The Madonna of the Mountains Read online

  Elise Valmorbida

  THE MADONNA

  OF THE

  MOUNTAINS

  For my mother and my sister

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1923

  Snow-melt

  Two wooded fields

  Polenta e bacalà

  Sugared almonds

  1928: Fascist Era Year VI

  The plains

  Blessings

  Sugared almonds

  After dark

  1936: Fascist Era Year XIV

  Martedì grasso

  Delfina

  1942: Fascist Era Year XX

  Wartime grain

  Summer salvage

  Conejo in umido

  Graspa co asperula

  Blessings

  Violet oil

  Before bombs

  Winter salvage

  Meat extract

  Cossack boot

  Promised banquet

  1944: Fascist Era Year XXII

  Fasoi, formajo, graspa

  Food is power

  Polenta e osei

  Lizards and snails

  Holy oil

  Risi e bici

  One last guinea pig

  Pipo and Baldassare

  1948

  Fireflies

  Lent

  Holy Monday

  Holy Week

  Clearing the granary

  Precious eggs

  Amelia

  St Mark’s feast

  Between two saints

  Ripe cocoons

  The silk-works

  Bearing witness

  Vendetta

  St Peter’s feast

  Amelia

  The best peas

  1950

  Late Wintertime

  Lent

  The stock-taking

  Caffè-caffè

  Blood and water

  Grace

  The vernal equinox

  Stowaway

  No chickens

  La Madona de la Montagna

  Tiny wild cyclamens

  Time to sew

  Oceantime

  Coda Food, family, history

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  1923

  Snow-melt

  Her father has gone to find her a husband. He’s taken his mule, a photograph and a pack of food: homemade sopressa sausage, cold polenta, a little flask of wine – no need to take water – the world is full of water. It’s Springtime, when a betrothal might happen, as sudden as a wild cyclamen from a wet rock, as sweet as a tiny violet fed by melting mountain snow.

  Maria Vittoria is embroidering a sheet for her dowry trunk.

  Everyone is working hard, making use of the light. Twelve huddled households chopping, fixing, hammering, cooking, washing, hoeing, setting traps, pruning vines, stripping and weaving white willow, planting the tough seeds, oats, tobacco, cabbage, onions, peas, and the animals are making their usual racket – but the whole contrà feels wanting without her father. A body without a head.

  In his breast pocket he has the only photograph there is of her, made when she was seventeen, together with her sisters, brothers, parents, grandparents. She’s almost unmarriageable now, at twenty-five years old, but she’s strong and healthy and her little sister Egidia says she’s pretty. It’s just bad luck, or God’s will, or destiny, that there are no eligible men in this valley or the next one, just sickly inbreds and hunchbacks and men mutilated by the Austrians. It doesn’t help that the contrà is so hard to get to, so far from the towns. And her father won’t accept the hand of just anyone – he has his name and standing to consider. He owns some property. He is a man of business. He even has notepaper with his name printed on it.

  Before the photograph, before the evacuation, Maria had a proposal. The fellow had come all the way from Villafranca, he had documents saying he didn’t have to fight any more, that he’d have a proper pension and special privileges. But he’d lost a finger and an eye.

  Who knows what else he’s missing? her father said when he turned the offer down. We can do better than that.

  And Mama said what everyone says, all the cousins, all the women: no se rifiuta nessun, gnanca se l’è gobo e storto. Refuse nobody, even if he’s hunchbacked and crooked. And Papà told her to shut up with her stupid sayings.

  Maria whispers to herself, imagining a field daisy, pulling off one petal after another.

  El me ama He loves me

  El me abrama He covets me

  El me abracia He hugs me

  El me vol ben He cares for me

  El me mantien He supports me

  El me ama He loves me

  El me brama He covets me

  Nol me vole He doesn’t want me

  El me dise su. He tells me off.

  She repeats prayers from The Christian Bride. This book, her only book, is dear to her. Small, bound in blue leather, with tiny gold lines around each page, it has more prayers than she can say and more sermons than she can remember, but the guidance at the beginning – for my dear young girl – lifts her spirit and shows her the way. While you pray, you do well to add light mortifications of the flesh. This is a way of offering sacrifice and also releasing your spirit from life’s petty irritations.

  She pricks herself with the needle, in her fingertips. She watches as the blood appears. Her sewing must wait. She wipes the dots with her handkerchief.

  ‘Please Lord, grant me the piety to accept the Holy Sacrament of Marriage,’ she whispers aloud, even though there is no one to hear her. ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, ask Him to grant me a man who will protect me and give me a devoted Christian family …’

  But secretly she is thinking of how handsome her beloved will be, as kind in the face as Jesus, as straight-backed as the priest, as tall as her father, and sweet-smelling like a woman. Will he have a moustache like her Papà, thick and bushy? Will he have a beard like her grandfather, a swathe of old tobacco masking his face and neck? Or will he have a moustache like her brother, two thin lines ending in points? She imagines the hair on his handsome face tickling her cheek. Her heart beats like a bird’s wings. She banishes these thoughts and pricks herself. Once in each fingertip, neat as a rosary. At the Canaan wedding feast, where Jesus turned water into wine, the bride and groom had no appetite for blind passions – they knew that God would hold them strictly accountable on Judgement Day.

  Maria pricks herself at each wrist now that she has done her ten fingertips. She wipes the blood with her handkerchief again. She must keep the wedding sheet clean and white, like her soul, like her body, immaculate and new. But she is old. Twenty-five years old and untouched by a husband. Her fingers are without thimbles. She has hands that can wring an animal’s neck. Arms to stir a pot of boiling polenta. She’s a good investment for any man, if only he can overlook her age.

  She gazes out of the window. The eaves and sills are dripping, the world beyond is dripping as it thaws. Some of the trees are still under snow, stooped and blanketed. She hears a mule complaining. And then the church bells, clear and bold despite the distance. One continuous minute of tolling. Single notes. They are melancholy, not happy-sounding like a Baptism. Then there is a pause. Someone is dead. Then another minute of bells. If it stops now, it is a woman who has died, perhaps the old witch who lives like a lunatic in her nightdress. There is a pause. Then another minute of ringing. It’s a man who has died. Another dead man in the world. A man gets three minutes, and a woman gets two minutes, because a man is more important, because Adam was the first man, and Jesus was a man, and God is the Lord, and the Disciples were men, and priests are men, and the Pope is a man.

  Her father is making his journey up and down the valleys, picking his path against steep slopes of softening snow, risking avalanches, and wolves perhaps … who knows what dangers he will have to brave?

  People wander but mountains stay put. And yet mountains are fickle – a chasm can appear suddenly with a slip of the foot, a sunny sky lulls a hunter like a child to venture too far, a freezing fog blinds the world in moments, a sly air creeps into the lungs and becomes pneumonia.

  Maria sews and sews. White blossoms in a wavy line. The linen is not the most expensive, but it’s good enough in quality, and tough – it will be years before she has to darn or patch. Her betrothed will admire her handiwork. He will stroke her embroidered flowers and then he will stroke her cheek like a flower. And they will hold each other as close as two walnut halves and children will eventually appear, with God’s help, because children and flowers make a house a home.

  Fioi e fiori i fà la casa.

  The border of her bedsheet is almost complete. It must be a sign. Just three more blossoms with curling stems and sprays of tiny buds in between. Satin-stitch and chain-stitch and stem-stitch. All white. She feels sure that when she reaches the hem at last, her father will appear with her beloved. He’s been gone more than two days. And she will hide behind the door, and she will catch a glimpse of her sweet-faced, sweet-smelling betrothed and he will recognise her from the old photograph.

  She puts down her sewing and pinches her cheeks, runs her fingertips along her jaw, touches her full lips. What is it like to kiss a man? She almost let her cousin Duilio kiss her once, before he went to the seminary, before he became a soldier. She kisses her fingers and remembers her mortifications.

  On Sundays and for Sacraments, she still wears
her dark brown dress, high-collared and tight-waisted – she has taken good care of it. Her husband will recognise it, as soon as he sees her, even though her dress was new in the photograph, crisp and undarned. Will he think well of the darning because it shows her thrift and skill? No, he’ll think her father isn’t rich enough to buy her a new dress in eight long years. She hates being poor. Hates it. But she won’t be married in November like a really poor girl, when the hard work of Summer and Autumn is done, and a girl is just one more mouth to feed through Winter. Na boca in più. If she marries near Easter, people will look up to her. How much can her father pay a man to marry her? It’s not enough that she is pretty and strong. She hates the war and the Spanish flu and the evacuation and her isolation for making her unmarried and past her prime.

  The travelling photographer had lined them up in the schoolroom at Albarela, twelve bodies in front of a big curtain painted with misty columns and a floral frame. That was a sorry day. The first photograph of Maria’s life, and perhaps the last time they would all be alive together. The entire family dressed up as if for a wedding, but with fear in their bellies. The girls were ready to be sent to Piedmont – if they’d stayed at home, they’d have been taken by the foreign soldiers to do with as they pleased.

  For every Italian man or gun: four Austrian men and four Austrian guns, everyone said that, doom in their voices.

  For the photograph, a potted plant was placed between her father’s feet. And there was another plant, tall and strange – a palm, the photographer said, from the Bible Lands. The emblem of martyrs. Did the photographer think they were martyrs? Did he pity them? Maria stared hard at his camera, silently vowing never to be pitied again.

  Palm or no palm, her beloved will be able to see her upright modesty in the picture, her tiny bright medallion of the Virgin proud on the yoke of her dress, her regular features and steady gaze. No squint, no crossed eye, no blindness. He will surely see that.

  And now, despite her years, she is still healthy, she has nice firm fat on her hips and bosom, her bones are straight and her hands are strong. He will see all that, because he’ll be looking for a long life with her, and thinking of his children with her. He’ll be looking for a woman who can do the work.

  Maria can do the work. Everyone in the contrà says that.

  How long did she live as a servant with the signori in Piedmont? She gave those rich people her best years. She learned to cook, and clean, and grow food. She already knew how to sew. She learned to protect her virtue, the signori taught her that. She learned to crave wealth, they taught her that too. When she and her sisters returned home after the War in Snow and Ice, there were no animals, no glass in the windows, not a sound. Just devastation. They thanked God for the American soldiers who gave them livestock to start all over again. And they thanked God for the lucky men in their family – they’d survived.

  But where is he, this man for her, who has survived the battles with the Austrians? The valleys have been officially declared a monument to war, and an ossuary like a lighthouse is being built on one of the peaks, but half of all men are dead, or else there wouldn’t be enough bones and teeth and skulls to fill it.

  She must have a wedding this year or it will never happen.

  You’ve got to get married or you’ll end up like that witch in a nightdress, Mama says whenever Maria is excitable or ungrateful.

  La Delfina wanders from contrà to contrà, she belongs to nobody, she sings to the moon like a wild dog, when the light is so bright at night it’s like a cold blue day, and the shadows are sharp as granite, and the rocks glitter. Sometimes she hangs about the cesso in the daytime, muttering obscenities and blasphemies. Little Egidia won’t use the privy when La Delfina is around, but Maria is determined not to show any fear of her. Sometimes she gives her food. It’s charitable to do so. She leaves it at a safe distance, or she throws it. Secretly she is terrified of the madwoman’s curses. What if she has the power of a gypsy? It’s less dangerous if she sings, so Maria calls out through the wooden walls and asks for a song while her cacca drops metres into the mountain earth.

  And sometimes La Delfina co-operates.

  L’uselin de la comare The godmother’s little bird

  L’è volà su le tete Flew onto her breasts.

  L’uselin sbatea le alete, The little bird beat its little wings,

  E un po’ più giù volea volare! It’s a bit further down he wanted to fly!

  Maria sews and sews. She must be married this year or she will be like the matrons in church whose childlessness marks their faces with hollow sorrow, whose breasts hang empty, women who spray spit when they talk, and talk too much, and fuss, and complain, and find fault with everything. La dona senza fioi come ’na vegna morta. A woman without children is as useless as a dead vine.

  Her father will save her. He will find her a war hero without wounds – perhaps just the one dashing scar on his cheek or shoulder. She pictures his shoulder.

  Now she has to stop sewing and prick her thumbs extra hard. The new blood is a ruby, two rubies, three rubies, four.

  When she is married there will be rubies on the sheet that she has embroidered, because a virgin must bleed, but she doesn’t know how or why. She must ask the Madonna of the Mountain. She will find her some flowers and place them before her statue in its glass dome, and pray for answers.

  Maria Vittoria knows that blood comes with pain, like the blood of Jesus all over His crucified flesh, tender and soft and pale as a woman’s. Maybe wedding blood is as terrible as the pain of childbirth which is God’s punishment for Eve. There is nothing about a bloody bed in The Christian Bride.

  She has only one blossom to go.

  The mule outside is still complaining but there’s another animal braying further down the valley, on the track from Albarela. It’s her father’s mule, she knows the sound, and the chickens are hysterical, and the last heap of snow falls with a dead thud off the roof, and the air through the window is full of sparkles as she looks out and sees no one.

  ‘Maria!’ her mother calls from below, loud and jittery. ‘He’s coming!’

  *

  There’s a storm in Maria’s body. Her knees tremble. When did she last wash? Yesterday. No – the day before. No time to wash now. No time to fetch water. Besides, he might be near the well. There’s a bucket in the kitchen and another by the fireplace. No time. She washes her face and neck with water from the dressing-table bowl and the mottled brown soap that she made after butchering last year’s pig, its fat rendered into tallow, mixed with olive oil and caustic soda from the shop in Monastero. She holds a cloth to her skin. Wipes it clean. She dabs her pricked wrists with her mother’s perfume, saved for Sacraments and special days. She has not asked permission. She crosses herself. She inhales the scent. How many violets had they picked? Hundreds. She strips off her pinafore and day dress. The cold hits her. She takes her dark brown dress out of the wardrobe, and steps into it, but her legs are useless, like a foal trying to stand. She trips. She tries again, careful not to rip it. Attaches a clean new collar. Buttons it up. Straightens her petticoat and undergarments. Smooths the skirts. Arranges her tiny gold Madonna medallion in the centre of her chest, the same as the photograph. The godmother’s little bird flew onto her breasts. Maria banishes La Delfina’s song from her mind. It’s bound to be unlucky. She looks in the mirror, even though it is the Devil’s work. She tidies her hair. She pinches her cheeks to bring out the pink. A mouse, loud as a pig, scrabbles in the granary above. No matter. The mouse can eat all the corn it likes. She crosses herself and goes downstairs to meet the stranger who will be her husband, God willing.

  There is nobody on the ground floor. Her younger sisters are away at work, doing domestic service, earning money. But little Egidia, where is she? Her elder sisters are with their husbands and families, many kilometres away – valleys and plains away. Her brother Severo is with his wife in Padua. Her brother Vito is working in the fields. But where is her mother?

  Mama’s voice calls again from outside.

  Maria grabs her shawl. In the bright light of day, she sees the straight back of her mother past the walnut tree, standing rigid at the top of the track.