Lives of the Saints

by Nino Ricci

  And so saying she moved into the stone coolness of the kitchen and set her tub on the floor, then dragged a chair away from the table halfway to the door and straddled it backwards, the way young men did at Di Lucci’s bar. She rested her thick arms on the chair’s back and extended her legs before her, her bulging veins leading like purple highways to the high lands of her hips. Her flesh, its tremors receding, came to uneasy rest, her breasts and belly pressing against the chair back like a cliff wall.

  Giuseppina kept her place by the door, etched out there by the morning sunlight, her tub still perched on her hip.

  ‘I don’t think I can stay,’ she said; but she did, just where she was.

  Mothers in Valle del Sole—and these were mothers, as the clothes in their washtubs showed, the bleached diapers, the tiny knickers, the dollish socks—formed a class: ruddy, swollen hands, thick skirts of homespun wool, hair short and tucked under a kerchief, round bellies protected with aprons of burlap or grey linen, like sacks of wheat. They moved with a slow, elephantine gait, arms akimbo, all the movement coming from the hips, a habit developed from carrying water-filled jugs on their heads, the bottom half of the body adjusting to all the undulations of the road while the top remained regal, exquisitely poised. They spoke the most flattened form of the local dialect, because unlike the men—who at the least would have improved their Italian during their army service, and who travelled more often to other districts—they were far from any edifying influence, whatever proper Italian they might have learned in their five years of schooling in Valle del Sole long-forgotten (though my own mother had got as far as la terza media in Rocca Secca, and I’d sometimes heard her talking with merchants in an Italian more rounded and precise than la maestra’s). Maria and Giuseppina had both married local farmers and borne several children, had long ago completed the rite of passage from the small freedoms of adolescence to the daily toils of peasant motherhood.

  Maria was talking pleasantries, gesticulating widely; when her chair let out a creak of protest she lifted a foot onto the crossbar to silence it, so that from where I stood against my mother, pouring water for her into the dough, I caught a sudden glimpse of the marbled fat of Maria’s inner thigh. Maria was using metaphors I couldn’t understand—something about Antonella, Alfredo Catalone’s daughter, down in the pasture with Antonio Girasole; something else about a priest in Tornamonde breaking a commandment, Maria didn’t say which one. But here Giuseppina broke in.

  ‘You’re always making fun of the priests,’ she said, her voice high and thin, like a mountain wind whistling around a cliff. ‘It’s not right.’ In Giuseppina it was still possible to make out the curves of breasts, belly, hips; but it seemed only her clothes held her together, her flesh ready at any moment to burst its restraints and revert to formlessness. Her legs, though, tapered strangely to thinness.

  ‘Why should you defend the priests?’ my mother said, stretching out her dough and working her palms and knuckles into it. ‘They’re no better than the rest of us.’ She wore a thin black sweater, its sleeves pushed up above her elbows, that caught her curves as she worked, now the roundness of her breasts as she reached up to brush a strand of hair away from her eyes with the back of her hand, now the feline curve of her back as she arched over the rolling board.

  ‘You’re too proud,’ Giuseppina said, shifting her weight from peg leg to peg leg, like a sheep on rocky ground. ‘Even when you were young. When’s the last time you went to confession?’

  ‘What does confession have to do with it? Cristina doesn’t need the priests,’ Maria said, her voice wheezing, as if she was about to break into laughter. Despite the day’s coolness, a line of sweat had collected on the dark down above her lip. ‘She’s going to get to heaven by climbing to the top of an olive tree.’

  ‘When I climb an olive tree,’ my mother said, banging the dough against the rolling board, ‘it’s to pick the olives.’

  My mother kneaded now with increasing aggression, the dough thickening, retaining the impression of her fists. A bead of sweat formed on her brow and dropped into the dough.

  ‘Giuseppí,’ she said, ‘why don’t you come in and sit down? Whatever I have it’s not contagious.’

  But now for a moment a veil seemed to drop: Maria shifted suddenly in her chair to shoot a dark glance back to Giuseppina, and some secret message seemed to pass between them.

  ‘I left a pot on the fire,’ Giuseppina said, then mumbled her goodbyes and hurried away.

  That afternoon, tending sheep on the slope beneath Colle di Papa, I overheard familiar voices coming from the fountain. My mother’s name was mentioned. A steep slope led up to the road from where I was; when I got to the top, I peered across the road from the shadow of a bush to see Maria and Giuseppina filling their water jugs.

  ‘You know what they’re saying about her in Rocca Secca,’ Maria said. ‘As if everyone was blind. Walking around like a princess.’

  ‘God will make his judgments,’ said Giuseppina. ‘It’s not for nothing she was bitten by a snake.’

  ‘What does the snake have to do with it?’

  ‘Beh, you’re one to talk. The way you pulled your chair away from her this morning, you might as well have been half way across the road.’

  Maria grunted.

  ‘It’s her father I feel sorry for,’ she said, after a pause. ‘And Vittorio. Growing up like a weed. Do you ever see him getting up at four to help with the harvest, like my Vincenzo? Never. He and his mother play like schoolchildren all day. Someone should write to the boy’s father—I have a mind to do it myself.’

  ‘Worry about your own troubles,’ Giuseppina said.

  The two women had begun to move back towards the town.

  ‘Beh,’ I heard Maria say as their voices faded, ‘one way or another he’ll find out. They always do.’

  VI

  Invidia, envy, had been the root of all the peasants’ troubles according to my grandfather—the reason why brother did not get along with brother, son with father, neighbour with neighbour; why the lot of the con tadini now was such a hard one, their plots of land scattered piecemeal across the countryside, often miles from the village; why the soil offered up yearly only the same closed fist, though the farmers cursed and cajoled it the way they did a stubborn mule.

  Once, my grandfather had told me, long before the time of Christ, the land around Valle del Sole had all been flat, unpeopled jungle, rich and fertile, the trees a mile high and the river a mile wide. At last a giant named Gambelunghe had come down from the north and cleared the land with his two great oxen, then planted his crops—a thousand hectares of grain, a thousand hectares of vineyards, a thousand hectares of olives, a thousand hectares of vegetables, and a thousand hectares of pasture for his sheep. But in the winter, when Gambelunghe was asleep, wolves came and broke into his stores, then fell finally on Gambelunghe himself and tore him apart, his head dropped into the river, where it floated down to the sea, and his limbs scattered pell-mell across the countryside.

  In the spring, a strange thing happened—the fingers on Gambelunghe’s severed hands began to grow, those on the left growing into five women, those on the right into five men. When they were fully grown the men married the women and began to farm Gambelunghe’s land, one couple for each field. But soon jealousy broke out among them: the one with the sheep was jealous of the one with the grain, for though he had meat and wool, he had no bread; the one with the grain was jealous of the one with the vineyards, for though he had bread he had no wine; and so it went. The wives, certain that the other women had an easier life, complained to their husbands, and encouraged them to steal from the other men’s stores; and it was not long before fighting broke out amongst them, and the noise from their arguments—because they shouted very loudly—reached up to heaven.

  ‘So that is what you do with your good fortune,’ God said, and to punish them He caused mountains and rocks to grow up out of the ground, and made the soil tired and weak.

 
After that the farmers had to make a plan to avoid invidia. So they divided each of the thousand hectares into five equal portions and distributed the portions among themselves, making sure no one got a piece that was worse than anyone else’s, that had more rocks or was too far from the river. And when they had children they divided the land again, a piece of vineyard here, a piece of pasture there, making sure everything was fair. Over the years the land became more and more divided—that was why a farmer might have a hectare of land on the slopes of Colle di Papa, another on the far side of Belmonte, a third all the way down by the Valley of the Pigs. It might take him a whole day of travelling just to visit all his pieces of land; and often, to save on walking, he’d have to spend the night out in the open, cooking up a little cornmeal over an open fire and sleeping in the scanty shelter of a lean-to.

  Even in good years in Valle del Sole, the farmers always complained of the meagreness of the harvest, afraid of calling invidia upon themselves by boasting; and mothers did not like to tell how many children they had borne, lest fate then take one away from them. It was not simply the envy of one person towards another that the villagers feared; it was the tremendous forces which envy stirred up, forces age-old and sacred, ones that found their incarnation in the evil eye. No less a man than Mussolini had feared the eye, it was said; and even the Pope himself had once banished a priest from the Vatican for possessing it. The eye was the locus of all the powers which could not be explained under the usual religion, the religion of the churches; and despite its name it stood outside the normal categories of good and evil, subsumed them, striking both the righteous and the depraved. It was drawn towards you merely by a certain lack of vigilance, a small flouting of fate, a crack in the door it might slither through, fangs bared, to catch you by surprise; and its fickleness made it deadly and all-powerful, like fate itself, a force which knew no masters, neither God nor the devil.

  The villagers avoided anyone or anything that had been touched by the eye, as if there was a peril that the affliction might spread by contagion. When Girolamo Dagnello’s best wheat field was burnt by lightning one fall, he let the field go fallow the next year, sprinkling it with a potion he bought from la strega di Belmonte; and when Fiorina Girasole gave birth to twins, both boys, and both dead within a week, the townspeople for a long time avoided her doorway when they passed, until finally the rumour spread that Fiorina, too, had been up to Belmonte. Belmonte, just off the high road on the way to Rocca Secca, had been destroyed by the Germans in the second war, and out of superstition the residents had refused to rebuild there, fleeing to Rome, to Argentina, to America, the toppled roofs and walls of the buildings of the town overgrown now with moss and weeds and wildflowers and overrun with lizards; and its sole inhabitant now was la strega, who wandered the countryside in summer and then holed up in one of Belmonte’s ruined buildings in the fall and winter. Once, playing in the ruins there, I had caught a glimpse of her through the hollow of a window, an ancient woman with tough, darkened skin and long grey hair that hung in matted clumps down her back, though a grimace or grin she had flashed me before I had run had revealed two rows of brilliant white teeth.

  At our own house now, no one stopped by anymore to speak to my grandfather, to ask his help in settling some dispute or have a word with him about village politics; and if the villagers passed my mother sitting in front of the house they did not look at her when they mumbled their greetings, and quickly moved towards the centre of the street. My mother began more and more to keep inside, spending her days knitting beside the fireplace, or sometimes simply shut up in her room; and she and my grandfather hardly spoke now, sometimes passing a whole meal together in heavy, awkward silence.

  But one afternoon, my mother downstairs knitting while I lay upstairs studying my books, I heard footsteps echoing quickly along the street and then stopping abruptly in front of our house.

  ‘Are you alone?’ The voice was hardly louder than a whisper; but I recognized at once Giuseppina Dagnello’s thin whine.

  ‘What is it?’ My mother’s voice had taken on a hard edge in the past few days.

  ‘Where’s your father?’

  ‘He’s up at Di Lucci’s. Where he always is.’

  ‘And Vittorio?’

  ‘What’s the big secret, Giuseppi? What are you so nervous about? Come in and sit down and say what you have to say.’

  ‘You know what I have to say,’ Giuseppina started, and I heard the kitchen door close behind her. ‘How can you sit there sewing your socks?’

  ‘They have holes in them.’

  I crept out of my room to crouch at the head of the stairs. I could make out the shadows of my mother and Giuseppina etched against the kitchen floor by sunlight from the far window, my mother’s seated in its chair, its hands still moving with its sewing, Giuseppina’s stretching taller beside it at a distance.

  ‘Cristina,’ Giuseppina started again, ‘you and I were like sisters when we were small. You know I wouldn’t wish you any harm. But other people aren’t so kind, they like to see a person destroyed. You can’t afford to walk around like a princess. It turns people against you.’

  ‘So what should I do? Should I lock myself in the stable, just to make other people happy?’

  ‘You know what I’m talking about, Cristí. You have to make a gesture. You should make a confession. You should go and speak with Father Nicola—’

  ‘Please, Giuseppina, you know I don’t have any use for him.’

  A brief silence; Giuseppina’s shadow edged closer to my mother’s.

  ‘Look, Cristí,’ she went on finally, dropping her voice low, ‘if you won’t see the priest you should at least make a cure.’

  A chair creaked as my mother’s shadow shifted, the hands abruptly ceasing their movement.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘It worked for my cousin in Rocca Secca,’ Giuseppina continued, her voice still low and eerie. ‘The old woman in Belmonte told her how to do it—you take a chicken or a goat and drain out the blood, then cut out the heart to put in your soup later, to give you strength. You have to wash your hands in the blood and then pour it into the ground and say three times, “This is my blood, which comes out of me like a river to the sea.” Then in the same place where you poured the blood you make a fire for the offering—’

  But my mother burst suddenly into laughter.

  ‘Giuseppi, you’re not serious! A good God-fearing woman like you talking to me about these stupidaggini! I thought you had more sense than that.’

  But when Giuseppina spoke again a nagging severity had returned to her voice.

  ‘I warn you, Cristí, you’ll bring a curse on everyone around you. It’s only for your father that people have kept quiet till now. But with the snake everyone has started to talk. I didn’t want to say it but you force me to, you think that people are fools, that they don’t see the way you carry on. But I don’t have to tell you the name that everyone is calling you. You have to make a gesture.’

  Later, when I came down for supper, my mother said nothing of Giuseppina’s visit. A deep silence had descended on the house: the very walls, the floor, the splintered table, seemed to have grown strangely distant and mute, as if guarding some secret about themselves. Over my grandfather’s face a film had formed, tangible as stone, which he retreated behind like a snail into its shell, staring into space as if my mother and I were not there. My mother reached out suddenly once to fill his glass while we ate; in her movement there seemed some ghost of a hidden message, struggling at once to reveal and conceal itself, and I thought for a moment she was about to speak. But she turned quickly back to her plate and we ate on in silence. Later I lay awake in bed waiting for her footsteps on the stairs, wanting to go in to her in her room; but a long time passed and she did not come, and I drifted finally into sleep.

  VII

  On my seventh birthday my mother and I walked hand in hand up to the high road, in the cool damp of early morning, to catch the bus into
Rocca Secca. The sun was just rising over Colle di Papa, round and scarlet, sucking in dawn’s darkness like God’s forgiveness, the mountain slopes slowly changing from a colourless grey to rich green and gold. The wheat in our region ripened in a slow wave which started in the valleys and gradually worked its way up the slopes through the summer, like sunlight emerging from behind a cloud, and of the highest villages it was sometimes said that they harvested in September and planted in August, sowing their new crop between the still uncut stocks of the old; and though down close to the river the fields had already been ploughed brown, around Valle del Sole the harvest was only just beginning, small bent figures dotting the countryside now, felling their wheat with short quick pulls of their scythes.

  The bus into Rocca Secca was actually a small battered truck, the back fixed up on three sides with splintered planks for seats and covered with a dusty canvas. The truck, owned and operated by a small, swarthy entrepreneur called Cazzingulo (a nickname meaning ‘balls in your ass’—what usually happened when you rode in his truck), plied the road between Capracotta and Rocca Secca, collecting and discharging passengers en route, rolling to the rhythm of the road. Cazzingulo didn’t follow a schedule you could measure on a watch—he never left his point of departure until he had a full load, full by official standards, which didn’t mean he couldn’t fit in another eight or nine passengers after he’d passed the police checkpoint on the edge of town—but somehow the peasants always sensed when he would be passing, as if they could feel premonitory tremors in the earth. It was only a few minutes after my mother and I reached the main road that a cloud of dust rounded the curve of a slope, and Cazzingulo’s truck appeared in the middle of it.

  ‘Oh, Cristí!’ Cazzingulo knew everyone in the region by name. ‘Rocca Secca! Special today, the little boy rides for half price if he sits on your lap. And you ride for free if you sit on mine.’