Lives of the Saints

by Nino Ricci

  So there was still a test. A sick feeling began to build in the pit of my stomach. The Fascists, my mother had told me, used to test people sometimes by making them drink cod liver oil—that was how I felt now, as if I was being forced to swallow something I didn’t like, the bile already beginning to collect in my throat at the thought.

  Vincenzo was pointing to a small hole in the ground in front of Alfredo.

  ‘After you show everyone,’ he was saying, ‘you have to put it in the hole and move it up and down fifty times. Make sure you go as deep as you can. The rest of us will count out loud. When you reach fifty, then you’re a member.’

  Everything happened quickly now. On a nod from Alfredo, Vincenzo and one of the other boys lifted me by the armpits, and before I had had time to think or object I was already pinned face up on the ground, one boy on each arm and Alfredo sitting on my ankles, the other boys peering down at me like a flock of strange birds. Alfredo unbuckled my pants with a ritual slowness, pulling the belt free with a low hiss of leather, then undoing the buttons at my waist and down my fly. His nails brushed against my skin as he pulled down my pants, and I shivered; but even if I had wanted to bolt now I could not have, my body held to the ground as if nailed there. The boys were looking down on me, eyes wide.

  ‘Look at the size of that,’ Vincenzo said. ‘It must be five feet long.’ But no one laughed.

  ‘It’s a big one, all right,’ Alfredo said, leaning back so the other boys could have a better look.

  ‘It’s almost as big as a mule’s,’ one of them said, and then Guido reached down and grabbed the wrinkled end of it between thumb and forefinger, moving it back and forth to inspect it.

  ‘It’s not the regular kind,’ he said finally, and the other boys fell silent. But then, after a pause: ‘This is the kind they used to have before the war. You can tell because it has more meat on it.’

  Some of the other boys agreed that Guido was right. But one of them said that it was more like the kind the Africans had, and that maybe one of my great-grandfathers had been an African; and someone else said it was in America that you found birds like that, which meant that one day I would go to America. Now each of the boys took sides, arguing about the colour and the length and the thickness; but they couldn’t reach a conclusion.

  ‘Give me a cigarette,’ Alfredo said finally. ‘We’ll do the test.’

  Vincenzo reached into his pocket and handed Alfredo a wrinkled cigarette. But just as Alfredo was reaching forward to apply the measure, the eyes of all the other boys fixed on my groin, he lurched forward suddenly and let out a powerful grunt, his hand shooting up to the back of his head. Suddenly the clearing was filled with shouts and confusion: in an instant the boys around me had scattered, shouting curses and running towards some distraction at the edge of the clearing. Alfredo himself quickly recovered from whatever blow had felled him, leaping up in one quick motion and raising his voice for the first time that afternoon: ‘Ammazzatelo!’

  Kill him. There at the far edge of the clearing, backed up against a cliff wall and wielding a long thick stick which he whirled back and forth in a mad semi-circle, striking anyone who came in his path, was Fabrizio, answering curse for curse the abuse which the other boys were hurling at him.

  ‘I’ll break the heads of all of you!’

  And for a moment it seemed that he would: time and again his stick found its mark, striking elbows and heads and ribs with a dull thud, holding the boys back. But what had gotten into him? He had ruined my chances now, that was certain, and as I struggled up, still buckling my pants, I felt myself flush with anger and hate, hate for Fabrizio, my only friend, who seemed suddenly stupid and useless beyond all bearing. I hated him in that moment more than I had ever hated Vincenzo or Alfredo or any of the boys who tortured me at school, hated him as if he were something shackled to me that I must cut away at all costs, the way animals gnawed off their own limbs when caught in a hunter’s trap. And I hated him even though an awful truth was already forcing itself on me, all the events of the afternoon beginning to distort and skew like objects in a curved mirror.

  Alfredo had stepped into the fray now, and as Fabrizio’s stick arched towards him he reached out a swift hand and caught it in his open palm, then quickly closed his other hand around the first and yanked mightily. Fabrizio, still holding the other end of the stick, lurched forward suddenly and fell to the ground. In a moment the other boys were on him, and Fabrizio was shouting, ‘Oh, Vittò, get the stick!’ But I was already running, wildly, tumbling down the slopes of the mountain until I emerged finally breathless and bleeding behind the church, running still until I had slammed myself at last into my own bedroom, where I dragged out the sock that held the chicken’s head and flung it from my balcony out towards the ravine, as far as I could manage, before breaking into sobs on my bed. And I did not have to wait until the following morning, when Alfredo whispered ‘Five feet long!’ as he passed my desk, to a chorus of laughter, to know that I had betrayed Fabrizio, as surely as if I had wished him dead, and to know also that I had sunk so low in shame now that no magic or miracle could ever reclaim me.

  XVI

  My mother had come home from the hospital with little fanfare, in Cazzingulo’s truck, after being away more than a week. She had begun to wear long, loose dresses now, ones that fell straight at the waist, and that hid for a while the slow swelling going on underneath them; but she did not go into the village anymore, not even for Sunday mass, and if she stepped out of the house at all it was only to feed the animals or to pick the olives at the back of the garden. If there were other errands to be done, water to be fetched or something to be bought at Di Lucci’s, she would send me off early in the morning before I left for school, or wait till I had returned in the afternoon. It was only to send me on these errands that she spoke to me now; other times she hardly seemed to notice my presence, her face expressionless as a ghost’s, as if the swelling in her stomach had sucked all the life out of her. Not a word passed between her and my grandfather: it was as if they simply did not see each other, moving through the same house, the same room, as if they only sensed each other’s alien presence lurking like a shadow nearby, and kept clear of it. For a few days after my mother’s return, my grandfather kept to his room; but then he began to go up to Di Lucci’s again, sitting not on the terrace any more but in the back room where Di Lucci sometimes served meals, and where people like Angelo the Red or Silvio the postman would sit sometimes for a night of drinking. In the evening when my grandfather returned home the wine would be heavy on his breath.

  Meal times were the worst. Sometimes my grandfather would not come home at all, though I’d gone up to Di Lucci’s to call him, and my mother and I would wait in silence for half an hour or more, the table set, before sitting down to eat without him. When he did come he remained walled up in his stony silence, his head bowed over his plate, while my mother sat turned away from him crosswise, her legs never under the table, as if she expected at any moment to have to rise up suddenly on some errand. All our meals now had this provisory quality about them, as if there were something more important that they were standing in the way of; but at the same time they seemed to stretch out interminably, as if we were mired in the strange torpor of an afternoon dream, some force retarding our movements to a painful, maddening slowness. In the charged silence each sound, a fork against a plate, the muffled clenching of teeth, seemed unnatural, a violation.

  On Sundays, Aunt Lucia and Marta still came to eat with us, even when my grandfather was out. For a while I was comforted by this one sign of constancy and by Zia Lucia’s continued dignified calm, which seemed the mark of a rare wisdom, as if a few words from her could suddenly set right all the troubles of our house; but the Sundays passed and only the same commonplaces crossed her lips whenever she spoke, as if she were merely blind, had not noticed our household’s agitation, and a resentment began to build in me for her stupidity or obstinacy, for the five lire coins she still gave me wit
h the same ghost of a smile, as if nothing had changed. It was Marta, instead, in whom knowledge seemed to be growing, burgeoning in her crooked and strange, like a plant in rocky soil. Marta seldom spoke, and when she did she seemed to waver between nonsense and sudden lucidity: sometimes without warning she’d break into a conversation to say how she’d hurt her foot that day when she’d gone to the fountain, or how she’d seen a rat behind her house; but a few minutes later she might make some remark that seemed suddenly to the point, as if she’d been following all along what others had been saying. Sometimes she’d begin clearly and then slowly twist away into her strange logic, her comments like riddles or oracles that refused to give up their meaning, that slipped away as soon as you tried to grab hold of them. But mainly she sat silent, watching over us with her nervous bird-eyes, drinking in every gesture, her glance darting sometimes to my mother’s belly with what seemed like sharp understanding.

  Fabrizio had not come back to school. From his brother Fulvio I found out he’d been hired out to a farmer near Rocca Secca.

  ‘Oh, stronzo,’ he called out to me once in the street. ‘Five feet long, eh? You fixed my brother all right, that’s for sure. My father threw him out of the house—he left the sheep alone on the mountain, we had to look for them half way to Capracotta. He’s out at the Valley of the Bones now, with Rompacazzo, that old bastard, he’ll be lucky if he lasts the winter!’

  But at school the other boys seemed to have grown suddenly bored with their teasing; either that or, understanding the meaning of my mother’s loose dresses, they had begun to fear the truth of Alfredo Girasole’s prediction, his whispered warning to me about a snake-headed child. La maestra, though, continued unabated in her attentions. ‘Vittorio!’ she’d call out as I hurried past her in the morning. ‘Look, your shirt is coming out of your pants.’ And she’d bend with a smile to tuck it in, while a dozen other untucked shirts slipped past us unnoticed. Some part of me encouraged her in her new attitude—in the space of a few weeks I had become a model student, took my books home every night and studied them diligently, my tests coming back to me now only with large red swirls of approval. When the teacher assigned seat work now she always let me work in peace while she went around to the other students scolding and rapping heads; and then finally when I had set down my pencil she’d lean over me, with her garlic and perfume smell, and rest a heavy hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Bene, Vittorio, bravo!’ she’d say, picking up my exercise book and holding it open to the class. ‘Vittorio has got every question right!’

  After class I still stayed behind to sweep the room and clean the chalkboard, and though the threat of violence seemed to have abated I was grateful nonetheless to be spared for half an hour or so from returning home; but sometimes I’d look up from my corn broom and catch the teacher staring at me with her wet-eyed look of pity, and something inside me would grow cold and I’d begin to sweep more furiously, raising great clouds of dust that hung in the windows’ shafts of light like fog. Then one day as I was scooping up the last of the day’s dirt, dawdling, I noticed her glancing pregnantly at me several times, some new devilment surging in her.

  ‘That’s fine, Vittorio,’ she said finally. ‘Now come over here, I have something to show you.’

  I went up to the front of her desk but she motioned me to come around beside her.

  ‘Piú vicino. Don’t be shy.’

  She reached down between her legs and from a chafed leather handbag under her desk drew a large clothbound book. ‘Lives of the Saints,’ the title read, ‘adapted by Giambattista del Fiore from the tales of The Golden Legend.’ Underneath was a glossy colour plate, glued to the book’s cover, showing a cassocked man in a garden or courtyard, two white birds perched on his outstretched hand. A golden halo hovered above his head.

  ‘San Francesco,’ the teacher said. ‘He was so gentle that even the birds came to eat from his hands.’

  ‘In Rocca Secca I saw someone feeding the pigeons like that in front of the church,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not the same thing,’ la maestra said firmly. ‘San Francesco was a saint. The birds came to him because he was a man of God. Those pigeons in Rocca Secca are like rats, they only come for the food.’

  The teacher cracked open the book and leafed through its thumb-worn pages, stopping finally at the saint for that day’s date. Here was another colour plate, covered by a sheet of fine white tissue which the teacher lifted gingerly aside: another haloed man, this one in a forest, his hair long and golden, his right hand holding a wooden staff and one foot resting atop the head of a large snake whose body lay coiled and inert in the foreground.

  ‘San Leonardo,’ the teacher said, and then she began to read me his tale. San Leonardo had the strength of a lion, and wrought many miracles; he was the patron saint of prisoners, and broke their chains whenever they invoked his name in prayer. As the teacher read I inched up closer to her, caught up by the sound of her voice; and finally she had reached out an arm and circled it around my shoulder.

  ‘And once when San Leonardo lay on the ground in prayer,’ she read, ‘a huge serpent came out of the woods and slid up inside his shirt. But the saint did not even get up from his prayer. He waited until he had finished, and then he said to the serpent: “I know that ever since the day you were created you have made as much trouble for men as you could; but now, if God has given you power over me, then do to me whatever I have deserved!” And at these words the serpent jumped out of San Leonardo’s shirt and fell at his feet dead.’

  So began what became almost a daily ritual over the next weeks: every day after my sweeping the teacher would call me up gently to her desk, and read to me the deeds of the saints. At first I kept up my grudging resistance; but finally I could no longer hide from myself the vague longing that focused each day now on the teacher’s afternoon readings, when I seemed to drift briefly out of the world as into a dream, or deny the disappointment I felt when the reading was finished, and I had to return again to the thickening gloom of my grandfather’s house. Sometimes, still, when I was sweeping, my hate for the teacher would well up inside me until I could not bear it, until I could feel the muscles in my jaws begin to tense with it, as if someone was interminably scratching a nail against the chalkboard; but during the readings the hate slowly drained away from me. When she read the teacher seemed suddenly to lose her flesh and blood presence, to become merely a voice, disembodied and pure; and it was always a shock at the end of a reading when I became aware again of her strange mountain of flesh, with all its swells and summits, sitting real and solid beside me.

  La maestra more or less followed the order of the calendar in these readings; though sometimes she’d make digressions to pick out saints that would be special to me. There were my name saints—San Victorinus, known for his great fortitude in suffering, martyred by being pounded to death in a great marble mortar; San Vittorio the First, a pope, who underwent constant persecutions for his energy and zeal; San Innocente, also a pope and zealot, who was spared by his absence from the sack of Rome just as Lot had been spared from Sodom. Then my birthday saint, San Bartolomeo, one of the twelve apostles: after Christ’s resurrection he preached the Gospel in India, and when he had worked many miracles and converted many sinners he was skinned alive by barbarians and then beheaded, thus fulfilling his martyrdom.

  When school let out for Christmas la maestra had a treat for me: I was to be allowed to take her book home for the holidays. I smuggled it home with me under my other books, anxious that my classmates and my mother not see it; but when I had got it up to my room and begun to leaf through it I saw that the stories were full of long words whose meanings I didn’t know, and which the teacher must have been leaving out during her readings. Still, over the next few days, with the help of a vocabolario I found in my grandfather’s room, I made my way through the story of Santa Cristina, on July twenty-fourth, a virgin and martyr famous for the wonders she had worked through the power of Christ.

 
Santa Cristina had been born into the house of a rich Roman nobleman, but at a young age she became a Christian and broke up all of the gold and silver images of the pagan gods in her father’s house, selling the pieces to help the poor. When her father discovered her crime he beat her without mercy and brought her before the magistrate for final judgement, and thus began a long series of chastisements. First the judge ordered that Santa Cristina be thrown into a pit with a hundred venomous serpents; but these Santa Cristina overcame, through the strength of Christ, and she was brought once again before the court. Now her flesh was torn away with large iron hooks; but Santa Cristina picked up a chunk of her own flesh and threw it into the magistrate’s face. Finally the judge had her tied to a stake to be burnt as a witch; but when a fire was lit beneath her it spread to burn down a whole block of the city, killing hundreds but leaving Santa Cristina untouched. That night, while Santa Cristina waited in a cell, the magistrate suffered a seizure and died.

  In the morning Santa Cristina was brought before a second magistrate. He ordered her put into a large tub of boiling oil; but Santa Cristina emerged from it as if she had merely taken a warm bath. Next her head was shaved and she was led naked through the city to the temple of Jupiter; but when she reached the temple the image of the god fell headlong into the street and shattered into a thousand pieces. And now the second judge, too, suffered a seizure and died.

  On the third morning, her hair grown back, her flesh healed, Santa Cristina was brought before the third magistrate. Two guards shackled her to a wall and cut off her breasts; but milk, not blood, flowed from the wounds, and Santa Cristina, slipping from her shackles, warned the judge not to go on, because the power of Christ was surely greater than his own. The judge ordered her tongue cut out; but Santa Cristina, still talking freely, threw the tongue at the judge’s eye, which immediately went blind. Finally the judge ordered Santa Cristina to be cast into the sea. A battalion of a hundred men marched her, naked and shackled, to the port, where she was tied to the prow of a ship and rowed out several miles from the harbour, to the deep water. A great slab of stone was strapped to her body with chains—it took a dozen men to lift her to the ship’s rail and thrust her towards the sea. But just as Santa Cristina was about to strike the water, the stone and chains slipped mysteriously from her: for an instant she hovered above the surface of the sea like a shade, dressed now in flowing white, while the sky, a moment before a clear blue, was eclipsed suddenly by a mass of purple clouds, a sole shaft of light trained on Santa Cristina. Then the archangel Michael was standing beside her; and while the soldiers watched, Michael cupped a palmful of sea-water and brought it to Santa Cristina’s forehead. At last he reached out his hand to her and he led her up into the heavens, while on the earth a great storm was finally unleashed, and the Roman ship and all aboard it were swallowed into the sea.