Lives of the Saints (20 page)

‘We have to go home,’ I said. ‘It’s going to get dark.’

‘You promise to send me a letter? No joking?’

‘
Sí.
’

He set his cigarette down on a stone.

‘Then we have to make it good. Spit into your hand.’

‘Why?’

‘Just spit, you’ll see.’

I spit into my palm. Fabrizio took my wrist and brought my hand towards his mouth; before I could pull away his tongue had lapped up the gob of spit cradled there.

‘Why did you do that?’

‘It’s to make us brothers,’ he said. ‘Like we had the same blood. A person can never hurt someone who has the same blood. Here, you now.’

Fabrizio wiped his gritty palm on his knickers and spit into it.

‘Go on,’ he said, holding his hand up to me. ‘It’s only spit. Your mouth is full of spit all the time, it’s the same thing.’

But when my tongue touched against Fabrizio’s wet palm I felt myself beginning to retch. I closed my eyes and lapped the spit up quickly, trying to shunt it off to my cheek, hoping to spit it out again when Fabrizio had gone; but my stomach lurched again, forcing bile up into my throat, and I swallowed deeply to quell it.

‘It’s done,’ Fabrizio said, grinning. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his jackknife, the one his uncle had brought him from America. ‘I want you to take this. That’s to make sure I’ll come to stay with you.’

In all the time I had known Fabrizio he had never gone anywhere without his jack-knife; it had seemed like a part of him, like his knickers and cap, as inseparable as a finger or toe. I could not have imagined him giving it away, any more than I could have given away my lucky one
lira
coin.

‘
Grazie,’
I mumbled, taking the knife awkwardly in my hand. I ran my thumb over the smooth silver casing.

‘Don’t lose it,’ Fabrizio said. ‘You have to give it back when I come.’

He had not really given me the knife, then. It could be the same thing with my coin—I could get it back from him later, if I gave it to him now. But Fabrizio had already picked up his cigarette and stood, brushing dirt away from the seat of his knickers.

‘I have to go,’ he said, starting away. ‘I have to get the sheep out of the pit before it gets dark.’

When he had already begun to grow dim in the twilight, he turned in mid-stride to wave.

‘Ho, Vittò!’ he bellowed out. ‘
Buona fortuna in America!’

He was almost half way to the cemetery now; but I had taken my one
lira
coin out of my pocket, held it cradled in my palm.

‘Fabrizio!’ I called out.

He turned again; but he did not wait for me to speak.

‘Don’t forget to send me a letter!’ he shouted. ‘
Numero tredici, via Giovanni Battista!’
He turned and walked on, stopped a moment to grind his cigarette butt into the earth with his heel, half-turned to wave again, then dipped his hands into his back pockets and disappeared finally in the darkening twilight.

On my last day of school, the teacher kept me behind after classes. It was Antonio Girasole’s turn to sweep—since the New Year
la maestra
had ceased to single me out, and the readings from the
Lives of the Saints
had dwindled—and for several minutes I sat silently beside the teacher’s desk while she waited for him to finish. Seeing the teacher’s eye on him, Antonio swept furiously, continually casting sidelong glances up to the front of the room; but he never seemed to move away from a small patch of floor in the back corner, enveloped there in a cloud of dust.

‘Go on, Antonio, you can finish in the morning,’ the teacher said finally. ‘Anyway I’ve told you a thousand times to be more gentle. All you do is move the dirt from one place to another.’

‘
Scusi, maestra
,’ Antonio said, head bowed, ‘but I can’t come
in the morning. My mother is sick with diarrhoea, and I have to make the food for my brothers and sisters.’

‘Liar. I saw her on the street only this morning.’

‘She got sick this afternoon.’

‘Get out of here,’ the teacher said, ‘before I break your skull for your lies. And if you’re not here first thing in the morning, the devil himself won’t want you when I’m done with you!’

But when Antonio had gone,
la maestra’s
anger melted.

‘Come here, Vittorio,’ she said, motioning me around her desk; and when I had come close enough she reached out suddenly with both arms and pulled me against her, burying my face in her bosom. She held me a long moment, tight, rocking me back and forth, beginning to sob; but all I could think of was the way Fabrizio had called her
quella porca
a few days before, and ballooned out his arms in imitation of her.

When she drew away from me, finally, she pulled a handkerchief from her skirt pocket to daub at her eyes.

‘Ah, Vittorio,
figlio mio
,’ she said, pulling in her breath. ‘You see what babies women are? Here, there’s something I want you to have.’

She reached down under the desk and pulled her
Lives of the Saints
from her leather bag.

‘I hope you’ll live by it,’ she said, handing the book to me. ‘I hope you’ll follow their example.’

I clutched the book guiltily under my arm.

‘
Grazie.
’

‘You know, Vittorio,’ she said, ‘I had a son once too. He would have been your age now, but he died when he was a baby, and the Lord hasn’t seen fit to give me another one.’

I stared at the floor. I had not imagined that teachers had babies, too. Suddenly
la maestra
seemed a stranger to me, as if she had split before my eyes into two separate people: one who
had babies that died, the other who appeared as if from nowhere every morning in our classroom, and who faded into some shadowy limbo when school was over.

‘Go on now,’ she said, beginning to cry again. ‘I’ve already made a fool of myself. Go on home. Maybe you’ll send me a letter from America, no?’

‘
Sí
,’ I murmured.

She wiped at her tears.

‘Here, give me the book,’ she said. ‘I’ll write my address on the front page, so you’ll know where to send it.’

‘
Signora
Gelsomina Amicone,’ she wrote, in her large, careful script, ‘Piazza del Tomolo No. 3, Rocca Secca’; but I still could not make any sense of it, could not connect her to a name and address, to a table and chairs in some dim kitchen, to a bed. I had an image of her going into the market in Rocca Secca to buy her vegetables, like the other big-boned women there, talking like them with the traders, haggling over the price of a cabbage or bag of onions; but the image did not fit.

‘Go on now,’ she whispered finally, still wiping at her tears.

She leaned forward and planted a last silent kiss on my forehead.

‘
Buona fortuna.’

The eve of our departure, after supper, my grandfather called me into his room.

‘Close the door,’ he said.

In his own house my grandfather’s room had looked over the valley, always airy and bright; but Zia Lucia’s house was on the hill side of the street, cut into the slope, and the only window in his room now looked onto a sloping wall of rocky earth. Seeping moisture had coated the wall under the window with frothy white sediment and the room smelt of damp and rot, like an old blanket left too long in a corner.

My grandfather’s face had grown pale and gaunt from his confinement, loose skin draped over sharp, thin bones that looked frail as a bird’s. He lay propped on a pillow now, his cast
bulging beneath the sheets like the last vestige of some former larger self.

‘Open the drawer in my table,’ he said, his voice already hoarse with emotion, ‘and give me the case with my medals.’

His hand trembled as he reached for the case I held out to him.

‘I’ve had these medals since the first war,’ he said, clicking the case open. ‘The first two are nothing, half the men who fought then have the same ones. It’s only the last one that has any meaning. Here, look at it.’

He handed the case back to me, impatiently almost, as if he were anxious to be rid of it. The medals were pinned to a backing of faded red velvet; the one he pointed to bore a medallion of bronze engraved with a laurel-wreathed star and the inscription ‘
Al valore militare
.’ A ribbon of thick blue cloth hung down from the medallion.

‘That’s what I got for a wasted life,’ my grandfather said, taking the case back from me. ‘That and a small pension that couldn’t keep a goat alive. And I was so foolish as to think it was enough. Do you know what I got this medal for? For saving the life of a coward. A man who if he was standing before me now I would put a bullet between his eyes. I carried him a mile and a half, on my back, by God, because his muscles were so stiff with fear he couldn’t move, and when the bomb fell that ruined my legs he left me to rot in the mud. He left me to die there,
per l’amore di Cristo
, after I had saved his life, and no one came back for me until one of our own horses had finished the damage and left me a cripple. I lay there in the mud for what seemed a thousand years, bombs falling everywhere, wishing only that I would die. And now I curse God that I did not.’

Tears had begun to trickle down his cheeks; but his voice was still dry and bitter, his words hanging in the air like frost.

‘Here,’ he said, closing the case with an air of finality and handing it towards me, ‘take them. Maybe they’ll mean something to you some day, when you’re older. I have no one else to leave them to. When I die I’ll leave the house to you, if you ever come back for it. But now you’re lucky to leave this country, because it’s a place of Judases and cowards. That’s what killed Mussolini. Now everyone is brave, everyone denounces me in the streets, because I’ve been made a fool. But who was brave then, of those asses and cowards who laugh at me now? Who complained when the school was built, when money came from the government to buy land? All my life I’ve been surrounded by traitors and fools. Even my own daughter has betrayed me.’

His voice was choked now with emotion. He tried to pull himself up in bed, pushing his fists against the mattress, his jaw tight with pain, until finally his cast shifted slightly under the sheets. He closed his eyes and leaned back against his pillow, the muscles of his face loosening finally like a fist slowly unfolding. When he opened his eyes again he brought a hand up and brushed it against my cheek.

‘Take them,
figlio mio
,’ he said. ‘I hope they bring you better fortune than they brought me.’

The morning of our departure from Valle del Sole dawned wet and cold. I heard the rain coming in the early hours before daybreak, first the wind, which dragged some object on the balcony across the metal rail and hurled it with a muffled clap to the floor, then the first dull splats of rain against the window. As the noise built up to an insistent drone, grey light began to filter through the curtain and give form to the objects in the room, the chair at the foot of the bed, a rickety table, a crucifix on the wall. I had spent the last nights in almost constant wakefulness, listening to the measured rhythms of my mother’s breathing, conscious always of the warm bulge at her belly, which seemed to hum with a strange, electric energy; but tonight my mother had tossed and turned the whole night, her breathing broken and quick.

‘Get up, Vittorio,’ she said, when she’d dragged herself up from sleep. ‘It’s time to go.’

We had breakfast with Zia Lucia and Marta in silence, a small fire burning in the hearth and the rain still falling heavily outside. My mother seemed tense and irritable. She brought some breakfast in to my grandfather but they didn’t speak.

‘Don’t trouble yourself about him,’ Zia Lucia said, in her calm, ancient voice. ‘Marta has no one else to look after. He’ll be her father and her son.’

There was a glint in Marta’s eye, of pride or insolence; for a moment it made her seem almost lucid, almost competent. But then she rose up suddenly from the table and moved towards the door.

‘Where are you going, in this weather?’ Zia Lucia said.

‘I have to feed the pigs.’

‘
Dai
, you can do it later.’ But Marta had already pulled on a shawl, and she slipped out of the room like a shadow.

A small group of well-wishers, Giuseppina and her husband, Silvio the postman, a few neighbours and cousins, began to collect in Zia Lucia’s kitchen after breakfast. Di Lucci arrived finally as well, draped under a wide rain poncho, restrained and solemn; but after a moment of sombre greeting he unveiled a small parcel he carried in a plastic bag.

‘A camera,’ he whispered to my mother. ‘Just a few pictures before you go.
Per ricordo
.’

‘Please, Antonio,’ my mother said, ‘not this morning.’

‘
Ma scusa
, Cristina, if not this morning then when?’ Several others had come bearing parcels, holding them clutched in their hands or tucked under their arms as if embarrassed by them; but finally Giuseppina approached my mother, holding out a small brown bundle neatly tied with white string.

‘It’s just a little something for my husband’s cousin,’ she said.
‘If you don’t have room for it—’

My mother sucked in her breath.

‘I’m sorry Giuseppina,’ she said. ‘I’m not taking anything. It’s nothing against you, but I’m not the one to send as your messenger. Three months ago, if I’d gone, not one of you would have come to see me off. I don’t know why it should be different now.’

But Giuseppina remained for a moment where she stood as if confused, her parcel still held out before her.

‘I don’t know what you’re saying,’ she said finally.

‘You know damn well what I’m saying,’ my mother said. ‘You and the rest of you.’

Giuseppina shot a glance around the room, her face flushed.

‘If that’s how you feel I don’t know why I bothered to come at all,’ she said.

‘Then go.’

My mother had already turned away, packing some food for the journey into a hamper. Giuseppina, as if still hoping she’d misunderstood, remained for a moment in the centre of the room, her parcel clutched protectively to her now; but finally she seemed to gather her pride around her like a cloak, and turned towards the door.