Free Lives of the Saints by Nino Ricci Page A

in the spotlight was over and I had become invisible, Luciano and my mother speaking together in low voices again.
    ‘He came to the village?’ Luciano had dropped his voice to whisper. ‘Cristí, you’re tempting the devil.’
    ‘What could I do?’ my mother said calmly. She stared down at her hands. ‘A letter came in the morning, he came in the afternoon. How could I stop him?’
    ‘Someone must have seen him,’ Luciano said. ‘I hear people are beginning to talk.’
    ‘Let them talk.’
    ‘I heard that someone from the German embassy had come looking for him. Did he tell you that?’
    ‘Yes,’ my mother said.
    ‘All these years and they haven’t forgotten. If it was the Italians they would have lost his file years ago. And it’s not as if they won the war—if he went home now he’d be a hero, for what he’d done. Did he say where he was going?’
    ‘What do I care where he goes? Milan, Switzerland—I haven’t heard anything from him. Anyway I have my own troubles to worry about. I hope he didn’t leave me a little gift—he got very excited when he saw that snake.’
    ‘And the snake on top of everything. You know I’m not superstitious, Cristí, but a snake is a snake—’
    ‘Don’t be foolish. The snake was a stupid accident.’
    Luciano shifted awkwardly on the stone step, bringing a hand up to rub the back of his neck.
    ‘Still,’ he said finally. ‘The villagers. You know how they like to get hold of a scandal—for peasants like that everything is a sign. Things must be getting hard for you. What will you do if he comes back?’
    My mother shrugged.
    ‘Maybe we’ll run off to America together.’
    ‘Cristina, this is nothing to joke about.’
    ‘Who’s joking? America’s a big place. No one would ever find us there.’
    ‘Look,’ Luciano said, ‘I have to get my vegetables. Why don’t you and Vittorio come around to the restaurant for lunch? On me. I have some good wine from last year. And a bowl of
tortellini alla bolognese
for Vittorio.’
    He leaned over to kiss my mother on the cheek, then rose and put a hand on my shoulder.
    ‘
Ciao
, Vitto,’ he said, and then walking away he turned backto call out ‘
Auguri!
’ before he rounded the corner and disappeared up the street, the echo of his footsteps quickly fading into the distant hum of the market.

VIII
    Luciano’s restaurant—the ‘
Hostaria del Cacciatore
,’ its name painted in red on the front window just above the small figure of a hunter with a rifle and a hunter’s sack slung over his shoulder—sat just across from the main square, where Alberto de’ Giardini had once bared himself to the hollowed-out
tomolo
; though the
tomolo
had recently been replaced by a stone obelisk, a memorial to the townspeople killed in the second war. After the market my mother and I had been up and down a dozen crooked streets—first into one of the shops to buy me a shirt; then into a cold dim office where my mother had filled out a form and talked in a low voice to a man behind a counter; then, strangely, into a photographer’s studio, where a sleek-haired, spectacled man who reeked of perfume had taken our picture, my mother didn’t say why—but it was stillonly late morning by the time we arrived at the restaurant, and most of the tables were empty. A single couple was seated inside, visible through the frilly curtains and plastic vines and leaves that decorated the front window, and outside only a thin old man in a suit and fedora who peered up from a newspaper to give a long narrow-eyed look at my mother as we sat down at the table next to his.
    A heavy-set boy of about fifteen, dressed in black pants and white shirt, came out to serve us.
    ‘Where’s your father?’ my mother said.
    ‘He’s gone out. He said I should take care of you if you came.’
    He took my mother’s order and went inside, disappearing then through a door at the back of the restaurant. A moment later a large, rough-featured woman, heavy