Lives of the Saints

by Nino Ricci

  On the far wall of the cabin two curtained portholes looked over the sea. By standing on one of the armchairs and leaning over its back I was able to peer out one of them into the bay. From here the sea, about a dozen feet below me, looked not blue but murky green. Out on the bay a large black ship was just heaving into port, a crowd of small dinghies bobbing precariously in its wake.

  But someone pounded on our door now, hard and frantic.

  ‘Apri! Senti! Open the door, I know you’re in there!’

  It was a woman’s voice, angry and shrill. My mother came out of the bathroom in her slip, wiping her face on a towel.

  ‘Ma chi è questa? There must be some mistake.’ More pounding.

  ‘Open up, I know who you are! Open so I can see your face! So I can see the face of a whore!’

  ‘This woman is mad,’ my mother said, paling; but she went to the door and drew it open.

  In the doorway, blocking it like a mountain face, stood a short older woman of generous proportions whose too-tight dress seemed ready to burst with the pressure of its owner’s trembling, red-faced anger. But as my mother drew the door fully open, the blood seemed to drain away suddenly from the woman’s cheeks.

  ‘Madonna!’ she cried, clapping her hands together like a penitent. ‘She’s pregnant! My God, it’s come to this!’ Then, catching sight of me hovering near my mother’s side, her eyelids drooped as if she were about to collapse.

  ‘Another one! God help me!’ And pushing past my mother and me she lunged across the room and fell heavily into an armchair, her chest heaving.

  ‘Two children, I never imagined, not in my worst dreams. And four at home who never see his face!’

  ‘Scusi,’ my mother said slowly. She shifted the strap of her slip and crossed her arms over her chest, hugging her shoulders protectively. ‘Ma chi è Lei?’

  The woman drew a handkerchief from her bosom and patted at her forehead.

  ‘What does it matter, who I am,’ she said, still struggling for breath. ‘Nessuno. I’m no one. Two children! I can’t, I can’t, I can’t go on like this any longer. I’ll kill myself.’ She blew loudly into her handkerchief, then broke finally into heaving sobs. ‘Trent’ anni! Thirty years I’ve worked like a slave for him!’

  ‘Scusi, but I don’t understand,’ my mother said, still hovering uncertainly near the open door. ‘Who have you worked like a slave for?’

  ‘Who, who, you know as well as I do, who,’ the woman said, her chest still heaving. ‘What’s the use in hiding it now? When the cook’s wife told me I didn’t believe it, I thought it was invidia, because her own husband has been running around with a tramp. But then I found the key in his pocket, room 213, just like she said—ten years! Ten years this has been going on, and no one told me a word. If you knew what I have to put up with—’ but she broke into sobs again.

  But a look of sudden understanding had crossed my mother’s face, and she moved towards the woman now and crouched down beside her.

  ‘Calmatevi,’ she said gently. ‘I think you’ve made a mistake. I’m not the woman you’re looking for.’

  ‘Ma come, what are you saying?’ the woman said, still sobbing. ‘It’s this room, I know it, it’s always this room. I wanted to wring your neck, but now I see how things are with you, two children, he’s probably ruined your life too—’

  ‘Scusate, signora,’ my mother started again. ‘We’ve both been tricked—the captain’s friend isn’t coming aboard this trip, they must have put me here to confuse you. I don’t know anything else about it, except that they tried to make fools out of both of us.’

  The woman looked over at my mother now with new attention, her sobs subsiding.

  ‘Ma è vero?’ she said, daubing at her eyes. ‘You’re not trying to make fun of me?’

  ‘Sí, è vero.’

  ‘And the children?’

  ‘Whoever they belong to, it’s not your husband.’ The woman looked from my mother’s face to mine, then back to my mother’s.

  ‘Oh, thank God!’ She let out a great sob and clasped thick arms around my mother’s neck. ‘Thank you, signora, thank you, you don’t know what a burden you’ve taken off me! Beh, you can imagine when I came in here and saw you bloated up like a whale, and then the little boy, his eyes are just like my husband’s —’

  But a foghorn sounded now, drowning the woman out, and the floor beneath us began to tremble like a huge stomach growling.

  ‘Signora, I think they’re starting the engines,’ my mother said. ‘If you don’t want to follow us to Canada, you’d better get off the ship.’

  ‘Sí, sí, grazie. I hope you’ll excuse me for the way I lost my head but you can imagine how a woman feels—’

  ‘Hurry now,’ my mother said, helping the woman to the door. ‘If I have a chance I’ll have a few words with him for you.’

  ‘La ringrazio, signora, grazie tanto,’ she said, backing out the door and clasping my mother’s hand; but a moment later, as she hurried away down the hall, she was cursing again. ‘L’ammazzo! I’ll kill him! I’ll kill them both!’

  ‘Addio,’ my mother said, watching her go. ‘Poveretta.’ But a smile was playing around her lips. ‘Well, at least we got this room out of it, eh Vittorio? Come on, I’ll put on a dress and we’ll go say goodbye to Italy.’

  Up on deck the gangway was just being pulled up, newly boarded passengers abandoning their suitcases and bags to flock to the rails and wave their final goodbyes. All along the port side the rails were lined three and four thick with people exchanging shouts with those they’d left behind on the pier or simply casting their goodbyes to the wind.

  ‘Addio Italia! Salve America!’

  My mother managed to squeeze us through to a place against the rails just as the ship was churning away from its moorings. On the pier people were shouting last minute instructions, raising enough noise to wake the dead.

  ‘Tell Giovanni the army is looking for him!’

  ‘Say hello to President Eisenhower! And send me back an American woman!’

  ‘Tell your father that when I get my hands on him, I’ll break his balls!’

  Then, amidst the noise, I made out a boyish shout of ‘Ho, Vittò!’ and my eyes scanned the crowd until they lighted on a familiar face peering out from the shadows of a corduroy cap. My hand shot up instinctively to wave.

  ‘Who are you waving to?’ my mother asked.

  But I shrugged in embarrassment—the corduroy cap had come up now, in response to my wave or someone else’s, to reveal not a boy but a small, ancient man with a wrinkled face and blackened teeth.

  As the gap between the rails and the dock widened, the ship’s horn boomed above us, drowning out the shouts from the shore. Slowly the ship, like a great tired whale, pulled back into the waters of the bay and began to turn its nose to the sea. At last the people on the pier had become a single undulating wave, their shouts barely audible, and as the ship slipped away from them I felt a tremendous unexpected relief, as if all that could ever cause pain or do harm was being left behind on the receding shore, and my mother and I would melt now into an endless freedom as broad and as blue as the sea.

  We stood at the rails until most of the crowd around us had filtered away. Gradually the wind stiffened, the smells of the shore, of Naples, of the crowds, giving way to the briny smell of the sea. For a few minutes my mother cried silently beside me.

  ‘Is grandfather going to die while we’re away?’ I asked her, when she’d stopped crying.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Do we have to live with my father when we get to America?’

  ‘Do you want to?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  When we went down to our room, finally, the bay of Naples was no larger than a cup you could hold in the palm of your hand, and we were on the open sea.

  XVIII

  My mother settled quickly into the life of the boat. Though it was only mid-March each day dawned warm and cloudless, and the air and sun seemed to brin
g back to my mother a warm radiance, as if the crisp blue of the sky and sea had seeped inside her. She had soon made a number of friends: Mr. D’Amico, a bent, bespectacled man in the room across from ours who was going to America to visit his son, and who greeted me every morning when we went up to breakfast with him with a ‘Salve, dottore!’ and a hearty salute; a honeymoon couple down the hall who asked every day after my mother’s health, as if nothing could be more precious or fragile than a woman in maternity; a grey-eyed German from first class who spoke only broken Italian but who bought my mother an English grammar book in the magazine store and gave her lessons sometimes on the sun deck or at the side of the ship’s tiny indoor pool. For the first day or two we did not see Antonio Darcangelo again; but then a box of chocolates arrived from the gift shop with the enigmatic note, ‘My deepest apologies for Naples—I had not realized the full extent of the problem. Antonio.’ The next day the ship docked in a small port overlooking a dusty sun-drenched town of white adobe, and Antonio appeared at our door.

  ‘We’ve stopped to pick up some oranges and the captain has given all the officers four hours of shore leave. Will la signora and her son join me for a Spanish lunch?’

  Thereafter we began to see much of Antonio. He’d slip away from his rounds sometimes to join my mother and me on the sun deck, regaling us with gifts of sweets and ice cream; occasionally he came to our table in the dining hall, bringing a special dessert over for me from first class. Around the other crewmen Antonio was always formal and aloof, issuing orders with a crisp precision; but my mother would tease him.

  ‘Heil, Herr Kommandant! Always so stiff! The war was over more than a dozen years ago, you know.’

  She got him once to take us down to the engine room, despite his protest that women were not allowed to go below. We looked down from a high railing into a dim cavern that stank of steam and coal; everything seemed larger than life, as if made for giants, the huge pipes that ran overhead and along the walls, the great outsize boilers that rose up like vast oxen. Below, men in grey overalls stoked coal or watched over gauges and valves. One of them looked up and caught sight of my mother.

  ‘Oh, signó! Look, the third mate brought his mistress to visit us!’

  The other men had turned to look up now.

  ‘Oh, Andò, you made quick work of this one, eh? Two children! Crist’ e Giusepp’!’

  But Antonio had taken my mother by the arm.

  ‘Let’s go, Cristina. I told you I didn’t want you to come down here.’

  ‘There’s no need to get angry,’ my mother said. ‘You’re the boss, why don’t you tell them what’s what?’ But Antonio had already hustled us back to the stairwell.

  ‘You can’t say anything to those men. They live like animals down there.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ my mother said. ‘One or two of them seemed rather handsome. Why is it that all the handsome men go out to sea?’

  But Antonio had flushed with anger.

  ‘Everything is a joke to you, isn’t it? And the baby you’re carrying, is that a joke? Maybe you know all about men like those down there.’

  My mother pulled suddenly away from him, her smile gone.

  ‘We’ll find our own way upstairs.’

  But that evening there was another box of chocolates for my mother, and a bottle of wine; and the next day she and Antonio were laughing together again on the sun deck, while around us the sea lay bright blue and placid, stretching away in every direction, it seemed, to the very ends of the earth.

  XXIX

  Since the start of the trip the captain had appeared only seldom among the passengers, coming down once or twice at supper to sit briefly at the head of a large table in first class, stiff and gruff, and disappearing long before the meal had ended. Once Antonio had taken me up to the bridge, and I had stood only a few feet from him; I had expected him to turn to me, to show some sign of recognition, but he had continued staring squinty-eyed towards the sea as if he hadn’t noticed me, his hands thrust deep into his pockets, his jaw set so firm and hard he seemed to be nursing some ancient grudge, mulling it over and over in his mind until it made him burn with anger. He had about him an air of distant authority which made me think of the politicians in Rome that people in Valle del Sole always complained about, men who directed our lives from afar but were never seen, like spirits from another world.

  But a week or so after we had left Naples, Antonio came down to our room with an invitation.

  ‘The captain would like to know if la signora and her son would join him at his table this evening.’ My mother raised her brows.

  ‘To what do we owe this honour?’

  Antonio cleared his throat.

  ‘The captain wishes to make amends—for the little incident which occurred at Naples.’

  ‘I see,’ my mother said. ‘And was this gesture entirely the captain’s idea?’

  ‘I admit I may have dropped a word or two—’

  ‘And did you also tell the captain what I thought of his little joke?’

  ‘I beg you, Cristina—don’t say anything embarrassing to him in front of the other men. For my sake.’

  ‘Well, we’ll see how he behaves himself.’

  The captain’s quarters were just down from his office, and had the same aura of faded elegance—dark panelling on windowless walls, heavy wood furnishings, worn velvet upholstery. To one side, beneath a brass chandelier hung with dozens of glass pendants, sat a long white-clothed dining table, most of the chairs around it filled. The captain, at the head, rose as we came in, the other men around the table following suit.

  ‘Darcangelo I take it has conveyed my regrets for the confusion over your room.’ He bowed slightly towards my mother; but the gesture had an air of condescension about it, as if he considered the matter hardly worth mentioning. On the wall behind him, though, I noticed now four pictures of children, hung in large oval frames, and in the centre of them one of a woman who looked like a younger, prettier version of the woman who had stormed into our room in Naples.

  Antonio had begun introductions. There were twelve or thirteen of us in all, most of the other guests in officer’s uniforms, crew-cut and blue-jacketed and tight-collared, almost indistinguishable from each other. One guest, however, stood out from the rest, a corpulent man with thin, greasy hair and a network of broken blood vessels on his cheeks. He was dressed completely in white, from the tips of his collar to the toes of his shoes; I had noticed him once or twice before in the dining hall, moving from table to table in the first class section, his voice always louder than the rest, a glass always in his hand.

  ‘Il dottore Cosabene,’ Antonio introduced him, ‘who tends to the ship’s sick and dying. Which means he usually has nothing to do.’

  ‘Piacere,’ said the doctor, extending thick fingers to take my mother’s hand and bring it to his lips.

  The table had been set with white china and gleaming silverware, napkins of red cloth billowing from the mouths of wine glasses like exotic flowers, bottles of red wine set out along the table like columns along a boulevard. The place settings, with their three-tiered arrangement of dishes, a large plate at the bottom, a soup bowl, a small antipasto dish with bits of celery and carrot, black olives, slices of prosciutto and provolone, seemed like tiny models of the fountains I had seen in the squares in Naples.

  We took our places, and the captain bowed his head briefly in silent grace. When he had finished he wished the table a gruff ‘Buon appetito,’ and the officers fell to as if a spring had been released in them, spreading napkins on their knees and bearing down silently on the small bits of antipasto before them. Stewards, meanwhile, invisible as ghosts in their white gloves and serving jackets, had come into the room with steaming bowls and covered trays which they set on a serving trolley at the side of the room. One of them worked his way around the table uncorking bottles and filling glasses.

  ‘Grazie,’ my mother said, when her own glass had been filled. Her voice rang out strangely in
the room’s strained silence. ‘Maybe you can get some gassosa for my son.’

  My mother had held back from eating, looking from face to silent face as if waiting for her own cue to begin.

  ‘Dai, Vittorio, let’s eat,’ she said finally. She cracked a roll over her dish, stuffed a slice of meat into it with her fingers, and handed it to me. She made another roll for herself and bit into it, then raised up her glass.

  ‘Saluti.’ A hurried chorus of toasts went up around the table, dying down again into an awkward silence. My mother set her glass down again.

  ‘Scusate, Captain, but is it forbidden to talk at your table?’

  Around the table a dozen mouths abruptly ceased their chewing. The captain looked up suddenly from his dish and brought his napkin to his lips, his face flushed.

  ‘Forbidden? Why do you say that?’

  ‘No one has said more than a dozen words since I came in. I feel like I’m at a funeral.’

  But now the captain smiled sourly, as if he had suddenly understood.

  ‘I merely like to observe a little formality,’ he said. ‘La signora of course is free to talk if she wishes.’

  The captain picked up his glass, and despite his invitation it seemed we would pass once more into a strained silence; but after he had drunk, he turned back to my mother and smiled again his grim smile.

  ‘Once upon a time a captain had absolute power at sea,’ he said. ‘Now everywhere he turns he finds a union. These little rituals are all we have left.’

  ‘And at home?’ my mother said.

  Antonio, sitting beside her, shifted uncomfortably in his chair, picking his napkin up suddenly and bringing it to his lips.

  ‘Scusi?’ the captain said.

  ‘At home. Does a captain still have absolute power at home?’

  A nervous laugh went up around the table. The captain smiled, less sourly. Antonio set down his napkin.

  ‘Ma certo,’ the captain said, almost genial. ‘At least until wives have unions.’

  The laughter now was less restrained.

  ‘Tell me this,’ my mother said, beginning to pick again at the contents of her antipasto dish, ‘doesn’t it worry you to spend so much time at sea? What do you think your wife does when you leave her alone like that? Even a woman has an itch she needs to scratch once in a while.’ Another round of laughter. But this one died away awkwardly: the captain was not smiling.