Lives of the Saints (10 page)

Monsignor Felano loomed over the church’s small lectern like a great mountain bird, his quiet presence seeming to force itself out over the pews, the church for a moment poised in an absolute stillness. He began quietly and calmly, in a polished Italian stripped clean of dialect, hard to follow at first but taking on more and more a clarity like glass, as if the words themselves had disappeared and only their meanings remained, hanging in the air like the wind.

‘Mary was a woman,’ he said, his long-fingered hands folded on the lectern, ‘inscribed with the grace of God. A woman for whom a virgin birth was merely the outward sign of an inner purity. But she was also a woman of flesh and blood, the wife of a simple labourer, such a woman’—and now he brought one hand up, two fingers extended, and gestured broadly across the church—‘as you might see walking down the streets of this village with a child on her arm or a jug of water on her head. The gospels tell us of a woman filled with goodness and grace. But there is a story that they don’t tell us. They don’t tell us’—stepping away from the lectern now, coming down towards the congregation—‘of the
shame
she must have endured from skeptics who did not believe in a virgin birth. They don’t tell us’—tempo and volume slowly building—‘of the
hardships
she and Joseph underwent to feed a family and raise it, the same hardships we all face, the hardships of the poor. They don’t tell us’—and now he was beating words out singly like bullets,
one hand striking the palm of the other in time—‘of the mother’s pain she must have felt when her
first born son
was spit on by the crowds and nailed to a cross like a common criminal.’ Then a pause, like stormy waters grown suddenly calm, and a voice that was almost a whisper saying, ‘This, too, is the story of Mary.’

As soon as the service had finished, four husky members of the
comitato
squeezed their way through the crowd at the back of the church and made their way up the aisle, bearing a wooden rack that was normally used to carry coffins from the church to the cemetery. They set the rack before the arched niche to the right of the chancel that held the Madonna, a large smiling figure in starry halo and robes of bright blue, the infant Jesus cradled in her lap. We remained in our seats while she was being set down onto the rack, Father Nick waiting patiently on the chancel steps to begin the procession, aspergillum in hand. The Monsignor had sat down again in one of the chancel pews—he would not, it seemed, be taking part in the procession, but was lending it the use of his
baldacchino
and his altar boys, who were struggling now to re-erect the canopy in the church aisle while the committee members waited to squeeze under it with their load.

The head of that year’s committee, Alfredo Mastroantonio, had come up a side aisle to greet the Monsignor. Alfredo, an uncle of Father Nick’s, was respected in the town because he didn’t work, living off the rent from land he’d inherited; and though he wasn’t rich, didn’t own a car or a big house, he always walked around the village in a suit, and he spoke to everyone in a careful, florid Italian, because he’d been to
lascuola superiore
in Rocca Secca. He approached the Monsignor now on bended knee, bringing his lips to the back of the Monsignor’s proffered hand and then loudly thanking
him for his presence, so that heads in the church turned towards him. When he rose his eyes shot briefly towards my grandfather a few feet away in the front pew; he seemed about to call him to the attention of the Monsignor, his hand gesturing out in our direction, but at the last instant he checked the gesture and suddenly clasped his hands together as if closing us out, then shifted position, still speaking brightly to the monsignor, until his back was to us.

The procession was underway now, Father Nick in front, walking solemnly towards the exit and sprinkling the aisle with his aspergillum, his voice rising up in song, and the Madonna, seated atop her litter like an ancient queen, the purple canopy above her, falling in behind him. Soon the aisles were crowded with people sliding out of their pews, the air filled with song:

My grandfather and I brought up the rear, he grim and silent beside me as we made our way down the aisle and out the door. The procession was stretched out now along the path that sloped down behind Di Lucci’s in a switchback that opened onto the main square; it moved slowly, and even at my grandfather’s pace we were able to keep up with it. But the grey mass which had been hanging in the air before the service had thickened, the wind grown wet and cold; and by the time my grandfather and I had brought the tail end of the procession into the square, a light drizzle had begun to fall.

From the square the procession moved down the S that cut towards the lower edge of town. The column had begun to swell as people who had missed the service came out of their homes to join it, lifting sweaters and jackets above their heads to shield themselves from the drizzle. In front of some houses sat tables covered with white cloth like altars and laid out with fruit and eggs and garlands of dried figs; here the procession would stop for a moment and women would come forward with their offerings, some placing fruits and eggs at the Madonna’s feet or hanging garlands around her neck, others thrusting bank notes into the plaster folds of her lap. From second floor balconies old black-cowled women tossed handfuls of grain or rice in the Madonna’s path as they did at weddings. One old woman threw out a fistful of coins, and a
flurry of boys raced out suddenly from the line of the procession to gather them up. But I did not join them, too shy to leave my grandfather’s side; instead I reached instinctively into my pocket to palm my lucky one
lira
, passing it between my fingers to test again its texture and weight.

People had crowded in behind my grandfather and me now, though a small sphere of open space seemed to circle us, room enough for my grandfather to swing his cane freely. I had begun to sing, but beside me my grandfather’s lips remained sealed in stony silence, his cane swinging with a stiff, determined rhythm over the mud-slicked cobblestones. Finally the procession branched off via San Giuseppe onto Giovanni Battista, the poorer section of town, where Fabrizio lived, the street here unpaved, turned now into a thick imprinted paste under the rain and the marchers’ feet. The houses in this part of the village were built of the same thick stone as in the rest of the village, but were single-storied and more ramshackle, paint on door frames peeling, the wood underneath crumbled and rotting, windows covered in some houses only with yellowed oil-paper. Some of the houses were deserted, their owners gone to America, the shutters nailed closed and the doors boarded up, walls beginning to crumble, roofs caved in from rot and termites. We passed Fabrizio’s house, ramshackle like the rest, its tiled roof slanting in a single slope from back to front. I had never been inside it, because Fabrizio’s mother, a gaunt dark-eyed woman with a limp, always eyed me with suspicion and made me wait outside when I came to call; but from the doorway I’d made out a single dim room split down the centre by a soiled curtain, a few spare furnishings, a floor of plain hardened dirt, a fireplace that seemed simply a hollow in the wall. At night, Fabrizio had told me, he and his family slept on one side of the curtain, the goats and sheep on the other. The house
seemed deserted now, no one standing before the doorway to make an offering; the family was likely out working in the fields, Fabrizio’s father one of the few in the village who seldom made a contribution for the festival.

But as we came to the end of the street, where it sloped down in a sharp switchback to join up again with via San Giuseppe, someone whispered to me from an alleyway.

‘Oh, Vittò.’

It was Fabrizio, motioning me towards him from the shadow of the alley, his cap drooping from the rain, his naked shins glistening with wet.

‘I had the sheep out,’ he said, grinning, ‘but I left them in the pasture to come and see the procession. I don’t have to cut wheat any more because I cut myself.’ He showed me a long black-scabbed scar across his calf where he had caught himself with his scythe.

‘Won’t the sheep get lost?’

‘
Beh
, whenever I want to go for a walk I make them jump in that hole near the cemetery where people used to hide during the war. But
madonna
! when I have to get them out later. They’re as fat as cows.’

On the street behind us the last stragglers of the procession were still filing by, their voices echoing briefly in the alley as they passed. Fabrizio, looking out towards them, ducked down suddenly and pulled me deeper into the alley.

‘Christ,’ he said, crouching in the shadows, ‘I think my aunt Carmella saw me. If she tells my father I was talking to you he’ll break my balls.’

Instinctively I crouched down now too and glanced behind me into the street, feeling suddenly fugitive.

‘It’s not because of you,’ Fabrizio said, whispering now, our voices seeming suddenly loud with the fading of the procession’s
song. ‘It’s because of your mother and the snake.
Lu malocchiu
.’ He twisted his face into a scowl and brought two fingers up to his head as horns, to mimic the evil eye.

I crouched silently for a moment.

‘Can’t we play together tonight?’ I said finally.

‘It’s not safe,’ Fabrizio said. ‘We have to wait till school starts. Then we’ll have some laughs. My father’s smoking cigarettes with filters on them now.’

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette grown damp and soft with the rain.

‘Keep this for later,’ he whispered. ‘I have to go back to the sheep.’

The rain had stopped now, small patches of limpid blue appearing in the canopy of grey overhead. The procession had made its way back up via San Giuseppe and through the square again, Father Nicola still in front, shaking his aspergillum, holy water mingling with the mud underfoot, Mother Mary still riding dry and purple-canopied above the crowd, bobbing with the movement of her bearers, though her canopy sagged now from the wet and from the rice and grain that had collected in it. A small crowd of watchers, Romans, mainly, stood waving at the procession from under the awning of Di Lucci’s terrace, not wanting to dirty their clothes in the mud and rain.

I took my place again next to my grandfather, who still plodded stiff and silent over the mud-slicked street, his heavy shoes clacking like hooves against the cobblestones. The wind had stiffened, but overhead the sky was clearing quickly, the patches of blue widening as the clouds flitted like ghosts towards the east, torn now into a thousand ragged shreds. As we approached the edge of town a cold sun appeared suddenly, reflecting gold and silver from the droplets of rain falling from the eaves of houses. As we approached our own house, I looked out from
the line of the procession to see if my mother would appear at the door as the Madonna passed; but the house seemed deserted, even the curtains on the upper-storey balcony drawn.

The procession ended about a half-mile out of town, at the rusted iron gates that led down to the cemetery. The cemetery itself, which filled only a small plot of hedged-in land—the newly dead were usually buried in old grave sites, to save on land, a heap of anonymous bones unearthed each time a new grave was dug—lay on a grassy plateau at the bottom of a steeply-sloping dirt path; but at the cemetery gates, before the path sloped downward, stood a small, ancient chapel, its roof and walls overgrown with moss and creeping vines. The chapel would serve as the Madonna’s home until Easter, when another procession would bring her back to the church. Inside, the chapel was unadorned, to avoid temptation for thieves, the only spots of colour the small circular window of stained glass at the peak of the back wall and the mottled greens and browns of the slab of serpentine marble that formed the chapel’s tiny altar. Every year the Madonna was set in a fireplace-sized niche in the chapel’s back wall, from where she would have a clear view of the valley through the fans of clear glass in the upper half of the chapel door, and could watch over the greening of the slopes in the spring.

I had left my grandfather’s side and wormed my way up to the chapel doorway to watch the men setting the Madonna in her grotto. The canopy had been collapsed and two of the Madonna’s bearers had lifted the statue off the rack and were squeezing it now through the narrow chapel door, a small gasp coming up from the crowd as one of them stumbled on the chapel’s threshold and almost lost his grip.

‘Gently now,’ Father Nick said from inside, standing by officiously as the men squeezed past him. ‘The material is very
fragile. Perhaps some day we will have a real Madonna, made of marble.’ He smiled at his joke.

‘With all due respect,’ one of the men said, gently forcing the statue into its niche, ‘this one is real too, if I can believe my shoulders. If you get a marble one you’ll have to leave it here the whole year, because no one will be able to carry it.’

‘If you get a marble one,’ someone beside me said, ‘you’ll have to make sure she isn’t pregnant yet, to cut down on the weight.’

‘Or she’ll have to leave the baby at home, like everyone else.’

But now an ear-splitting explosion echoed through the valley, and all eyes turned skyward, to where a wisp of white smoke was still lingering against the sky’s now almost solid blue. In a moment another small burst of white appeared, blossoming in the air like a flower, followed a split second later by its accompanying bang, and then at short intervals a third and a fourth; and finally a long series of bursts and blasts in quick succession, again, again, and again, the echoes accumulating one on top of the other until the air rang with them. These were the first of the fireworks, testaments to the power of loud noises, and announcing to all the valley that tonight there would be feasting and song in Valle del Sole.