You saw it too? Well, green is better than brown. Did it come from the right or the left?’

  Di Lucci was up on his snake lore.

  ‘Never mind about your superstitions,’ my grandfather said. ‘What do you know about snakes?’

  ‘Giuseppe lu forestier, like I was telling you—’

  ‘We don’t want to hear about Giuseppe lu forestier.’

  ‘Beh, scusate, I just thought—’

  ‘Just think about your driving.’

  Di Lucci remained silent for a moment, putting his energies into frightening a flock of approaching sheep to the side of the road, his hand leaning on his horn. We trundled past the sheep just as their shepherd, thrashing out wildly with his staff, beat the last of them into single file against the mountain face. But now Di Lucci was ready for another volley.

  ‘Where did it bite you?’

  My mother let out a sigh.

  ‘Andò, you heard me say just a few minutes ago. On the ankle.’

  ‘Yes, of course, on the ankle, but where were you when it bit you on the ankle?’

  ‘Too close to a snake.’

  ‘Ma, scusate, Cristina, I’m asking a simple question.’

  ‘You ask too many questions,’ my mother said. ‘You’re like an old woman. You’ve been sitting in that bar too long, listening to other people’s nonsense.’

  ‘Well maybe the doctor will want to know some of these things. What happens if you faint before we get to the hospital? Giuseppe lu forestier—’

  ‘Scusa, Andò, what does the doctor care where I was when the snake bit me?’ my mother said, her voice tinged with irritation. ‘If it bit me in the church, or in the stable, what’s the difference?’

  Di Lucci paused for an instant, pensive, the way he did when he was adding up a total at his store.

  ‘So you were in the stable then,’ h
e said finally.

  ‘Beh, fine, I was in the stable then! Are you happy now?’

  Di Lucci did in fact seem suddenly calm and pleased, as if my mother’s anger had given him the upper hand; and he paused for an instant to sweep his glance nonchalantly across the valley, as if to say that he could go on with his questions now or not, it made no difference to him. As we approached Rocca Secca he eased down on the clutch and downshifted, the gears catching the engine again with uncommon smoothness.

  ‘And what were you doing in the stable?’ he said finally.

  ‘Oh, Andò, basta!’ my mother said. ‘What does anyone do in the stable? I was feeding the pigs!’

  Now my grandfather, who seemed to have been paying much more attention to Di Lucci’s driving than to this conversation, swivelled his head towards the back seat again.

  ‘I thought you fed the animals this morning.’

  ‘I was checking their water,’ my mother said impatiently. She turned away towards her window. ‘I didn’t have time to fill the troughs this morning.’

  Bumbling Di Lucci, man of light. Did he know something of what had gone on in our stable, of those blue eyes that had swooped down on me? Or was he just following the villager’s instinct that beneath every simple event there lurked some dark scandal? At any rate, he had succeeded now in causing a ripple to appear on the surface of my mother’s calm; and if his small discovery made little difference in the long run, it gave him at least a claim to priority. No doubt a few weeks later he could have been seen leaning over the counter of his bar and whispering to one of his patrons: ‘And then the old man turned to her and said, “But you fed the animals this morning.” You fed the animals this morning. That’s when I knew.’

  III

  The hospital in Rocca Secca was on the outskirts of town, a high-walled medieval building that had been an orphanage before the second war. We entered through massive front doors into a large reception room filled with whispers and moans, people everywhere, leaning against walls, sitting on the floor, shuffling around the room like ghosts—hard-featured peasants, mainly, some dressed awkwardly in Sunday suits but many still in their dirty working clothes, nursing bandaged limbs or internal ailments that showed themselves only in their low moans and pale skin. The only light in the room came from two tall narrow windows in one wall; a naked bulb hung down from the centre of the high ceiling, but it was not lit. A few babies were crying, but their wails seemed stifled by an atmosphere of almost religious reverence that hung over the room; and remembering that I was in my bare feet and undershirt I felt suddenly ashamed, like in dreams I had where I found myself inexplicably naked in school or in church.

  A small desk was wedged in one corner of the room, and a woman in nurse’s uniform and cap sat behind it painstakingly applying a coloured liquid to her fingernails with a tiny brush. Di Lucci, flushed with self-importance, stormed in ahead of us and went up to her, stepping over a man with a bandaged leg who lay stretched out on the floor with eyes closed, his hands propped behind his head as a pillow.

  ‘This woman has been bitten by a snake,’ Di Lucci said. ‘Look at the way her ankle is swelling up.’

  A silence descended on the room and a dozen heads turned in my mother’s direction. An old woman in black made a sign of the cross and mumbled a few words to herself; and even the man with the bandaged leg opened his eyes and sat up suddenly, looking on with interest. My mother’s ankle had swollen now to the size of a melon, and she dragged it the way my cousin Marta dragged her club foot, leaning on my shoulder as she walked.

  ‘You’ll have to fill out a form,’ the receptionist said.

  Now my grandfather had come up to the desk.

  ‘How long before she can see the doctor?’ he said, leaning heavily on his cane. ‘It’s been over an hour since she was bitten.’ Though in fact Di Lucci had made good time: perhaps no more than ten minutes had passed since we’d left Valle del Sole.

  The receptionist had the open, welcoming face of a child—dark eyes as large as chestnuts and a small nose that curved upwards at its peak; but my grandfather’s sense of urgency did not seem to impress her.

  ‘You can see the doctor is very busy today,’ she said, tilting her chin towards the crowded room.

  Di Lucci reached a hand into his pant pocket and pulled it out with a bank note crumpled in his fist. He set the note discreetly on the desk and pushed it with his fingers towards the receptionist. The receptionist opened a drawer, let Di Lucci’s fingers push the bill into it, then closed the drawer again with her elbow. She shrugged.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she said.

  ‘Go find a place to sit with your mother,’ my grandfather said to me. ‘Help her to loosen the bandage, then count to thirty in your head and tie it up again.’ My mother had not spoken for some time. Her eyelids were drooping now, her eyes slightly glazed, and she was swaying on her feet the way Angelo the Red did after a bottle of wine. When I looked around the room for a place to sit, the man with the bandaged leg motioned me over to him. He squeezed his own thin body over so that there was space on the floor beside him. He made a show of wiping the floor with his hand, but the grime there seemed permanent, a layer of grey hiding the mottled green and brown of the marble underneath.

  ‘What colour was the snake?’ the man whispered when we had sat down beside him. My mother looked at him drowsily but didn’t answer.

  ‘Green,’ I said. A murmur passed through the room.

  ‘Green is good,’ the man said. ‘Maybe you’ll have a good harvest.’

  He helped me to loosen my mother’s tourniquet while I kept time in my head. The swelling was spreading up her calf now, and when we tied the tourniquet again it sank into her flesh like a string into a sausage.

  ‘You’ll take care of me, eh, Vittorio?’ my mother said, stretching her lips into a sleepy smile; but her voice sounded dreamy and far-off.

  ‘The poison is spreading,’ the man whispered to me over my mother’s outstretched legs, speaking as if my mother couldn’t hear him. He put a finger to his head and screwed it back and forth. ‘It starts to affect the brain.’

  He spoke to me with the candour one would show to an adult, his voice low and confidential, his grizzled face leaning in close to mine.

  ‘At least they have medicines now—in the old days, heh, addio! She’ll be all right, once the doctor sees her. It’s worse when they can’t do anything for you, only say a prayer and send you home, like that one over there by the door.’

  He gestured towards a man with jet black hair seated in one of the room’s few chairs, his arm draped in bloody rags. The man was clutching the arm to his chest as if it were a child, rocking it gently back and forth, mumbling to himself.

  ‘What can the doctor do for him now?’ my friend said. ‘The police brought him in here not an hour ago. He had a fight with his neighbour about a chicken. His neighbour came over with a shotgun, they started shouting and screaming, and, pom! the next thing you know his hand is gone, shot right off. Because of a chicken! And the boy beside him, with the patch on his eye—some of his schoolmates thought it was funny to tease him because one eye was green and one eye was brown. They said he had a devil in him. So what does he do? He takes a stick and plahck! that’s the end of it. His own eye! God save us all!’

  But now there was some commotion at the entrance. A young woman, led by a thin older woman in black, had come in doubled over from some pain in her stomach. As she crossed the threshold her body convulsed and a stream of bluish-green vomit shot from her mouth onto the floor, spattering onto people sitting or standing nearby. The nurse behind the reception desk looked up from the forms she was still filling in with my grandfather and Di Lucci and wrinkled her nose.

  ‘Beatrice!’ she bellowed out, mustering a surprising volume from her slender throat. ‘Bring a bucket! And a mop!’ And a moment later another nurse, somewhat heftier and plainer than the receptionist, her uniform stained and askew, came bustling out of a corridor to tend
to the pool of vomit on the floor. The young woman’s black-habited guide, meanwhile, had leaned her charge against a wall and joined my grandfather and Di Lucci at the reception desk, where she launched into a long plea in a cracked, high-pitched whine.

  ‘I beg you, signora, I beg you, my daughter is dying. She’s the only one left to me now, all dead—it’s a curse, I tell you, the doctor must see her—’

  ‘Scusate, signora,’ Di Lucci interjected, ‘but this man’s daughter has been bitten by a snake—’

  But the woman did not seem to hear him.

  ‘L’invidia!’ she cried out. ‘A curse!’ She broke into a long funereal wail that echoed through the room and made people shift uncomfortably in their places, though it seemed to liven them up, too, as if they were glad of the distraction. ‘Poveretta,’ they whispered, and even the man with the bloody stump looked up for a moment from his mumbling, and shook his head sadly. My grandmother had wailed like that when Tatone Vittorio—my father’s father, Vittorio Innocente, my namesake—had dropped stone dead in his kitchen on la festa di San Giuseppe, those same long shuddering groans that seemed to come from sources too deep to think about, all the misery of ages caught up in them. My grandfather had been a grim, unlikeable man, a constant rage seeming always to smoulder within him, waiting for some spark to suddenly ignite it; and though he had always been mean to my grandmother, had caged her like a frightened animal within his anger and violence, and though he had died with a fire poker raised up against her, ready to strike her, still she had wailed as if no greater humiliation could have befallen her than his death. To me my grandfather’s death had seemed almost miraculous, an act of God—one moment he had been looming red-faced over my grandmother and the next he lay pale and still on the floor, his face frozen in a wide-eyed look of shock and his anger vanished suddenly from the room like smoke. His anger had always seemed to me something without limit, that could grow and grow until it somehow wrecked everything around it; and that afternoon it had burgeoned like a straw fire, when my uncle Pasquale had started to talk about my father.