Lives of the Saints

by Nino Ricci

  ‘You’ll see,’ they said. ‘Like magic. Poof!’

  But my grandfather led the way through the crowd without glancing right or left, mindless of the buzz of curiosity the lights seemed to have sparked. Towards the far side of the square, I caught sight of Fabrizio’s older brother Fulvio smoking a cigarette amidst a group of older boys. Fulvio was five or six years older than I was; he had been pulled out of school early to help his father in the fields, his body grown as tawny and muscled as a young man’s.

  ‘Looking for Fabrizio, eh?’ he said, catching my glance as I passed. ‘He’s sick at home. He’s got a broken ass.’ The boys around him laughed.

  My grandfather led us to the very back row of seats. For a long time the seats beside us remained empty; but finally someone emerged from the chatter of familiar voices behind us, a slim, dark-eyed man in a fedora and well-tailored blue suit who nodded respectfully to my grandfather before sitting down beside my mother.

  ‘Alfredo!’ my mother said. ‘No one told me you were back.’

  ‘I got in last night,’ the man said, speaking with the recognizable twang of Castilucci’s dialect. He took off his hat and stared into it, avoiding my mother’s gaze. ‘I came back to sell my land.’

  ‘Sell your land? Why, to pay for that suit? You look like someone from the camorra.’

  ‘I’m bringing my family back to Canada,’ he said. ‘Five years is long enough to be separated.’

  ‘It doesn’t look like you mind being separated tonight. I don’t see your wife with you.’

  But the man didn’t smile.

  ‘I brought you something from your husband,’ he said after a pause. He reached into an inside pocket and handed my mother an envelope. When she unfolded the letter inside a bank note fell into her lap, the number 50 inscribed in each of its corners.

  ‘What’s this?’

  The man shrugged.

  ‘Something to get you through the winter.’

  ‘He sends me money through the bank,’ my mother said. ‘He probably needs this more than I do—I hear he’s living in a chicken coop.’

  ‘It’s a room attached to Umberto Di Menna’s barn,’ Alfredo said. ‘He must have told you in his letters. They fixed it up so he has water and electricity.’

  ‘He doesn’t tell me anything in his letters,’ my mother said. ‘He only complains. Here, look for yourself.’ She scanned quickly the letter the man had given her. ‘Ah, perfetto, here—“Make sure Vittorio has some warm clothes for the winter.” And I should feel lucky he reminds me, because otherwise the poor boy would run around naked.’

  Alfredo fingered the rim of his hat.

  ‘He’s going to buy a farm,’ he said. ‘He wants to bring you over.’

  ‘He knows I won’t leave my father,’ my mother said, a little quickly. ‘Anyway if he thinks I’ll go there to live in a barn he’s wrong. We have some fine stables right here in Valle del Sole.’

  My grandfather, through this conversation, had been staring up towards the stage as if wrapped in his own thoughts; but now he rose up suddenly on his cane.

  ‘Brava,’ he muttered, spitting the word out with such restrained force and contempt it seemed to hang in the air like ice. ‘God forgive me for raising you to talk like an idiot.’

  He started back across the square, the crowd opening to let him pass and then swallowing him up again. Alfredo’s eyes caught my mother’s for a moment, and she looked away from him awkwardly, her cheeks flushed. When Alfredo spoke again a peremptory note had crept into his voice.

  ‘It hasn’t been easy for Mario these last months. He lost his job at the factory, but still he sends you money, even if he has to borrow it.’

  ‘He lost his job because he can’t get along with anyone. I hear things too, even if he doesn’t tell me. And I know Mario—he’s always right, there’s no way to talk to him. The only way he knows how to talk is with the back of his hand. Now he sends me money because he’s too proud to admit he was fired.’

  ‘That’s right, you hear things,’ Alfredo said, in a low voice, almost menacing. ‘And how long do you think it takes people there to hear things? Then you’ll see if he still sends you money.’

  ‘Ah, so that’s it, isn’t it? Che cretino! You think it’s the money I want, don’t you? Here, take it back to him, stronzo, tell him I don’t need his money.’ My mother crumpled the bill she still held in one hand and stuffed it in Alfredo’s side pocket. ‘Or tell him whatever you like, I don’t care.’

  Alfredo pulled the bill out of his pocket and slowly smoothed it, then folded it into a tight wad and wedged it into the wicker of his chair seat.

  ‘I won’t be the one to tell him anything,’ he said, rising. ‘But it’s for his sake, not for yours.’

  When he had gone my mother pulled the bill free from the chair and unfurled it.

  ‘Idiot,’ she muttered, tearing the bill down the centre with a quick jerk, then tearing the halves again. She glanced to her side and behind her as if looking for a place to discard the shreds; but finally she stuffed them into the pocket of her skirt.

  The show was beginning now. After a long speech praising the accomplishments of that year’s committee, the chairman introduced the first act, Silvio the postman, who every year opened the Saturday night festivities with some of his poems. Silvio’s father had made a small fortune in America before the first war, and had sent his son to university; but there Silvio had gotten in with some young men who had taken advantage of him and had begun to drink and gamble, and finally his father had had to leave the village to fetch his son home, and to pay the debts Silvio had accumulated from his gambling. They said that when his father found him he was huddled in rags in front of a small fire in his room, burning pages from Dante to keep the fire going. Now he worked as the village postman, delivering mail in the morning and drinking alone for the rest of the day in the large house his father had built with American money. His parents were both dead, much of the father’s fortune lost on Silvio’s failed education and debts; and Silvio’s yearly recitations had become a kind of joke the villagers indulged in, as if to remind themselves of the dangers of high aspirations. Silvio stood now centre stage in the light of a few lamps, his checkered suit too tight over his plumpish body, a missing button on his shirt revealing a patch of pink, hairless belly. His collar, adorned with a small black bow tie, was buttoned tight, his head seeming squeezed out of it like a balloon, his ruddy cheeks showing the effects of too much wine; though his eyes, dark pools that brimmed with moisture, seemed to belong to a different person, as if his body was a mask or costume that had trapped some stranger inside it.

  ‘Signor’ e signori,’ he started, in meticulous Italian, ‘it is a great honour to be asked again to share my little poems with you—’

  ‘Bravo, Silvio!’ someone shouted.

  ‘Never mind the speech! Give us a poem!’ Other people took up the shout.

  ‘Oh, Silvó, a poem! A poem from the gods!’ ‘Every year it’s the same stupidaggini,’ my mother said. ‘E quel cretino, smiling through it all like a child. As if these people knew anything more than sheep and goats.’ Silvio turned his eyes skyward and began to recite, mingling poems about love and the countryside with ballads that told the stories of the bandit-heroes who had fought against Garibaldi, his fist coming up often to strike his breast or pound the air with emphasis. With each poem the crowd applauded and cheered, goading Silvio on to greater animation. He ended with a paean to the Madonna, hands clasped against his breast like a Roman orator’s:

  Signora, we think of you

  In the time of pregnant fields

  When the olives fall like tears from heaven

  And the grapes hang heavy as milky breasts.

  Signora, we think of you

  In the time of barren fields

  When the trees stand deserted like women without love

  And the wine cellars are as dry as the wind.

  Signora, we come like lovers

  Offe
ring kisses and caresses

  You bless us in fall, you comfort us in winter

  Signora, we think of you.

  Cat calls and cries for an encore followed Silvio as he bowed away, his face beaming, from centre stage; but when he seemed about to return the chairman of the comitato, waiting in the shadows on the other side of the stage, frowned at him and shook his head disapprovingly. After a last round of fitful applause, the chairman came up to centre stage.

  ‘Per favore,’ he said, ‘the band has asked that we turn out all the lamps before they come out.’

  Hesitantly at first, but more surely under, the chairman’s remonstrances, the lamps went out and darkness slowly swallowed the square. The audience sat for a moment in utter silence; but when nothing happened people began to fidget in their seats, wondering aloud whether it would be all right to light the lamps again. Then everything happened very quickly: an engine sputtered into life from the direction of the band’s bus, the sound growing to a high hum and then dropping again to a groan, and finally a gasp came up from the audience as the bulbs above us burst into light, the square suddenly bright as day. There was hardly time to adjust to the shock before an explosion of sound rolled out from the stage like thunder, the band members, already behind their instruments, starting in on a vigorous overture. In a moment the chorus members had filed up and arranged themselves on stage, three women on the left, three men on the right, all dressed in bright costumes of green, white, and black and keeping up a synchronized marching movement in time with the music as a final couple emerged into the stage’s halo of lights and sashayed hand in hand up to centre stage, a young dark-skinned woman whose arms were adorned with a dozen golden bangles like a gypsy’s, and a man in wide sequined sleeves, his dark hair groomed to a silver sheen.

  ‘Buonasera, signor’ e signori. We are Capo di Molise.’

  The crowd, it seemed, was still in a trance from the sudden rush of light and sound, Valle del Sole’s medieval square transformed in an instant into a pocket of rich modernity, as bright and alive as any street in Rome or Naples; but on stage the singers, picking up the tune of the overture, embarked at once on a singing duel:

  I think you do me wrong if you lose your head

  Because you found a soldier hiding under my bed.

  Your first romance is wonderful

  Your second one is better still.

  Only slowly now did people begin to recover from their shock, shaking their heads and moving slowly towards the stage as towards an oracle. It seemed as if we had been transported into one of la maestra’s stories of the saints, the world suddenly filled with light, and all possibilities open again; but beside me my mother sat unmoved, still as a sentry, her arms folded tight over her chest against the cold, though around us the seats soon emptied, only the older villagers staying behind, everyone else pressing up closer to the lights of the stage for a better view. Gradually couples began to filter into the dance area.

  ‘As if no one had ever seen a light bulb before,’ my mother said.

  All through the first set my mother sat still and silent beside me, staring up towards the stage as if still expecting some secret to be revealed there. Behind us the square lay dark and empty now, a cold wind biting at our backs; a small group of men hung back at the terrace of Di Lucci’s bar, but the rest of the crowd had moved up to the warmth and light of the stage. The band’s songs seemed strange and foreign to me, even the few local ones it played rendered unfamiliar by the twang and blare of its equipment, which filled the air so totally that in the hush at the end of each song it seemed the square had suddenly been sucked free of all sound, despite the continued hum of the crowd and of the engine in the band’s bus; but the peasants by now seemed to have taken to the blare as if born to it, the dance area always filled, the couples adapting their saltarelli and tarantelle to the band’s strident rhythms. In between songs the lead singers—Mario and Maria, they introduced themselves—joked with the audience.

  ‘Tell me, Maria, honestly, how many times have you been unfaithful to me?’

  ‘Look up at the sky. How many stars do you see?’

  ‘Ah, Maria, that many! You should be careful, you know—a wronged man can turn into a devil.’

  ‘Not everything with horns is a devil. Goats have horns too.’

  During one of these pauses Di Lucci appeared suddenly beside us, emerging like a ghost from the shadows to squat next to my mother’s chair.

  ‘Crist’ e Maria, have you ever seen such a festival? The lights! I knew all about it, of course, because they wanted to hang them from my terrace, so it was only right that I should know, but still I was just as surprised as everyone else. Like a miracle! What happened to your father, didn’t he see it?’

  ‘He went home,’ my mother said tonelessly.

  ‘Home? Yes, yes, now that you mention it I saw him going that way before, I thought maybe he was sick—he looks thin these days.’

  ‘We can’t all be fat.’

  ‘Eh? Ah, sí, it’s true, it’s true,’ Di Lucci said, patting his belly and forcing a laugh, ‘maybe some of us have to be thin to make up for the ones that are fat, eh? So I see Alfredo Pannunzio is back, maybe he had some news from your husband, no?’

  ‘He told me he’s living in a stable.’

  ‘Ha, sí, in a stable, I know how they live in America, just look at that suit Pannunzio was wearing. Though maybe your husband is saving his money to bring you over, no? Just old men like me and your father,’ shaking his head now, ‘that’s all there’ll be left in Valle del Sole. And no one to take care of us in our old age.’

  The band stopped now for an intermission, and the crowd around the stage began to disperse, small groups moving in the direction of Di Lucci’s bar. With a sudden bound Di Lucci rose up off his haunches, surprisingly agile.

  ‘Well, back to my place,’ he said. ‘For you a festival means enjoyment. For me it means work.’

  ‘What a jackass,’ my mother said, when he had gone.

  The band’s second set started out on the same high pitch as the first, but as the evening wore on the tempo seemed gradually to slow, modern songs giving way more and more to local ones, the band’s accordion beginning to take centre stage, its melancholy notes seeming all in a minor key, riding out over the sound of the other instruments to hang on the wind like the threat of a frost. Eventually I drifted into sleep, the glitter and noise of the square receding: I had a sudden image of what the square looked like in winter, after a snowfall, silent, the cobblestones covered in a thin blanket of white, icicles hanging from the eaves of houses and from the branches of the crooked trees that rose up from the embankment. But a hand reached out suddenly to pull me back into the light and noise, and I opened my eyes to see my mother standing over me. The band was announcing the last song of the evening.

  ‘Come on, Vittorio,’ my mother said. ‘We’re going to dance.’

  She took me by the hand and led me up towards the stage, heads turning as we passed, couples in the dance area edging away as we approached, clearing a small circle as if to cordon us off. But as soon as the band had begun to play we seemed to be forgotten, the crowd of other dancers slowly closing in around us, as if the music had made us suddenly anonymous, invisible. The singers had arranged themselves now in the familiar semi-circle, the musicians abandoning their instruments to join them, leaving only the accordion player to pick out the tune; though Mario and Maria still held centre stage, singing alternately the verses of a familiar local song, no longer the duelling lovers of the evening’s first set but a happy couple remembering their days of courtship:

  Vorrei far ritornare un’ ora sola

  Il tempo bello della contentezza

  Quando che noi giocando a vola vola

  Di baci i’ ti coprivo e di carezze.

  But the energy of the crowd seemed to have reached some strange peak now, many of the men drunk with beer and wine, whirling their partners around the dance area at a speed that was out of all time w
ith the music, with a kind of joyless intensity that bordered on violence, as if they were anxious to spend before the end of the evening some anger or resentment that had been bottled up inside them. One couple stumbled out onto the circle of old women who had pulled their chairs up close to the perimeter of the dance area; but the man righted himself with a stagger and a laugh, ignoring the shrieks and curses of the old women, and quickly pulled his partner back into the crowd of other dancers. A crush of bodies churned around my mother and me like the wheels of some great machine, jostling us to the centre of the dance area; but my mother too seemed suddenly infected by the crowd’s strange energy, twirling with me at a breathless pace, faster and faster, the crowd around me fading to a dizzy blur. The audience had begun to sing along with the band, and a thousand voices started in now on the final refrain: