Lives of the Saints

by Nino Ricci

  Di Lucci stood by hesitantly for a moment.

  ‘Dai, Andò, smash out the windows,’ someone suggested again. ‘They’ll freeze to death before they get to the hospital in that thing.’

  ‘Sí, smash the windows,’ Di Lucci said, already moving to the door of his car. ‘You and your foolish ideas.’ And in a moment he had heaved himself into the driver’s seat, gunned up the engine, and sped off into the snow.

  My mother had already motioned Virginio and Pastore to lift my grandfather onto the cart. His eyes were closed now, but he was muttering softly to himself, as if in troubled sleep, his face beaded with droplets that may have been sweat or melted snow. With a single discreet finger Father Nick made a quick sign of the cross over him as the two men slid the rack onto the cart. Several women had come forward now with blankets; my mother covered my grandfather with a thick layer of them, then draped one around her own shoulders and moved up to the head of the cart.

  ‘Go back to your suppers,’ she said to her cousins, ‘I can manage on my own from here. There’ll be someone at the hospital to help me carry him in.’

  ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ Virginio said, moving up to take the reins from her. ‘Pastore and I will take him in.’

  ‘No. This is my affair.’

  ‘Let Virginio take him in,’ Mastronardi said, eyeing his cart proprietorially. ‘The woods are full of thieves. And in your condition—’

  ‘I can take care of myself,’ my mother said quickly. And while Virginio and Pastore still hovered uncertainly near the cart my mother heaved herself onto the bench and gave the reins a quick jerk, the cart lurching suddenly forward as the mule raised up his head and thrust himself against his bridle.

  ‘Wait, Cristina.’

  It was Father Nick. My mother pulled back on the reins.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Father Nick said. ‘Thieves won’t harm a priest.’

  ‘You?’ My mother stared at him hard a moment. ‘All right, then, let’s go,’ she said finally. ‘Put a blanket around yourself, that padding on your belly won’t be enough to keep you warm.’

  There were a few muffled laughs, quickly suppressed. Father Nick blushed and hesitated a moment, but finally he took a blanket that was offered to him and draped it over his shoulders. He hiked up his skirts and walked briskly up to the cart, pulling himself onto the bench with surprising nimbleness.

  ‘I’ll take the reins,’ he said, suddenly stern. ‘You can get back in the cart and keep the snow off your father.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  Father Nick jerked the reins and the mule set off with a snort, the cart wheels creaking, flattening the snow beneath them with a soft crunch. The snow was falling heavy and thick now, and shortly the cart had been swallowed into its white hush; but for a long while we could still make out the haloed haze of my mother’s lantern. Finally this too faded into the snow and night, and the villagers still gathered in front of our house brushed the snow off their shoulders and moved quietly back towards their unfinished suppers, and home.

  XX

  My grandfather had fractured his hip and broken a leg, the same one a horse had shattered in the war. He was in the hospital almost a month, my mother and I riding into Rocca Secca in Cazzingulo’s truck once or twice a week to visit him. A metal frame enclosed his bed like a cage, his broken leg, wrapped in thick plaster up to his thigh, suspended from an upper bar of it by a cable, as if he were a strange sculpture that had been set out to dry and harden. His skin had taken on the same pallor as the white plaster of his cast, and when we came to see him he’d mumble to us as if talking out of a dream, hardly aware of our presence, his face limp with fatigue. Once the doctor came in with a nurse to give him an injection, the same doctor who had tended to my mother’s snake bite, his eye going down to my mother’s belly now with a gleam, as if he shared some secret with her about the bulge there.

  ‘You’ve been well, I hope?’ he said, in his burnished Italian, taking a needle from a tray the nurse held out to him and sucking a clear liquid into it from a tiny bottle.

  But my mother took him quickly aside.

  ‘Is it necessary to keep feeding him all those drugs? Look at him, he hardly recognizes us. You’d never know I was his daughter.’

  But the doctor moved aside my grandfather’s blanket and jabbed the needle with a quick thrust into the soft flesh of his thigh.

  ‘The bone in his leg shattered like glass,’ he said when he had finished. ‘We got out what we could, but there are still some splinters floating around there now, moving every time he breathes. Do you know what it feels like when one of those splinters brushes up against a nerve?’ He set his needle back onto the nurse’s tray. ‘Like a knife.’

  ‘He’s had to deal with pain all his life,’ my mother said. ‘I’d rather see him in pain than like this.’

  ‘Maybe that’s a little selfish of you,’ the doctor said.

  Once when we visited, my grandfather called out to me by name, and my mother motioned me to stand beside him.

  ‘Vittorio,’ he whispered, taking my hand in his own and squeezing it feebly; but his hand was moist and clammy, and I pulled my own away as soon as I felt his fingers loosening.

  While my grandfather was still in the hospital, letters began to arrive at our house from America. Only a few came at first, but soon they were coming almost daily, Silvio the postman handing them to my mother each day with the same sheepish shrug, each of them bearing the unmistakable scrawl of my father’s hand. The inevitable had happened—someone had poured some poison in my father’s ear. Some word from a friend or a family member or from one of the messengers who departed regularly from Castilucci and Valle del Sole for America (and from Valle del Sole itself there had been already three departures since la festa) had finally pierced the veil that shrouded my father’s mysterious life across the sea; and now he let forth a fury of letters, my mother reading each with the same wild-eyed impatience before crumpling them and flinging them into the fireplace. ‘He’s crazy,’ she’d mutter, and for the rest of the day a silent rage would seem to simmer inside her, and I’d know not to cross her. I thought that she would sit down soon at the kitchen table and write some response to him, the way she used to, then send me off to Di Lucci’s to buy stamps for it and to post it at the mailbox there; but the days passed and still she had no letter for me to post. Late at night, though, I sometimes heard the scratch of her pen from her room, and the next morning she would be up early and gone to Rocca Secca, on what missions I did not know.

  When my grandfather returned home, ferried to the village in the back of the mail truck, his leg still in a cast and his hip wound round with wide bandages, the fog that had clouded his mind during his stay in the hospital seemed to have lifted.

  ‘I’ll rot in this bed!’ he’d shout out from his room. ‘I’ll die and rot here, you might just as well have put me straight into the grave!’

  The muscles of his face never relaxed now, screwed into a perpetual grimace, and his eyes were ringed round with the pink of an infection he’d gotten at the hospital, as if the skin there were raw from crying. My mother served him his meals on a wooden stand the carpenter had made up to fit over the bed, and every night she emptied out the sack at his bedside fed by a long plastic tube that came down from his groin. Then once every two days or so my grandfather would call out to my mother with an embarrassed, angry shout, and she would close the door of his room and come out several minutes later with a pile of linen in a basin.

  ‘Like a baby,’ my grandfather would rumble. ‘Sixty-six years old and my daughter has to change my diapers.’

  But after months of silence my grandfather’s curses seemed almost comforting, as if a storm had broken less disastrously than it had threatened; and my mother, too, had refound her voice, an almost ceaseless banter going on now between her and my grandfather, the subject of which was the letters which continued to stream into our house from my father. Long argumen
ts were carried on daily between kitchen and bedroom, tensions hovering around a critical point but never seeming to move beyond it, the arguments finally petering out to a resigned silence that was more the calm after a storm than the one before it.

  ‘He doesn’t know what he wants!’ my mother would say. ‘One day he says he’s coming back to wring my neck, the next that I can go to the dogs, the next that he wants me over there on the next boat. Last week he sent me a letter to give to the embassy in Rome, to get a visa. As if I’m going to travel half way around the world in my condition. And then to put up with the same idiocy there that I put up with here!’

  ‘Sei scimunita, Cristí! Idiocy? Who’s the idiot? You’re lucky if he doesn’t crack your skull and throw you in the streets!’

  ‘Then to hell with all of you! I’ll go to Rome, Naples, anywhere—’

  ‘Ah, bello! Like a gypsy. And what will you live on, the few thousand lire you’ve saved from what he sends you? Because you’ll not see a cent of my money, I swear on my grave. And with two children to take care of, you can work in the streets. Disgraziata.’

  ‘Ah, sí, he’s probably slept with every whore in America by now, but for me it’s a disgrace. Women have had their faces up their asses for too long, they let their men run around like goats and then they’re happy if they don’t come home and beat them!’

  ‘Brava. And you, communista, are going to change all that. With your communist boyfriend, a foreigner no less, who’s just a coward and a beggar. Yes, you think I’m blind, but I know all about him. Where is he now, your communist boyfriend? Go, go, to Rome, to America, to the devil for all I care! Get out of my sight and let me die in peace. I’ll sell the house to some rich Roman for a summer house, or I’ll burn it to the ground and feed the fire with my own bones, and all the bones of my fathers who worked to build it!’

  The arguments and curses left me with troubling images. I had a vision of my dark-haired father looming suddenly large and angry in our doorway one day, bringing with him some unspeakable doom; of my mother and me left to wander the streets of Rome or Naples like beggars, or packed suddenly onto a ship and sent off to a dark future across the sea. But a few weeks after my grandfather had returned home a final letter arrived from my father which seemed somehow to carry more weight than the rest.

  ‘He thinks we’re still in the dark ages,’ my mother said the day it arrived, ‘when women used to dump their babies at the back door of the convent in the middle of the night and leave them there to die from the cold. Let him carry a baby for nine months and see if he feels that way.’

  ‘You’ll do as he tells you,’ my grandfather said. ‘The orphanage is full of babies just like yours, don’t think yours will be special. I’ll not have that bastard child living under my roof.’

  An uneasy truce settled over our house now, and it seemed that despite my mother’s objections the matter was settled: whatever my mother was carrying in her belly—‘that bastard child,’ as my grandfather called it, which I thought might be a reference to the snake-headed baby Alfredo had warned of—could be got rid of at the orphanage in Rocca Secca, so that for the time being we would be troubled by neither arrivals nor departures. Gradually an air of normalcy began to assert itself again in our household. My mother still kept up a tight-lipped aloofness around the other villagers; but she went about the town freely now, and the villagers did not skirt her as they used to, only nodded in greeting and continued on their way. And with the last day of March set now by the town’s election committee as the date for the election of a new mayor, a hand-painted sign announcing the decision posted prominently on the front wall of Di Lucci’s bar, some of the older men in the village had begun to visit my grandfather in his room, talking strategy and politics long into the night.

  But I had learned by now that Valle del Sole had more than a single face.

  ‘Still holding her nose up like a queen,’ I overheard Maria Maiale say at Di Lucci’s. ‘Quella Maria! Maybe it’s a virgin birth.’

  ‘Maybe it’s the other Mary, Magdalena, you’re thinking about,’ Di Lucci said.

  ‘We’ll see what happens when her husband gets his hands on her. He’ll crack her skull, you remember what he was like, just like his father. Then she’ll see how good she’s had it here.’

  But there were other scandals too, more cryptic, which seemed about to surface. The election, it seemed, had stirred up much emotion in the village. My grandfather’s party had chosen Alfredo Mastroantonio, the former chairman of il comitato della festa, to replace my grandfather; but this time the election was not to be decided by acclamation, as it always had been during my grandfather’s reign. The Communists, too, had fielded a candidate—Pio Dagnello, son of Angelo the Red, who every night now rose up on a crate in the square, his face flushed with emotion, and told the villagers how the government in Rome had ignored them since the war because no one among them had had the courage to raise an angry voice. At first the villagers paid him little attention, as if they took for granted that the government in Rome would ignore them, and it was useless to think it would ever be otherwise; but night by night the crowds around Pio began to grow. Alfredo Mastroantonio, who did not make speeches in the square but held small private meetings in the back room of Di Lucci’s bar, seemed alarmed: one day all the walls along via San Giuseppe were suddenly covered with large posters that had been printed up in Rocca Secca, an unheard-of expense, Alfredo Mastroantonio’s plump-cheeked face beaming its strained smile from every one of them. But still the villagers continued to flock every night around Pio, and every night Pio grew bolder in his denunciations, until there was no mistaking who he blamed for the village’s ills.

  ‘You see how he paid for it in the end? He was the first one to take them in when they came. Roads, he said! Lights! Viva il Duce! The communists will eat us alive! But where are the roads now? Where are the lights? He sold us to the devil for fifty lire, and because the people are like sheep it’s taken them twenty years to open their eyes. You don’t see Alfredo Mastroantonio knocking on his door now. Alfredo may be a horse’s ass, but he’s no idiot. He knows the old man sold us out.’

  As election time grew nearer the visits to my grandfather became more and more sporadic, only a few old loyalists still coming by, mumbling consolations in response to my grandfather’s increasingly bitter invectives.

  ‘The village will go to the dogs, I tell you. Dagnello is a liar and a coward. Where was he during the war? I’ll tell you where he was, gone out to some hole in the mountains the very day the letter came calling him up for service. If I’d had half a mind then I would have turned him in. Now he makes it seem like he was a hero, when half his cousins died in the same war, just so he could come back to his house in one piece at the end of it. And Mastroantonio is no better, the fool—you could buy him with the change in your pocket.’

  Towards the end of February, another letter arrived for my mother; but this one bore a small neat script of bright blue, not at all my father’s violent hand. My mother whisked the letter up to her room, closing the door behind her; and when I went up later I found her packing some clothes into a hamper.

  ‘I’m going to Rome for a few days in the morning,’ she said. ‘I’ll get Marta to come by to look after you and your grandfather.’

  She drew open the drawer of her writing table, rifling through some papers there and sliding a few into her hamper.

  ‘I don’t want Marta to come,’ I said.

  ‘Please, Vittorio, don’t start. I have some very important business to look after.’

  When my mother brought in my grandfather’s supper that night, I caught snippets of subdued conversation between them.

  ‘If you ask me he’s as foolish as you are,’ my grandfather said. ‘You should have waited till after, the way you’d decided. He won’t have that child in his house.’

  ‘We’ll settle that,’ my mother said. But her words were curiously empty and dead, as if they were not her own. ‘I spoke to Zia Lucia,
everything is arranged. But I don’t want you to say anything to anyone until I get back.’

  ‘What difference will it make? Now you think about keeping secrets. You should have thought of that months ago. I should have sent you away.’

  ‘It would have been the same,’ my mother said. ‘Everyone would have known.’

  ‘No. That’s where you’re stupid, Cristina. You carry your shame in the streets, you force people to point a finger at you. What you’ve done you’ve done, and may God forgive you for it; but that’s not the way to be with people.’

  ‘Please, don’t start.’

  Later, in bed, I heard the scratch of my mother’s pen again. But when I went to her door she quickly slid the piece of paper she’d been writing on into her drawer.

  ‘What is it?’ she said, annoyed. ‘You should be in bed.’

  ‘Why do you have to go to Rome?’

  She took in a breath in irritation; but after a moment her anger seemed to melt, and she drew me towards her and nestled me against her knees.

  ‘Poor Vittorio. No one ever tells him anything.’ She wrapped her arms around me, and I saw that she’d begun to cry. ‘Do you promise to keep it a secret, if I tell you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She pulled me closer, putting her cheek against mine.

  ‘We’re going to leave the village, Vittorio,’ she whispered finally. ‘In a few weeks, we’re going to America.’

  XXI

  America. How many dreams and fears and contradictions were tied up in that single word, a word which conjured up a world, like a name uttered at the dawn of creation, even while it broke another, the one of village and home and family. In Valle del Sole the men had long been migrants, to the north, to Buenos Aires, to New York, every year weighing their options, whether the drought would ruin the year’s crops, or a patch of land bring a sufficient price to buy a passage, whether to strike out for Torino or Switzerland, with the promise at least of a yearly return, or to reckon on an absence of years or a lifetime, and cross the sea.