Read Online The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store by Jo Riccioni - Free Book Online Page B

like a rabid dog. When it was done, he laid her down in the nave, and they were both pale and wracked and wet from the urine that had soaked through her skirt. His father’s face had stared back at him from the line of soldiers at the altar — a blank, vacant expression, as if he barely knew who they were.
    The scientific in Montelupini took his mother’s fits to be one step removed from lunacy. The women twisted a finger to their temples if she walked away from a good price at the market, or when she avoided the washhouse, preferring to beat her clothes alone in the stream at Collelungo. Others were more superstitious, protecting themselves with the two-fingered cornuto raised to her back and muttering about witchcraft . But the worst by far were the men at the osteria. Those same men who invoked every orifice of each other’s wives and sisters and mothers-in-law as they damned their scopa hands found their mouths dry and empty when Letia Onorati walked past. They would fidget behind their cards, casting lingering looks from under their brows, and Lucio had learned to see in their eyes the reflection of his mother’s mouth, her hair blacker than the lake on a moonless night, the curve of her neck as she balanced a basket on her head. When she walked away down Via del Soccorso, their raffia chairs groaned underneath them. And what Lucio detected in their faces was a mix of regret and relief, like they had followed the song of a siren and she had thrown them back out to sea.
    â€˜Santa Lucia,’ his mother said, uncrossing her legs and sitting upright. ‘Not yet, surely?’ Lucio’s grandfather was climbing the stage, with Polvere, the baker, not far behind. Nonno Raimondi had dressed himself up as a woman, his lips smeared red, a shabby wig on his head. He staggered in a pair of stolen high heels. Even from the battlements, Lucio could tell he was flushed and sweaty, both from a day’s drinking at the osteria and from struggling with two enormous breasts of water-filled pig’s bladders, jostling for freedom at the neck of his dress. Meanwhile, the baker wore the Sunday clothes of a suitor and was attempting to seduce Nonno Raimondi with a ludicrous length of salami and a sampling of his chestnuts. Lucio wasn’t really surprised: nearly every celebration in the village degenerated into drunken skits or tawdry songs at some stage of the evening, but this was early even by Montelupini’s standards. The audience, on their upturned crates, cheered and heckled nonetheless.
    His mother got up. ‘I can’t watch. Your grandfather seems intent on outdoing his own idiocy tonight,’ she said. ‘Will you make sure he gets home?’ Lucio nodded. She put her fingers in his hair and tugged fondly, but the piazza below drew her attention again. A silence had settled over the crowd, the shouts and laughter dampened as if by a winter fog. Even the babies seemed quiet. Lucio saw his father standing before the village, his hands clasped at his back. Behind him Padre Ruggiero had ordered two men to drag Nonno Raimondi from the stage, water trailing from one of the breasts that had burst inside his dress.
    His father paused before speaking. He was wearing his commissioner’s uniform: the black shirt and tie he had made Lucio’s mother press for him that afternoon, even as he told her to stay in the house and rest. He brought his hands out from behind his back and ran a palm over his head before settling his fez over it. The tassel swayed hypnotically and it seemed, for a second, the only movement in the piazza. ‘People of Montelupini,’ he began, his voice carrying clear to the battlements. ‘Montelupinese.’ The word raised a cheer of solidarity, as it always did among the villagers. ‘We’ve been celebrating the Sagra dell’Uva for longer than I can remember, longer than many older than me can remember.’ He nodded respectfully at