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

into the stone coolness of thekitchen and set her tub on the floor, then dragged a chair away from the table halfway to the door and straddled it backwards, the way young men did at Di Lucci’s bar. She rested her thick arms on the chair’s back and extended her legs before her, her bulging veins leading like purple highways to the high lands of her hips. Her flesh, its tremors receding, came to uneasy rest, her breasts and belly pressing against the chair back like a cliff wall.
    Giuseppina kept her place by the door, etched out there by the morning sunlight, her tub still perched on her hip.
    ‘I don’t think I can stay,’ she said; but she did, just where she was.
    Mothers in Valle del Sole—and these were mothers, as the clothes in their washtubs showed, the bleached diapers, the tiny knickers, the dollish socks—formed a class: ruddy, swollen hands, thick skirts of homespun wool, hair short and tucked under a kerchief, round bellies protected with aprons of burlap or grey linen, like sacks of wheat. They moved with a slow, elephantine gait, arms akimbo, all the movement coming from the hips, a habit developed from carrying water-filled jugs on their heads, the bottom half of the body adjusting to all the undulations of the road while the top remained regal, exquisitely poised. They spoke the most flattened form of the local dialect, because unlike the men—who at the least would have improved their Italian during their army service, and who travelled more often to other districts—they were far from any edifying influence, whatever proper Italian they might have learned in their five years of schooling in Valle del Sole long-forgotten (though my own mother had got as far as
la terza media
in Rocca Secca, and I’d sometimes heard her talking with merchants in an Italian more rounded and precise than
la maestra’s
). Maria and Giuseppina had both married local farmers and borne severalchildren, had long ago completed the rite of passage from the small freedoms of adolescence to the daily toils of peasant motherhood.
    Maria was talking pleasantries, gesticulating widely; when her chair let out a creak of protest she lifted a foot onto the crossbar to silence it, so that from where I stood against my mother, pouring water for her into the dough, I caught a sudden glimpse of the marbled fat of Maria’s inner thigh. Maria was using metaphors I couldn’t understand—something about Antonella, Alfredo Catalone’s daughter, down in the pasture with Antonio Girasole; something else about a priest in Tornamonde breaking a commandment, Maria didn’t say which one. But here Giuseppina broke in.
    ‘You’re always making fun of the priests,’ she said, her voice high and thin, like a mountain wind whistling around a cliff. ‘It’s not right.’ In Giuseppina it was still possible to make out the curves of breasts, belly, hips; but it seemed only her clothes held her together, her flesh ready at any moment to burst its restraints and revert to formlessness. Her legs, though, tapered strangely to thinness.
    ‘Why should you defend the priests?’ my mother said, stretching out her dough and working her palms and knuckles into it. ‘They’re no better than the rest of us.’ She wore a thin black sweater, its sleeves pushed up above her elbows, that caught her curves as she worked, now the roundness of her breasts as she reached up to brush a strand of hair away from her eyes with the back of her hand, now the feline curve of her back as she arched over the rolling board.
    ‘You’re too proud,’ Giuseppina said, shifting her weight from peg leg to peg leg, like a sheep on rocky ground. ‘Even when you were young. When’s the last time you went to confession?’
    ‘What does confession have to do with it? Cristina doesn’tneed the priests,’ Maria said, her voice wheezing, as if she was about to break into laughter. Despite the day’s coolness, a line of sweat had collected on the dark down above her lip.