Lives of the Saints (21 page)

‘Let’s go, Alberto,’ she said coldly. Her husband hesitated a moment, staring down into his cap; but finally he followed Giuseppina out the door into the rain.

A silence fell over the room, and a few others moved towards the door as if preparing to leave. But a clatter of hooves outside seemed to distract them, and a moment later my uncle Pasquale was standing large and wet in the doorway. It had been months since we had had any contact with my father’s side of the family; but my uncle simply tossed aside the plastic sheet draped over his shoulders and strode smiling towards my
mother without breaking his stride.

‘So finally going to America,’ he said, bending forward to kiss her cheek, natural as rain. ‘You should have let us know. Mario didn’t say anything in his letters.’ But my mother turned away from him awkwardly.

‘Everything was decided in a hurry,’ she said. ‘Here, you must be soaked through, I’ll make you some coffee. There’s still some warm on the fire.’

‘No, no, it’s all right, I have to get to the market.’ He pulled a parcel from a hunter’s sack draped over his shoulder and held it out tentatively towards my mother. ‘
Mamma
wants you to bring this to Mario, a shirt or something, as if they don’t have shirts in America. If you don’t have a place for it I’ll bring it back. It’s only a token.’

But my mother took the parcel from him quickly.

‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I’ll find a place for it.’ She stuffed the parcel into the wicker hamper where she had been packing food. But the tension in the room was thick now; even my uncle seemed infected by it, an awkwardness breaking through his genial surface.

‘Is Mario meeting you at the port?’ he asked.

‘No,’ my mother said. ‘We’ll take the train ourselves. We’ll find our way.’

‘Ah.’

He stood for a moment in the centre of the room, staring at the floor.

‘Maybe I’ll take that cup of coffee after all,’ he said finally.

The other visitors began to leave now, my mother saying her goodbyes from half-way across the room, her arms folded sternly across her chest, as if only impatient for the leave-takings to be over. Finally only my uncle remained, sitting stoop-shouldered beside Zia Lucia in front of the fire, and Silvio and
Di Lucci. Marta had returned from the stable, as furtively and silently as she had left, and was cleaning away dirty glasses and cups. We waited several minutes in silence, my mother and I seated at the table, Di Lucci and Silvio at the door, until finally we heard the sound of a horn above the patter of rain outside—Cazzingulo, who would be taking us into Rocca Secca. In a moment his truck pulled up in front of the house, and he popped his head through the door.

‘Oh, is this the house?
Crist’ e Maria
, it’s raining like a bitch out here. We’ll have to hurry if you don’t mind, signora, I have a dozen people in the back of my truck who want to break my balls.’

Silvio and Di Lucci carried our one suitcase and our hamper of food out to the truck, then went up to the old house to help Cazzingulo with the trunk; but my uncle stayed behind, coming slowly across the room to join my mother at the table.

‘Vittorio, go in and say goodbye to your grandfather,’ my mother said. My uncle had rested his elbows on the table; he leaned forward slightly now towards my mother, staring down at his hands. Marta, washing cups at the sideboard, tilted her head almost imperceptibly towards us.

‘You’re not going to him,’ my uncle said, barely audible. ‘I saw it in your eyes the moment I came in.’ But my mother turned away.

‘Vittorio, damn it, I told you to go in to your grandfather.’

I hovered a moment by the table; but my mother rose suddenly and prodded me with an abrupt push into my grandfather’s room. As we came in my grandfather’s eyes shot sharply towards her; but she stepped out of the room almost at once, closing the door behind her.

I was in my grandfather’s room only a minute. Without speaking he reached out and drew me towards him, pressing his
grizzled cheeks hard against my own. When he pulled away his eyes were rimmed with tears.

‘I hope to God she doesn’t ruin your life the way she’s ruined hers,’ he said.

When I came out I heard my uncle just starting up his cart outside; he had not waited to say goodbye to me. There was a silence in the room like the ringing silence after an argument, though I had not heard any loud voices while I had been in with my grandfather. Zia Lucia was still staring into the fire, her back to me; Marta was still wiping glasses dry in the corner. My mother rose from the table when I came out, stepping past me into my grandfather’s room without looking at me and closing the door behind her.

‘Oh, are you coming?’ Cazzingulo had popped his head in the front door. ‘The bus from Rocca Secca leaves in half an hour.’

Now Silvio and Di Lucci crowded in behind him, Di Lucci, huddled under his poncho, still clasping the plastic bag that held his camera. For the next few minutes we waited in silence in Zia Lucia’s kitchen while a low hum of conversation reached us through the door of my grandfather’s room.

‘What do they have to discuss in there?’ Cazzingulo said. ‘A kiss on each cheek and it’s finished.’

‘Sit down for a minute,’ Zia Lucia said. ‘Let them make their peace.’

Di Lucci moved towards the fire, bending to warm his hands; but my grandfather’s voice rose up suddenly sharp and loud from behind his door.

‘Have you gone mad? If you go through with this, so help me God, I’ll pray every day of my life that you rot in hell!’

‘And what would you have me do? Go to the hell that’s waiting for me there?’

‘You’ll face your sins, and pray that God will have mercy on your soul!’

‘I’ve paid for my sins a thousand times over!’

‘And the boy,’ my grandfather said, shouting a full voice now, ‘what’ll become of him? You’ll not take him away from me like this!’

‘I’ll take my own son where I damn well please, and not you nor anyone is going to stop me.’

‘Then get out! Get out of this house! And if you ever step through that door again I swear by God I’ll throttle you with my own hands!’

The door to my grand father’s room flew open, and my mother stormed into the kitchen.

‘To hell with you all!’ she shouted. She pulled her shawl off a hook by the door and flung it around her shoulders.

‘And you,’ she said to Cazzingulo, ‘don’t stand there like an ass.’ She pushed her way past the men at the door and into the street.

‘Vittorio! Get your coat and let’s go!’

In a moment I had run out in the street after her, afraid that I would be left behind. From the back of Cazzingulo’s truck half a dozen people, their knees jammed up against our trunk, stared at us blankly as we came towards them; but my mother marched up to the cab, and a man sitting there quickly gave up his place and hurried through the rain to join the others in the back.

Cazzingulo, flanked by Silvio and Di Lucci, still stood staring after us at Zia Lucia’s door.

‘
Per l’amore di Cristo
, what are you waiting for?’ my mother shouted back to him.

But all along via San Giuseppe, I saw now, on the balconies, on the stoops, huddled under jackets or shawls in the street, the
villagers had come out to watch us, the men and women, small children, the old people who never moved the long day from the chairs where someone had set them, all of them watching us now so still and rapt they might have been posing for a portrait, offering us a final frozen image of themselves, only the hard drone of the rain relieving their still silence. For an instant my mother, her hair curling down now in glistening coils, her dress glued to her belly and thighs with rain, seemed suddenly small and defeated: something like fear seemed to flash through her eyes, and she drew the edges of her shawl more tightly over her chest.

‘Fools,’ she muttered to herself. She turned back to the open door of the truck, drawing me towards her protectively. ‘Go on Vittorio, get inside.’

But before she had lifted me into the cab she whipped suddenly around again, one hand still clutching my shoulder.

‘Fools!’ she shouted now. ‘You tried to kill me but you see I’m still alive. And now you came to watch me hang, but I won’t be hanged, not by your stupid rules and superstitions. You are the ones who are dead, not me, because not one of you knows what it means to be free and to make a choice, and I pray to God that he wipes this town and all its stupidities off the face of the earth!’

When she had finished an eerie silence fell over the street, even the rain seeming suddenly hushed. The villagers stood still as stone, seemed to have merged with the rock of the houses and pavement, become finally themselves simply crags and swells in the hard mountain face of the village.

My mother hustled me into the cab.

‘Get in and drive!’ she shouted back to Cazzingulo. She climbed in beside me, dripping now with rain. She whipped her head to one side to draw her locks from her face and her hair
sent a spatter of rain against the side window.

In a moment Cazzingulo had slid into the driver’s seat.

‘
Ma scusi, signora
,’ he said, scratching his chin, ‘I know that as long as I get paid it’s none of my business—’

‘Then drive!’ my mother said. ‘The only mistake I made was that I didn’t leave this hell a dozen years ago, when I had the chance. Drive!’

Cazzingulo seemed about to speak; but finally he shrugged, reached forward to start up the engine, and lurched into gear. Through the rain-streaked side-view mirror I had a last glimpse of the villagers—some of them had begun to move now, drifting like wraiths towards the edge of town; though no one raised a hand to wave goodbye to us, the way they did when other families left the village. But in a moment we had gained the high road, Cazzingulo taking the curve without stopping and shifting into a higher gear, and Valle del Sole had disappeared from view.

To the sea, to the sea. A bus ride down pitted, mountain-slung roads, the bus stopping in every town and village until it was crammed with other passengers, day labourers in home-spun jerseys and cracked hobnailed boots, freshly shaven soldiers in sharp-creased khaki, adolescent town girls who covered their mouths when they spoke, to hide their lipstick. Long switch-backed descents into raindrenched valleys, then the sudden grinding churn of the gears and groan of the engine as the driver urged the bus up another rise, up and up, into gloomy cypress forests and small stony villages still crusted with snow.

After several hours of hard mountain the land began by slow degrees to ease into gentle rolls, and finally the bus rumbled onto a wide highway of smooth black. Above us the clouds which had followed us the whole journey gave way now to
widening swatches of blue; and beside me the hardness in my mother’s eyes melted slowly into runners of quiet tears, which she hid by turning to the window and bringing a discreet hand up to wipe at her cheek. ‘Napoli 13’ a sign read, and in the distance the almost perfect lines of two great triangles of earth rose up towards the sky, the Vesuvius; and moments later we were into the outskirts of the city, driving past billboards and streetside markets and great smouldering heaps of garbage. Gradually the streets narrowed, hemmed in by mottled pink buildings a dozen stories high and increasingly crammed with cars and carts and people, until finally the bus came to a lurching stop in an enormous square where the traffic formed almost a solid sea, and where boys my own age, crooked-toothed and barefoot, went from car to car hawking cigarettes and fruit and glossy-covered magazines.

We spent the night in a dim, brown-walled hotel room, a picture of the last supper hanging over the bed and curtains of dirty red velvet draped over a window that looked onto a garbage-strewn alleyway. My mother had hardly spoken since we’d left Valle del Sole, and all night long she twitched and turned, as if wrestling a phantom, the bulge of her belly dragging the sheets away from me and leaving me exposed to the room’s cold. Towards morning I slipped into a familiar dream, one I had had a hundred times before in Valle del Sole: my mother and I were in a dark passageway, slowly feeling our way along the walls in search of a way out, hoping to slip unseen past the hunch-backed guardian who inevitably barred our way. Tonight, though, the hunchback did not come; but at some point, reaching out into the darkness, I realized with sudden horror that my mother was no longer beside me.

But someone nudged my shoulder then—my mother, still in bed next to me.

‘Wake up, Vittorio,’ she whispered. ‘It’s time to go.’

Outside, it was still dark. My mother and I had a breakfast of bread and cheese from the food she had packed, then went down to the lobby. My mother exchanged a few words with the man behind the counter there; he went out into the street and returned a few minutes later with a small, gaunt-faced man with a clot of blood in one eye.

‘Oh,
signó
’,’ he said, grinning at my mother and winking his bloody eye, ‘so you’re going to America, eh?’ The two men dragged our trunk from a storage room behind the hotel counter, carrying it out into the street and lifting it onto the roof of a battered Cinquecento, where they secured it with ropes passed through the car’s open windows.

The gaunt-faced man drove us through the city, keeping up a steady stream of banter in a thick, rounded dialect I couldn’t understand. The city was quiet now, great
palazzi
looming up out of the morning shadows on either side of the streets like silent sentries. I drifted off to sleep in the car’s back seat; when my mother woke me our driver and a man in a stiff red cap were lifting our trunk off the roof onto a cart. We were at the port: not a hundred yards from us, at the pier, was a great ship taller than any of the buildings I had seen in the city, a leviathan of blue that stretched half a mile along the pier. Beyond it, under a pale early-morning sky, was a crisper blue, stretching smooth and picture still as far as the horizon, the blue of the bay and the sea.

My mother and I followed our porter to a counter where a numbered label was pasted onto our trunk and it was hauled away by two thick-armed men who grinned at my mother through rotting teeth and called something out to her I couldn’t understand. Despite the early hour the port was alive with motion, blank-faced porters in their red suits and stiff caps
crisscrossing the pavement with trolleys and handcarts, moustached men in work clothes lounging at dockside on wooden crates, black-toothed vendors peddling
castagne
, baked chestnuts, shouting in their thick, rounded accents, ‘Oh,
castà! Cald’ e saporí! Venite signó’ e signó’! Casta!
’ Amidst the porters and workers and vendors moved a floating mass that seemed cut adrift, lost and directionless, men in stiff dark suits and white shirts, women in bulging flowered dresses, children in Sunday outfits that strained at their wrists and ankles, rope-tied suitcases and overstuffed handbags and lumpy burlap sacks strewn all over the pier like the ruins of a war. Here and there whole families were bedded down on the dirty pavement with bundled undershirts for pillows and thin coats for blankets; and from all along the mile-long pier came the great collective wailing of a thousand agonized goodbyes, women and men alike crying and clutching their sea-bound relatives as if seeing them off to the very bowels of hell.