Lives of the Saints (3 page)

Now my grandfather, who seemed to have been paying much more attention to Di Lucci’s driving than to this conversation, swivelled his head towards the back seat again.

‘I thought you fed the animals this morning.’

‘I was checking their water,’ my mother said impatiently. She turned away towards her window. ‘I didn’t have time to fill the troughs this morning.’

Bumbling Di Lucci, man of light. Did he know something of what had gone on in our stable, of those blue eyes that had swooped down on me? Or was he just following the villager’s instinct that beneath every simple event there lurked some dark scandal? At any rate, he had succeeded now in causing a ripple to appear on the surface of my mother’s calm; and if his small discovery made little difference in the long run, it gave him at least a claim to priority. No doubt a few weeks later he could have been seen leaning over the counter of his bar and whispering to one of his patrons: ‘And then the old man turned to her and said, “But you fed the animals this morning.”
You fed the animals this morning
. That’s when I knew.’

The hospital in Rocca Secca was on the outskirts of town, a high-walled medieval building that had been an orphanage before the second war. We entered through massive front doors into a large reception room filled with whispers and moans, people everywhere, leaning against walls, sitting on the floor, shuffling around the room like ghosts—hard-featured peasants, mainly, some dressed awkwardly in Sunday suits but many still in their dirty working clothes, nursing bandaged limbs or internal ailments that showed themselves only in their low moans and pale skin. The only light in the room came from two tall narrow windows in one wall; a naked bulb hung down from the centre of the high ceiling, but it was not lit. A few babies were crying, but their wails seemed stifled by an atmosphere of almost religious reverence that hung over the room;
and remembering that I was in my bare feet and undershirt I felt suddenly ashamed, like in dreams I had where I found myself inexplicably naked in school or in church.

A small desk was wedged in one corner of the room, and a woman in nurse’s uniform and cap sat behind it painstakingly applying a coloured liquid to her fingernails with a tiny brush. Di Lucci, flushed with self-importance, stormed in ahead of us and went up to her, stepping over a man with a bandaged leg who lay stretched out on the floor with eyes closed, his hands propped behind his head as a pillow.

‘This woman has been bitten by a snake,’ Di Lucci said. ‘Look at the way her ankle is swelling up.’

A silence descended on the room and a dozen heads turned in my mother’s direction. An old woman in black made a sign of the cross and mumbled a few words to herself; and even the man with the bandaged leg opened his eyes and sat up suddenly, looking on with interest. My mother’s ankle had swollen now to the size of a melon, and she dragged it the way my cousin Marta dragged her club foot, leaning on my shoulder as she walked.

‘You’ll have to fill out a form,’ the receptionist said.

Now my grandfather had come up to the desk.

‘How long before she can see the doctor?’ he said, leaning heavily on his cane. ‘It’s been over an hour since she was bitten.’ Though in fact Di Lucci had made good time: perhaps no more than ten minutes had passed since we’d left Valle del Sole.

The receptionist had the open, welcoming face of a child—dark eyes as large as chestnuts and a small nose that curved upwards at its peak; but my grandfather’s sense of urgency did not seem to impress her.

‘You can see the doctor is very busy today,’ she said, tilting her chin towards the crowded room.

Di Lucci reached a hand into his pant pocket and pulled it out with a bank note crumpled in his fist. He set the note discreetly on the desk and pushed it with his fingers towards the receptionist. The receptionist opened a drawer, let Di Lucci’s fingers push the bill into it, then closed the drawer again with her elbow. She shrugged.

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she said.

‘Go find a place to sit with your mother,’ my grandfather said to me. ‘Help her to loosen the bandage, then count to thirty in your head and tie it up again.’ My mother had not spoken for some time. Her eyelids were drooping now, her eyes slightly glazed, and she was swaying on her feet the way Angelo the Red did after a bottle of wine. When I looked around the room for a place to sit, the man with the bandaged leg motioned me over to him. He squeezed his own thin body over so that there was space on the floor beside him. He made a show of wiping the floor with his hand, but the grime there seemed permanent, a layer of grey hiding the mottled green and brown of the marble underneath.

‘What colour was the snake?’ the man whispered when we had sat down beside him. My mother looked at him drowsily but didn’t answer.

‘Green,’ I said. A murmur passed through the room.

‘Green is good,’ the man said. ‘Maybe you’ll have a good harvest.’

He helped me to loosen my mother’s tourniquet while I kept time in my head. The swelling was spreading up her calf now, and when we tied the tourniquet again it sank into her flesh like a string into a sausage.

‘You’ll take care of me, eh, Vittorio?’ my mother said, stretching her lips into a sleepy smile; but her voice sounded dreamy and far-off.

‘The poison is spreading,’ the man whispered to me over my mother’s outstretched legs, speaking as if my mother couldn’t hear him. He put a finger to his head and screwed it back and forth. ‘It starts to affect the brain.’

He spoke to me with the candour one would show to an adult, his voice low and confidential, his grizzled face leaning in close to mine.

‘At least they have medicines now—in the old days, heh,
addio
! She’ll be all right, once the doctor sees her. It’s worse when they can’t do anything for you, only say a prayer and send you home, like that one over there by the door.’

He gestured towards a man with jet black hair seated in one of the room’s few chairs, his arm draped in bloody rags. The man was clutching the arm to his chest as if it were a child, rocking it gently back and forth, mumbling to himself.

‘What can the doctor do for him now?’ my friend said. ‘The police brought him in here not an hour ago. He had a fight with his neighbour about a chicken. His neighbour came over with a shotgun, they started shouting and screaming, and, pom! the next thing you know his hand is gone, shot right off. Because of a chicken! And the boy beside him, with the patch on his eye—some of his schoolmates thought it was funny to tease him because one eye was green and one eye was brown. They said he had a devil in him. So what does he do? He takes a stick and plahck! that’s the end of it. His own eye! God save us all!’

But now there was some commotion at the entrance. A young woman, led by a thin older woman in black, had come in doubled over from some pain in her stomach. As she crossed the threshold her body convulsed and a stream of bluish-green vomit shot from her mouth onto the floor, spattering onto people sitting or standing nearby. The nurse behind the reception desk looked up from the forms she was still filling in with
my grandfather and Di Lucci and wrinkled her nose.

‘Beatrice!’ she bellowed out, mustering a surprising volume from her slender throat. ‘Bring a bucket! And a mop!’ And a moment later another nurse, somewhat heftier and plainer than the receptionist, her uniform stained and askew, came bustling out of a corridor to tend to the pool of vomit on the floor. The young woman’s black-habited guide, meanwhile, had leaned her charge against a wall and joined my grandfather and Di Lucci at the reception desk, where she launched into a long plea in a cracked, high-pitched whine.

‘I beg you,
signora
, I beg you, my daughter is dying. She’s the only one left to me now, all dead—it’s a curse, I tell you, the doctor must see her—’

‘
Scusate, signora,
’ Di Lucci interjected, ‘but this man’s daughter has been bitten by a snake—’

But the woman did not seem to hear him.

‘
L’invidia
!’ she cried out. ‘A curse!’ She broke into a long funereal wail that echoed through the room and made people shift uncomfortably in their places, though it seemed to liven them up, too, as if they were glad of the distraction. ‘
Poveretta
,’ they whispered, and even the man with the bloody stump looked up for a moment from his mumbling, and shook his head sadly. My grandmother had wailed like that when Tatone Vittorio—my father’s father, Vittorio Innocente, my namesake—had dropped stone dead in his kitchen on
la festa di San Giuseppe
, those same long shuddering groans that seemed to come from sources too deep to think about, all the misery of ages caught up in them. My grandfather had been a grim, unlikeable man, a constant rage seeming always to smoulder within him, waiting for some spark to suddenly ignite it; and though he had always been mean to my grandmother, had caged her like a frightened animal within his anger and
violence, and though he had died with a fire poker raised up against her, ready to strike her, still she had wailed as if no greater humiliation could have befallen her than his death. To me my grandfather’s death had seemed almost miraculous, an act of God—one moment he had been looming red-faced over my grandmother and the next he lay pale and still on the floor, his face frozen in a wide-eyed look of shock and his anger vanished suddenly from the room like smoke. His anger had always seemed to me something without limit, that could grow and grow until it somehow wrecked everything around it; and that afternoon it had burgeoned like a straw fire, when my uncle Pasquale had started to talk about my father.

‘Mario was the only smart one,’ my uncle had said, talking to Uncle Umberto about the crops. ‘The rest of us will live like slaves the rest of our lives.’

And though my uncle had leaned back drowsily in his chair when he’d said this, nudging his plate away and folding his hands over his belly as if he didn’t feel like a slave at all, and was only making a joke, my grandfather’s eyes had gone suddenly bright with anger.

‘Don’t you have enough to eat?’ he said. ‘Didn’t you always have enough to eat?’

And after that when my aunts and my grandmother tried to calm him it only seemed to fuel his rage, as if he felt the very force of it showed his rightness, and was determined that nothing should stand in the path of it.

‘Mario this, Mario that—he can rot in America, and all of you after him! Do you think he did a good thing to go against his father? Do you think he’s living like a king? I’ll tell you where he’s living—in a chicken coop! In a goddamned chicken coop,
per l’amore di Cristo!
Meanwhile he leaves his wife to run around like a whore!’

I had felt my mother’s body go suddenly rigid beside me then. But that was when my grandmother had blurted out some reproof or exclamation and my grandfather had wheeled round on his chair to grab the poker; and a moment later his jaw dropped as if some invisible fist had slammed up hard against his chest, and he was dead. I had been glad to see him lying inert on the kitchen floor—glad at least until my grandmother had begun her wails and I’d realized that death must be a fearful thing, more fearful even than my grandfather’s anger. I had never understood why this should be so: people died often, even in Valle del Sole, every month or so a funeral procession winding its way down via San Giuseppe to the cemetery, and nothing much seemed to change as a result. But now, as I sat on the cold hospital floor watching the woman in black plead with the receptionist, I felt suddenly as if I’d been hit by the same hard fist that had killed my grandfather, all the wind knocked out of me, for the thought had appeared in my head, surfacing there like a bubble in a pool, that even important people like my mother could die; and when I wheeled round to look at her I was certain that was what had happened, for her eyes were closed and her jaw had drooped open just as my grandfather’s had at the moment of his death.

‘
E’morta
!’ I cried out. ‘My mother’s dead!’

Now all attention turned away from the woman in black and focused again on my mother. Di Lucci came pushing through the crowd that was forming around us.

‘Stand back!’ he shouted. ‘Stand back!
Gesù Crist’ e Maria!
’ When he reached us he bent forward and slapped my mother hard across the cheek; but though her head jerked to one side her jaw did not close and her eyes did not open. Finally my grandfather came up behind Di Lucci and crouched with a grimace to take hold of my mother’s wrist. The onlookers
around us craned their necks for a better view, the room grown suddenly deathly silent. But finally my grandfather said: ‘She’s gone into shock. Everyone get back and let her have some air.’ The crowd held its place for a moment, necks still craning forward; but finally, under my grandfather’s urging, people slowly moved away, muttering and sighing their relief and mumbling benedictions.

Footsteps echoed now down the nearby corridor, and all heads turned again to witness the entrance of the doctor. From where I sat he seemed to stretch up almost to the ceiling, a tall, thin man with sharp features, black hair slicked neatly back, not a strand out of place. He had on a long white coat, which was spotless, and his shoes had been polished so brightly they showed a reflection. He looked out at the waiting room from behind small, wire-framed spectacles, then turned to the receptionist.

‘Who’s next,’ he said, in a burnished Italian. But the man with the bandaged leg said, ‘Take
la signora
,’ and others in the room murmured their agreement.

‘She’s been bitten by a snake,’ Di Lucci added, assuming again a voice of authority. ‘She’s in shock.’

The doctor looked down at my mother and frowned.

‘Very well,’ he said, then called out down the corridor, ‘Beatrice! Bring in a stretcher!’

Beatrice came hurrying down the corridor again.

‘They’re all being used, doctor,’ she said.

‘What about that one?’ The doctor gestured towards a stretcher just visible, from where I was sitting, at the corridor’s end. But the stretcher was occupied—a sheet draped over it formed the contours of nose, belly, knees, toes.