Lives of the Saints by Nino Ricci Read Free Book Online Page A

understand. So finally I said to him one morning:
    ‘ “Dompietro, why is it that every day you have to look for your shoe under the bed? Don’t you think the Lord would be much happier if you just put your shoes
beside
your bed, like everyone else, so you wouldn’t have to bother him every morning about finding it?”
    ‘ “But it’s not for my shoe that I speak to the Lord every morning,” Dompietro said. “Every night I make sure I throw my shoe under the bed so that in the morning I have to get down on my knees to look for it. And once I’m on my knees I remember to thank the Lord for everything he has given me.” ’
    My mother, though, did not think very much of Father Nick’s stories.
    ‘What are you doing under the bed?’ she said, when I tried to follow Dompietro’s example; but when I told her about Father Nick’s story she laughed.
    ‘What a thing! Don’t believe those stories, silly, who knows where he takes them from.’
    But I still couldn’t keep myself from liking Father Nick’s stories, though I guarded them from my mother now like secrets.
    On Sundays Zia Lucia and her daughter Marta usually joined us for dinner; but when they came by on the feast of San Camillo our kitchen seemed oddly strained and tense. My mother burnt herself on the cooking pot while pulling the sauce from the fireplace, spilling some of the sauce onto the flagstones.
    ‘
Stupida
,’ my grandfather said sharply, ‘can’t you be more careful?’
    Only my aunt Lucia seemed unchanged, in her almost vegetal calmness, sitting large and matronly in her usual place by the fireplace, wrapped in her usual thick skirts and apron and shawl despite the heat, her hair tied back in a kerchief. Before we gathered around the table to eat she called me to her and pulled a five
lire
coin from the pocket of her apron with a blue-veined hand.
    ‘Something to spend on your girlfriends,’ she said, the ghost of a smile on her lips. The skin of her palm was glossy with age, almost translucent.
    But Marta seemed especially canny today, in her dark silence,as if some usually dormant receptor in her had been aroused, the way some people’s limbs ached before a storm. Marta had always seemed ageless to me—she might have been fifteen or fifty, her large dark eyes wary and child-like but the skin around them wrinkled with age; and even in the village she was treated with a mixture of condescension and respect, as if she were both simple and yet possessed of mystical powers, a witch. Years of hiding her strangeness, perhaps, had taught her how to be invisible, for she moved through a room like a shadow, and when she sat it was as still as a stone, only her eyes moving, darting in their sockets as nervously as a bird’s; but today I was always aware of her presence, and I felt suddenly as if I had crawled up inside her eyes, from where the world looked oddly warped and unstable, like something seen through a piece of curved glass.
    I expected that other visitors would come in the afternoon, to welcome my mother home after her stay in the hospital or at least to talk with my grandfather about some problem in the village, as usually happened on Sundays; but after Zia Lucia and Marta had gone my grandfather went up to Di Lucci’s, and all afternoon the house remained quiet, my mother knitting in silence in a corner of the kitchen.
    It was not till the next day that two visitors stopped by, finally, while my mother and I were making bread—Maria Maiale and Giuseppina Dagnello, childhood friends of my mother’s, and distantly related to us, as was half the village, by blood. They appeared in our narrow doorway coming back from the fountain, laundry tubs perched on their hips, their knuckles chafed from scrubbing.
    ‘Like dogs, that’s how we live,’ Maria said from the doorway, ‘wash the clothes, haul the water, make the bread, feed the goats,
per l’amore di Crist’
let me rest my limbs for a minute.’
    And so saying she moved