Lives of the Saints

“Bumbling Di Lucci, man of light. Did he know something of what had gone on in our stable, of those blue eyes that had swooped down on me? Or was he just following the villager’s instinct that beneath every simple event there lurked some dark scandal?”

The word for “light” in Italian is “luce,” which is why Vittorio refers to Di Lucci as the “man of light.” Di Lucci is immediately suspicious of the “dark” secret that Cristina is hiding about her affair and he seeks to bring it into the light. Cristina’s unconventional sexual behavior introduces the theme of Traditional Values Versus Personal Freedom.

“I decided finally it had been my father now who’d made me move out of my mother’s bed, as if in some strange way he was able to control my life and see into it from whatever world he lived in across the sea, the way God could see into my thoughts. It did not surprise me that he had that power, because in my mind my father was like a phantom, some dim ghost or presence who could sometimes harden into the mute solid substance of a human form and then suddenly disperse again, spread out magically until he was invisible and omnipresent.”

The narrative is related from Vittorio’s point of view. As a sign of his childhood innocence, he engages in magical thinking to make sense of the world around him. In this instance, rather than understand that it was his grandfather insisting that he sleep in his own bed, as shown by the events unfolding, he ascribes this forced separation from his mother to his absent father, who he does not entirely understand.

“The eye was the locus of all the powers which could not be explained under the usual religion, the religion of the churches; and despite its name it stood outside the normal categories of good and evil, subsumed them, striking both the righteous and the depraved […] its fickleness made it deadly and all-powerful, like fate itself, a force which knew no masters, neither God nor the devil.”

One of the main examples of The Influence of Superstition and Myth in the Valle del Sole is the villagers’ belief in the “evil eye.” This belief goes beyond the Catholic religiosity of the villagers even as it incorporates some of its elements. The persistence of these old folk beliefs speaks to the parochial and isolated nature of life in the village.

“For some reason it was the thought of her having seen my mother’s anger that made me burn more than anything now, the thought of the large false smile she would light for us then if she returned, like someone who had won an argument; and when I could not make her out anywhere I felt a great 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 this sentence, Vittorio reveals that he has undergone a Loss of Childhood Innocence as a result of being obligated to keep his mother’s secret. Even though he resents her for the position she has put him in, as well as the effects that her ostracization has on his own life, he nevertheless wants to protect her. This is represented here by his relief that Luciano’s wife did not see Cristina hit him.

“That was the day, too, that Fabrizio had taught me to smoke […] and afterwards we’d spent an hour or so rolling and wrestling in the grass, laughing because sheep fell off cliffs, because fathers beat their sons, and because the world, for all its seeming stability, was actually spinning around at a tremendous speed, which only became apparent when you’d had a smoke.”

Fabrizio is Vittorio’s only friend and here Vittorio describes the day they met. Despite Vittorio’s efforts to understand the world around him, ultimately he recognizes fate’s randomness and his powerlessness, as represented by sheep falling off cliffs, domestic violence, and the endless turning of the world. The close bond between the two boys stands in contrast to the tense relations between Vittorio’s family and the rest of the villagers later in the novel.

“‘It’s not because of you,’ Fabrizio said, whispering now, our voices seeming suddenly loud with the fading of the procession’s song. ‘It’s because of your mother and the snake. Lu malochiu.’ He twisted his face into a scowl and brought two fingers up to his head as horns, to mimic the evil eye.”

In this snippet of dialogue, Fabrizio articulates the common superstition in the village, reflecting the influence of superstition and myth: Cristina has been marked with the evil eye as a result of her snake bite. The use of dialect (rather than Italian) in this dialogue shows how parochial and local these superstitions are: “Malochiu” is dialect for the “evil eye,” or “malochhio” in formal Italian.

“The crowd, it seemed, was still in a trance from the sudden rush of light and sound, Valle del Sole’s medieval square transformed in an instant into a pocket of rich modernity, as bright and alive as any street in Rome or Naples; but on stage the singers, picking up on the tune of the overture, embarked at once on a singing duel.”

The appearance of the band Capo di Molise, with their modern instruments and electric lights, provide a point of contrast with just how isolated and technologically underdeveloped the village of Valle del Sole is. The town square goes from medieval to modern by their presence. The band and its modernity is a sign that the town is slowly changing in the post-war period.

“I did not have any experience fighting, but somehow my body seemed to know instinctively how to do it, how to fling a fist, what areas to strike to cause the greatest harm; but in the midst of my attack I suddenly felt my rage ebbing, giving way to a vague fear, not simply the fear of being beaten up but a fear of my own violence, of the strange thing which was not me that had just flung itself with such dangerous force on Vincenzo Maiale.”

As is typical of the bildungsroman genre (See: Background), Vittorio gradually comes to understand himself better by facing and overcoming challenges. One such moment is his fight with Vicenzo Maiale over a “veiled comment about my mother which I didn’t understand” (107), when Vittorio learns that his body “instinctively” knows how to fight.

“[N]ow all the lore I had ever collected […] seemed tangled in my head in a great muddled heap. There were the ways of hurting an enemy, by putting glass in his footprints or by roasting his coat over a fire; there were the birds that shouldn’t be killed except at certain times of the year, pheasants and wrens, because the killer would break a bone or his cows would give bloody milk; there were the places it was forbidden to spin or carry a spindle, along the high road or in front of a freshly seeded field, because the crops would grow up crooked and dwarfed.”

This quote details a litany of the various superstitions and folk rituals that the villagers adhere to, detailing the influence of superstition and myth. Cristina is typically scornful of such beliefs; however, this quote shows that Vittorio is left in doubt as to whether Cristina herself had tried to do one of these rituals to cleanse herself of the evil eye before she fell ill.

“And I did not have to wait until the following morning, when Alfredo whispered ‘Five feet long!’ as he passed my desk, to a chorus of laughter, to know that I had betrayed Fabrizio, as surely as if I had wished him dead, and to know also that I had sunk so low in shame now that no magic or miracle could ever reclaim me.”

The moment when Vittorio abandons Fabrizio to the blows of the other boys is a key turning point in his journey towards the loss of childhood innocence. As he describes here, where once he felt that “magic or miracle” could help him, he is learning that the stark reality of both life and who he is cannot be so easily faced.

“Some part of me encouraged her in her new attitude—in the space of a few weeks I had become a model student, took my books home every night and studied them diligently, my tests coming back to me now only with large red swirls of approval.”

A key element of Vittorio’s transformation is from an indifferent to a dedicated student. This sentence describes how this new passion for reading changes his circumstances and will ultimately lead to his reading of the Lives of the Saints (See: Symbols & Motifs).

“If the cock was in the fields, the men of Valle del Sole said, the hen would lay her eggs in someone else’s nest. Yet that was what the men had always done, left their wives behind while they travelled out to farm their own fields or to earn a wage, away for days or months at a time […] Their fears had given birth to a wealth of proverbs: ‘Guard your women like your chickens,’ they said, ‘or they’ll make food for the neighbour’s table;’ or ‘A woman is like a goat: she’ll eat anything she sees in front of her.’”

In addition to the folk superstitions, the people of Valle del Sole have a number of folk proverbs about the best way to live life. These proverbs describe the men’s fear that the women they leave behind will have sex with others while they are away, reflecting the strict gender roles and expectations in the village. Cristina will later challenge this misogynistic belief to the ship captain while en route to Halifax, even though her own defiant behavior reflects her struggles with traditional values versus personal freedom.

“‘Women have had their faces up their asses for too long, they let their men run around like goats and then they’re happy if they don’t come home and beat them!’

‘Brava. And you, communista, are going to change all that. With your communist boyfriend, a foreigner no less, who’s just a coward and a beggar.’”

This dialogue between Cristina and her father, Vittorio’s grandfather, highlights just how much he knows about the situation and the source of their conflict, representing traditional values versus personal freedom. Cristina argues that the women in the village are treated badly because their men cheat on and beat them. In response, Vittorio’s grandfather calls her a communist for trying to improve her own lot by having a relationship with a “foreigner.” Vittorio’s grandfather, a fascist, disdains the communists and Cristina’s free-spirited ways.

“America. How many dreams and fears and contradictions were tied up in that single word, a word which conjured up a world, like a name uttered at the dawn of creation, even while it broke another, the one of village and home and family.”

To Vittorio and many others in the village, America is something of a myth. It is also something that breaks apart families, as it has done to Vittorio’s own family when his father left. Vittorio will experience this tearing away from family himself when he leaves for Halifax.

“‘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.’”

Mussolini was deposed by members of his own government and later killed by partisans (See: Background). Vittorio’s grandfather, a supporter of Mussolini, compares his own situation to that of his former leader, suggesting that members of his family, his daughter, and the other villagers have turned against him. Vittorio’s grandfather despairs of the changes happening in the village and has become a bitter old man as a result.

“‘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!’”

Cristina’s final speech to the villagers before she leaves to take the ship to America clearly articulates her position in the conflict of traditional values versus personal freedom. She is proud of her decision to make her own way in the world and refuses to be shamed by the traditional villagers for her choice. She literally curses the villagers for their closed-mindedness.

“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!’”

This sentence describes the scene at the port in Naples when Vittorio boards the ship with his mother. It is a clear example of Nico Ricci’s use of local color to conjure up the specific details of the place and time, including snippets of Neapolitan dialect (“Cald’ e saporí”) to highlight this specificity.

“Slowly the ship, like a great tired whale, pulled back into the waters of the bay and began to turn its nose to the sea. At last the people on the pier had become a single undulating wave, their shouts barely audible, and as the ship slipped away from them I felt a tremendous unexpected relief, as if all that could ever cause pain or do harm was being left behind on the receding shore, and my mother and I would melt now into an endless freedom as broad and as blue as the sea.”

The moment that the ship leaves the port, Vittorio feels an exhilarating rush of freedom. He is beginning to understand his mother’s emphasis on the importance of personal choice, represented by the decision to go to America, over traditional values, or staying in the village.

“My mother settled quickly into the life of the boat. Though it was only mid-March each day dawned warm and cloudless, and the air and sun seemed to bring back to my mother a warm radiance, as if the crisp blue of the sky and sea had seeped inside her.”

Having realized her dream to leave the village so that she can offer her children a better life, Cristina allows herself to be happy. She is no longer under the watchful, judgmental eye of her father and the other villagers.

“‘Tell me this,’ my mother said, beginning to pick again at the contents of her antipasto dish, ‘doesn’t it worry you to spend so much time at sea? What do you think your wife does when you leave her alone like that? Even a woman has an itch she needs to scratch once in a while.’”

Cristina is annoyed that the captain set her up so that his wife would think that Cristina was the captain’s mistress. In response and as a representation of her strong-willed nature that seeks to combat misogyny, she challenges the captain about his cheating at his own table, pointing out that women have sexual desires of their own. This reflects Cristina’s commitment to defying traditional gender norms in the battle of traditional values versus personal freedom.

“For perhaps five seconds I stood pinned there by the roll of the ship and by the rush of water at my back, staring helpless as the ship completed its roll and the sea opened up before me like a jaw, so close I could have thrust my fist into it, the great wall of a wave building over me in a lengthening curve. But in the brief instant before the wave fell, all my fear suddenly drained away and I felt a tremendous power surge in me, as if I had grown god-like and could command the movement of the world at will.”

After performing the chicken ritual to rid his mother of the evil eye, Vittorio has a dream about being swallowed by something “like the whale that swallowed Jonah” (120). This vision comes true, in a sense, when Vittorio is swallowed by the wave while on deck during a storm. He describes it as being in “the sea’s belly,” analogous to Jonah being in the belly of the Leviathan. His moment of courage shows both his maturity and his loss of childhood innocence.

“‘Say hello to your sister.’ She leaned towards me, and I started back. Only the bundle’s face was showing, small and ugly, the skin sickly blue and wrinkled like a dried olive; but I was flooded with relief to see that all its features were human, the tiny nose and eyes and ears, that it was not the snake-headed child that Alfredo Girasole had warned me about.”

Vittorio’s susceptibility to the influence of superstitions and myth is not entirely abandoned when he leaves the village. For this reason, he is still somewhat relieved that his half-sibling is born with human features, defying the predictions of “the snake-headed child” the folk superstitions suggested. This moment suggests that Vittorio is slowly becoming more skeptical towards village beliefs.

“It seemed I had fallen into the world of dreams, where no object or image had the meaning normally assigned to it, hid some secret about itself that I must discover; and all day and night my mind raced, working out complicated schemes and theories that might account for all the disparate facts, that might piece them together at last into a final magical solution.”

While feverish after the loss of his mother, Vittorio longs for a “final magic solution” that would rectify the situation. When none is forthcoming, this contributes further to his loss of childhood innocence, as he is now alone while heading for a new life in Canada.