Lives of the Saints

by Nino Ricci

  My mother’s room, with its big metal-framed bed and tall armoire, its pictures on the wall, one of my mother in her first communion dress, yellowed now with age, one of her and her classmates in front of the media school in Rocca Secca, had been warm and reassuring, rich with my mother’s smells, the body smells that lingered on the bed sheets, the perfume my mother sometimes dabbed on her wrists and neck on Sundays or when she went to market, and rich with the memory of the years I had slept there with her, the hundred times I had felt her slip into bed beside me as I lay half-asleep.

  But there were ghosts in my mother’s room, too—during the war, two German soldiers had once spent the night there. My grandfather had shown me the chip in the bedroom wall where one of them had fired his rifle at a spider.

  ‘You could hear the shot from here to Capracotta,’ he said. ‘But when I came up to see what had happened the two of them were rolling on the bed laughing like madmen. “I’ve just killed a spider!” one of them said, as if he’d just done the greatest thing in the world. After that, I made your mother lock herself in the stable.’ Though later my mother had told me she’d had a nice walk with the soldiers in the pasture, when they’d come down behind the stable to pee.

  Lying in bed at night in my mother’s room, I had sometimes seen the ghosts of the soldiers through the gauze curtains of the balcony doors, cigarettes dangling from their lips, heard the wind nudging the muzzles of their rifles against the balcony rails, metal against metal. Now, shifting uncomfortably in my strange bed, trying to avoid my unlucky left side, I heard my mother’s sandals slap on the stairs, heard her door open and close, the springs of her bed creak; and as I drifted into sleep I made out again the familiar scrape of metal against metal, fated to me this night because I had left my mother alone, prey to shadows. The wind nudged against my own balcony doors, slipped inside to sit in the chair beside my bed—‘Poveretto,’ it whispered, ‘poveretto’; but still the murmurs of the soldiers reached me as they conferred on my mother’s balcony, as they slung their rifles over their shoulders finally, blue eyes glowing like flames in the darkness, and went into my mother’s room.

  ‘It’s time to go,’ they said, and my mother opened her eyes and gently set aside her covers. She was fully dressed: she had been waiting for them. Soundlessly she followed them out of her room and down the stairs. At the front door they stopped for a moment while one of the soldiers lit up a cigarette; then one by one they stepped through the doorway into the night. They moved in the direction of the main road, my mother walking between the soldiers in her slow, easy pace while I, borne up on my winged bed, watched from above. No one talked now, and for a long time, as they receded into the night, the only sound was that of jackboots trudging along the dry earth. Finally I could no longer make out their forms in the darkness, only the last glowing ember of a soldier’s cigarette.

  V

  Sunday was the feast of San Camillo de Lellis, founder of the Ministers of the Sick, a local saint who some said had once cured a cripple at the top of Colle de’ Santi, and in honour of whom a special collection was taken up at the village church for the hospital in Rocca Secca. La maestra, for whom the saints were not merely the ghosts of some mythical past but an ever-present possibility, the mundane and everyday verging always on the miraculous—‘Who knows,’ she’d said once, ‘if there isn’t a saint among us right now?’—had told us the story of San Camillo in school.

  ‘When he was a young man he was a ruffian. He drank every night and then fought in the streets. He was as tall as a giant, but it doesn’t matter how big you are because God will always make you pay for your sins.

  ‘So one day San Camillo had to pay. He was drinking and gambling in a bar in the city with some thieves; but he didn’t know that the Lord had sent the thieves to teach him a lesson. Each time he bet, he lost; and the next time he’d bet twice as much to try to get back what he’d lost the time before. But by the end of the night he had gambled away all the money he had in the world. The last thing he had was a gold crucifix his mother had given him for his first communion, and when he lost that too, the thieves picked him up by the neck and threw him in the street.

  ‘That night he started on foot for his parent’s house in Bocchianico, hoping to beg a little money from them. But when he started to think of everything his parents had done for him, and how he had caused them only misery, and when he thought of how he had gambled away even his gold crucifix, he was filled with shame. He fell down on his knees and cried to God for mercy. And because God could see inside his heart, and could see that he had learned his lesson, He made a bright light appear in the sky, to let San Camillo know that he had been forgiven.’

  Until I’d begun hearing these stories from la maestra I’d never thought very much about religion. My mother, certainly, had never made an issue of it—she attended church every Sunday with my grandfather and me, shared the front pew, a portion of which was always reserved for my grandfather because of his position in the town; but though I had quickly memorized all the Latin responses and spoke them out in alta voce, as the teacher had taught us, my mother did not even bother to move her lips.

  ‘I say them in my head,’ she told me. ‘God can hear what you’re thinking.’

  My grandfather, at least, sang the hymns, his voice rising clearly above the rest, sounding like the wails of old women at funerals, though his face never lost its crusty composure. But towards the religion itself he was skeptical.

  ‘My grandfather used to read the bible,’ he’d said, ‘and it drove him crazy. Before he died he used to see angels coming down on the clouds to get him. All those old stories.’

  But the teacher’s tales of the saints worked on me like a potion. The teacher had me figured wrong—she thought I was a godless boy with a devil in me, because of the cigarettes and my truancy. But if the devil had claimed a hold on my soul, and I was sure he had, he had done so despite my best intentions; for even my truancy was born out of my battle with him, of a hard choice between the lesser of evils.

  ‘You should tell the priest,’ la maestra had told us when instructing us on sins suitable for confession, ‘if you ever walk around in your underwear or naked in front of other people.’

  And thereafter, whenever I passed la maestra on my way into school—she stood in the schoolhouse doorway each morning to welcome us into class, her face registering, as each of us passed before her, what place we held in her affections, smiles for the good children, stern frowns for the bad—I had a sudden vision of her standing tutta nuda, thick arms crossed against massive pink breasts, and a dark mound pulsing between her legs like a heart. This vision, which forced itself all the more surely into my head the more I tried to suppress it, filled me with excitement and horror, and I paid for it every week with ten Hail Marys, whispered surreptitiously as I sat beside my mother at Sunday mass. And whenever Fabrizio had filched a few cigarettes from his father and stood waiting to head me off before I got to the schoolhouse, I’d sneak off with him to the top of Colle di Papa, to be spared that day another vision of la maestra’s awful nakedness.

  Valle del Sole’s church, with its high stucco walls, bell tower, and spire, sat overlooking the village from the embankment that rose up behind Di Lucci’s bar, the shadow of its tower inching daily across the square with the movement of the sun like the large slow hand of a clock. On the feast of San Camillo, my mother and my grandfather and I walked up to church together, circling as we always did up the path that cut in behind Di Lucci’s from the square instead of taking the stairs, because of my grandfather’s legs. Inside the church people nodded to my grandfather the way they usually did; but though the church filled to capacity before the service started, a few people even standing back in the porch, a long stretch of pew remained empty beside my mother. The priest, Father Nicola—Zappa-la-vigna, he was known as, hoer-of-the-vineyard, because that was what they’d called his grandfather—preached a sermon about San Camillo and about how we had to help the sick. Somehow fro
m San Camillo he led into a story about a king and a man named Daniel, the only one who could read what God had written on the wall, and I couldn’t understand what he meant; though the story made me think of my father, and the strange way he wrote in the letters he sent to my mother. Finally, as if to take full advantage of the large audience the feast day had brought in, he closed with a warning about the villagers’ superstitions, which he said he would not name but which he assured us came from the devil. This last theme was by no means an uncommon one with Father Nick, and he never lost a chance to bring it up; but today as he spoke he seemed to cast a significant glance at my mother, as if pregnant with some secret meaning he wished to share with her.

  Outside, though, my mother said: ‘He was sweating like a pig today—and we like idiots still give him money for his wine and sausage, and eat stones all week. I’d like to see how much of what he took in today ever gets to the sick.’

  My mother called Father Nick ‘our fatted calf’—since he’d taken over the parish, she said, the church had gone to ruin, because all the money he collected went into his own pocket. Other people made fun of him too, behind his back; but if they saw him in the street they would still bow respectfully towards him and speak to him shyly, with their eyes averted downwards. At school we feared him because he would come to test us on our catechism, administering three thwacks to the buttocks with a short paddle for every incorrect answer, one for the Father, one for the Son, one for the Holy Ghost. Since the school sat just behind the church, only five paces from the back door of the rectory, Father Nick had only to slip on his shoes and retrieve his paddle from whatever dark place he kept it hidden whenever the whim took him to test us; and then suddenly he’d appear unannounced in the school doorway, like a dark angel, his black robes flowing to the floor, his collar tightly buttoned around his thick neck, and his paddle held discreetly behind his back. Immediately then all whispering, hair-pulling, note-passing, and paper-throwing would cease (la maestra was by no means as strict a disciplinarian as Father Nick) and the air would resound briefly with the scrape of chair legs against concrete; and finally, benches and chairs aligned in perfect columns, students standing beside them, evenly spaced, eyes forward, a burnished silence would descend on the room and a thin sour smile would stretch across Father Nicola’s fat sour face.

  ‘Buongiorno, ragazzi.’

  ‘Buon-gior-no, Don Ni-co-la.’

  When we had resumed our seats, Father Nick would circulate around the room and look into our eyes for signs of sin. When he’d chosen a victim, always a boy, he’d pass his desk and then slowly turn and call his name, so that he was always standing behind you, out of sight, when you stood to answer a question.

  ‘Antonio Girasole, alzati, per favore.’

  Antonio would rise and face forward, the priest standing only inches behind him, close enough for Antonio to feel his breath against his neck.

  ‘Tell me, Antonio, quante persone ci sono in Dio?’

  Always an easy question to begin.

  ‘Three persons, Don Nicola.’

  ‘Tre persone, giusto. And what are they called, these three persons?’

  ‘Il Padre, il Figlio, e lo Spirito Santo.’

  ‘Bene, Antonio, molto bene. You are truly a theologian, a Jesuit even.’

  A titter would arise from the other students; Father Nick liked to play with his victims before going in for the kill, like a boy tearing the wings off flies.

  ‘And now tell me, Antonio: how can it be that these three persons are one?’

  A dead silence, broken finally by a shuffling of feet, a nervous cough; and then from Antonio a small ‘I don’t know sir,’ and Father Nick would have his first victim.

  Father Nick never failed to crucify a scapegoat or two on his visits, allowing them to bear the burden of our collective guilt—for who among us could have answered those questions of his? But afterwards, our dues paid, he’d tell us stories about his days in the seminary; and somehow these stories would make me forget his paddle, so that it was always a shock when he next loomed up again in the school doorway, as if my mind could not understand how the Father Nick with the paddle and the Father Nick who told stories were one and the same person.

  ‘I had a friend in the seminary named Dompietro,’ he told us once, ‘who I knew from Rocca Secca. When they gave us beds they put Dompietro in the dormitory across from mine. So on the first morning in the seminary I went to call Dompietro to come with me to breakfast—but when I came to where he slept I found him lying on the ground with his head under his bed.

  ‘ “Dompietro,” I said, “what are you doing under your bed?”

  ‘ “I’m looking for my shoe,” he said.

  ‘After a few minutes he pulled himself out from under the bed and held up his shoe.

  ‘“Eccola!” he said, with a big smile on his face, as if he was the happiest man in the world. Then he knelt down beside his bed, put his hands together, closed his eyes, and whispered a little prayer.

  ‘What a strange fellow this Dompietro is, I thought to myself. He’s thanking God because he found his shoe!

  ‘The next morning when I went to call Dompietro it was the same story all over again. There was Dompietro lying on the ground with his head under his bed.

  ‘ “Dompietro,” I said, “what are you doing under your bed?”

  ‘ “I’m looking for my shoe,” he said.

  ‘And once again when he found the shoe he whispered a little prayer to the Lord.

  ‘This went on every day for over a week—first the shoe, then the prayer. I was beginning to think that maybe Dompietro was a little crazy. But in everything else he did he seemed very wise—it was only this one thing with the shoe I couldn’t understand. So finally I said to him one morning:

  ‘ “Dompietro, why is it that every day you have to look for your shoe under the bed? Don’t you think the Lord would be much happier if you just put your shoes beside your bed, like everyone else, so you wouldn’t have to bother him every morning about finding it?”

  ‘ “But it’s not for my shoe that I speak to the Lord every morning,” Dompietro said. “Every night I make sure I throw my shoe under the bed so that in the morning I have to get down on my knees to look for it. And once I’m on my knees I remember to thank the Lord for everything he has given me.” ’

  My mother, though, did not think very much of Father Nick’s stories.

  ‘What are you doing under the bed?’ she said, when I tried to follow Dompietro’s example; but when I told her about Father Nick’s story she laughed.

  ‘What a thing! Don’t believe those stories, silly, who knows where he takes them from.’

  But I still couldn’t keep myself from liking Father Nick’s stories, though I guarded them from my mother now like secrets.

  On Sundays Zia Lucia and her daughter Marta usually joined us for dinner; but when they came by on the feast of San Camillo our kitchen seemed oddly strained and tense. My mother burnt herself on the cooking pot while pulling the sauce from the fireplace, spilling some of the sauce onto the flagstones.

  ‘Stupida,’ my grandfather said sharply, ‘can’t you be more careful?’

  Only my aunt Lucia seemed unchanged, in her almost vegetal calmness, sitting large and matronly in her usual place by the fireplace, wrapped in her usual thick skirts and apron and shawl despite the heat, her hair tied back in a kerchief. Before we gathered around the table to eat she called me to her and pulled a five lire coin from the pocket of her apron with a blue-veined hand.

  ‘Something to spend on your girlfriends,’ she said, the ghost of a smile on her lips. The skin of her palm was glossy with age, almost translucent.

  But Marta seemed especially canny today, in her dark silence, as if some usually dormant receptor in her had been aroused, the way some people’s limbs ached before a storm. Marta had always seemed ageless to me—she might have been fifteen or fifty, her large dark eyes wary and child-like but the skin around them wrinkled with age
; and even in the village she was treated with a mixture of condescension and respect, as if she were both simple and yet possessed of mystical powers, a witch. Years of hiding her strangeness, perhaps, had taught her how to be invisible, for she moved through a room like a shadow, and when she sat it was as still as a stone, only her eyes moving, darting in their sockets as nervously as a bird’s; but today I was always aware of her presence, and I felt suddenly as if I had crawled up inside her eyes, from where the world looked oddly warped and unstable, like something seen through a piece of curved glass.

  I expected that other visitors would come in the afternoon, to welcome my mother home after her stay in the hospital or at least to talk with my grandfather about some problem in the village, as usually happened on Sundays; but after Zia Lucia and Marta had gone my grandfather went up to Di Lucci’s, and all afternoon the house remained quiet, my mother knitting in silence in a corner of the kitchen.

  It was not till the next day that two visitors stopped by, finally, while my mother and I were making bread—Maria Maiale and Giuseppina Dagnello, childhood friends of my mother’s, and distantly related to us, as was half the village, by blood. They appeared in our narrow doorway coming back from the fountain, laundry tubs perched on their hips, their knuckles chafed from scrubbing.

  ‘Like dogs, that’s how we live,’ Maria said from the doorway, ‘wash the clothes, haul the water, make the bread, feed the goats, per l’amore di Crist’ let me rest my limbs for a minute.’