By Christmas my mother’s loose dresses had begun to swell around her waist, hanging like tents above her shins; and with each day the tension in our house seemed to thicken, as if the swelling itself had become the measure of it, was responding to it like a gauge or meter. Then on Christmas morning, my grandfather broke a silence that had lasted more than two months.
‘Get dressed,’ he said to my mother. ‘You’re coming to church.’
My mother was standing at the side counter scrubbing a pot with fistfuls of dirt.
‘He’s crazy,’ she muttered, when my grandfather had gone into his room to dress; but after a moment she abruptly ceased her scrubbing, wiped her hands on her apron, and went up to her room.
I was the first to be dressed, and stood waiting at the kitchen door in my Sunday suit and blackened shoes, staring out into the street. The morning was cold and clear and brilliant, the village coated with a thin crust of snow that had fallen in the night; the coldness crept up at my ankles and wrists, my suit grown too small, almost two years old now, not replaced that year as I’d hoped it would by a new one from Rocca Secca. Finally the bell began to toll, with all the unbridled violence and clarity of a crisp winter morning, cracking the air with its peals. The bell was coated with a layer of pure silver: during the war, it was said, Father Nick’s predecessor had smeared it with soot to protect it from the Germans, and my mother said that Father Nick had not cleaned it since; but this morning it was polished to a sheen, glinting brightly from its tower as it swung to and fro and caught the sun, seeming to silver the air with its fine hollow ringing.
My grandfather emerged finally from his room in his fedora and baggy corduroy suit, his medals pinned in a line to his breast pocket, the silver and bronze medallions of them freshly polished. He came up to the door and stared into the street, grimacing at the light.
‘Let’s go,’ he said finally.
But the door to my mother’s room creaked open now and my mother appeared at the top of the stairs, dressed not in one of her loose dresses but in a white blouse and a black skirt which fit tight around her waist, the swell there rising up like a hill. She had wrapped a blue shawl around her shoulders, her hair flowing over it in loose waves, and her face was composed in a look of stern resoluteness, her eyes suddenly alive again for the first time in months, as if they had caught a glint of light and scattered it back like cut glass.
Outside, the sun had already begun to melt the night’s snow, crystal drops falling from the eaves of houses, small icicles forming on the goat horns posted above doorways to protect against the evil eye. The bells had stopped tolling now, but up ahead some of the villagers were still passing through the square. Then behind us a door creaked open and a babble of family noises filled the street, curses and babies’ cries—the Mastronardis, late for mass. But as they came up behind us, overtaking us because of my grandfather’s slow pace, their voices went suddenly quiet. They made a small arc around us, eyes averted, mumbling holiday greetings which my grandfather returned with a stiff formality.
We would be the last to arrive. The church would be full today, congregants spilling out into the porch; but a few places would still have been left free for my grandfather in the front pew, no one having thought yet to strip that privilege from him. In a moment the Mastronardis, too, had disappeared up the church steps, and when we came finally into the square, our shoes crunching strangely loud against the snow underfoot, it was deserted and still, the barren trees on the embankment leaning towards us like silent magi, offering down their crystal drops of melting snow.