by Nino Ricci
‘Mario was the only smart one,’ my uncle had said, talking to Uncle Umberto about the crops. ‘The rest of us will live like slaves the rest of our lives.’
And though my uncle had leaned back drowsily in his chair when he’d said this, nudging his plate away and folding his hands over his belly as if he didn’t feel like a slave at all, and was only making a joke, my grandfather’s eyes had gone suddenly bright with anger.
‘Don’t you have enough to eat?’ he said. ‘Didn’t you always have enough to eat?’
And after that when my aunts and my grandmother tried to calm him it only seemed to fuel his rage, as if he felt the very force of it showed his rightness, and was determined that nothing should stand in the path of it.
‘Mario this, Mario that—he can rot in America, and all of you after him! Do you think he did a good thing to go against his father? Do you think he’s living like a king? I’ll tell you where he’s living—in a chicken coop! In a goddamned chicken coop, per l’amore di Cristo! Meanwhile he leaves his wife to run around like a whore!’
I had felt my mother’s body go suddenly rigid beside me then. But that was when my grandmother had blurted out some reproof or exclamation and my grandfather had wheeled round on his chair to grab the poker; and a moment later his jaw dropped as if some invisible fist had slammed up hard against his chest, and he was dead. I had been glad to see him lying inert on the kitchen floor—glad at least until my grandmother had begun her wails and I’d realized that death must be a fearful thing, more fearful even than my grandfather’s anger. I had never understood why this should be so: people died often, even in Valle del Sole, every month or so a funeral procession winding its way down via San Giuseppe to the cemetery, and nothing much seemed to change as a result. But now, as I sat on the cold hospital floor watching the woman in black plead with the receptionist, I felt suddenly as if I’d been hit by the same hard fist that had killed my grandfather, all the wind knocked out of me, for the thought had appeared in my head, surfacing there like a bubble in a pool, that even important people like my mother could die; and when I wheeled round to look at her I was certain that was what had happened, for her eyes were closed and her jaw had drooped open just as my grandfather’s had at the moment of his death.
‘E’morta!’ I cried out. ‘My mother’s dead!’
Now all attention turned away from the woman in black and focused again on my mother. Di Lucci came pushing through the crowd that was forming around us.
‘Stand back!’ he shouted. ‘Stand back! Gesù Crist’ e Maria!’ When he reached us he bent forward and slapped my mother hard across the cheek; but though her head jerked to one side her jaw did not close and her eyes did not open. Finally my grandfather came up behind Di Lucci and crouched with a grimace to take hold of my mother’s wrist. The onlookers around us craned their necks for a better view, the room grown suddenly deathly silent. But finally my grandfather said: ‘She’s gone into shock. Everyone get back and let her have some air.’ The crowd held its place for a moment, necks still craning forward; but finally, under my grandfather’s urging, people slowly moved away, muttering and sighing their relief and mumbling benedictions.
Footsteps echoed now down the nearby corridor, and all heads turned again to witness the entrance of the doctor. From where I sat he seemed to stretch up almost to the ceiling, a tall, thin man with sharp features, black hair slicked neatly back, not a strand out of place. He had on a long white coat, which was spotless, and his shoes had been polished so brightly they showed a reflection. He looked out at the waiting room from behind small, wire-framed spectacles, then turned to the receptionist.
‘Who’s next,’ he said, in a burnished Italian. But the man with the bandaged leg said, ‘Take la signora,’ and others in the room murmured their agreement.
‘She’s been bitten by a snake,’ Di Lucci added, assuming again a voice of authority. ‘She’s in shock.’
The doctor looked down at my mother and frowned.
‘Very well,’ he said, then called out down the corridor, ‘Beatrice! Bring in a stretcher!’
Beatrice came hurrying down the corridor again.
‘They’re all being used, doctor,’ she said.
‘What about that one?’ The doctor gestured towards a stretcher just visible, from where I was sitting, at the corridor’s end. But the stretcher was occupied—a sheet draped over it formed the contours of nose, belly, knees, toes.
‘Someone put him on the ground,’ the doctor said. ‘He won’t be needing any more attention.’
There was some nervous shuffling in the room but no one moved forward to lift the body off the stretcher. Finally the man with the bandaged leg raised himself up and limped down the corridor.
‘Well,’ he called back, ‘someone give me a hand.’ ‘Go help him,’ my grandfather said to Di Lucci.
‘Ma scusate,’ Di Lucci said, ‘that’s a dead man!’
‘If he’s dead then he won’t complain,’ my grandfather said.
Grunting and cursing Di Lucci lifted one end of the body off the stretcher while the man with the bandaged leg lifted the other. It sagged for a moment as it came off the stretcher but then straightened again as the two men eased it onto the floor, where it sat wedged up against one wall like a plank. Di Lucci strained forward to bat with the tip of his fingers at a ripple that had formed in the sheet and left a pale hand exposed.
‘Dai, Andò!’ my grandfather said. ‘Leave it!’
My mother sagged too when they lifted her, like a sack of grain, and Di Lucci, who had her feet, tried to prop them under one arm so he could reach a free hand under her backside; but when he thrust his hand out it slipped up inside her dress instead of beneath it, and red-faced he pulled it quickly away again.
‘You might as well take advantage now,’ the doctor said, smiling strangely, as if my mother wasn’t sick at all, but only asleep. ‘She won’t let you get away with that later.’
When my mother was settled on the stretcher, Beatrice covered her with a blanket and wheeled her away. The doctor gave a last cursory glance at the waiting room and then followed Beatrice at a distance, the echo of his heels against the marble floor fading with him down the dim corridor.
IV
My mother survived her snake bite. Di Lucci took my grandfather and me in to the hospital to see her the next day; she had been placed in a large second-floor ward containing about thirty beds, all of them filled with thin, sickly women whose murmurs and quiet moans filled the room like a wind. My mother, propped up against a pillow, stood out like a flower in a bleak landscape, her colour returned and her hair flowing long and sleek around her shoulders.
‘So you leave me to sleep with all these old women,’ she said, pulling me up beside her, ‘while you run around like a devil. Have you been studying your books?’
‘When are you coming home?’
‘If it were up to me I’d come home right now. They make their tomato sauce here with water and old blood. They take the blood out of your arm in the morning and in the afternoon they feed it back to you in your food.’
Flanking my mother’s bed on either side were two old women with grey, wrinkled skin. One was lost in prayers, her hand fingering the beads of a rosary; the other lay with eyes closed and mouth half-open, a plastic tube feeding into her arm from a glass bottle suspended near her bed.
‘Why does that woman have that thing in her arm?’ I whispered.
‘Because she’s dying,’ my mother said. ‘Everyone in here is dying except me.’
That afternoon, while herding the sheep back into the stable after their grazing, I found a pair of tinted glasses that someone had dropped in the straw. When I had brought them up to my mother’s room I bent their thin wire arms tightly around my ears and stared in my mother’s wall mirror at the strange figure I cut. I looked like a small soldier: it was usually the soldiers, home on furlough from their army service, who wore tinted glasses, sometimes ones with a mirrored surface so you could se
e yourself reflected small and distorted in the lenses.
I had found another pair of tinted glasses about a year before, when my mother had taken me down to the river. It had been a spring day just after a rain, the slopes covered with a thick carpet of green and the air so clear that the world seemed encased in glass, trees and rocks and circling sparrows cut against a background of sky and slope like essences of themselves, so finely did the air etch them out. At the river, which was swollen from the rains, we waded for a while along the shore, the hem of my mother’s skirt catching the water and clinging to her thighs, translucent; then we crossed on a bridge of large rocks to the other side, where my mother led me down a path wedged between the river and the wall of a cliff. Soon we came to a large opening that receded into darkness in the cliff wall, its mouth so evenly formed it might have been dug by human hands; a small stream flowed out of the darkness in the direction of the river, as if it had burrowed itself out of the mountain like a worm.
‘It’s a hot spring,’ my mother said. ‘Warm water coming up out of the ground. I used to come here when I was a girl.’
‘How does the water get hot?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe the devil himself heats it up.’
Inside the air was stale and strange. A sandy ledge opened onto a large pool of water, the water bubbling in the centre as if boiling; but when I dipped my hand into it, it was only pleasantly warm, like the water my mother heated for my bath in winter. At the cave’s back, wrapped in shadows, toothy shapes stretched down from the ceiling and up from the floor, some joining to form silvery pillars. My mother and I bathed together in the pool, my mother letting her dress fall casually to the cave floor and standing above me for a moment utterly naked, smooth and sleek, as if she had just peeled back an old layer of skin, before climbing into the water beside me.
My mother told me that no one knew of the cave except her; but when we were dressing I found the glasses, wedged between a rock and the cave wall, one lens in them broken.
‘Can I keep them?’ I said.
But my mother pulled them quickly away from me.
‘Can’t you see that they’re broken? Anyway they’re too big for you. And they’re not good for your eyes.’ And on the way home, she had tossed the glasses into the river.
The glasses I had found now were still intact, and showed a world, when I stared out through them from my mother’s balcony, that was tinted a heady bluish-green; but instead of thinking to wear them in the village or to show them to my friend Fabrizio I hid them under the mattress like dangerous things, and in the morning I found that the lenses had shattered against the bed springs, shards of tinted glass littering the floor under the bed. I collected up the fragments in a handkerchief and took them along with the frame out to the pasture when I went to tend the sheep. Then, closing my eyes, I walked five hundred dizzying steps in a jagged line, knelt, eyes still closed, and bit blindly into the dirt with my fingers until I had dug what seemed to be a sufficiently large hole. I buried the remains of the glasses inside it, then walked another five hundred random, jagged paces, so that when I opened my eyes, finally, I could not say for certain where I had buried the glasses; that way, I felt sure, no one would ever discover them.
My mother remained in the hospital three days. When Di Lucci and my grandfather brought her home, there was a mattress strapped to the roof of Di Lucci’s Cinquecento. From the bench in front of my grandfather’s house I saw the small Fiat come barrelling down from the main road in a cloud of dust, the object on its roof tilting precariously to one side, straining against the ropes that had been used to secure it.
‘Il signor Vittorio Innocente,’ my mother said, coming to sit beside me after the car had lurched to a stop. There was no sign now of the trial she’d been through, though she looked more severe than usual, her hair uncharacteristically tied back in a bun. ‘Pope Innocente, head of the Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church. Come va? Has the pope been studying his mathematics?’
‘I don’t want to be the pope anymore,’ I said. ‘I want to be Jesus Christ.’
My mother laughed.
‘It’s too late for that. When the angel came your mother was already in bed with St. Joseph.’
‘That’s how you speak to your son,’ Di Lucci said, struggling to pull the mattress off his roof. But his tone was more than usually sententious, lacked the defensiveness it usually betrayed when he spoke to my mother. And my mother replied with more than the usual irritation: ‘We know what you teach your children. How to cheat a peasant over 50 grams of salt.’
My grandfather, coming around the back of the car stooped over his cane, sat down beside me with a grunt and spat into the street, the spit glinting in the sun like tinted glass. He stared off towards the high road.
‘Andò, see if you can get someone to give us a hand to bring the bed in.’
‘Mamma,’ I whispered, ‘who is the bed for?’ My mother shrugged.
‘Ask your grandfather. He bought it.’
‘It’s for you,’ my grandfather said, his voice taut and dry. ‘Next month you’ll be seven. That’s no age to be sleeping with your mother.’
A factory-made mattress was a rarity in Valle del Sole. Commonly mattresses were made at home, of burlap-covered straw; and even the wool mattress my mother and I slept on was home-made, stuffed full of shearings years before, my mother had told me, as a nuptial bed for her and my father. By village standards, though, we were well off—we had my father’s remittances and my grandfather’s pension and rents, and only the three of us to support; and it was a measure of our wealth now that my grandfather had bought me a mattress in Rocca Secca rather than having one made up in the village.
But I wanted nothing to do with this new bed; and all day long, while my mother prepared space for it in the dusty cobwebbed room next to hers that had sat unused till then, I brooded over the meaning of these changes being forced on me.
‘If your father was home he wouldn’t let you sleep with your mother,’ Fabrizio had told me on one of our cigarette romps on the mountain. ‘He’d want to do the thing to make babies. Like the goats.’ And he’d made a circle with the thumb and index finger of one hand and passed a finger from the other hand through it, back and forth.
I decided finally it had been my father now who’d made me move out of my mother’s bed, as if in some strange way he was able to control my life and see into it from whatever world he lived in across the sea, the way God could see into my thoughts. It did not surprise me that he had that power, because in my mind my father was like a phantom, some dim ghost or presence who could sometimes harden into the mute solid substance of a human form and then suddenly disperse again, spread out magically until he was invisible and omnipresent. My mother told me once how she had met him, at la festa di San Giuseppe in Castilucci—he’d been on furlough from his army service, dressed in his khakis and soldier’s cap, and all the young women had been trying to catch his eye.
‘But because I wasn’t paying any attention to him, I was the first one he asked to dance. And there we were, dancing la tarantella, him turning me around like a devil and sweating like a pig, when I heard a zzzzzup, and your father turned as red as a tomato. He had split his pants, right down the middle.’
But whenever I tried to conjure up that image of my father, dancing la tarantella in his soldier’s uniform and cap, it would shimmer in my mind the way objects did in the summer heat, refusing to take form; and because my mother told me little else about him, and we had no pictures of him in the house, I sometimes imagined that he had no face at all, merely a shadowy blank that hid him from the world like a veil.
The only solid link we had to my father now were the letters that came from him every month or so; but these my mother did not read to me, and when once I had retrieved one of them from the fireplace, where my mother had thrown it, and taken it out to the pasture, I’d been unable to make out anything in my father’s erratic script. For a while I’d been able to gather scraps of in
formation from the visits we made to his family in Castilucci; but we had not seen them now since my grandfather’s death. At the funeral my aunt Teresa, my father’s youngest sister, had winked at me from across the church aisle, and afterwards Uncle Pasquale had come forward cap in hand and said something to my mother that had made her smile; but my father’s other siblings had turned away from us, straightbacked and cold, and we had gone back to Valle del Sole without staying for the burial.
Sometimes, though, an image of my father would surface from my memory, dredged up like the fragment of a dream, an image of a handsome, stocky man sitting at a table, his short black hair slicked back, and his face, clearly visible, strong-featured and hard, contorted in anger. We must have been living then at my grandparents’ house in Castilucci, because I had an image of them too, sitting sullen and stoop-shouldered before a fire that was dying out, the room growing dark around them. I saw my father pick up something from the table, a dish or a bowl, and hurl it towards where my mother sat across from him, wrapped in shadows, saw my grandparents rise up suddenly from their chairs, saw my mother recoil, her lips forming into scream or soundless horror as the object shattered against her cheek. The memory was so dim and insubstantial that I could not say if it had actually happened, or if the man I saw in it was really my father or merely a man I had imagined as him; but on one cheek, barely visible, my mother bore a tiny scar, a faint lightening of skin in the shape of a small disjointed cross.
My new mattress had replaced an old straw one, a remnant of my mother’s childhood, bug-infested and smelling of mould, on a crooked wooden frame that held up planks of splintered wood for support in lieu of springs; but the frame was too big for the mattress and stuck out a foot on either side of it, making my sheets and blankets seem to stick out like wings. Apart from the bed the room held only a wicker chair I could drape my clothes over and a night table to set a candle or lamp on. Spider webs my mother had missed in her cleaning stretched silver and taut in the upper corners. No one had used this room in years, perhaps since the house had been built fifty years or so before, with money my great-grandfather had sent back from America—my grandfather’s family had never grown large enough to fill it, my grandmother having lost her first two children to sickness before losing her own life giving birth to her third, my mother. It was a room without a history, and my first night there, lying stiff and awkward and alone in my new bed, its air of abandonment seemed to hang over me like a pall.