Lives of the Saints (11 page)

It was approaching nightfall by the time my grandfather and I returned home, the sun setting red and cold behind Castilucci, my bones chilled from the afternoon rain. Our kitchen, though, was warm, my mother sitting in front of a small fire, her body slouched forward to take in the heat. Two plates had been set on the table, a platter between them holding bread and a few thick slices of cheese, a decanter of wine at my grandfather’s place.

‘You couldn’t have made some soup?’ my grandfather said, but my mother did not turn away from the fire. My grandfather draped his jacket over the back of a chair and set it before the fire, then moved towards his room.

‘It’s all right to waste firewood to keep your feet warm, but not to feed your family.’

When we had changed from our damp clothes my grandfather and I sat down at the table to eat, my mother keeping her place by the fire. My grandfather downed his wine now the way
Tatone
Vittorio used to, in short quick gulps that emptied a glass in a few draughts; though the wine did not unleash his anger the way it had with my grandfather Vittorio, only seemed to wind it up more tightly inside him.

‘Mamma,’ I whispered, going up to her when I had finished eating, ‘aren’t you coming to listen to the music tonight?’

‘I’m not feeling very well,’ she said tonelessly. ‘I think I’ll just go to bed.’

‘Fool!’ my grandfather said suddenly, wheeling around in his chair. ‘You might as well make an announcement!’

My mother shifted in her chair, but did not turn towards him.

‘Like you did last night?’ she said finally.

‘What I do is my own business.’

‘And what I do,’ my mother said softly, staring into the fire as if sharing a secret with it, ‘is my business.’

‘Not while you’re living in this house,
porca madonna!
Not while you want to remain my daughter!’

His face flushed, my grandfather took up his cane and rose from his chair, leaving a plate of unfinished food. When he had gone into his room and closed the door my mother rose and cleared the table, tossing the remains of my grandfather’s food into the fire—something she never did: even the bread might have been saved for the pigs—and then going upstairs. I sat in front of the fire, prodding the embers; the piece of cheese my mother had thrown there sizzled richly for a moment before it burst finally into flames. At last my grandfather came out of his room, wearing a heavy sweater of dark wool, his suit jacket with its row of medals still drying before the fire.

‘Put on your coat,’ he said gruffly. ‘It’ll be cold.’ But now the door of my mother’s room opened and she came downstairs with my coat in hand, a thick shawl draped around her shoulders. My grandfather glanced up at her briefly as she came down the stairs and then stepped out into the darkening street, my mother and I following him, melting soon into the file of other villagers and visitors making their way to the square.

The street was lined now with cars and carts that had squeezed up along the gutter, mules snorting and braying in the chill, tugging against reins that had been tied to car fenders or to rings embedded in the fronts of houses. The square itself was already alive with people, small crowds of men in thick sweaters and women in shawls gathered around dim lanterns, children racing in and out of the shadows. Many of the chairs that had been set out in the square were filled, the older women sitting in front, to have a good view of the dance area: by the end of the evening they would be able to predict with accuracy the marriages of the coming spring. There was a bustle of activity around Di Lucci’s terrace, a steady flow of people moving in and out through the door with glasses of beer or wine in hand, dark-haired young men leaning up against the railing, a crowd gathered around a table where a card game was in progress.

To the side of the terrace, wedged between a corner of the bandstand and the bar, was a large bus that had somehow managed to squeeze its way up via San Giuseppe. Inscribed in large black capitals on its back door were the words ‘
Capo di Molise
,’ ‘
Gruppo Folkloristico
’ in smaller capitals beneath. This was the band that would be playing tonight, its presence a coup for the
comitato
, made possible by money from America: it was said the band was known all over Italy, its songs often played on the radio. Usually Valle del Sole hired a band from Rocca Secca or Capracotta, motley assortments of singers, sometimes
of a single family, who arranged themselves in a semicircle on stage as if for a wedding photograph and followed the lead of a sole accordion player, with occasionally a drum and a horn or trombone for accompaniment. But
Capo di Molise
had come up all the way from Campobasso, a trip that would have taken the better part of a day; and the band’s equipment, already arranged under the stage’s canopy, gleaming silver and black and blood red under the light of a few lanterns, looked strange and unreal, like something that had no connection to the square or the people gathered there, that might have descended suddenly from the sky to impose itself among us.

Valle del Sole did not have any electrical service; but a web of wires led away from the band’s equipment, connecting finally to a large black cable that snaked along the ground towards the band’s bus. And around the bandstand, suspended from post to post, hung a string of white and orange bulbs, with two other strings stretching out from the stage over the dance area, one ending at Di Lucci’s terrace, the other at the eaves of the house across the square, the bulbs swaying like tiny balloons in the evening chill. For years now the people of Valle del Sole had anxiously awaited
la luce
, light, pressing my grandfather to lobby the government representative in Rocca Secca; and though a project had actually got underway once, the Communists from Castilucci, when they had learned that the line would not be extended as far as their town, had gone out in the night and set fire to the machinery doing the work, and all that remained of the effort now was a half mile of wireless poles that stretched like dead trees from the edge of Rocca Secca down the high road towards Valle del Sole. But tonight, it seemed, we were to have light, the white and amber bulbs hanging patiently above us, as if some miracle was shortly to fire them. The members of the
comitato
, for their part, rebuffed the
questions that were put to them with indifferent authority.

‘You’ll see,’ they said. ‘Like magic. Poof!’

But my grandfather led the way through the crowd without glancing right or left, mindless of the buzz of curiosity the lights seemed to have sparked. Towards the far side of the square, I caught sight of Fabrizio’s older brother Fulvio smoking a cigarette amidst a group of older boys. Fulvio was five or six years older than I was; he had been pulled out of school early to help his father in the fields, his body grown as tawny and muscled as a young man’s.

‘Looking for Fabrizio, eh?’ he said, catching my glance as I passed. ‘He’s sick at home. He’s got a broken ass.’ The boys around him laughed.

My grandfather led us to the very back row of seats. For a long time the seats beside us remained empty; but finally someone emerged from the chatter of familiar voices behind us, a slim, dark-eyed man in a fedora and well-tailored blue suit who nodded respectfully to my grandfather before sitting down beside my mother.

‘Alfredo!’ my mother said. ‘No one told me you were back.’

‘I got in last night,’ the man said, speaking with the recognizable twang of Castilucci’s dialect. He took off his hat and stared into it, avoiding my mother’s gaze. ‘I came back to sell my land.’

‘Sell your land? Why, to pay for that suit? You look like someone from the camorra.’

‘I’m bringing my family back to Canada,’ he said. ‘Five years is long enough to be separated.’

‘It doesn’t look like you mind being separated tonight. I don’t see your wife with you.’

But the man didn’t smile.

‘I brought you something from your husband,’ he said after a pause. He reached into an inside pocket and handed my
mother an envelope. When she unfolded the letter inside a bank note fell into her lap, the number 50 inscribed in each of its corners.

‘What’s this?’

The man shrugged.

‘Something to get you through the winter.’

‘He sends me money through the bank,’ my mother said. ‘He probably needs this more than I do—I hear he’s living in a chicken coop.’

‘It’s a room attached to Umberto Di Menna’s barn,’ Alfredo said. ‘He must have told you in his letters. They fixed it up so he has water and electricity.’

‘He doesn’t tell me anything in his letters,’ my mother said. ‘He only complains. Here, look for yourself.’ She scanned quickly the letter the man had given her. ‘Ah,
perfetto
, here—“Make sure Vittorio has some warm clothes for the winter.” And I should feel lucky he reminds me, because otherwise the poor boy would run around naked.’

Alfredo fingered the rim of his hat.

‘He’s going to buy a farm,’ he said. ‘He wants to bring you over.’

‘He knows I won’t leave my father,’ my mother said, a little quickly. ‘Anyway if he thinks I’ll go there to live in a barn he’s wrong. We have some fine stables right here in Valle del Sole.’

My grandfather, through this conversation, had been staring up towards the stage as if wrapped in his own thoughts; but now he rose up suddenly on his cane.

‘
Brava
,’ he muttered, spitting the word out with such restrained force and contempt it seemed to hang in the air like ice. ‘God forgive me for raising you to talk like an idiot.’

He started back across the square, the crowd opening to let him pass and then swallowing him up again. Alfredo’s eyes
caught my mother’s for a moment, and she looked away from him awkwardly, her cheeks flushed. When Alfredo spoke again a peremptory note had crept into his voice.

‘It hasn’t been easy for Mario these last months. He lost his job at the factory, but still he sends you money, even if he has to borrow it.’

‘He lost his job because he can’t get along with anyone. I hear things too, even if he doesn’t tell me. And I know Mario—he’s always right, there’s no way to talk to him. The only way he knows how to talk is with the back of his hand. Now he sends me money because he’s too proud to admit he was fired.’

‘That’s right, you hear things,’ Alfredo said, in a low voice, almost menacing. ‘And how long do you think it takes people there to hear things? Then you’ll see if he still sends you money.’

‘Ah, so that’s it, isn’t it?
Che cretino!
You think it’s the money I want, don’t you? Here, take it back to him,
stronzo
, tell him I don’t need his money.’ My mother crumpled the bill she still held in one hand and stuffed it in Alfredo’s side pocket. ‘Or tell him whatever you like, I don’t care.’

Alfredo pulled the bill out of his pocket and slowly smoothed it, then folded it into a tight wad and wedged it into the wicker of his chair seat.

‘I won’t be the one to tell him anything,’ he said, rising. ‘But it’s for his sake, not for yours.’

When he had gone my mother pulled the bill free from the chair and unfurled it.

‘Idiot,’ she muttered, tearing the bill down the centre with a quick jerk, then tearing the halves again. She glanced to her side and behind her as if looking for a place to discard the shreds; but finally she stuffed them into the pocket of her skirt.

The show was beginning now. After a long speech praising the accomplishments of that year’s committee, the chairman
introduced the first act, Silvio the postman, who every year opened the Saturday night festivities with some of his poems. Silvio’s father had made a small fortune in America before the first war, and had sent his son to university; but there Silvio had gotten in with some young men who had taken advantage of him and had begun to drink and gamble, and finally his father had had to leave the village to fetch his son home, and to pay the debts Silvio had accumulated from his gambling. They said that when his father found him he was huddled in rags in front of a small fire in his room, burning pages from Dante to keep the fire going. Now he worked as the village postman, delivering mail in the morning and drinking alone for the rest of the day in the large house his father had built with American money. His parents were both dead, much of the father’s fortune lost on Silvio’s failed education and debts; and Silvio’s yearly recitations had become a kind of joke the villagers indulged in, as if to remind themselves of the dangers of high aspirations. Silvio stood now centre stage in the light of a few lamps, his checkered suit too tight over his plumpish body, a missing button on his shirt revealing a patch of pink, hairless belly. His collar, adorned with a small black bow tie, was buttoned tight, his head seeming squeezed out of it like a balloon, his ruddy cheeks showing the effects of too much wine; though his eyes, dark pools that brimmed with moisture, seemed to belong to a different person, as if his body was a mask or costume that had trapped some stranger inside it.

‘
Signor’ e signori
,’ he started, in meticulous Italian, ‘it is a great honour to be asked again to share my little poems with you—’

‘Bravo, Silvio!’ someone shouted.

‘Never mind the speech! Give us a poem!’ Other people took
up the shout.

‘Oh, Silvó, a poem! A poem from the gods!’ ‘Every year it’s the same
stupidaggini
,’ my mother said. ‘
E quel cretino
, smiling through it all like a child. As if these people knew anything more than sheep and goats.’ Silvio turned his eyes skyward and began to recite, mingling poems about love and the countryside with ballads that told the stories of the bandit-heroes who had fought against Garibaldi, his fist coming up often to strike his breast or pound the air with emphasis. With each poem the crowd applauded and cheered, goading Silvio on to greater animation. He ended with a paean to the Madonna, hands clasped against his breast like a Roman orator’s: