Lives of the Saints

by Nino Ricci

  I pushed the pile of leaves and branches over the spot where I had poured the blood, then dumped the chicken and its severed head out of the burlap bag onto the ground. The body was still flaccid, not yet stiff with death, though a black clot had hardened around its neck. I prepared a small hollow at the top of the pyre and set the body inside, draping the burlap bag over it like a shroud.

  Beside the pyre, though, the chicken’s head stared up at me through lidless eyes, its mouth agape like a question. I could recall nothing about the head from Giuseppina’s instructions; but it seemed there was something I had forgotten, some crucial part of the chicken that should be spared, to guarantee the ritual’s success. I decided to devise a test. I forced a sturdy stick into the earth and impaled the chicken’s head on the end of it; then, stretched out on my belly, eyes closed, I twisted the stick between my bloodied palms, three full turns to the right, three to the left, then a few random turns in each direction to let fate do its work. I made up a charm as I went along:

  Head of a chicken, red and white

  Turn to the left and turn to the right

  If you face to the front then I keep you out

  If you face to the back then I burn you up.

  When I opened my eyes I was staring directly into the chicken’s gaping beak—the spirits had sent a clear message.

  ‘Grazie, signor Gallino,’ I whispered, then turned the head back towards the pyre so it could watch the sacrifice of its nether part.

  I had only four matches, but on the third the small pile of leaves and dead grass I’d set at the pyre’s base as kindling began to smoulder and burst finally into flames. Though the fire spread slowly at first, hissing and sizzling with moisture and sending up clouds of grey smoke, at last it had spread in a triangle up the pyre’s side and was burning in earnest, my face flushed now with heat. Finally the flames began to lick at the burlap sack at the top of the pyre. They teased it for a moment before the sack finally took fire; but then it burned with such a quickness and force that in an instant tall shafts of flame were leaping up suddenly as high as the overhanging branches of the chestnut tree, the leaves there cracking and shrivelling with the heat and popping into flame. The sudden blast of heat sent me scampering backwards; but even up against the bushes at the clearing’s edge the heat reached me, pressing against me like a wall. It seemed that in a moment the great chestnut tree itself would go up like a giant torch and the fire would spill across the ravine; it would be only a matter of time then before the whole village would be up in flames, all the stables along via San Giuseppe chock-full of dry hay and straw now from the harvest.

  I had taken my lucky coin from my pocket now and was rubbing it furiously, hoping to calm the spirits.

  But then as quickly as it had erupted in fury the fire gave up a few last tongues of tall flame and died down again—the burlap bag and the outer shell of leaves and branches had burnt themselves out. Gradually the pyre settled into a low comfortable burning, the fire retreating inward, muffled by a cloak of dying ashes. Atop the sinking heap of burning wood I could make out now the outlines of the chicken, the black stump of its neck, the charred feathers, the hooked claws. But it seemed to have lost little bulk from its ordeal: I had expected it to burn up like a log, crumble finally into a heap of glowing ashes, yet there it still lay in its solid mass, refusing to give itself up to the fire.

  I added a few more faggots of wood, cautiously, then a few handfuls of dead leaves, watched the flames leap up in momentary fervour and dwindle again; then finally I sat to wait the fire out, hoping that its now slow, patient flames would eat away at the corpse more surely than the wilder ones had. A deep exhaustion had come over me suddenly, as if my body had only just remembered that it was the middle of the night, and lulled by the fire I drifted finally into a fitful sleep. Strange images troubled me: my mother squatting in a field as if taking a pee, but getting up to reveal a large blue egg; Father Nick standing solemnly before a coffin in the church, reciting a mass for a Mr. Mario Gallino; some great black jaw stretching open in front of me, ready to swallow me like the whale that swallowed Jonah.

  I woke stiff and numb, my bones chilled and my bladder aching; beside me my lamp sat dead and cold, its fuel used up. The fire had died down now to glowing embers; but the chicken had held its ground, the feathers burnt to blackened stubs but the body still intact, merely slightly shrunken. Then an image from one of my dreams surfaced suddenly, of a large bloody mass pulsing ominously in my outstretched hands: I had forgotten to cut out the chicken’s heart. Somewhere inside the chicken’s shrivelled corpse the heart still lay sheltered, protecting the corpse from the fire spirits, while the head, mistakenly spared, gaped at me in mockery from atop its observation post.

  Through a small gap in the underbrush I could see that the eastern sky was already tinged with the deep blue of pre-dawn; soon many of the villagers would be rising to go out to the fields to harvest their grapes. I unbuttoned my fly and emptied my bladder onto the remnants of the fire, my urine steaming against the embers, then dragged away the chicken’s corpse and covered the fire’s ashes with dirt, stamping the dirt down before spreading a new blanket of leaves over it. Then, with the chicken head in my pocket, the charred corpse in the basin, and my lamp over one arm, I made my way through the ravine towards the steep slope that led up to the fountain. The corpse I tossed into the clay pipe that came under the road from the fountain, stuffing it down as far as I could with a long stick; then I shimmied up to the road, checked to make sure it was still deserted, and crept across to the fountain to wash my hands and the basin free of blood. The valley was already filled with grey light by the time I had slipped back into the house and up to my room, where I stuffed the chicken head into a sock and hid it under my mattress.

  That morning I failed to get up when my grandfather called me to feed the animals—normally my mother’s job—and he had to do it himself.

  ‘What happened to the chicken your mother was cleaning when she got sick?’ he said irritably when at last I had come downstairs.

  I shrugged.

  ‘Idiot,’ he said. ‘You should have known enough to bring it upstairs. Some dog probably walked off with it.’ At school that day I kept nodding off at my desk.

  ‘Vi-ttoh-rio!’ the teacher called out once, in a singsong. She had been being strangely nice to me since my fight with Vincenzo. ‘Don’t tell me you’re sleeping? You must be upset. I heard your mother was in the hospital again.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, coming out of a dream. ‘But she’s going to get better.’

  ‘Of course!’ the teacher said. ‘Of course she is.’

  XV

  Since my fight with Vincenzo, I had taken to coming to school early in the morning to avoid being headed off en route by any of the village boys. La maestra seemed to guess the reason for my early arrivals, and now when school let out she kept me behind to help her in the classroom.

  ‘Vittorio, per favore,’ she’d say with forced sternness, as if meting out a punishment, ‘you’ll stay behind today to sweep.’

  There was no use, of course, in the teacher’s adopting this tone—my classmates saw through it, knew that the status I’d held the previous year as a troublemaker, a status which though misplaced had at least given me a certain notoriety, was giving way to a new position as teacher’s favourite. But so far the system had worked, all the boys gone home by the time I finished my sweeping, though the price I paid for this amnesty was a heavy one—the cloying ‘Grazie, Vittorio’ that the teacher offered up to me every day when I left the classroom; and the looks of saint-like pity I’d catch her directing towards me sometimes when I was sweeping, looks that made me squirm and twitch, that filled me with revulsion and self-hatred, hatred for that part of myself which was grateful for the teacher’s kindness. And I knew, from the whispered insults I suffered through each day in the classroom—citro di mamma, the boys called me, mama’s boy—that the amnesty was only a temporary one, great forces gathering agai
nst me, preparing a day of reckoning; and no one would be there to protect me when some rough hand dragged me behind a bush and paid me with a fist for the immunity I’d enjoyed.

  A few days after my midnight vigil in the ravine, my mother then still in the hospital, I came out of the classroom after my sweeping to find Guido Mastroangelo sitting on the wide stone steps in front of the church. Guido was a gangly, stoop-shouldered boy whose body didn’t seem to have any support to it, as if he were made of straw; the other boys called him buffone, because he could not open his mouth without something peculiar coming out of it, as if he wasn’t able to make sense of the world in the way other people did.

  ‘Guido Mastroangelo,’ the teacher would ask, ‘why did Joseph and Mary have to stay in a stable when they were in Bethlehem?’

  ‘Well,’ Guido would start, rising up slowly and lifting a spidery arm to scratch the back of his head, ‘in those days all the hotels were owned by the Fascists’—but already the class would be in stitches, and even the teacher’s reproving face would crack into a smile.

  Guido had never shown me any ill will; but he hung around with Alfredo Girasole, the leader of Vincenzo Maiale’s gang. He did not seem to notice me now as I walked past the church, too intent on removing a fleck of snot from his nose, his face screwed up in concentration; but just as I reached the stairwell that led down to the square he said, ‘Do you have any matches?’

  When I stopped to look back at him he was staring intently at a small dark spot at the end of his finger.

  ‘It doesn’t really matter if you don’t have any,’ he said, talking to his finger, then looking up finally with a serious, almost sad expression, ‘because Alfredo probably does. But he told me to ask you, just in case.’

  What would Alfredo want with my matches? Guido was just talking; or he had made some kind of mistake.

  ‘I have to go take the sheep out,’ I said.

  Guido wiped his finger slowly and meticulously on his pants.

  ‘You don’t have to worry about the sheep,’ he said. ‘Alfredo talked to Fabrizio and he’s going to take them out for you. Your grandfather said it would be all right. Didn’t the teacher tell you?’

  Guido was looking at me so matter-of-factly that I flushed with embarrassment. Surely he wouldn’t lie, with the teacher so close? I had only to walk the few hundred paces to the classroom to ask her—

  ‘I have to go,’ I said, but very uncertain now where I had to go, or why.

  ‘I thought you were coming up on the mountain to smoke,’ Guido said. ‘That’s why I was waiting for you. Alfredo was at the hospital yesterday to see his aunt from Tornamonde and he asked your mother if you could be part of our gang. She said that was all right. When someone’s in the hospital it’s good to smoke some cigarettes, to keep the spirits away.’

  Guido had my head spinning with all these complicities. Nothing he said made sense—it was as if the world had abruptly changed into its opposite, been completely overturned. But suddenly everything came clear: the chicken had started to take effect. Every morning now I had been singing a little charm to its head to help the spell:

  Head of a chicken, white and red

  Watching me from under my bed

  Keep us safe from harm and hurt

  Or I’ll stick you in the dirt.

  And because I had persisted, the spirits had finally listened to me. That was how it was with these things—sometimes the spirits had to be cajoled, urged on. But then once they had decided, that was that. Things changed.

  Guido had stood up and was waiting for me to join him.

  ‘We’d better go,’ he said, as if there had never been any doubt about my coming. ‘They’re all waiting for you.’ And when I came up to him he put a long gangly arm around my shoulders.

  Fabrizio and I had wandered along the paths of Colle di Papa a hundred times together; but the path Guido led me by, winding and twisting in all directions, through thick patches of bush, over steep rocky slopes, across half-familiar streams, left me disoriented and lost, the landscape seeming to repeat itself endlessly, as if we were going in circles.

  ‘We’re almost there,’ Guido kept saying. ‘You’ve probably never been to this part of the mountain before. We had to make a special map so people would remember how to get there.’

  But the sheltered clearing we finally arrived at looked very much like the one where Fabrizio and I often smoked our cigarettes. Now about a dozen boys were gathered there in a rough circle, leaning against trees or seated on rocks, passing a lit cigarette from hand to hand.

  ‘Oh, finalmente!’ someone said as Guido and I broke through the bushes into the clearing. A chorus of cheers went up.

  ‘Ho, Vittò! It’s about time!’

  And now all the boys had come up to gather around me, some of them clapping a friendly hand on my shoulder. It was Vincenzo himself, a thumb cocked in his belt, his ruddy face all smiles and good will, who passed me the cigarette.

  ‘Friends, eh?’

  He gestured for me to take a puff of the cigarette; but when I did, sucking in too quickly, the smoke burned at my throat and set me coughing. Vincenzo, though, was all concern, patting my back gently to help me clear my lungs. When I had recovered another chorus of cheers went up.

  ‘Hey Vittorio.’ It was Alfredo. He was the only one who had not come up to greet me, seated in a rocky hollow like a king on his throne, his brown corduroy cap cocked to one side, his legs stretched out on the ground with a studied casualness. Alfredo had a long, lank body that did not look as if it would stand up well in a fight; but his air of calm confidence seemed to work like a charm or potion over the other boys, and his control over his group was absolute.

  ‘We hope you’re not angry about those names we called you,’ he said, smiling warmly. Alfredo always spoke in a low drawl that was almost a whisper, as if anything louder or faster might disturb his own inner calm. ‘We were just having a joke. Here, come over and sit beside me.’ He patted the ground beside him. When I had settled there he put a warm arm around me, and as if on cue the other boys reformed their circle in front of him. For a moment nobody spoke.

  ‘Guido said you saw my mother at the hospital,’ I said finally.

  ‘Did he?’ Alfredo lifted his head with the slowness of a great bird to look over at Guido. ‘At the hospital. That’s right, isn’t it Guido?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Guido said. ‘You saw her yesterday, when you went to visit your sick aunt from Tornamonde. She said it was all right if Vittorio joined our group.’ The other boys murmured in agreement.

  ‘Your mother told me to ask you,’ Alfredo said, with an encouraging smile, ‘what happened that day in the stable when the snake bit her. She said you saw the whole thing.’

  But now my thoughts began suddenly to clot.

  ‘I only saw the snake.’ I said, flushing. ‘It was coming out of the stable from the door.’

  ‘From the door,’ Alfredo said, pursing his lips and nodding. ‘And what colour was the snake?’

  ‘Green,’ I said.

  ‘Green,’ Alfredo said. ‘Na bella serpe verde.’ He smiled, and around the circle the other boys smiled too. ‘And how long was this green snake?’

  But though I tried to think, the image of the snake would not come to me.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Three feet long? Four? Five?’

  ‘Five feet long,’ I said. ‘I think it was five.’

  ‘Five feet long! Gesù e Maria, a beautiful green snake five feet long!’ Alfredo had begun to laugh, but a low, friendly laugh. The other boys started to laugh too.

  ‘Imagine that,’ Vincenzo said. ‘Five feet long!’

  ‘I saw the tongue too,’ I added.

  ‘The tongue too!’ Alfredo said. ‘The tongue on top of everything!’

  But now suddenly Alfredo drew up close to me again, as if to tell me a secret.

  ‘You know, you’re lucky your mother didn’t go with another man,’ he said in a whis
per. ‘Then there’d be trouble, eh? They say that if a woman goes with another man and gets bitten by a snake, then the next baby she has will have the head of a snake. And then the only thing you can do’—he made a sudden jabbing motion with a clenched fist, and I started back—‘is to kill the baby the minute it’s born, and cut out its eyes, so the evil eye won’t follow you.’

  For an instant then I wished I hadn’t come up to the mountain at all, wanted to bolt into the woods and be away, my mind filled suddenly with the vision of the two eyes that had lunged at me from the stable the day of the snake, and with the fear that I had been party to some unspeakable crime which Alfredo would slowly unmask now; but Alfredo had already sat back and begun cleaning his fingernails with a jack-knife, as if he had suddenly lost all interest in me. When he spoke again, though, it was in a new tone, distant and slightly ominous.

  ‘Did Guido tell you what you have to do to become a member?’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t want to tell him,’ Guido said, ‘because la maestra was following us.’

  I hadn’t noticed la maestra at all, could not imagine her scrambling furtively up Colle di Papa’s rocky slopes to keep up to us or lying in wait for us behind bushes; but Alfredo nodded knowingly, as if he was well-acquainted with la maestra’s ways.

  ‘That old whore,’ he said, and the other boys laughed. ‘Good. Vincenzo can tell him, he knows how we do it, eh Vincenzo?’

  ‘Sure, we all had to do it, it’s easy,’ Vincenzo said, and the other boys murmured in agreement. ‘First you have to show us your bird, to prove you’re a man, and then if it’s big enough you can join. It has to be at least half as long as a cigarette.’