Lives of the Saints by Nino Ricci

relief, as if my mother’s slap had not been a punishment at all but part of some sin or crime we’d committed together, and which had gone undetected.
    In silence I picked up my fork and began to eat my
tortellini
, my eyes trained now on the slowly emerging bottom of the bowl. When we had finished eating, Luciano’s son came around to collect our dishes.
    ‘How much is it,’ my mother said tonelessly.
    ‘But my father told me—’
    ‘Never mind that,’ my mother said. ‘Just give me the regular price.’

IX
    La festa della Madonna
on the last weekend of September transformed Valle del Sole every year from a sleepy peasant village into a carnival town. Three days of festivities—music, dancing, processions, fireworks—to cap off the summer and to celebrate the harvest. People from neighbouring villages, from Rocca Secca, old residents from Rome and Naples, flocked into the village; day labourers working on distant farms took leaves of absence; migrants in the north, in Switzerland, in France, boarded crowded trains for the long journey home. Sometimes even a few
Americani
appeared, planning their return to their native village to coincide with
la festa
.
    About a month before the festival, members of
lu comitato della Madonna
went around to each household in the village for
la questua
, the collection taken up to pay festival expenses,arriving in twos in their Sunday suits and summoning up their most proper Italian to make their plea. The poverty of many of the villagers sometimes made their job an uncomfortable one; but village loyalty assured that even the poorest families would reach into the pot or jug in which they kept their savings and separate out the expected number of notes with little hesitation. During the course of the year each village in the area had its own festival, in honour of its patron saint, and ancient rivalries ensured that the peasants would go hungry before they would allow their village to be outdone by one of its neighbours.
La festa della Madonna
was tied up in these rivalries in more ways than one: Valle del Sole’s original patron was St. Michael, whose feast fell on the 28th of September, but once when a cholera epidemic had decimated the population of Valle del Sole but not claimed a single victim from Castilucci, the villagers, jealous that Castilucci’s patron, St. Joseph, had been more powerful than their Michael, had applied to Rome for a change of saints. As their replacement they chose the Virgin, who had a long history of successful intercessions with a God who was sometimes distant and unapproachable; and though Rome had denied their request, they had finally made the change on their own authority, though they had kept the last weekend of September as their time of celebration.
    These village rivalries, too, had led to a continual escalation in the lavishness of the festivities in the past few years, for though the peasants’ fortunes had not improved much,
paesani
who had had good fortune overseas had begun pouring their own wealth into the festivals. This year, in Valle del Sole, rumours were being whispered of a celebration such as had never been seen before in the region, because Salvatore Mancini, who had left Valle del Sole before the war to make his fortune in America, had sent the
comitato
a sum that would have made the Popehimself suck in his breath.
    But in my grandfather’s house no sense of excitement had been building. Our kitchen had been strangely silent for that time of year; for though my grandfather seldom sat on the
comitato
himself, as mayor he presided over its selection in the spring and was usually kept well informed of its activities as the festival approached and called upon to settle the committee’s internal disputes, our kitchen often alive with heated debate well into the night. But this year no one had come, to wrangle over the timing of the fireworks or the number of chairs that should be rented from Rocca Secca or the sum that should be