Lives of the Saints

by Nino Ricci

  About a dozen passengers had already been crammed into the back, their feet resting on the handbags and produce hampers and grain sacks that filled the small corridor between the seats, their knees jammed up against their faces. But after some jostling and muttered curses and a shout up to Cazzingulo about his greed and the suffering of peasants, a patch of bare wood appeared finally on one of the benches, and my mother eased herself onto it. I wedged myself between her legs, clutching her knees and crouching unsteadily on a sack of onions; then the all clear was sounded and the truck took off with a lurch, leaving a swirl of dust in its wake.

  Rocca Secca claimed to be the site of ancient Aquilonia, a Samnitic fortress town from before the time of Christ. The Samnites, a fierce mountain people, had been the first to settle our region, riding down from the north along the ridge-line of the Apennines on the great ox the gods had given them. Their imposing cities, Aquilonia, Bovianum, Cominium, carved it was said right out of the bare rock of the mountains, had been levelled by the Romans, only a few odd ruins remaining now—roadside markers of forgotten import, the mossy foundations of a temple or shrine, the curved stone seats of an amphitheatre; though these were proudly tendered by local towns and villages as evidence of their ancient past. The church at Rocca Secca, just off the main square, was built above a huge cornerstone, accessible through a crypt, that was said to have formed part of Aquilonia’s walls.

  Rocca Secca itself had once been a great centre, renowned for its goldsmiths and bronzeworks, its schools, its convents, and the seat of the region’s aristocracy. But in recent times its fortunes had declined: the politicians in Rome, the townspeople complained, thought only about collecting taxes and passing laws that no one could understand, and not about building roads or rail lines; and nowadays, at any rate, people wanted to buy things made in the city by machines rather than things made by hand. For many years now the people of Rocca Secca had been moving away, to Argentina mainly; whole sections of the town stood abandoned, the houses boarded up and crumbling.

  The last vestige of the town’s former grandeur sat on a lonely hill on the outskirts of town—the Giardini estate, once the seat of the most powerful family in the region, who owned half the land from Rocca Secca to Capracotta. The last of the Giardini, Alberto, had died just after the war, and was still well remembered in the town. In the 1890s he had served as an officer during the war in Abyssinia; but after the Italian defeat he had set off on a trek across Africa, more or less lost to the world for several years. Then one day a beggar had wound his way down the main street into Rocca Secca, his clothes in tatters, his face bearded and gaunt, and had done something which had caused the townspeople to stare in curiosity: he walked up to the tomolo in the centre of the square, a hollowed out stone of three compartments used to measure grain for rent and taxes, and dropped his pants to his knees to touch his bared buttocks to the stone. This gesture had a long tradition in Rocca Secca: it was the way in which a man who had exhausted all his resources might publicly declare bankruptcy. But it was only when the beggar pulled a latch key from around his neck and started up towards the estate on the edge of town that the townspeople realized he was Alberto de’ Giardini, returned finally home after his mysterious absence.

  Giardini never explained his long absence to anyone, living the next several years as a recluse, seeing no one; though sometimes at twilight he’d appear suddenly in the town in full regalia, his medals pinned in an even row to his chest, and wander the streets like a ghost. Then, just after the first war, he began the project which was to occupy the rest of his days, remaking the grounds of his estate in the image of a primal paradise, importing tropical trees, flowers, shrubs and building a great conservatory to house them in winter, beginning next on the fauna, monkeys, gazelles, strange tropical birds, until he had turned his hill into a small piece of Africa, the air at night resounding with strange jungle sounds. At his death, because he had no heirs, Giardini’s estate reverted to the state, who kept it up briefly as a zoo; but there was little interest in our region for that sort of thing and the property soon fell into decay, the animals dying off, needed repairs neglected. The estate was abandoned now, the conservatory left to ruin, the lawns overgrown, the cages which had once housed the animals left to warp in the sun and rain and a great glass aviary which had been renowned once for its strange coloured birds now sprouting the limbs of trees which had been allowed to grow inside it unchecked. People in the town avoided the estate, as if a curse hung over it; and in the story of the tomolo and Giardini’s gesture people saw now an oracle, the prediction of their own town’s declining fortunes.

  Compared to other towns in the area, Rocca Secca was filled with life—mule carts and motor cars, men in suits and women in high-heeled shoes, coloured awnings over sidewalk restaurants, shop windows crowded with posters. But still a shadow seemed to loom over the town, as if all the pomp and display had been carted in only moments before your arrival, put on for your benefit, as if you had only to turn your back and the glitter would fade, the wind whistling through empty streets. In neighbouring towns Rocca Seccans had a reputation as people whose surface smiles hid a meanness of spirit. ‘Ho, signó,’ a friend from Rocca Secca would call out to you, ‘have you eaten yet?’ And if you had he’d say, ‘That’s too bad, I was just going to ask you over,’ and if you hadn’t, ‘Then go home and eat.’

  Only the market in Rocca Secca seemed real, at least honest in its transience: after all, it had been carted in, by peasants and traders who had hitched up their carts in the dead of night to be ready at their stalls by dawn, and by afternoon it would be faded and finished, the noise and colour gone, the stalls boarded up again until the following day. It was at the edge of the market that we disembarked on my birthday, at that hour still in full swing, the din of it, the shouts and laughter, the clatter of coins, reaching us under our canvas as Cazzingulo’s truck pulled up to a stop on a small side-street. It had been many months since I had last been to the market with my mother; for a long time now she had preferred to make her trips into Rocca Secca alone. But as we threaded our way through the market street, jostling for space with goats and carts and thick-set town women come for the day’s provisions, many of the traders called out to me by name, remembering me from my previous visits.

  ‘Oh, Vittò! Look how big you’ve gotten! And handsome, too, like your mother.’

  ‘It’s his birthday today,’ my mother told them. ‘He’s come to collect his gifts.’ And this would be good for five or ten lire, the coins collecting hard and tinny in my pocket as we made our way through the market.

  But the market seemed more than usually oppressive today, the street too narrow, the crowds too thick, the large-boned women of Rocca Secca jostling against me without seeing me, caught up in their haggling. The traders, after their moment of attention, would turn back quickly to my mother, leaving me to stare up at great pyramids of cabbages and tomatoes and onions piled precariously atop sloping shelves. Beneath the shelves chickens cackled wildly in wicker cages, poking their beaks through the gaps to pick at scraps that had fallen to the ground. Rivulets of grey water trickled between the cracks in the cobblestones, giving off a strong sewer stench.

  ‘Mamma, I want to go.’ My mother was talking in a low voice to an older man I didn’t recognize. He towered above me tall and husky, dressed oddly in Sunday clothes, white shirt and tie, though his sleeves were rolled up over his forearms and the upper buttons of his shirt were undone, dark hair curling up thick and matted from his chest.

  ‘Here,’ my mother said, turning to me, ‘I’ll get Luciano to carry you piggyback. He can buy his vegetables later. You don’t open till noon, vero?’

  ‘But by then all that’s left here is what they feed to the pigs,’ the man said. ‘My wife will break my balls if there’s as much as a bruise on an olive.’ But he smiled and gathered me up in his sinewed arms, then lifted me effortlessly onto his shoulders, his upper arms gripping my calves.

  ‘I’ll bet you
can see the whole world from up there, eh Vittorio,’ he said.

  From above the market looked like a sea or a river, waves of bobbing heads shored in by the sloping roofs of corrugated tin that covered the market stalls.

  ‘How do you know my name?’

  ‘Oh, I know all about you,’ the man said, turning to glance at my mother beside him. ‘Your mother tells me everything.’

  ‘You don’t know what day it is today.’

  ‘Of course I do. It’s the feast of St. Bartholomew.’

  ‘No it’s not,’ I said. ‘It’s my birthday.’

  ‘E’ vero? Why didn’t you say so?’

  We had reached the edge of the market. From here the street led towards the square; I could see the open brightness of it beckoning a few hundred yards on. But after walking a bit further, Luciano turned down a narrow, deserted side-street, the houses along it old and decrepit. From here the sound of the market reached us only as a distant hum, punctuated occasionally by a shout or a peal of laughter. Luciano slid his hands under my arms and lifted me onto the ground. My shoes had left two large smudges under the armpits of his shirt.

  ‘Explain those to your wife,’ my mother said. ‘You shouldn’t wear white if you can’t keep clean.’

  ‘You sound like a priest.’

  My mother sat down on a step in front of a boarded-up doorway, drawing her knees up and wrapping her arms around them, like a young girl. Luciano sat down beside her, then dipped a hand into his pant pocket and pulled out a large silver coin.

  ‘It’s an old one lira,’ he said, holding the coin towards me. ‘From before the war, when you could still buy something with a lira.’

  The date, printed in tiny numbers under the claw of an eagle, read 1927. Luciano pointed to a small indentation on the eagle’s wing.

  ‘I want to tell you about that mark,’ he said, closing his fingers around the coin again like a magician. He motioned me up against his knee.

  ‘I found this coin,’ he said, ‘in a field in Greece. During the war. It must have slipped through the pocket of one of the other soldiers, because I found it shining in the mud in somebody’s footprint. Who knows what I was thinking—here we were marching against the enemy, bullets flying everywhere, and I stop to pick a one lira off the ground, like a schoolboy.’

  Luciano glanced at my mother beside him. ‘And then?’ she said.

  ‘Well, we had a hard time that day,’ Luciano said, turning back to me. ‘We lost the battle and many of my friends were killed. It was like a bad dream. But that night, when I was sitting in my tent, I found a little hole in my shirt pocket, like a bullet hole. Then I remembered the coin I had picked up, and when I took it out of my pocket I saw the mark on the wing. That’s when I realized that the coin had saved my life—it must have stopped the bullet that had left the hole in my shirt. If I hadn’t stopped to pick it up the bullet would have gone straight into my heart.’ My mother laughed.

  ‘Is that true?’ she said, tugging Luciano’s hand toward her to look more closely at the coin.

  ‘Every word of it, by Jesus, Joseph, and Mary. Ever since then I’ve carried this coin with me everywhere, for good luck. But now,’ and he turned back to me with eyebrows raised, ‘I’m going to give it to you.’

  He set the coin in my palm. It weighed heavily there, not tinny like the five and ten lire coins I had been collecting but as thick and dense as a fifty or hundred lire. I rubbed the coin with my thumb, feeling its thickness and weight, the texture of its detailed surface. An intricate pattern of feathers stood out in relief on the eagle’s outstretched wings.

  ‘Look on the other side,’ Luciano said. ‘It even has your name on it.’

  On the obverse side, in profile, was a bald-headed bust. Luciano pointed to the inscription etched around the coin’s circumference, not the usual ‘Repvbblica Italiana’ of newer coins but ‘Vittorio Emanvele III Re e Imp.’

  It seemed strange to me that fortune could be as simple as Luciano made it out, that it could be passed along from one person to another or depend on something as slight as a hole in your pocket; but for the moment my time in the spotlight was over and I had become invisible, Luciano and my mother speaking together in low voices again.

  ‘He came to the village?’ Luciano had dropped his voice to whisper. ‘Cristí, you’re tempting the devil.’

  ‘What could I do?’ my mother said calmly. She stared down at her hands. ‘A letter came in the morning, he came in the afternoon. How could I stop him?’

  ‘Someone must have seen him,’ Luciano said. ‘I hear people are beginning to talk.’

  ‘Let them talk.’

  ‘I heard that someone from the German embassy had come looking for him. Did he tell you that?’

  ‘Yes,’ my mother said.

  ‘All these years and they haven’t forgotten. If it was the Italians they would have lost his file years ago. And it’s not as if they won the war—if he went home now he’d be a hero, for what he’d done. Did he say where he was going?’

  ‘What do I care where he goes? Milan, Switzerland—I haven’t heard anything from him. Anyway I have my own troubles to worry about. I hope he didn’t leave me a little gift—he got very excited when he saw that snake.’

  ‘And the snake on top of everything. You know I’m not superstitious, Cristí, but a snake is a snake—’

  ‘Don’t be foolish. The snake was a stupid accident.’

  Luciano shifted awkwardly on the stone step, bringing a hand up to rub the back of his neck.

  ‘Still,’ he said finally. ‘The villagers. You know how they like to get hold of a scandal—for peasants like that everything is a sign. Things must be getting hard for you. What will you do if he comes back?’

  My mother shrugged.

  ‘Maybe we’ll run off to America together.’

  ‘Cristina, this is nothing to joke about.’

  ‘Who’s joking? America’s a big place. No one would ever find us there.’

  ‘Look,’ Luciano said, ‘I have to get my vegetables. Why don’t you and Vittorio come around to the restaurant for lunch? On me. I have some good wine from last year. And a bowl of tortellini alla bolognese for Vittorio.’

  He leaned over to kiss my mother on the cheek, then rose and put a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Ciao, Vitto,’ he said, and then walking away he turned back to call out ‘Auguri!’ before he rounded the corner and disappeared up the street, the echo of his footsteps quickly fading into the distant hum of the market.

  VIII

  Luciano’s restaurant—the ‘Hostaria del Cacciatore,’ its name painted in red on the front window just above the small figure of a hunter with a rifle and a hunter’s sack slung over his shoulder—sat just across from the main square, where Alberto de’ Giardini had once bared himself to the hollowed-out tomolo; though the tomolo had recently been replaced by a stone obelisk, a memorial to the townspeople killed in the second war. After the market my mother and I had been up and down a dozen crooked streets—first into one of the shops to buy me a shirt; then into a cold dim office where my mother had filled out a form and talked in a low voice to a man behind a counter; then, strangely, into a photographer’s studio, where a sleek-haired, spectacled man who reeked of perfume had taken our picture, my mother didn’t say why—but it was still only late morning by the time we arrived at the restaurant, and most of the tables were empty. A single couple was seated inside, visible through the frilly curtains and plastic vines and leaves that decorated the front window, and outside only a thin old man in a suit and fedora who peered up from a newspaper to give a long narrow-eyed look at my mother as we sat down at the table next to his.

  A heavy-set boy of about fifteen, dressed in black pants and white shirt, came out to serve us.

  ‘Where’s your father?’ my mother said.

  ‘He’s gone out. He said I should take care of you if you came.’

  He took my mother’s order and went inside, disappearing then through a door
at the back of the restaurant. A moment later a large, rough-featured woman, heavy bosom straining against a black sweater, came bustling out of the same door wiping her hands on her apron. She stared hard towards our table for a moment before disappearing again.

  ‘Do you like it here?’ my mother said.

  But despite the coins I’d collected in the market, the tinny fives and tens and the large one lira, despite the new shirt that lay wrapped in brown paper on the chair next to me, despite the photographs we’d had taken, a silent resentment had been building in me since my mother’s conversation with Luciano, and I would not let go of it now until it had some issue.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ my mother said. ‘Do you have a bug in your pants?’

  She reached under the table and poked me lightly in the ribs, but I pulled away from her sulkily.

  ‘Beh, do what you want,’ she said.

  We sat silent. A bottle of wine appeared, set out and poured expertly by Luciano’s son, then a bowl of tortellini and a plate of trippa in tomato sauce for my mother. We had begun to eat already when I felt the shadow of a large shape looming over us, and looked up to see the black-sweatered woman smiling down on us, her hands on her hips, a thin line of moustache overshadowing her smile. A dark wart stuck out prominently on one cheek, a few thin hairs spiralling up from it.

  ‘Buongiorno, signora! And this must be your little son! How handsome he is! Are you going to tell me your name?’

  She had reached down to run her fingers under my chin.

  ‘His name is Vittorio,’ my mother said, curt. ‘He’s shy.’

  ‘Isn’t that sweet! And so many boys these days are little devils. Diavoli!’

  My mother took another bite of her food.

  ‘And your friend?’ the woman said finally, her mouth remaining open around her last syllable.

  My mother raised her eyebrows as if she had not understood.

  ‘Yes, of course, he’s gone out of town,’ the woman said, forcing a laugh. ‘A shame—do you like the way I’ve made up the tripe?’