Lives of the Saints (2 page)

I sat for a moment dazed where I had fallen, my head pounding and my palms scraped and bleeding from my fall. The thick growth of bushes and weeds and saplings that lined the ravine cut off my view of the pasture which opened out beyond it; but up on the high road I made out a glint of metal amidst a clump of trees that rose up from the bank of a curve. As I watched, a small figure scrambled up the slope beneath the trees and a moment later an engine sputtered distantly to life and a small car pulled suddenly out of the trees’ shadow, disappearing almost at once around a corner of the mountain in the direction of Castilucci.

Someone, though, was still in the stable. My mother: I came in to find her pouring water from a bucket into the pigs’ trough
as if nothing had happened, a lantern burning pale blue from a rafter above her.

‘Ah, it’s you,’ she said, turning. She ran a hand through her hair to pull away a stick of straw dangling from it. ‘I thought you were studying your mathematics.’

‘I heard someone yelling,’ I said.

‘Oh, that was nothing. I saw a snake.’

‘It wasn’t you, it was a man.’

My mother pursed her lips and drew them to one side, the way she did when she was considering a problem. She crouched down in front of me.

‘What did you see when you came down here?’ she said finally. She stared at me hard a moment, her eyes narrowed; but when I did not answer she put her hands gently on my shoulders.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ she said, more softly. ‘Maybe other people will ask you too. What will you tell them?’ Question and answer: that was how
la maestra
taught us our lessons at school and how Father Nicola, the village priest, taught us our catechism. Every question had its right response; from everything you had heard and learned you had to pick out only what was necessary, only what was required.

‘I didn’t see anything,’ I said finally.

For a moment my mother stared at me through narrowed eyes again, as if to gauge the solemnity of my response; but finally she leaned forward to plant a kiss on my forehead. In the sanction of her kiss it seemed possible for an instant that I had told the truth, that the strange blue eyes had been an aberration, a trick of the sunlight. But I had noticed now the two small pin pricks of red on my mother’s ankle.

‘
Mamma
,’ I said, ‘there’s some blood on your foot.’

My mother looked down at her ankle.

‘
Gesù Crist’ e Maria.
’

She touched a finger to the blood and smeared it across her shin.

‘Run up quick to Di Lucci’s,’ she said, ‘and get him to bring his car. Tell him I’ve been bitten by a snake.’

Antonio Di Lucci’s bar stood at the point where the big S cut by via San Giuseppe widened into the village square, tucked back against the embankment that the church and the schoolhouse sat on. Halfway up the street I could already see my grandfather and Di Lucci, a balding, thick-waisted man whose wrinkled, loose-skinned face had a larger-than-life animation about it, as if it were a mask, playing cards on the terrace.

‘
Mamma
’s been bitten by a snake!’ I yelled out. The village women who had come out after their siesta to knit on their front steps stared after me as I ran; others popped their heads out of doorways and over balconies.

‘Come quickly!
Mamma
’s been bitten by a snake!’ My grandfather was already hurrying down the terrace steps by the time I got to the bar, one hand gripping the rail and the other his cane.

‘Andò!’ he called out to Di Lucci, who was still standing open-mouthed on the terrace. ‘What are you waiting for? Get your car!’

Di Lucci owned the only car in Valle del Sole, a battered orange Cinquecento which he had bought used in Rocca Secca and which he parked prominently next to his bar, despite the envy it was likely to inspire there. In a minute we were scrambling into it, I crawling into the cramped space in back while Di Lucci struggled to help my grandfather pull his legs into the front passenger seat.

‘
Basta
, Andò, enough, I’m not a child,’ my grandfather said, waving Di Lucci away. ‘Just get in and drive.’ Di Lucci squeezed his thick body into the driver’s seat and moved his hand towards the ignition.

‘The keys! I’ve forgotten the keys!’

He scrambled back out of his seat. From the centre of the square he shouted up to a balcony above the bar’s terrace, holding a hand up to shield his eyes from the sun.

‘Marì! MARIA! Where are the keys to the car?’ ‘Oh, Andò!’ Di Lucci’s wife, a stout woman with the thick-boned build of an ox, had come out on the balcony. ‘Why are you yelling like a madman? How should I know where you put the keys? Do I drive your car? Aren’t they in the glove compartment where you always put them? Where are you going with the car?’

Di Lucci hurried back to the car. A few strands of his thin hair had fallen across his forehead and his face had flushed a deep red. He carried his belly in front of him like a huge gourd.

‘Hurry up, Andò,
per l’amore di Cristo
,’ my grandfather said. ‘Here, I’ve got the keys.’

Di Lucci’s wife was still watching us from the balcony.

‘
Ma
Andò, where are you going, I just finished making your lunch, if it gets cold you can feed it to the pigs!’

‘Look after the store,’ Di Lucci called out through his open window, pulling into the square with a lurch. ‘The mayor’s daughter has been bitten by a snake!’ From the back window of the car I saw Di Lucci’s wife make a quick sign of the cross.

The front steps and balconies along via San Giuseppe were lined now with women and children. As Di Lucci tried to manouevre through the narrow street some of them crowded up to the windows to find out what had happened.

‘Out of the way,
per favore
!’ Di Lucci shouted, leaning on his horn. ‘Can’t you see we’re in a hurry?’

By the time we had reached my grandfather’s house we had a crowd in tow, women dropping their knitting or their washing to fall in behind us, diapered toddlers waddling after them, bawling at being left behind, older children running ahead and mimicking Di Lucci’s curses. Even my old aunt Lucia, my grandfather’s sister, who seldom moved out of the comfort of her kitchen, had come out to her front door to see what the commotion was, her club-footed daughter Marta staring out of the shadows behind her. But when we pulled up in front of my grandfather’s house the noise of the crowd fell down to a murmur, because there was my mother sitting calmly on the stone bench as if nothing had happened, one leg crossed over the other, her hands folded neatly on her lap. She had put on a new dress, a sleek flowered one she had bought in Rocca Secca when some money had come from my father, and had combed out her hair. Di Lucci pulled up his brake.

‘Vittorio said you’d been bitten by a snake,’ he said, suddenly peevish.

The village women hung back, keeping the car between themselves and my mother.

‘Yes,’ my mother said simply, rising. She came around to the driver’s side of the car, the women opening up a path for her.

‘Well aren’t you going to let me in?’ Di Lucci, struggling to reassert some dignity after his excitement, collected himself slowly and heaved himself out of the car.

‘You’d think you were just going to the market,’ he said, pulling back his seat. Before letting my mother in he leaned inside. ‘Vittorio, you get out and wait at home.’

‘No,’ my mother said behind him. ‘I want him to come with me.’

‘Ma Andò,’ my grandfather said, ‘
per l’amore di Dio
, just let her get in the car and let’s go.’

‘Anyhow it seems funny to me,’ Di Lucci muttered, still put off by my mother’s unexpected calm; but finally we ground into gear and moved up towards the high road, leaving the village women behind us. A few of my schoolmates ran alongside us before being discouraged by the dust. My grandfather and Di Lucci rolled up their windows, the car rattling wildly now from the ruts and gullies in the road; and finally my grandfather shifted in his seat and turned with a grimace to my mother.

‘Where did it bite you?’

‘On the ankle,’ my mother said.

‘Why didn’t you tie something around your leg?’

‘I didn’t think of it.’

‘Vittorio,’ my grandfather said, ‘take off your shirt.’ My mother helped me with the buttons, then peeled the shirt off my back and over my arms the way she did when she got me ready for bed.

‘How long ago were you bitten?’ my grandfather said.

‘Ten minutes or so.’

‘Tie it a little ways up from the bite.’

My mother twisted the shirt into a half-knot part way up her calf.

‘Vittorio, help her to pull it tight. You take one end while she
holds the other. Pull until it hurts.’

I pulled on my end with all my strength while my mother pulled on hers. The cloth sank into her leg and the skin around it turned white, but my mother did not wince or grimace. In the village, my mother was famous for her indifference to pain: everyone told the story about my own birth, how for three weeks I didn’t want to come out, but my mother still went down to the river with the other women to do her washing, and how when the day finally came my mother didn’t make a sound, and the midwife thought she had fallen asleep. At home, when she was baking bread, I’d seen my mother pull hot bricks from the fireplace with her bare hands, lifting them in one smooth motion into the oven.

‘Pull harder,’ my grandfather said.

We pulled on the shirt ends again, the cloth burning against my palm. My mother took up the loose ends and tied them neatly into a knot. The snake’s poison hadn’t changed the way she acted as I thought it would, wasn’t making her groan or swoon, her eyes still bright and alert, and her lips stretched into what seemed the faintest hint of a smile, as if she was remembering something pleasant; but her ankle now had begun to swell visibly.

‘You have to stop the blood,’ Di Lucci said. We had pulled onto the main road, and Di Lucci was picking up speed. ‘Remember when Giuseppe
lu forestier
was bitten down by the Valley of the Pigs? He was hoeing his vineyard, I remember it like yesterday—they had to cut his leg off because the poison had spread too far.’

‘Don’t be an idiot,’ my grandfather said. ‘They cut off his leg because some fool tried to get out the poison with a rusty knife. And slow down. These roads were made for mules, not cars.’

The main road was less pitted and scarred than the trail
which led into Valle del Sole: work crews came through after the spring rains and smashed up rocks and stones from the countryside into coarse gravel which they used to fill in gullies and potholes. But the road had been carved straight out of the mountainside, and followed every one of the mountain’s erratic curves, with little margin for error if you met a car or cart moving in the opposite direction, only a few feet of clearance between a solid rock wall on one side and a steep slope on the other. Di Lucci, though, was taking the curves wide and fast, my mother and I swaying against each other in the back seat.

‘For God’s sake, Andò, there’s no need to kill us all,’ my grandfather said, but Di Lucci did not let up on his speed, relying on his horn to warn in time whatever lay in wait around corners. He brushed off now a close call with a peasant and his hay-laden mule.

‘Damn peasants,’ he said. ‘Most of them have never seen a car before.’ Through the back window I saw the mule’s wizened owner raise an angry fist after us.

Di Lucci took his eyes off the road now to shoot a quick sidelong glance into the back seat.

‘What colour was the snake?’ he asked, a little breathless.

‘Green,’ I said, without thinking.

‘Green? You saw it too? Well, green is better than brown. Did it come from the right or the left?’

Di Lucci was up on his snake lore.

‘Never mind about your superstitions,’ my grandfather said. ‘What do you know about snakes?’

‘Giuseppe
lu forestier
, like I was telling you—’

‘We don’t want to hear about Giuseppe
lu forestier
.’

‘
Beh, scusate
, I just thought—’

‘Just think about your driving.’

Di Lucci remained silent for a moment, putting his energies
into frightening a flock of approaching sheep to the side of the road, his hand leaning on his horn. We trundled past the sheep just as their shepherd, thrashing out wildly with his staff, beat the last of them into single file against the mountain face. But now Di Lucci was ready for another volley.

‘Where did it bite you?’

My mother let out a sigh.

‘Andò, you heard me say just a few minutes ago. On the ankle.’

‘Yes, of course, on the ankle, but where were you when it bit you on the ankle?’

‘Too close to a snake.’

‘
Ma, scusate
, Cristina, I’m asking a simple question.’

‘You ask too many questions,’ my mother said. ‘You’re like an old woman. You’ve been sitting in that bar too long, listening to other people’s nonsense.’

‘Well maybe the doctor will want to know some of these things. What happens if you faint before we get to the hospital? Giuseppe
lu forestier
—’

‘
Scusa
, Andò, what does the doctor care where I was when the snake bit me?’ my mother said, her voice tinged with irritation. ‘If it bit me in the church, or in the stable, what’s the difference?’

Di Lucci paused for an instant, pensive, the way he did when he was adding up a total at his store.

‘So you were in the stable then,’ he said finally.

‘
Beh
, fine, I was in the stable then! Are you happy now?’

Di Lucci did in fact seem suddenly calm and pleased, as if my mother’s anger had given him the upper hand; and he paused for an instant to sweep his glance nonchalantly across the valley, as if to say that he could go on with his questions now or not, it made no difference to him. As we approached Rocca
Secca he eased down on the clutch and downshifted, the gears catching the engine again with uncommon smoothness.

‘And what were you doing in the stable?’ he said finally.

‘Oh, Andò,
basta
!’ my mother said. ‘What does anyone do in the stable? I was feeding the pigs!’