Lives of the Saints (16 page)

‘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.

By Christmas my mother’s loose dresses had begun to swell around her waist, hanging like tents above her shins; and with each day the tension in our house seemed to thicken, as if the swelling itself had become the measure of it, was responding to it like a gauge or meter. Then on Christmas morning, my grandfather broke a silence that had lasted more than two months.

‘Get dressed,’ he said to my mother. ‘You’re coming to church.’

My mother was standing at the side counter scrubbing a pot with fistfuls of dirt.

‘He’s crazy,’ she muttered, when my grandfather had gone into his room to dress; but after a moment she abruptly ceased her scrubbing, wiped her hands on her apron, and went up to her room.

I was the first to be dressed, and stood waiting at the kitchen door in my Sunday suit and blackened shoes, staring out into the street. The morning was cold and clear and brilliant, the village coated with a thin crust of snow that had fallen in the night; the coldness crept up at my ankles and wrists, my suit grown too small, almost two years old now, not replaced that year as I’d hoped it would by a new one from Rocca Secca. Finally the bell began to toll, with all the unbridled violence and clarity of a crisp winter morning, cracking the air with its peals. The bell was coated with a layer of pure silver: during the war, it was said, Father Nick’s predecessor had smeared it with soot to protect it from the Germans, and my mother said that Father Nick had not cleaned it since; but this morning it was polished to a sheen, glinting brightly from its tower as it swung to and fro and caught the sun, seeming to silver the air with its fine hollow ringing.

My grandfather emerged finally from his room in his fedora and baggy corduroy suit, his medals pinned in a line to his breast pocket, the silver and bronze medallions of them freshly polished. He came up to the door and stared into the street, grimacing at the light.

‘Let’s go,’ he said finally.

But the door to my mother’s room creaked open now and my mother appeared at the top of the stairs, dressed not in one of her loose dresses but in a white blouse and a black skirt which fit tight around her waist, the swell there rising up like a hill. She had wrapped a blue shawl around her shoulders, her hair flowing over it in loose waves, and her face was composed in a look of stern resoluteness, her eyes suddenly alive again for the first time in months, as if they had caught a glint of light and scattered it back like cut glass.

Outside, the sun had already begun to melt the night’s snow,
crystal drops falling from the eaves of houses, small icicles forming on the goat horns posted above doorways to protect against the evil eye. The bells had stopped tolling now, but up ahead some of the villagers were still passing through the square. Then behind us a door creaked open and a babble of family noises filled the street, curses and babies’ cries—the Mastronardis, late for mass. But as they came up behind us, overtaking us because of my grandfather’s slow pace, their voices went suddenly quiet. They made a small arc around us, eyes averted, mumbling holiday greetings which my grandfather returned with a stiff formality.

We would be the last to arrive. The church would be full today, congregants spilling out into the porch; but a few places would still have been left free for my grandfather in the front pew, no one having thought yet to strip that privilege from him. In a moment the Mastronardis, too, had disappeared up the church steps, and when we came finally into the square, our shoes crunching strangely loud against the snow underfoot, it was deserted and still, the barren trees on the embankment leaning towards us like silent magi, offering down their crystal drops of melting snow.

If the cock was in the fields, the men of Valle del Sole said, the hen would lay her eggs in someone else’s nest. Yet that was what the men had always done, left their wives behind while they travelled out to farm their own fields or to earn a wage, away for days or months at a time, or now, if they worked in France or Switzerland, or across the sea, sometimes for years. Their fears had given birth to a wealth of proverbs: ‘Guard your women like your chickens,’ they said, ‘or they’ll make food for the neighbour’s table;’ or ‘A woman is like a goat: she’ll eat anything she sees in front of her.’ Yet it was the women of the village who had been harshest towards my mother, and who watched hawk-eyed from their stoops for the slow progress of her disease, as if they had taken it upon themselves to keep the disease from spreading; and even at mass now, and afterwards
as we filed back into the village, the men seemed merely awkward and put out by my mother’s presence, passing by us stoop-shouldered, their eyes averted almost guiltily, as if they had been forced into a posture that did not sit well with them, while the women avoided my mother still with a cold-eyed rectitude, hurrying their children around us with their backs straight and their eyes forward.

But later, after we’d finished a sullen meal with Zia Lucia and Marta, my mother just clearing away the dishes, there was a knock at our door. Marta’s eyes darted to the door with a look of wild-eyed curiosity, but for a moment no one moved to answer it, as if we could not make sense of the sound we’d heard there.

‘Go on, Vittorio, open it,’ Zia Lucia said finally.

A moment later Giuseppina and her husband and children were huddled in a close group inside the doorway, reeking of winter and looking stiff and formal in their Christmas clothing. Almost in unison they uttered a forced ‘
buon natale
,’ Giuseppina moving awkwardly towards the centre of the room, offering a tray she’d held in the crook of an arm towards my mother as she pulled a white cloth from it.

‘I brought you some pastries,’ she said. ‘You probably didn’t have time to make any yourself.’

She’d brought a tray of
ostie
, paper-thin wafers like large communion hosts sandwiching a thick layer of honey and chopped almonds. Every family in the village had irons for making their
ostie
and their
cancelle
, crusty diamond-shaped waffles, at holiday times, the irons made up by the blacksmith in Rocca Secca and bearing the family name or initial on the plates, so it came out in relief on each pastry; but this Christmas our own irons had sat in their corner of the kitchen untouched.