On the Saturday afternoon of la festa, while the church bells tolled, my grandfather and I made our way under a grey sky to the service that marked the festival’s true beginning. We were dressed in our best Sunday clothes, my grandfather’s war medals pinned in an even row to the breast pocket of his jacket. The streets were filled already with small crowds of men talking and joking in front of doorways and families hurrying up towards the church. Some former villagers had arrived from Rome and Naples, their Cinque- and Seicentos parked beyond the village on the path that led up to the high road.
‘Oh, lu podesta!’ one of them called out when my grandfather passed.
But then someone nearby whispered in his ear and he fell silent, and I knew he’d been told that my grandfather had resigned his position as mayor.
It had happened the night before, at the festival’s official opening. The official opening had no entertainment or spectacle attached to it, but most of the villagers attended—not for the hour or so of speeches with which the various committee members opened the proceedings, but for the final tally of la questua, when the villagers learned whether anyone in the village had shamed them by giving an outrageously large sum, or they themselves had called envy upon their household by giving more than their neighbours. My grandfather had sat up on the festival bandstand along with the committee members, rising to speak in his turn, his voice dry as winter.
‘It’s not for an old cripple like me to be involved in politics,’ he’d said. ‘There are plenty of young men anxious to take my place. Let one of them step forward.’
The bells had stopped tolling by the time my grandfather and I arrived at the church, the last pews filled and newcomers spilling into the porch, no longer able to reach the stoop to anoint themselves; but a small path was cleared for my grandfather and me, and I was surprised to see that a few spaces had still been left open for us in the front pew. The crowd kept swelling, reaching out finally into the church square, the doors propped open and a cool wind breathing into the church like a sigh, cutting wet and fresh through a heavy must of sweat and old wood and crumbling plaster.
The church had no organ, the cue for the beginning of the service always the first quivering note of the Introit from Father Nicola as he entered from the rectory door at the back of the church and made his way to the altar. His voice announced him now, and we stood in our pews, though he came not from the rectory but from the church square, the crowd in the portico parting to let him pass. But today Father Nick, dressed simply in his usual black robe and white mantle, a small skull cap on his head, had been sent ahead merely to prepare the way; for behind him, dressed all in white, a short brocaded mantelet draped over his shoulders and a stole of white silk shimmering so richly around his neck and down the front of his vestments it seemed on the verge of bursting into colour, came Monsignor Felano from Rocca Secca, four cherub-faced altar boys flanking him and supporting a tasselled canopy of ornate purple brocade above his head. I had seen Monsignor Felano in Castilucci once, at la festa di San Giuseppe, but he never attended our festival, because the church in Rome had not forgiven us for our change of saints, people said; but today he had come, and in full regalia. Everyone had turned to watch his entry, and for an instant a chorus of murmurs and whispers cut beneath the trill of the Introit. There was a brief pause in the procession as the Monsignor’s canopy caught on the door frame coming in from the square; but in a moment he moved on again unperturbed, up the short aisle towards the altar, his altar boys, singing in honeyed sopranos, moving in synchrony with him, their small fists wrapped tightly around the metal poles that held up the canopy. At the foot of the altar the altar boys withdrew and collapsed the canopy in a corner, and Monsignor Felano took a seat modestly in one of the chancel pews.
Father Nicola took us through the first part of the service, Monsignor Felano remaining seated in his pew, hands folded neatly on his robed lap, raising his baritone only to join in plainsong with the congregation. Father Nick preached with an unusual fluency, each word rolling off his tongue with a flourish, as if frilled with elaborate swirls and curlicues; though the Monsignor’s presence at his side seemed to pull on him like an invisible thread, slowly inclining him in the direction of the chancel pews, so that a dozen times he swung suddenly in the opposite direction in compensation, preaching briefly above the heads of the congregation to the stations of the cross that hung on the far wall, until slowly he drifted back again in the direction of the Monsignor. Finally, at the homily, Monsignor Felano rose and Father Nick retreated to a chancel pew with a small bow, pulling a handkerchief from a pocket of his robe and patting discreetly at the small beads of sweat on his forehead.
Monsignor Felano loomed over the church’s small lectern like a great mountain bird, his quiet presence seeming to force itself out over the pews, the church for a moment poised in an absolute stillness. He began quietly and calmly, in a polished Italian stripped clean of dialect, hard to follow at first but taking on more and more a clarity like glass, as if the words themselves had disappeared and only their meanings remained, hanging in the air like the wind.
‘Mary was a woman,’ he said, his long-fingered hands folded on the lectern, ‘inscribed with the grace of God. A woman for whom a virgin birth was merely the outward sign of an inner purity. But she was also a woman of flesh and blood, the wife of a simple labourer, such a woman’—and now he brought one hand up, two fingers extended, and gestured broadly across the church—‘as you might see walking down the streets of this village with a child on her arm or a jug of water on her head. The gospels tell us of a woman filled with goodness and grace. But there is a story that they don’t tell us. They don’t tell us’—stepping away from the lectern now, coming down towards the congregation—‘of the shame she must have endured from skeptics who did not believe in a virgin birth. They don’t tell us’—tempo and volume slowly building—‘of the hardships she and Joseph underwent to feed a family and raise it, the same hardships we all face, the hardships of the poor. They don’t tell us’—and now he was beating words out singly like bullets, one hand striking the palm of the other in time—‘of the mother’s pain she must have felt when her first born son was spit on by the crowds and nailed to a cross like a common criminal.’ Then a pause, like stormy waters grown suddenly calm, and a voice that was almost a whisper saying, ‘This, too, is the story of Mary.’
As soon as the service had finished, four husky members of the comitato squeezed their way through the crowd at the back of the church and made their way up the aisle, bearing a wooden rack that was normally used to carry coffins from the church to the cemetery. They set the rack before the arched niche to the right of the chancel that held the Madonna, a large smiling figure in starry halo and robes of bright blue, the infant Jesus cradled in her lap. We remained in our seats while she was being set down onto the rack, Father Nick waiting patiently on the chancel steps to begin the procession, aspergillum in hand. The Monsignor had sat down again in one of the chancel pews—he would not, it seemed, be taking part in the procession, but was lending it the use of his baldacchino and his altar boys, who were struggling now to re-erect the canopy in the church aisle while the committee members waited to squeeze under it with their load.
The head of that year’s committee, Alfredo Mastroantonio, had come up a side aisle to greet the Monsignor. Alfredo, an uncle of Father Nick’s, was respected in the town because he didn’t work, living off the rent from land he’d inherited; and though he wasn’t rich, didn’t own a car or a big house, he always walked around the village in a suit, and he spoke to everyone in a careful, florid Italian, because he’d been to lascuola superiore in Rocca Secca. He approached the Monsignor now on bended knee, bringing his lips to the back of the Monsignor’s proffered hand and then loudly thanking him for his presence, so that heads in the church turned towards him. When he rose his eyes shot briefly towards my grandfather a few feet away in the front pew; he seemed about to call him to the attention of the Monsignor, his hand gesturing out in our direction, but at the last instant he checked the gesture and suddenly clasped his hands together as if closing us out, then shifted position, still speaking brightly to the monsignor, until his back was to us.
The procession was underway now, Father Nick in front, walking solemnly towards the exit and sprinkling the aisle with his aspergillum, his voice rising up in song, and the Madonna, seated atop her litter like an ancient queen, the purple canopy above her, falling in behind him. Soon the aisles were crowded with people sliding out of their pews, the air filled with song:
Your eyes are more beautiful than the sea
Your skin is as white as ocean pearls
And Your cheeks, kissed by the Saviour, Your Son
Are two roses, and Your lips are flowers.
My grandfather and I brought up the rear, he grim and silent beside me as we made our way down the aisle and out the door. The procession was stretched out now along the path that sloped down behind Di Lucci’s in a switchback that opened onto the main square; it moved slowly, and even at my grandfather’s pace we were able to keep up with it. But the grey mass which had been hanging in the air before the service had thickened, the wind grown wet and cold; and by the time my grandfather and I had brought the tail end of the procession into the square, a light drizzle had begun to fall.