Lives of the Saints (6 page)

‘ “Dompietro, why is it that every day you have to look for your shoe under the bed? Don’t you think the Lord would be much happier if you just put your shoes
beside
your bed, like everyone else, so you wouldn’t have to bother him every morning about finding it?”

‘ “But it’s not for my shoe that I speak to the Lord every morning,” Dompietro said. “Every night I make sure I throw my shoe under the bed so that in the morning I have to get down on my knees to look for it. And once I’m on my knees I remember to thank the Lord for everything he has given me.” ’

My mother, though, did not think very much of Father Nick’s stories.

‘What are you doing under the bed?’ she said, when I tried to follow Dompietro’s example; but when I told her about Father Nick’s story she laughed.

‘What a thing! Don’t believe those stories, silly, who knows where he takes them from.’

But I still couldn’t keep myself from liking Father Nick’s stories, though I guarded them from my mother now like secrets.

On Sundays Zia Lucia and her daughter Marta usually joined us for dinner; but when they came by on the feast of San Camillo our kitchen seemed oddly strained and tense. My mother burnt herself on the cooking pot while pulling the sauce from the fireplace, spilling some of the sauce onto the flagstones.

‘
Stupida
,’ my grandfather said sharply, ‘can’t you be more careful?’

Only my aunt Lucia seemed unchanged, in her almost vegetal calmness, sitting large and matronly in her usual place by the fireplace, wrapped in her usual thick skirts and apron and shawl despite the heat, her hair tied back in a kerchief. Before we gathered around the table to eat she called me to her and pulled a five
lire
coin from the pocket of her apron with a blue-veined hand.

‘Something to spend on your girlfriends,’ she said, the ghost of a smile on her lips. The skin of her palm was glossy with age, almost translucent.

But Marta seemed especially canny today, in her dark silence,
as if some usually dormant receptor in her had been aroused, the way some people’s limbs ached before a storm. Marta had always seemed ageless to me—she might have been fifteen or fifty, her large dark eyes wary and child-like but the skin around them wrinkled with age; and even in the village she was treated with a mixture of condescension and respect, as if she were both simple and yet possessed of mystical powers, a witch. Years of hiding her strangeness, perhaps, had taught her how to be invisible, for she moved through a room like a shadow, and when she sat it was as still as a stone, only her eyes moving, darting in their sockets as nervously as a bird’s; but today I was always aware of her presence, and I felt suddenly as if I had crawled up inside her eyes, from where the world looked oddly warped and unstable, like something seen through a piece of curved glass.

I expected that other visitors would come in the afternoon, to welcome my mother home after her stay in the hospital or at least to talk with my grandfather about some problem in the village, as usually happened on Sundays; but after Zia Lucia and Marta had gone my grandfather went up to Di Lucci’s, and all afternoon the house remained quiet, my mother knitting in silence in a corner of the kitchen.

It was not till the next day that two visitors stopped by, finally, while my mother and I were making bread—Maria Maiale and Giuseppina Dagnello, childhood friends of my mother’s, and distantly related to us, as was half the village, by blood. They appeared in our narrow doorway coming back from the fountain, laundry tubs perched on their hips, their knuckles chafed from scrubbing.

‘Like dogs, that’s how we live,’ Maria said from the doorway, ‘wash the clothes, haul the water, make the bread, feed the goats,
per l’amore di Crist’
let me rest my limbs for a minute.’

And so saying she moved into the stone coolness of the
kitchen and set her tub on the floor, then dragged a chair away from the table halfway to the door and straddled it backwards, the way young men did at Di Lucci’s bar. She rested her thick arms on the chair’s back and extended her legs before her, her bulging veins leading like purple highways to the high lands of her hips. Her flesh, its tremors receding, came to uneasy rest, her breasts and belly pressing against the chair back like a cliff wall.

Giuseppina kept her place by the door, etched out there by the morning sunlight, her tub still perched on her hip.

‘I don’t think I can stay,’ she said; but she did, just where she was.

Mothers in Valle del Sole—and these were mothers, as the clothes in their washtubs showed, the bleached diapers, the tiny knickers, the dollish socks—formed a class: ruddy, swollen hands, thick skirts of homespun wool, hair short and tucked under a kerchief, round bellies protected with aprons of burlap or grey linen, like sacks of wheat. They moved with a slow, elephantine gait, arms akimbo, all the movement coming from the hips, a habit developed from carrying water-filled jugs on their heads, the bottom half of the body adjusting to all the undulations of the road while the top remained regal, exquisitely poised. They spoke the most flattened form of the local dialect, because unlike the men—who at the least would have improved their Italian during their army service, and who travelled more often to other districts—they were far from any edifying influence, whatever proper Italian they might have learned in their five years of schooling in Valle del Sole long-forgotten (though my own mother had got as far as
la terza media
in Rocca Secca, and I’d sometimes heard her talking with merchants in an Italian more rounded and precise than
la maestra’s
). Maria and Giuseppina had both married local farmers and borne several
children, had long ago completed the rite of passage from the small freedoms of adolescence to the daily toils of peasant motherhood.

Maria was talking pleasantries, gesticulating widely; when her chair let out a creak of protest she lifted a foot onto the crossbar to silence it, so that from where I stood against my mother, pouring water for her into the dough, I caught a sudden glimpse of the marbled fat of Maria’s inner thigh. Maria was using metaphors I couldn’t understand—something about Antonella, Alfredo Catalone’s daughter, down in the pasture with Antonio Girasole; something else about a priest in Tornamonde breaking a commandment, Maria didn’t say which one. But here Giuseppina broke in.

‘You’re always making fun of the priests,’ she said, her voice high and thin, like a mountain wind whistling around a cliff. ‘It’s not right.’ In Giuseppina it was still possible to make out the curves of breasts, belly, hips; but it seemed only her clothes held her together, her flesh ready at any moment to burst its restraints and revert to formlessness. Her legs, though, tapered strangely to thinness.

‘Why should you defend the priests?’ my mother said, stretching out her dough and working her palms and knuckles into it. ‘They’re no better than the rest of us.’ She wore a thin black sweater, its sleeves pushed up above her elbows, that caught her curves as she worked, now the roundness of her breasts as she reached up to brush a strand of hair away from her eyes with the back of her hand, now the feline curve of her back as she arched over the rolling board.

‘You’re too proud,’ Giuseppina said, shifting her weight from peg leg to peg leg, like a sheep on rocky ground. ‘Even when you were young. When’s the last time you went to confession?’

‘What does confession have to do with it? Cristina doesn’t
need the priests,’ Maria said, her voice wheezing, as if she was about to break into laughter. Despite the day’s coolness, a line of sweat had collected on the dark down above her lip. ‘She’s going to get to heaven by climbing to the top of an olive tree.’

‘When I climb an olive tree,’ my mother said, banging the dough against the rolling board, ‘it’s to pick the olives.’

My mother kneaded now with increasing aggression, the dough thickening, retaining the impression of her fists. A bead of sweat formed on her brow and dropped into the dough.

‘Giuseppí,’ she said, ‘why don’t you come in and sit down? Whatever I have it’s not contagious.’

But now for a moment a veil seemed to drop: Maria shifted suddenly in her chair to shoot a dark glance back to Giuseppina, and some secret message seemed to pass between them.

‘I left a pot on the fire,’ Giuseppina said, then mumbled her goodbyes and hurried away.

That afternoon, tending sheep on the slope beneath Colle di Papa, I overheard familiar voices coming from the fountain. My mother’s name was mentioned. A steep slope led up to the road from where I was; when I got to the top, I peered across the road from the shadow of a bush to see Maria and Giuseppina filling their water jugs.

‘You know what they’re saying about her in Rocca Secca,’ Maria said. ‘As if everyone was blind. Walking around like a princess.’

‘God will make his judgments,’ said Giuseppina. ‘It’s not for nothing she was bitten by a snake.’

‘What does the snake have to do with it?’

‘
Beh
, you’re one to talk. The way you pulled your chair away from her this morning, you might as well have been half way across the road.’

Maria grunted.

‘It’s her father I feel sorry for,’ she said, after a pause. ‘And Vittorio. Growing up like a weed. Do you ever see him getting up at four to help with the harvest, like my Vincenzo? Never. He and his mother play like schoolchildren all day. Someone should write to the boy’s father—I have a mind to do it myself.’

‘Worry about your own troubles,’ Giuseppina said.

The two women had begun to move back towards the town.

‘
Beh
,’ I heard Maria say as their voices faded, ‘one way or another he’ll find out. They always do.’

Invidia
, envy, had been the root of all the peasants’ troubles according to my grandfather—the reason why brother did not get along with brother, son with father, neighbour with neighbour; why the lot of the
con tadini
now was such a hard one, their plots of land scattered piecemeal across the countryside, often miles from the village; why the soil offered up yearly only the same closed fist, though the farmers cursed and cajoled it the way they did a stubborn mule.

Once, my grandfather had told me, long before the time of Christ, the land around Valle del Sole had all been flat, unpeopled jungle, rich and fertile, the trees a mile high and the river a mile wide. At last a giant named Gambelunghe had come down from the north and cleared the land with his two great oxen, then planted his crops—a thousand hectares of grain, a
thousand hectares of vineyards, a thousand hectares of olives, a thousand hectares of vegetables, and a thousand hectares of pasture for his sheep. But in the winter, when Gambelunghe was asleep, wolves came and broke into his stores, then fell finally on Gambelunghe himself and tore him apart, his head dropped into the river, where it floated down to the sea, and his limbs scattered pell-mell across the countryside.

In the spring, a strange thing happened—the fingers on Gambelunghe’s severed hands began to grow, those on the left growing into five women, those on the right into five men. When they were fully grown the men married the women and began to farm Gambelunghe’s land, one couple for each field. But soon jealousy broke out among them: the one with the sheep was jealous of the one with the grain, for though he had meat and wool, he had no bread; the one with the grain was jealous of the one with the vineyards, for though he had bread he had no wine; and so it went. The wives, certain that the other women had an easier life, complained to their husbands, and encouraged them to steal from the other men’s stores; and it was not long before fighting broke out amongst them, and the noise from their arguments—because they shouted very loudly—reached up to heaven.

‘So that is what you do with your good fortune,’ God said, and to punish them He caused mountains and rocks to grow up out of the ground, and made the soil tired and weak.

After that the farmers had to make a plan to avoid
invidia
. So they divided each of the thousand hectares into five equal portions and distributed the portions among themselves, making sure no one got a piece that was worse than anyone else’s, that had more rocks or was too far from the river. And when they had children they divided the land again, a piece of vineyard here, a piece of pasture there, making sure everything
was fair. Over the years the land became more and more divided—that was why a farmer might have a hectare of land on the slopes of Colle di Papa, another on the far side of Belmonte, a third all the way down by the Valley of the Pigs. It might take him a whole day of travelling just to visit all his pieces of land; and often, to save on walking, he’d have to spend the night out in the open, cooking up a little cornmeal over an open fire and sleeping in the scanty shelter of a lean-to.

Even in good years in Valle del Sole, the farmers always complained of the meagreness of the harvest, afraid of calling
invidia
upon themselves by boasting; and mothers did not like to tell how many children they had borne, lest fate then take one away from them. It was not simply the envy of one person towards another that the villagers feared; it was the tremendous forces which envy stirred up, forces age-old and sacred, ones that found their incarnation in the evil eye. No less a man than Mussolini had feared the eye, it was said; and even the Pope himself had once banished a priest from the Vatican for possessing it. The eye was the locus of all the powers which could not be explained under the usual religion, the religion of the churches; and despite its name it stood outside the normal categories of good and evil, subsumed them, striking both the righteous and the depraved. It was drawn towards you merely by a certain lack of vigilance, a small flouting of fate, a crack in the door it might slither through, fangs bared, to catch you by surprise; and its fickleness made it deadly and all-powerful, like fate itself, a force which knew no masters, neither God nor the devil.

The villagers avoided anyone or anything that had been touched by the eye, as if there was a peril that the affliction might spread by contagion. When Girolamo Dagnello’s best wheat field was burnt by lightning one fall, he let the field go
fallow the next year, sprinkling it with a potion he bought from
la strega di Belmonte
; and when Fiorina Girasole gave birth to twins, both boys, and both dead within a week, the townspeople for a long time avoided her doorway when they passed, until finally the rumour spread that Fiorina, too, had been up to Belmonte. Belmonte, just off the high road on the way to Rocca Secca, had been destroyed by the Germans in the second war, and out of superstition the residents had refused to rebuild there, fleeing to Rome, to Argentina, to America, the toppled roofs and walls of the buildings of the town overgrown now with moss and weeds and wildflowers and overrun with lizards; and its sole inhabitant now was
la strega
, who wandered the countryside in summer and then holed up in one of Belmonte’s ruined buildings in the fall and winter. Once, playing in the ruins there, I had caught a glimpse of her through the hollow of a window, an ancient woman with tough, darkened skin and long grey hair that hung in matted clumps down her back, though a grimace or grin she had flashed me before I had run had revealed two rows of brilliant white teeth.