Free Lives of the Saints by Nino Ricci

you know my name?’
    ‘Oh, I know all about you,’ the man said, turning to glance at my mother beside him. ‘Your mother tells me everything.’
    ‘You don’t know what day it is today.’
    ‘Of course I do. It’s the feast of St. Bartholomew.’
    ‘No it’s not,’ I said. ‘It’s my birthday.’
    ‘
E’ vero
? Why didn’t you say so?’
    We had reached the edge of the market. From here the street led towards the square; I could see the open brightness of it beckoning a few hundred yards on. But after walking a bit further, Luciano turned down a narrow, deserted side-street, the houses along it old and decrepit. From here the sound of the market reached us only as a distant hum, punctuated occasionally by a shout or a peal of laughter. Luciano slid his hands under my arms and lifted me onto the ground. My shoes had left two large smudges under the armpits of his shirt.
    ‘Explain those to your wife,’ my mother said. ‘You shouldn’t wear white if you can’t keep clean.’
    ‘You sound like a priest.’
    My mother sat down on a step in front of a boarded-up doorway, drawing her knees up and wrapping her arms around them, like a young girl. Luciano sat down beside her, then dipped a hand into his pant pocket and pulled out a large silver coin.
    ‘It’s an old one
lira
,’ he said, holding the coin towards me. ‘From before the war, when you could still buy something with a
lira
.’
    The date, printed in tiny numbers under the claw of an eagle, read 1927. Luciano pointed to a small indentation on the eagle’s wing.
    ‘I want to tell you about that mark,’ he said, closing his fingers around the coin again like a magician. He motioned me up against his knee.
    ‘I found this coin,’ he said, ‘in a field in Greece. During the war. It must have slipped through the pocket of one of the other soldiers, because I found it shining in the mud in somebody’s footprint. Who knows what I was thinking—here we were marching against the enemy, bullets flying everywhere, and I stop to pick a one
lira
off the ground, like a schoolboy.’
    Luciano glanced at my mother beside him. ‘And then?’ she said.
    ‘Well, we had a hard time that day,’ Luciano said, turning back to me. ‘We lost the battle and many of my friends were killed. It was like a bad dream. But that night, when I was sitting in my tent, I found a little hole in my shirt pocket, like a bullet hole. Then I remembered the coin I had picked up, and when I took it out of my pocket I saw the mark on the wing. That’s when I realized that the coin had saved my life—it must have stopped the bullet that had left the hole in my shirt. If I hadn’t stopped to pick it up the bullet would have gone straight into my heart.’ My mother laughed.
    ‘Is that true?’ she said, tugging Luciano’s hand toward her to look more closely at the coin.
    ‘Every word of it, by Jesus, Joseph, and Mary. Ever since then I’ve carried this coin with me everywhere, for good luck. But now,’ and he turned back to me with eyebrows raised, ‘I’m going to give it to you.’
    He set the coin in my palm. It weighed heavily there, not tinny like the five and ten
lire
coins I had been collecting but as thick and dense as a fifty or hundred lire. I rubbed the coin with my thumb, feeling its thickness and weight, the texture of its detailed surface. An intricate pattern of feathers stood out in relief on the eagle’s outstretched wings.
    ‘Look on the other side,’ Luciano said. ‘It even has your name on it.’
    On the obverse side, in profile, was a bald-headed bust. Luciano pointed to the inscription etched around the coin’s circumference, not the usual ‘
Repvbblica Italiana
’ of newer coins but ‘
Vittorio Emanvele III Re e Imp.
’
    It seemed strange to me that fortune could be as simple as Luciano made it out, that it could be passed along from one person to another or depend on something as slight as a hole in your pocket; but for the moment my time