Lives of the Saints (7 page)

At our own house now, no one stopped by anymore to speak to my grandfather, to ask his help in settling some dispute or have a word with him about village politics; and if the villagers passed my mother sitting in front of the house they did not look at her when they mumbled their greetings, and quickly moved towards the centre of the street. My mother began more and more to keep inside, spending her days knitting beside the fireplace, or sometimes simply shut up in her room; and she and my grandfather hardly spoke now, sometimes passing a whole meal together in heavy, awkward silence.

But one afternoon, my mother downstairs knitting while I lay upstairs studying my books, I heard footsteps echoing
quickly along the street and then stopping abruptly in front of our house.

‘Are you alone?’ The voice was hardly louder than a whisper; but I recognized at once Giuseppina Dagnello’s thin whine.

‘What is it?’ My mother’s voice had taken on a hard edge in the past few days.

‘Where’s your father?’

‘He’s up at Di Lucci’s. Where he always is.’

‘And Vittorio?’

‘What’s the big secret, Giuseppi? What are you so nervous about? Come in and sit down and say what you have to say.’

‘You know what I have to say,’ Giuseppina started, and I heard the kitchen door close behind her. ‘How can you sit there sewing your socks?’

‘They have holes in them.’

I crept out of my room to crouch at the head of the stairs. I could make out the shadows of my mother and Giuseppina etched against the kitchen floor by sunlight from the far window, my mother’s seated in its chair, its hands still moving with its sewing, Giuseppina’s stretching taller beside it at a distance.

‘Cristina,’ Giuseppina started again, ‘you and I were like sisters when we were small. You know I wouldn’t wish you any harm. But other people aren’t so kind, they like to see a person destroyed. You can’t afford to walk around like a princess. It turns people against you.’

‘So what should I do? Should I lock myself in the stable, just to make other people happy?’

‘You know what I’m talking about, Cristí. You have to make a gesture. You should make a confession. You should go and speak with Father Nicola—’

‘Please, Giuseppina, you know I don’t have any use for him.’

A brief silence; Giuseppina’s shadow edged closer to my mother’s.

‘Look, Cristí,’ she went on finally, dropping her voice low, ‘if you won’t see the priest you should at least make a cure.’

A chair creaked as my mother’s shadow shifted, the hands abruptly ceasing their movement.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘It worked for my cousin in Rocca Secca,’ Giuseppina continued, her voice still low and eerie. ‘The old woman in Belmonte told her how to do it—you take a chicken or a goat and drain out the blood, then cut out the heart to put in your soup later, to give you strength. You have to wash your hands in the blood and then pour it into the ground and say three times, “This is my blood, which comes out of me like a river to the sea.” Then in the same place where you poured the blood you make a fire for the offering—’

But my mother burst suddenly into laughter.

‘Giuseppi, you’re not serious! A good God-fearing woman like you talking to me about these
stupidaggini!
I thought you had more sense than that.’

But when Giuseppina spoke again a nagging severity had returned to her voice.

‘I warn you, Cristí, you’ll bring a curse on everyone around you. It’s only for your father that people have kept quiet till now. But with the snake everyone has started to talk. I didn’t want to say it but you force me to, you think that people are fools, that they don’t see the way you carry on. But I don’t have to tell you the name that everyone is calling you. You have to make a gesture.’

Later, when I came down for supper, my mother said nothing of Giuseppina’s visit. A deep silence had descended on the house: the very walls, the floor, the splintered table, seemed to
have grown strangely distant and mute, as if guarding some secret about themselves. Over my grandfather’s face a film had formed, tangible as stone, which he retreated behind like a snail into its shell, staring into space as if my mother and I were not there. My mother reached out suddenly once to fill his glass while we ate; in her movement there seemed some ghost of a hidden message, struggling at once to reveal and conceal itself, and I thought for a moment she was about to speak. But she turned quickly back to her plate and we ate on in silence. Later I lay awake in bed waiting for her footsteps on the stairs, wanting to go in to her in her room; but a long time passed and she did not come, and I drifted finally into sleep.

On my seventh birthday my mother and I walked hand in hand up to the high road, in the cool damp of early morning, to catch the bus into Rocca Secca. The sun was just rising over Colle di Papa, round and scarlet, sucking in dawn’s darkness like God’s forgiveness, the mountain slopes slowly changing from a colourless grey to rich green and gold. The wheat in our region ripened in a slow wave which started in the valleys and gradually worked its way up the slopes through the summer, like sunlight emerging from behind a cloud, and of the highest villages it was sometimes said that they harvested in September and planted in August, sowing their new crop between the still uncut stocks of the old; and though down close to the river the fields had already been ploughed brown, around Valle del Sole the harvest was only just beginning, small bent figures dotting
the countryside now, felling their wheat with short quick pulls of their scythes.

The bus into Rocca Secca was actually a small battered truck, the back fixed up on three sides with splintered planks for seats and covered with a dusty canvas. The truck, owned and operated by a small, swarthy entrepreneur called Cazzingulo (a nickname meaning ‘balls in your ass’—what usually happened when you rode in his truck), plied the road between Capracotta and Rocca Secca, collecting and discharging passengers en route, rolling to the rhythm of the road. Cazzingulo didn’t follow a schedule you could measure on a watch—he never left his point of departure until he had a full load, full by official standards, which didn’t mean he couldn’t fit in another eight or nine passengers after he’d passed the police checkpoint on the edge of town—but somehow the peasants always sensed when he would be passing, as if they could feel premonitory tremors in the earth. It was only a few minutes after my mother and I reached the main road that a cloud of dust rounded the curve of a slope, and Cazzingulo’s truck appeared in the middle of it.

‘Oh, Cristí!’ Cazzingulo knew everyone in the region by name. ‘Rocca Secca! Special today, the little boy rides for half price if he sits on your lap. And you ride for free if you sit on mine.’

About a dozen passengers had already been crammed into the back, their feet resting on the handbags and produce hampers and grain sacks that filled the small corridor between the seats, their knees jammed up against their faces. But after some jostling and muttered curses and a shout up to Cazzingulo about his greed and the suffering of peasants, a patch of bare wood appeared finally on one of the benches, and my mother eased herself onto it. I wedged myself between her legs,
clutching her knees and crouching unsteadily on a sack of onions; then the all clear was sounded and the truck took off with a lurch, leaving a swirl of dust in its wake.

Rocca Secca claimed to be the site of ancient Aquilonia, a Samnitic fortress town from before the time of Christ. The Samnites, a fierce mountain people, had been the first to settle our region, riding down from the north along the ridge-line of the Apennines on the great ox the gods had given them. Their imposing cities, Aquilonia, Bovianum, Cominium, carved it was said right out of the bare rock of the mountains, had been levelled by the Romans, only a few odd ruins remaining now—roadside markers of forgotten import, the mossy foundations of a temple or shrine, the curved stone seats of an amphitheatre; though these were proudly tendered by local towns and villages as evidence of their ancient past. The church at Rocca Secca, just off the main square, was built above a huge cornerstone, accessible through a crypt, that was said to have formed part of Aquilonia’s walls.

Rocca Secca itself had once been a great centre, renowned for its goldsmiths and bronzeworks, its schools, its convents, and the seat of the region’s aristocracy. But in recent times its fortunes had declined: the politicians in Rome, the townspeople complained, thought only about collecting taxes and passing laws that no one could understand, and not about building roads or rail lines; and nowadays, at any rate, people wanted to buy things made in the city by machines rather than things made by hand. For many years now the people of Rocca Secca had been moving away, to Argentina mainly; whole sections of the town stood abandoned, the houses boarded up and crumbling.

The last vestige of the town’s former grandeur sat on a lonely hill on the outskirts of town—the Giardini estate, once the seat of the most powerful family in the region, who owned half
the land from Rocca Secca to Capracotta. The last of the Giardini, Alberto, had died just after the war, and was still well remembered in the town. In the 1890s he had served as an officer during the war in Abyssinia; but after the Italian defeat he had set off on a trek across Africa, more or less lost to the world for several years. Then one day a beggar had wound his way down the main street into Rocca Secca, his clothes in tatters, his face bearded and gaunt, and had done something which had caused the townspeople to stare in curiosity: he walked up to the
tomolo
in the centre of the square, a hollowed out stone of three compartments used to measure grain for rent and taxes, and dropped his pants to his knees to touch his bared buttocks to the stone. This gesture had a long tradition in Rocca Secca: it was the way in which a man who had exhausted all his resources might publicly declare bankruptcy. But it was only when the beggar pulled a latch key from around his neck and started up towards the estate on the edge of town that the townspeople realized he was Alberto de’ Giardini, returned finally home after his mysterious absence.

Giardini never explained his long absence to anyone, living the next several years as a recluse, seeing no one; though sometimes at twilight he’d appear suddenly in the town in full regalia, his medals pinned in an even row to his chest, and wander the streets like a ghost. Then, just after the first war, he began the project which was to occupy the rest of his days, remaking the grounds of his estate in the image of a primal paradise, importing tropical trees, flowers, shrubs and building a great conservatory to house them in winter, beginning next on the fauna, monkeys, gazelles, strange tropical birds, until he had turned his hill into a small piece of Africa, the air at night resounding with strange jungle sounds. At his death, because he had no heirs, Giardini’s estate reverted to the state, who kept it
up briefly as a zoo; but there was little interest in our region for that sort of thing and the property soon fell into decay, the animals dying off, needed repairs neglected. The estate was abandoned now, the conservatory left to ruin, the lawns overgrown, the cages which had once housed the animals left to warp in the sun and rain and a great glass aviary which had been renowned once for its strange coloured birds now sprouting the limbs of trees which had been allowed to grow inside it unchecked. People in the town avoided the estate, as if a curse hung over it; and in the story of the
tomolo
and Giardini’s gesture people saw now an oracle, the prediction of their own town’s declining fortunes.

Compared to other towns in the area, Rocca Secca was filled with life—mule carts and motor cars, men in suits and women in high-heeled shoes, coloured awnings over sidewalk restaurants, shop windows crowded with posters. But still a shadow seemed to loom over the town, as if all the pomp and display had been carted in only moments before your arrival, put on for your benefit, as if you had only to turn your back and the glitter would fade, the wind whistling through empty streets. In neighbouring towns Rocca Seccans had a reputation as people whose surface smiles hid a meanness of spirit. ‘Ho,
signó
,’ a friend from Rocca Secca would call out to you, ‘have you eaten yet?’ And if you had he’d say, ‘That’s too bad, I was just going to ask you over,’ and if you hadn’t, ‘Then go home and eat.’

Only the market in Rocca Secca seemed real, at least honest in its transience: after all, it
had
been carted in, by peasants and traders who had hitched up their carts in the dead of night to be ready at their stalls by dawn, and by afternoon it would be faded and finished, the noise and colour gone, the stalls boarded up again until the following day. It was at the edge of the market that we disembarked on my birthday, at that hour
still in full swing, the din of it, the shouts and laughter, the clatter of coins, reaching us under our canvas as Cazzingulo’s truck pulled up to a stop on a small side-street. It had been many months since I had last been to the market with my mother; for a long time now she had preferred to make her trips into Rocca Secca alone. But as we threaded our way through the market street, jostling for space with goats and carts and thick-set town women come for the day’s provisions, many of the traders called out to me by name, remembering me from my previous visits.

‘Oh, Vittò! Look how big you’ve gotten! And handsome, too, like your mother.’

‘It’s his birthday today,’ my mother told them. ‘He’s come to collect his gifts.’ And this would be good for five or ten lire, the coins collecting hard and tinny in my pocket as we made our way through the market.

But the market seemed more than usually oppressive today, the street too narrow, the crowds too thick, the large-boned women of Rocca Secca jostling against me without seeing me, caught up in their haggling. The traders, after their moment of attention, would turn back quickly to my mother, leaving me to stare up at great pyramids of cabbages and tomatoes and onions piled precariously atop sloping shelves. Beneath the shelves chickens cackled wildly in wicker cages, poking their beaks through the gaps to pick at scraps that had fallen to the ground. Rivulets of grey water trickled between the cracks in the cobblestones, giving off a strong sewer stench.