Lives of the Saints (19 page)

She took in a breath in irritation; but after a moment her anger seemed to melt, and she drew me towards her and nestled me against her knees.

‘Poor Vittorio. No one ever tells him anything.’ She wrapped her arms around me, and I saw that she’d begun to cry. ‘Do you promise to keep it a secret, if I tell you?’

‘Yes.’

She pulled me closer, putting her cheek against mine.

‘We’re going to leave the village, Vittorio,’ she whispered finally. ‘In a few weeks, we’re going to America.’

America. How many dreams and fears and contradictions were tied up in that single word, a word which conjured up a world, like a name uttered at the dawn of creation, even while it broke another, the one of village and home and family. In Valle del Sole the men had long been migrants, to the north, to Buenos Aires, to New York, every year weighing their options, whether the drought would ruin the year’s crops, or a patch of land bring a sufficient price to buy a passage, whether to strike out for Torino or Switzerland, with the promise at least of a yearly return, or to reckon on an absence of years or a lifetime, and cross the sea.

Tales of America had been filtering into Valle del Sole for many years already. My grandfather’s own father, who in the 1890s, just after my grandfather’s birth, had left his family to
fight in Abyssinia, had been among the first to reach there: when the war was over he had begun to wander, first along the coast of Africa—my grandfather used to joke that he had taken an African bride, and that somewhere now I had a brood of creamy-brown cousins who prayed in African but swore in Italian—then on to Argentina and finally New York. For several years he had sent money back, in increasingly large sums, enough to build the house we now lived in; but suddenly the money stopped, and nothing more was heard of him. After a year my grandfather’s oldest brother had gone in search of him, but had returned in despair.

‘Vanished,’ my grandfather had told me. ‘He might have died, or he might still be there now, a hundred years old, living like a king with some American wife.’

Others, too, had been swallowed up by America, never to be heard from again, a few like my great-grandfather leaving behind wives and children; but most, after an absence of years, had returned to the village, using their savings to build a house and to live out their years in relative ease. There were several houses in Valle del Sole that had been built with foreign earnings; though only an extra storey or room or a tarnished brass knocker on the door distinguished them from the rest, their owners perhaps fearing the envy that greater ostentation might have brought.

But since the war the village had known mainly one-way departures. The men left, and a few years later wives and children and sometimes ageing parents followed, land and livestock sold off, clothes and old pots packed up in wooden trunks made by the village carpenter, houses left abandoned, their doors and windows boarded up.

‘Only babies and old people left behind,’ my grandfather would grumble. ‘No one left to work the land.’ But no one went
to New York or Buenos Aires now, or to Abyssinia; they went instead to a place called the Sun Parlour. Before the war two men from our region, Salvatore Mancini of Valle del Sole and Umberto Longo of Castilucci, had smuggled themselves across the ocean and settled there—and it was the first time in history, people said, that a man from Valle del Sole and one from Castilucci had been able to work together without slitting each other’s throats—and now one by one their relatives had begun to join them, every year the tide increasing. The Sun Parlour was in a new part of America called Canada, which some said was a vast cold place with rickety wooden houses and great expanses of bush and snow, others a land of flat green fields that stretched for miles and of lakes as wide as the sea, an unfallen world without mountains or rocky earth.

But for the many of us who had never been much beyond the small world circumscribed by the ring of mountains that cut off Valle del Sole’s horizon in each direction, who had never passed out of hearing range of the village church bells, America was still all one, New York and Buenos Aires and the Sun Parlour all part of some vast village where slums and tall buildings and motor cars mingled with forests and green fields and great lakes, as if all the wide world were no larger than Valle del Sole itself and the hollow of stony mountains that cradled it. And for all the stories of America that had been filtering into the village for a hundred years now from those who had returned, stories of sooty factories and back-breaking work and poor wages and tiny bug-infested shacks, America had remained a mythical place, as if there were two Americas, one which continued merely the mundane life which the peasants accepted as their lot, their fate, the daily grind of toil without respite, the other more a state of mind than a place, a paradise that shimmered just beneath the surface of the seen, one which even those who had been there,
working their long hours, shoring up their meagre earnings, had never entered into, though it had loomed around them always as a possibility. And these two natures coexisted together without contradiction, just as goats were at once common animals and yet the locus of strange spirits, just as
la strega
of Belmonte was both a decrepit old woman and a witch, a sorceress. When occasionally, now, a young man returned from overseas to choose a bride, the young women of the village primped and preened themselves, made potions, promenaded daily through the square, caught up in a dream of freedom, their every second word then a wistful ‘Ah-merr-ica’; but when the young man had chosen, those left behind said ‘
Tutt’ lu mond’ è paes
’,’ life was the same all over the world, sorry now for the one who had had to leave behind the familiar comfort of family and village for an uncertain destiny across the sea.

My mother, though, never spoke about America, as if the place did not exist for her, and what images I had of it I’d had to gather from my grandfather’s stories and from the talk of the town. ‘In America,’ I’d heard Giuseppina Dagnello say once, ‘the bread sticks in your mouth like glue. They have to put sugar in it or it wouldn’t taste like anything.’ Giuseppina, though, lived with her ageing parents, who had no one else to look after them, and had little prospect of crossing the sea. But Maria Maiale, who had a brother in America, told a different story. The houses there were so warm, she said, you could walk around in your socks even in the middle of winter. ‘And telephones in every room,
per l’amore di Cristo
, it’s the law there, you have to have a telephone. And when will we see a telephone in Valle del Sole? When our children’s children are dead and buried in the grave!’

Fabrizio, ready with facts on any subject, had told me once that in America everyone lived in houses of glass.

‘When you’re taking a bath anyone can come by and look at you. You can see all the women in their underwear. People look at each other all the time, over there, because nobody believes in God.’

My mother was away in Rome for a week. She returned with passport in hand, one of its thick parchment pages stamped with a box of foreign script where numbers and dates and signatures had been filled in in pen, ‘Canada’ printed in capitals at the top beneath a blue crown. On the passport’s signature page, layered over with stamps and seals, was a photograph of me and my mother that I had never seen before.

‘Don’t you remember?’ my mother said, when I asked about it. ‘We took it in Rocca Secca on your birthday.’

‘Did you know we were going to go to America?’

‘Of course not,
stupido
. I found out last week, just like you. I didn’t have time to get another picture.’

Inside a blue plastic folder was the ticket that would get us from Naples to a place called Halifax, a tiny ship etched across the top of it.

‘But where is
quest’ Alifax
?’ I asked. ‘I thought we were going to America.’

‘America is a big place,’ my mother said.

Departures for America were common enough in Valle del Sole; Maria Mancini had left not a month before, with her parents and three children, to join her husband in the Sun Parlour, and one of the Mastroangelos had left around Christmas. But proper time was always allowed for the rituals of separation to be played out, for each relation to prepare a final meal, for belongings to be sold off or bequeathed, for trunks to be built and packed, for dozens of small parcels to be wrapped in brown paper and string by those being left behind to be delivered to some relative across the sea, as little packets of food were
sometimes dropped into graves to be carried to the spirits on the other side. But my mother and I, it seemed, were being ripped untimely from our womb, without gestation: our own trunk was built in a day, and packed in a matter of hours; and our house, which had once seemed, even through the months of silence and anger, like a solid constant, unchangeable, infested as it was with our lives and smells, our histories, became almost overnight an empty shell, all the serviceable furniture carted up to Zia Lucia’s and boards nailed across the shutters. Our sheep and pigs, confused and stubborn, were chased out of their stable and into Zia Lucia’s, which had been abandoned for years; and my grandfather was once again placed on the church’s rack, amidst groans and curses, and moved to Zia Lucia’s as well, back into the house where he’d spent his childhood. He was set in a small ground floor room that looked out onto the spine of Colle di Papa, while my mother and I, together again in the last days, slept upstairs in Marta’s room, Marta sleeping for the time in the kitchen on the flowered mattress that had been mine.

It was only when the last scrap of furniture had been removed from my grandfather’s house, leaving my mother’s packed trunk to sit alone in the middle of the kitchen floor, that our leaving took on in my mind the visible form of a truth. But in the few days that remained before our departure I could not bring that truth into any focus. I walked through the streets with a strange sense of lightness, as if at any moment I might simply lift up and walk on air; and houses, faces, voices seemed to fade away from me, to lose their power to impress me with their presence. But though my mind was filled with images of America, of tall buildings and wide green fields, of the dark-haired man I remembered as my father, I could not believe in the truth of them, even my father now seeming merely like someone I had
imagined in a dream; and all I could see clearly of the future was a kind of limitless space that took shape in my head as the sea, and a journey into this space that took direction not from its destination but from its point of departure, Valle del Sole, which somehow could not help but remain always visible on the receding shore.

A few days before our departure I saw Fabrizio, as I came out of school, chasing his father’s sheep through the late winter mud and slush of via San Giuseppe. He looked frailer and thinner than he had in the fall; but he was still in his knickers and cap, swaggering as he walked, wielding his sheep stick like a sceptre. I waited at the top of the steps until he’d rounded the corner at the edge of town, so he wouldn’t see me; but later that afternoon, tending the sheep down in the Valley of the Pigs, where the snow had all melted, I looked up to see him coming towards me from the direction of the cemetery. He came up without saying a word, plucking a stem of dead grass to chew and lowering himself cross-legged onto the ground beside the rock I was sitting on.

‘My father says it’s no use sending someone like me to
school,’ he said finally. ‘He says I’m as stupid as a mule. The only way you can make a mule understand is with a whip.’

He stretched out his legs on the damp grass and leaned back on his elbows, holding his body with the studied nonchalance of a young man.

‘Rompacazzo sent me home because I threw a stone at a rat and made a hole in a bag of wheat. Pom! across my face, just like my father. He says, “
Ma che sei, scimunoit
?” ’—Fabrizio put on the thick accent of Rocca Seccans—‘ “
ma che sei, impazzoit
?” My father wanted to crack my skull.’

He spit out a piece of chewed grass, then sat up again and rubbed his goose-pimpled calves with his palms.

‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter to me,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to know
matematica
to stick a seed in the ground, my father says.
E quella maestra
’—Fabrizio bloated his cheeks and lifted out his arms, making a jogging motion like a fat person walking—‘
quella maestra
gave me a pain in the ass. “Fabrizio” ’—taking on the teacher’s falsetto—‘ “tell me, Fabrizio,
ma chi sono le tre persone in Dio?” Addio, quella porca!
’

The sun had begun to set already, hovering cold and red just above Castilucci. A gust of wind whipped down sharply from the snow-covered upper slopes of the mountains, rattling the bare branches of an old apple tree nearby. A bird let out a few solitary notes; I searched for it amidst the tree’s branches but could not make it out.

Fabrizio was holding a cigarette out to me. I hesitated, then took it, leaning forward towards Fabrizio’s proffered match.

‘In America everybody smokes like chimneys,’ Fabrizio said. ‘Sometimes you can’t even see where you’re going because of all the smoke.’

‘That’s not true,’ I said suddenly.

Fabrizio cocked his head and looked at me oddly, squinting
because of the sun.

‘I was only making a joke,’ he said finally.

He picked up a clump of dirt and slowly crushed it in his fist, the dirt trickling in a fine powder onto the pocket of his knickers. When a small mound had formed he leaned forward and blew gently into the centre of it, the dirt retreating from his smoke-filled breath in an ever-widening circle.

‘When you go to America,’ he said, ‘you can write me a letter and tell me what it’s like. When I have enough money you can call me over.’

But I didn’t know what to say to him, didn’t know if I wanted to write a letter to him or call him over or even if I could; and I didn’t know why I was angry at him now for coming to talk to me, as if
he’d
been the one who had done something wrong to
me
.