Lives of the Saints

by Nino Ricci

  Tales of America had been filtering into Valle del Sole for many years already. My grandfather’s own father, who in the 1890s, just after my grandfather’s birth, had left his family to fight in Abyssinia, had been among the first to reach there: when the war was over he had begun to wander, first along the coast of Africa—my grandfather used to joke that he had taken an African bride, and that somewhere now I had a brood of creamy-brown cousins who prayed in African but swore in Italian—then on to Argentina and finally New York. For several years he had sent money back, in increasingly large sums, enough to build the house we now lived in; but suddenly the money stopped, and nothing more was heard of him. After a year my grandfather’s oldest brother had gone in search of him, but had returned in despair.

  ‘Vanished,’ my grandfather had told me. ‘He might have died, or he might still be there now, a hundred years old, living like a king with some American wife.’

  Others, too, had been swallowed up by America, never to be heard from again, a few like my great-grandfather leaving behind wives and children; but most, after an absence of years, had returned to the village, using their savings to build a house and to live out their years in relative ease. There were several houses in Valle del Sole that had been built with foreign earnings; though only an extra storey or room or a tarnished brass knocker on the door distinguished them from the rest, their owners perhaps fearing the envy that greater ostentation might have brought.

  But since the war the village had known mainly one-way departures. The men left, and a few years later wives and children and sometimes ageing parents followed, land and livestock sold off, clothes and old pots packed up in wooden trunks made by the village carpenter, houses left abandoned, their doors and windows boarded up.

  ‘Only babies and old people left behind,’ my grandfather would grumble. ‘No one left to work the land.’ But no one went to New York or Buenos Aires now, or to Abyssinia; they went instead to a place called the Sun Parlour. Before the war two men from our region, Salvatore Mancini of Valle del Sole and Umberto Longo of Castilucci, had smuggled themselves across the ocean and settled there—and it was the first time in history, people said, that a man from Valle del Sole and one from Castilucci had been able to work together without slitting each other’s throats—and now one by one their relatives had begun to join them, every year the tide increasing. The Sun Parlour was in a new part of America called Canada, which some said was a vast cold place with rickety wooden houses and great expanses of bush and snow, others a land of flat green fields that stretched for miles and of lakes as wide as the sea, an unfallen world without mountains or rocky earth.

  But for the many of us who had never been much beyond the small world circumscribed by the ring of mountains that cut off Valle del Sole’s horizon in each direction, who had never passed out of hearing range of the village church bells, America was still all one, New York and Buenos Aires and the Sun Parlour all part of some vast village where slums and tall buildings and motor cars mingled with forests and green fields and great lakes, as if all the wide world were no larger than Valle del Sole itself and the hollow of stony mountains that cradled it. And for all the stories of America that had been filtering into the village for a hundred years now from those who had returned, stories of sooty factories and back-breaking work and poor wages and tiny bug-infested shacks, America had remained a mythical place, as if there were two Americas, one which continued merely the mundane life which the peasants accepted as their lot, their fate, the daily grind of toil without respite, the other more a state of mind than a place, a paradise that shimmered just beneath the surface of the seen, one which even those who had been there, working their long hours, shoring up their meagre earnings, had never entered into, though it had loomed around them always as a possibility. And these two natures coexisted together without contradiction, just as goats were at once common animals and yet the locus of strange spirits, just as la strega of Belmonte was both a decrepit old woman and a witch, a sorceress. When occasionally, now, a young man returned from overseas to choose a bride, the young women of the village primped and preened themselves, made potions, promenaded daily through the square, caught up in a dream of freedom, their every second word then a wistful ‘Ah-merr-ica’; but when the young man had chosen, those left behind said ‘Tutt’ lu mond’ è paes’,’ life was the same all over the world, sorry now for the one who had had to leave behind the familiar comfort of family and village for an uncertain destiny across the sea.

  My mother, though, never spoke about America, as if the place did not exist for her, and what images I had of it I’d had to gather from my grandfather’s stories and from the talk of the town. ‘In America,’ I’d heard Giuseppina Dagnello say once, ‘the bread sticks in your mouth like glue. They have to put sugar in it or it wouldn’t taste like anything.’ Giuseppina, though, lived with her ageing parents, who had no one else to look after them, and had little prospect of crossing the sea. But Maria Maiale, who had a brother in America, told a different story. The houses there were so warm, she said, you could walk around in your socks even in the middle of winter. ‘And telephones in every room, per l’amore di Cristo, it’s the law there, you have to have a telephone. And when will we see a telephone in Valle del Sole? When our children’s children are dead and buried in the grave!’

  Fabrizio, ready with facts on any subject, had told me once that in America everyone lived in houses of glass.

  ‘When you’re taking a bath anyone can come by and look at you. You can see all the women in their underwear. People look at each other all the time, over there, because nobody believes in God.’

  My mother was away in Rome for a week. She returned with passport in hand, one of its thick parchment pages stamped with a box of foreign script where numbers and dates and signatures had been filled in in pen, ‘Canada’ printed in capitals at the top beneath a blue crown. On the passport’s signature page, layered over with stamps and seals, was a photograph of me and my mother that I had never seen before.

  ‘Don’t you remember?’ my mother said, when I asked about it. ‘We took it in Rocca Secca on your birthday.’

  ‘Did you know we were going to go to America?’

  ‘Of course not, stupido. I found out last week, just like you. I didn’t have time to get another picture.’

  Inside a blue plastic folder was the ticket that would get us from Naples to a place called Halifax, a tiny ship etched across the top of it.

  ‘But where is quest’ Alifax?’ I asked. ‘I thought we were going to America.’

  ‘America is a big place,’ my mother said.

  Departures for America were common enough in Valle del Sole; Maria Mancini had left not a month before, with her parents and three children, to join her husband in the Sun Parlour, and one of the Mastroangelos had left around Christmas. But proper time was always allowed for the rituals of separation to be played out, for each relation to prepare a final meal, for belongings to be sold off or bequeathed, for trunks to be built and packed, for dozens of small parcels to be wrapped in brown paper and string by those being left behind to be delivered to some relative across the sea, as little packets of food were sometimes dropped into graves to be carried to the spirits on the other side. But my mother and I, it seemed, were being ripped untimely from our womb, without gestation: our own trunk was built in a day, and packed in a matter of hours; and our house, which had once seemed, even through the months of silence and anger, like a solid constant, unchangeable, infested as it was with our lives and smells, our histories, became almost overnight an empty shell, all the serviceable furniture carted up to Zia Lucia’s and boards nailed across the shutters. Our sheep and pigs, confused and stubborn, were chased out of their stable and into Zia Lucia’s, which had been abandoned for years; and my grandfather was once again placed on the church’s rack, amidst groans and curses, and moved to Zia Lucia’s as well, back into the house where he’d spent his childhood. He was set in a small ground floor room that loo
ked out onto the spine of Colle di Papa, while my mother and I, together again in the last days, slept upstairs in Marta’s room, Marta sleeping for the time in the kitchen on the flowered mattress that had been mine.

  It was only when the last scrap of furniture had been removed from my grandfather’s house, leaving my mother’s packed trunk to sit alone in the middle of the kitchen floor, that our leaving took on in my mind the visible form of a truth. But in the few days that remained before our departure I could not bring that truth into any focus. I walked through the streets with a strange sense of lightness, as if at any moment I might simply lift up and walk on air; and houses, faces, voices seemed to fade away from me, to lose their power to impress me with their presence. But though my mind was filled with images of America, of tall buildings and wide green fields, of the dark-haired man I remembered as my father, I could not believe in the truth of them, even my father now seeming merely like someone I had imagined in a dream; and all I could see clearly of the future was a kind of limitless space that took shape in my head as the sea, and a journey into this space that took direction not from its destination but from its point of departure, Valle del Sole, which somehow could not help but remain always visible on the receding shore.

  XXII

  A few days before our departure I saw Fabrizio, as I came out of school, chasing his father’s sheep through the late winter mud and slush of via San Giuseppe. He looked frailer and thinner than he had in the fall; but he was still in his knickers and cap, swaggering as he walked, wielding his sheep stick like a sceptre. I waited at the top of the steps until he’d rounded the corner at the edge of town, so he wouldn’t see me; but later that afternoon, tending the sheep down in the Valley of the Pigs, where the snow had all melted, I looked up to see him coming towards me from the direction of the cemetery. He came up without saying a word, plucking a stem of dead grass to chew and lowering himself cross-legged onto the ground beside the rock I was sitting on.

  ‘My father says it’s no use sending someone like me to school,’ he said finally. ‘He says I’m as stupid as a mule. The only way you can make a mule understand is with a whip.’

  He stretched out his legs on the damp grass and leaned back on his elbows, holding his body with the studied nonchalance of a young man.

  ‘Rompacazzo sent me home because I threw a stone at a rat and made a hole in a bag of wheat. Pom! across my face, just like my father. He says, “Ma che sei, scimunoit?” ’—Fabrizio put on the thick accent of Rocca Seccans—‘ “ma che sei, impazzoit?” My father wanted to crack my skull.’

  He spit out a piece of chewed grass, then sat up again and rubbed his goose-pimpled calves with his palms.

  ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter to me,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to know matematica to stick a seed in the ground, my father says. E quella maestra’—Fabrizio bloated his cheeks and lifted out his arms, making a jogging motion like a fat person walking—‘quella maestra gave me a pain in the ass. “Fabrizio” ’—taking on the teacher’s falsetto—‘ “tell me, Fabrizio, ma chi sono le tre persone in Dio?” Addio, quella porca!’

  The sun had begun to set already, hovering cold and red just above Castilucci. A gust of wind whipped down sharply from the snow-covered upper slopes of the mountains, rattling the bare branches of an old apple tree nearby. A bird let out a few solitary notes; I searched for it amidst the tree’s branches but could not make it out.

  Fabrizio was holding a cigarette out to me. I hesitated, then took it, leaning forward towards Fabrizio’s proffered match.

  ‘In America everybody smokes like chimneys,’ Fabrizio said. ‘Sometimes you can’t even see where you’re going because of all the smoke.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ I said suddenly.

  Fabrizio cocked his head and looked at me oddly, squinting because of the sun.

  ‘I was only making a joke,’ he said finally.

  He picked up a clump of dirt and slowly crushed it in his fist, the dirt trickling in a fine powder onto the pocket of his knickers. When a small mound had formed he leaned forward and blew gently into the centre of it, the dirt retreating from his smoke-filled breath in an ever-widening circle.

  ‘When you go to America,’ he said, ‘you can write me a letter and tell me what it’s like. When I have enough money you can call me over.’

  But I didn’t know what to say to him, didn’t know if I wanted to write a letter to him or call him over or even if I could; and I didn’t know why I was angry at him now for coming to talk to me, as if he’d been the one who had done something wrong to me.

  ‘We have to go home,’ I said. ‘It’s going to get dark.’

  ‘You promise to send me a letter? No joking?’

  ‘Sí.’

  He set his cigarette down on a stone.

  ‘Then we have to make it good. Spit into your hand.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just spit, you’ll see.’

  I spit into my palm. Fabrizio took my wrist and brought my hand towards his mouth; before I could pull away his tongue had lapped up the gob of spit cradled there.

  ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘It’s to make us brothers,’ he said. ‘Like we had the same blood. A person can never hurt someone who has the same blood. Here, you now.’

  Fabrizio wiped his gritty palm on his knickers and spit into it.

  ‘Go on,’ he said, holding his hand up to me. ‘It’s only spit. Your mouth is full of spit all the time, it’s the same thing.’

  But when my tongue touched against Fabrizio’s wet palm I felt myself beginning to retch. I closed my eyes and lapped the spit up quickly, trying to shunt it off to my cheek, hoping to spit it out again when Fabrizio had gone; but my stomach lurched again, forcing bile up into my throat, and I swallowed deeply to quell it.

  ‘It’s done,’ Fabrizio said, grinning. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his jackknife, the one his uncle had brought him from America. ‘I want you to take this. That’s to make sure I’ll come to stay with you.’

  In all the time I had known Fabrizio he had never gone anywhere without his jack-knife; it had seemed like a part of him, like his knickers and cap, as inseparable as a finger or toe. I could not have imagined him giving it away, any more than I could have given away my lucky one lira coin.

  ‘Grazie,’ I mumbled, taking the knife awkwardly in my hand. I ran my thumb over the smooth silver casing.

  ‘Don’t lose it,’ Fabrizio said. ‘You have to give it back when I come.’

  He had not really given me the knife, then. It could be the same thing with my coin—I could get it back from him later, if I gave it to him now. But Fabrizio had already picked up his cigarette and stood, brushing dirt away from the seat of his knickers.

  ‘I have to go,’ he said, starting away. ‘I have to get the sheep out of the pit before it gets dark.’

  When he had already begun to grow dim in the twilight, he turned in mid-stride to wave.

  ‘Ho, Vittò!’ he bellowed out. ‘Buona fortuna in America!’

  He was almost half way to the cemetery now; but I had taken my one lira coin out of my pocket, held it cradled in my palm.

  ‘Fabrizio!’ I called out.

  He turned again; but he did not wait for me to speak.

  ‘Don’t forget to send me a letter!’ he shouted. ‘Numero tredici, via Giovanni Battista!’ He turned and walked on, stopped a moment to grind his cigarette butt into the earth with his heel, half-turned to wave again, then dipped his hands into his back pockets and disappeared finally in the darkening twilight.

  XXIII

  On my last day of school, the teacher kept me behind after classes. It was Antonio Girasole’s turn to sweep—since the New Year la maestra had ceased to single me out, and the readings from the Lives of the Saints had dwindled—and for several minutes I sat silently beside the teacher’s desk while she waited for him to finish. Seeing the teacher’s eye on him, Antonio swept furiously, continually casting sidelong glances up
to the front of the room; but he never seemed to move away from a small patch of floor in the back corner, enveloped there in a cloud of dust.

  ‘Go on, Antonio, you can finish in the morning,’ the teacher said finally. ‘Anyway I’ve told you a thousand times to be more gentle. All you do is move the dirt from one place to another.’

  ‘Scusi, maestra,’ Antonio said, head bowed, ‘but I can’t come in the morning. My mother is sick with diarrhoea, and I have to make the food for my brothers and sisters.’

  ‘Liar. I saw her on the street only this morning.’

  ‘She got sick this afternoon.’

  ‘Get out of here,’ the teacher said, ‘before I break your skull for your lies. And if you’re not here first thing in the morning, the devil himself won’t want you when I’m done with you!’

  But when Antonio had gone, la maestra’s anger melted.

  ‘Come here, Vittorio,’ she said, motioning me around her desk; and when I had come close enough she reached out suddenly with both arms and pulled me against her, burying my face in her bosom. She held me a long moment, tight, rocking me back and forth, beginning to sob; but all I could think of was the way Fabrizio had called her quella porca a few days before, and ballooned out his arms in imitation of her.

  When she drew away from me, finally, she pulled a handkerchief from her skirt pocket to daub at her eyes.

  ‘Ah, Vittorio, figlio mio,’ she said, pulling in her breath. ‘You see what babies women are? Here, there’s something I want you to have.’

  She reached down under the desk and pulled her Lives of the Saints from her leather bag.

  ‘I hope you’ll live by it,’ she said, handing the book to me. ‘I hope you’ll follow their example.’