Lives of the Saints (8 page)

‘
Mamma
, I want to go.’ My mother was talking in a low voice to an older man I didn’t recognize. He towered above me tall and husky, dressed oddly in Sunday clothes, white shirt and tie, though his sleeves were rolled up over his forearms and the upper buttons of his shirt were undone, dark hair curling up
thick and matted from his chest.

‘Here,’ my mother said, turning to me, ‘I’ll get Luciano to carry you piggyback. He can buy his vegetables later. You don’t open till noon,
vero?
’

‘But by then all that’s left here is what they feed to the pigs,’ the man said. ‘My wife will break my balls if there’s as much as a bruise on an olive.’ But he smiled and gathered me up in his sinewed arms, then lifted me effortlessly onto his shoulders, his upper arms gripping my calves.

‘I’ll bet you can see the whole world from up there, eh Vittorio,’ he said.

From above the market looked like a sea or a river, waves of bobbing heads shored in by the sloping roofs of corrugated tin that covered the market stalls.

‘How do you know my name?’

‘Oh, I know all about you,’ the man said, turning to glance at my mother beside him. ‘Your mother tells me everything.’

‘You don’t know what day it is today.’

‘Of course I do. It’s the feast of St. Bartholomew.’

‘No it’s not,’ I said. ‘It’s my birthday.’

‘
E’ vero
? Why didn’t you say so?’

We had reached the edge of the market. From here the street led towards the square; I could see the open brightness of it beckoning a few hundred yards on. But after walking a bit further, Luciano turned down a narrow, deserted side-street, the houses along it old and decrepit. From here the sound of the market reached us only as a distant hum, punctuated occasionally by a shout or a peal of laughter. Luciano slid his hands under my arms and lifted me onto the ground. My shoes had left two large smudges under the armpits of his shirt.

‘Explain those to your wife,’ my mother said. ‘You shouldn’t wear white if you can’t keep clean.’

‘You sound like a priest.’

My mother sat down on a step in front of a boarded-up doorway, drawing her knees up and wrapping her arms around them, like a young girl. Luciano sat down beside her, then dipped a hand into his pant pocket and pulled out a large silver coin.

‘It’s an old one
lira
,’ he said, holding the coin towards me. ‘From before the war, when you could still buy something with a
lira
.’

The date, printed in tiny numbers under the claw of an eagle, read 1927. Luciano pointed to a small indentation on the eagle’s wing.

‘I want to tell you about that mark,’ he said, closing his fingers around the coin again like a magician. He motioned me up against his knee.

‘I found this coin,’ he said, ‘in a field in Greece. During the war. It must have slipped through the pocket of one of the other soldiers, because I found it shining in the mud in somebody’s footprint. Who knows what I was thinking—here we were marching against the enemy, bullets flying everywhere, and I stop to pick a one
lira
off the ground, like a schoolboy.’

Luciano glanced at my mother beside him. ‘And then?’ she said.

‘Well, we had a hard time that day,’ Luciano said, turning back to me. ‘We lost the battle and many of my friends were killed. It was like a bad dream. But that night, when I was sitting in my tent, I found a little hole in my shirt pocket, like a bullet hole. Then I remembered the coin I had picked up, and when I took it out of my pocket I saw the mark on the wing. That’s when I realized that the coin had saved my life—it must have stopped the bullet that had left the hole in my shirt. If I hadn’t stopped to pick it up the bullet would have gone straight into my heart.’ My mother laughed.

‘Is that true?’ she said, tugging Luciano’s hand toward her to look more closely at the coin.

‘Every word of it, by Jesus, Joseph, and Mary. Ever since then I’ve carried this coin with me everywhere, for good luck. But now,’ and he turned back to me with eyebrows raised, ‘I’m going to give it to you.’

He set the coin in my palm. It weighed heavily there, not tinny like the five and ten
lire
coins I had been collecting but as thick and dense as a fifty or hundred lire. I rubbed the coin with my thumb, feeling its thickness and weight, the texture of its detailed surface. An intricate pattern of feathers stood out in relief on the eagle’s outstretched wings.

‘Look on the other side,’ Luciano said. ‘It even has your name on it.’

On the obverse side, in profile, was a bald-headed bust. Luciano pointed to the inscription etched around the coin’s circumference, not the usual ‘
Repvbblica Italiana
’ of newer coins but ‘
Vittorio Emanvele III Re e Imp.
’

It seemed strange to me that fortune could be as simple as Luciano made it out, that it could be passed along from one person to another or depend on something as slight as a hole in your pocket; but for the moment my time in the spotlight was over and I had become invisible, Luciano and my mother speaking together in low voices again.

‘He came to the village?’ Luciano had dropped his voice to whisper. ‘Cristí, you’re tempting the devil.’

‘What could I do?’ my mother said calmly. She stared down at her hands. ‘A letter came in the morning, he came in the afternoon. How could I stop him?’

‘Someone must have seen him,’ Luciano said. ‘I hear people are beginning to talk.’

‘Let them talk.’

‘I heard that someone from the German embassy had come looking for him. Did he tell you that?’

‘Yes,’ my mother said.

‘All these years and they haven’t forgotten. If it was the Italians they would have lost his file years ago. And it’s not as if they won the war—if he went home now he’d be a hero, for what he’d done. Did he say where he was going?’

‘What do I care where he goes? Milan, Switzerland—I haven’t heard anything from him. Anyway I have my own troubles to worry about. I hope he didn’t leave me a little gift—he got very excited when he saw that snake.’

‘And the snake on top of everything. You know I’m not superstitious, Cristí, but a snake is a snake—’

‘Don’t be foolish. The snake was a stupid accident.’

Luciano shifted awkwardly on the stone step, bringing a hand up to rub the back of his neck.

‘Still,’ he said finally. ‘The villagers. You know how they like to get hold of a scandal—for peasants like that everything is a sign. Things must be getting hard for you. What will you do if he comes back?’

My mother shrugged.

‘Maybe we’ll run off to America together.’

‘Cristina, this is nothing to joke about.’

‘Who’s joking? America’s a big place. No one would ever find us there.’

‘Look,’ Luciano said, ‘I have to get my vegetables. Why don’t you and Vittorio come around to the restaurant for lunch? On me. I have some good wine from last year. And a bowl of
tortellini alla bolognese
for Vittorio.’

He leaned over to kiss my mother on the cheek, then rose and put a hand on my shoulder.

‘
Ciao
, Vitto,’ he said, and then walking away he turned back
to call out ‘
Auguri!
’ before he rounded the corner and disappeared up the street, the echo of his footsteps quickly fading into the distant hum of the market.

Luciano’s restaurant—the ‘
Hostaria del Cacciatore
,’ its name painted in red on the front window just above the small figure of a hunter with a rifle and a hunter’s sack slung over his shoulder—sat just across from the main square, where Alberto de’ Giardini had once bared himself to the hollowed-out
tomolo
; though the
tomolo
had recently been replaced by a stone obelisk, a memorial to the townspeople killed in the second war. After the market my mother and I had been up and down a dozen crooked streets—first into one of the shops to buy me a shirt; then into a cold dim office where my mother had filled out a form and talked in a low voice to a man behind a counter; then, strangely, into a photographer’s studio, where a sleek-haired, spectacled man who reeked of perfume had taken our picture, my mother didn’t say why—but it was still
only late morning by the time we arrived at the restaurant, and most of the tables were empty. A single couple was seated inside, visible through the frilly curtains and plastic vines and leaves that decorated the front window, and outside only a thin old man in a suit and fedora who peered up from a newspaper to give a long narrow-eyed look at my mother as we sat down at the table next to his.

A heavy-set boy of about fifteen, dressed in black pants and white shirt, came out to serve us.

‘Where’s your father?’ my mother said.

‘He’s gone out. He said I should take care of you if you came.’

He took my mother’s order and went inside, disappearing then through a door at the back of the restaurant. A moment later a large, rough-featured woman, heavy bosom straining against a black sweater, came bustling out of the same door wiping her hands on her apron. She stared hard towards our table for a moment before disappearing again.

‘Do you like it here?’ my mother said.

But despite the coins I’d collected in the market, the tinny fives and tens and the large one
lira
, despite the new shirt that lay wrapped in brown paper on the chair next to me, despite the photographs we’d had taken, a silent resentment had been building in me since my mother’s conversation with Luciano, and I would not let go of it now until it had some issue.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ my mother said. ‘Do you have a bug in your pants?’

She reached under the table and poked me lightly in the ribs, but I pulled away from her sulkily.

‘
Beh
, do what you want,’ she said.

We sat silent. A bottle of wine appeared, set out and poured expertly by Luciano’s son, then a bowl of
tortellini
and a plate
of
trippa
in tomato sauce for my mother. We had begun to eat already when I felt the shadow of a large shape looming over us, and looked up to see the black-sweatered woman smiling down on us, her hands on her hips, a thin line of moustache overshadowing her smile. A dark wart stuck out prominently on one cheek, a few thin hairs spiralling up from it.

‘
Buongiorno, signora
! And this must be your little son! How handsome he is! Are you going to tell me your name?’

She had reached down to run her fingers under my chin.

‘His name is Vittorio,’ my mother said, curt. ‘He’s shy.’

‘Isn’t that sweet! And so many boys these days are little devils.
Diavoli
!’

My mother took another bite of her food.

‘And your friend?’ the woman said finally, her mouth remaining open around her last syllable.

My mother raised her eyebrows as if she had not understood.

‘Yes, of course, he’s gone out of town,’ the woman said, forcing a laugh. ‘A shame—do you like the way I’ve made up the tripe?’

‘I’ve had worse,’ my mother said.

‘Yes, Luciano bought it in Tornamonde, you can’t find good meat here in Rocca Secca anymore. But you should be careful how much you eat! A friend of mine ate tripe every day for a week, and she gave birth to triplets!’

My mother forced a smile. Pig tripe was what people in the region fed to grooms on their wedding nights, to help them have children.

‘And did they have little tails, the children?’ my mother said, still smiling.

The woman’s face darkened for the briefest instant before she let out a long falsetto laugh.

‘Oh,
signora
, always joking!’ She laughed again, wiping her hands on her apron. ‘Well, enjoy your meal, Luciano will be sorry he missed you. I’ll give you a good price on the wine.’

‘Eat your food,’ my mother said when the woman had gone, returning to her own meal with a vengeance. My appetite, though, had died, the wet texture of the pasta in my mouth beginning to make my stomach turn. But when I set down my fork my mother looked at me in irritation.

‘What’s the matter with you? Oh!
Basta!
’

‘It tastes like shit,’ I said.

I had got it out now, spit out my resentment like something that had stuck in my throat. But an instant later my face was burning: my mother had slapped me, hard, against the cheek. A lump rose in my throat but I swallowed it, my lips sealed tight. There were a few people sitting at the tables around us now, but only the old thin man glanced over at us, peering up above the top of his newspaper for an instant before returning again to his reading; though almost at once I looked up through the restaurant window to see if the black-sweatered woman had been watching us. For some reason it was the thought of her having seen my mother’s anger that made me burn more than anything now, the thought of the large false smile she would light for us then if she returned, like someone who had won an argument; and when I could not make her out anywhere I felt a great relief, as if my mother’s slap had not been a punishment at all but part of some sin or crime we’d committed together, and which had gone undetected.

In silence I picked up my fork and began to eat my
tortellini
, my eyes trained now on the slowly emerging bottom of the bowl. When we had finished eating, Luciano’s son came around to collect our dishes.

‘How much is it,’ my mother said tonelessly.

‘But my father told me—’

‘Never mind that,’ my mother said. ‘Just give me the regular price.’

La festa della Madonna
on the last weekend of September transformed Valle del Sole every year from a sleepy peasant village into a carnival town. Three days of festivities—music, dancing, processions, fireworks—to cap off the summer and to celebrate the harvest. People from neighbouring villages, from Rocca Secca, old residents from Rome and Naples, flocked into the village; day labourers working on distant farms took leaves of absence; migrants in the north, in Switzerland, in France, boarded crowded trains for the long journey home. Sometimes even a few
Americani
appeared, planning their return to their native village to coincide with
la festa
.