Lives of the Saints

by Nino Ricci

  ‘A good night’s work,’ the doctor said, on his way out. As the door swung shut I saw his hand go to Luisa’s behind for a quick pinch.

  In the bathtub, lulled by the water’s warmth, I twice nodded off; now that I could finally go to bed a great tiredness had overtaken me. Afterwards I pulled on a pair of long underwear and a thick long-sleeved undershirt. But before I had climbed up to bed my mother called out to me softly.

  ‘Is it done?’ she whispered.

  ‘Sí.’

  ‘A boy or a girl?’

  ‘A girl.’

  ‘Lie down beside me.’

  My mother’s belly felt soft and flabby now, and her hair was still dank with sweat; but I nestled close against her, drawing myself into her warmth. She kissed me on the forehead.

  ‘Figlio mio,’ she whispered.

  Almost as soon as I closed my eyes, I was asleep. I slept for what seemed a long time in an utter darkness, without thoughts or dreams; then I dreamt that I was lying in a pool of warm water and I awoke with a start, afraid that I had fallen asleep again in the bath. But no, I was still in bed with my mother—I was conscious of her lying warm and still beside me in the darkness, her breathing so calm and faint now it was barely audible. I thought at first that I was back in my mother’s room in Valle del Sole, then remembered the ship, then thought that I was somehow on the ship and in Valle del Sole at the same time; but the effort of piecing out the truth seemed too great. I wanted only to go back to sleep; but though I felt a heavy tiredness closing over me again, I could not sink under it, felt suddenly as if the whole night a hand had been constantly nudging my shoulder. My body now was making a hundred claims on me—my limbs were stiff and sore, as if covered with bruises; my bladder ached; and all along my back and thighs I felt a warm stickiness, as if I had forgotten to change out of my sea-soaked pyjamas, or I had wet the bed. Still thinking I was back in Valle del Sole, I rose out of bed to go behind the stable to pee. I had already turned on the bathroom light before my mind clicked with a little shock and I realized where I was, and that the warm stickiness I’d felt was blood—all along one side my clothes were soaked in it, some of it already beginning to dry and crust.

  Mr. D’Amico was just stepping out his door when I came into the hall. His face paled when he saw me.

  ‘For God’s sake what’s happened?’ Then through the open door of the cabin he saw my mother still lying in bed, and he went in quickly and pulled back her covers.

  ‘Gesu Crist’ e Maria.’

  He took my mother’s wrist in his hand briefly and then hurried back into the hall, closing the door behind him.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Sí.’

  ‘Go wait in my room. I’ll get the doctor.’

  From Mr. D’Amico’s room I saw the doctor come, still in his pyjama top, Luisa behind him with his bag. A few minutes later Mr. D’Amico returned with Antonio.

  ‘Look after the boy,’ Antonio said. He went into my mother’s room and closed the door.

  In silence Mr. D’Amico poured a bath for me. When I had gotten out of my clothes he bundled them into a tight ball and set them in a plastic bag he pulled from one of his suitcases. For several minutes he left me alone in the bathtub; I heard Antonio come into the room and talk briefly with him in a low voice. When Antonio had gone, Mr. D’Amico came into the bathroom and lowered himself with a grimace onto his knees in front of the bathtub, his eyes clouded behind his spectacles. He took the washcloth from me and began to scrub my back, dipping the cloth continually into the water to clean it, the water crimsoning gradually with blood. Finally he pulled up the tub’s plug and the water swirled slowly down into the drain. He wrapped a towel around my shoulders, then took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes with one hand as if he were tired. But I saw that he had started to cry.

  He leaned towards me finally and I thought he was going to lift me out of the bathtub; but instead he clutched my shoulders with his hands and pressed his cheek hard against mine, his body trembling now with his quiet crying.

  ‘E’ morta tua mamma,’ he whispered finally, as if telling me a secret. ‘E’ morta.’

  XXXII

  The next few weeks I passed in a delirium. I had contracted pneumonia, and spent the rest of the voyage, and some time after it, in a high fever. It seemed I had fallen into the world of dreams, where no object or image had the meaning normally assigned to it, hid some secret about itself that I must discover; and all day and night my mind raced, working out complicated schemes and theories that might account for all the disparate facts, that might piece them together at last into a final magical solution. But just when the solution seemed near, an odd image would intrude: the face of Dr. Cosabene peering over me, distorted like an object in a curved mirror; a white room whose rough ceiling had become the surface of the moon; two spoons the size of young men leaning tiredly against a wall, rifles slung over their shoulders; a large orange balloon floating calmly by in the sky, and someone in a basket beneath waving goodbye, goodbye to a friend on the earth.

  Later, in a hospital ward where a thousand wild voices babbled incoherently around me, I had two visitors. The first did not take me by surprise, really: I had seen him only once before, and then only fleetingly, but his eyes, blue flames, had burned themselves into my memory then, and I recognized him at once when he came to stand over my bed, his presence fitting into place like the final sum of one of la maestra’s arithmetic questions. But I was only just coming out of the delirium of my fever then; and afterwards I could not say for certain whether he had actually stood over me, or whether I had merely imagined him.

  It was the second visitor, who came after the first, that I had not expected to see: a stranger who was my father, and after all not the black-haired ogre I had imagined but a tired-eyed man whose hair had begun to grey and whose burly shoulders and limbs seemed to fit him awkwardly, like the Sunday clothes the peasants in Valle del Sole wore to mass. He cried without shame when the nurse brought him to my bed; and every day afterwards, until my fever had finally broken, he came to sit beside me, though he never spoke a word, only peered at me through his watery eyes, his cap clutched in his hands like a talisman. When I was let out of the hospital we rode together on a coal-dust-filled train, my father holding the baby in his awkward arms while we rolled across a desolate landscape, bleak and snow-covered for as far as the eye could see.

  But all these later events happened in a mist. Before the mist set in, though, I was granted a few final moments of clarity—time enough to witness my mother’s funeral, which took place the morning after her death, and which I was allowed to attend because no one, not even myself, had noticed that I was burning with fever. The funeral was held at the ship’s stern, where the sun deck normally was, though all the chairs had been cleared away now. The sun was just edging above a still sea, the air cold but the sky stubbornly clear; and despite the early hour a small crowd of passengers attended—the ones my mother had befriended, Mr. D’Amico, the grey-eyed German, the honeymoon couple, and several others who I did not recognize, and who stood a ways back as if they were afraid of being turned away. Antonio was there, and the captain, hats in hands, as well as a few of the other officers, the ship’s chaplain, Luisa, a sombre and sober Dr. Cosabene.

  But only Luisa and Mr. D’Amico and the honeymoon couple cried through the service; the others retained a stony silence, stiff and awkward, as if the bright sun and clear sky made them feel unnatural in their mourning.

  My mother’s body, enclosed in a canvas sack and covered with an Italian flag, lay on a small platform that rose up above the rails and pointed out to sea. After the chaplain had read from his missal Antonio gave the eulogy. But I wasn’t following—there had been a mistake, the kind of thing where dead people were not dead or where they could sometimes come back to life again, like that, the way the wheat around Valle del Sole, snow-covered in winter, could suddenly be green again in the spring. In a moment, I was sure, my mother’s head woul
d pop out of her sack. ‘Vittorio,’ she’d say, eyes all squinty and lips pouting, ‘look at you, always so serious!’ And everyone would laugh.

  But now Antonio, his voice hoarse with emotion, was ending his eulogy; and after a long moment of silence a young frail-eyed officer began to play a song on a bugle, while we stood with our heads bowed. When he had finished the chaplain made a sign of the cross, and on a nod from the captain Antonio’s hand slipped over a lever beneath the platform that held my mother, hesitated there a moment, then finally wrenched the lever back, hard. The platform tilted sharply towards the sea and the canvas sack slid out suddenly from under the flag; but before I could hear it strike the sea’s surface my knees buckled beneath me, and my mind went black.

  XXXIII

  That evening I lay white-gowned in the infirmary, with a temperature of a hundred and four. The day nurse, Maria, older and more matronly than Luisa, her hands ruddy and thick and her uniform smelling of starch, roused me from sleep to feed me a bowl of chicken soup. The soup seemed to curb my fever, because some time after I’d eaten it I felt suddenly clear, clear enough to look around the room and realize where I was, and to see the one bed in the corner whose barred sides had been raised and whose occupant had been enclosed in a large plastic cube, two small grey tanks breathing coiled tubes into its canopied air. Maria had gone—she was not in her chair by the entrance, or behind the reception desk; and seeing that I was alone I climbed out of my bed and went to the one in the corner, wedging my face in between two bars to get up close to the cube. The baby was staring up at its plastic ceiling, waving its wrinkled limbs as if reaching for something above her. I tried to get its attention, tapped on the plastic, made small gurgling noises, and finally it turned towards me, spittle dribbling down its ruddy cheek. I made a face to make it laugh, but its small grey eyes—they were not yet the vivid blue they would become—seemed to stare right through me.

  Maria had not returned yet. I saw now that the clothes I had worn to the funeral were hanging on a rack near the doorway; I went over and pulled my pants on over my gown, then slipped through the reception room into the hall. A couple was coming in from the sun deck but they paid no attention to me, and I passed outside without resistance, through the same door that had cracked my bones the night of the storm. On the sun deck all the canvas chairs had been set out again in their orderly rows, as if nothing had happened; but it was supper hour, and the area was almost deserted. I skirted around the chairs until I came to the stern. At the other end of the ship the sun was only just setting; but beyond the stern the sky was already a deep blue, and it was hard to tell where the sky ended and the sea began.

  My fever had begun to creep up on me again, my head starting to spin and my knees growing weak. The words of a song were floating into my head, surfacing like sunken relics from a place that was no longer visible on the horizon, that had been swallowed into the sea:

  Vorrei far ritornare un’ ora sola

  Il tempo bello della contentezza

  Quando che noi giocando a vola vola

  Di baci i’ ti coprivo e di carezze.

  I realized with a start that I’d been singing out loud, a small mumble that died now as I became aware of it. I glanced behind me to see if anyone had heard. My mother’s grey-eyed German friend had just come onto the sun deck with a young woman; but they eased themselves into deck chairs without noticing me, laughing and talking in a language I couldn’t understand.

  In my pant pocket, where I’d put it that morning before the funeral, was my lucky one lira, and I pulled it out now to look at it. The coin was shiny and slick from handling; but the imprint had not worn away, as it did sometimes on older five and ten lire—the lines were still visible on the eagle’s wings, and the mark where Luciano had said a bullet had hit. But when I flipped the coin over to look at the bust on the other side, it slipped through my fingers—easily almost, without resistance, as if I had not tried to stop it, or had not believed it could fall; though now that it was falling my limbs seemed to have grown too thick and slow to stop it. For a long instant it tumbled down, winking darkly at me in the dying light as if to send me some final secret message, some magic consolation, if only I could make it out; but at last it fell with a hollow clang to the deck, where it rolled for a moment in a wide slow arc before tilting fatally toward the rails, and tumbling out to sea.