The Flour-Eater and the Girl Without a Reflection

Bucchione married Iose Dal Porto, Derì’s sister, who was from Centoni and had unusual eating habits. By the time she had completed her eighteenth year she had been courted by two young men but had quickly grown tired of both of them. Bucchione was impressed by her reputation for hard work in the fields, a reputation she had developed from an early age. She was smitten with his size and looks, although, as it turned out, this applied only as long as she wasn’t required to make physical contact with him.

Delicate and ladylike in her youth, despite her large, square, masculine fingers, Iose was accustomed to a comfortable life with indulgent parents. She had her own pretty carriage, which she hitched to a nervous little pony to tour the villages on Sundays after Mass while showing off a new dress. Skittish like her horse, which bolted once and at breakneck speed carried her two kilometres along the ridge of the San Ginese hill, she ran away and went back home three days into her marriage to the large and boisterous Bucchione, who frightened her with his size and strength. Within a week she was back, reluctantly, but never really felt at home in Villora, and always pined for Centoni and the gentleness of her father’s house, for white satin lace and frilly dresses, for her doting mother, for her two sisters and her sweet, melancholy brother.

Nevertheless, she helped train the young heifers as working cows, and grew beans, onions, carrots and cardoons, which she sold at the market in Lucca. The vegetables were grown in the family’s fields at la Botra, also known as il Bozzo, a pond on a spring near Pierini that had eels in it.

Early in the morning, when it was still dark, she and her son, little Paolo, would load the bicycle with baskets and bags full of the current season’s crop and head off to the Piazza dell’Anfiteatro. On arriving she would claim a good position near one of the archways leading into the big open space that had once been a Roman amphitheatre. Over hundreds of years, houses had been built up against the amphitheatre’s outer walls, and as it had fallen into decay and eventually been demolished, the houses around its perimeter remained, leaving empty the oval shape it had once occupied, and forming a communal area perfectly suited for a market. Iose would spread out a large canvas sheet and arrange the produce in small, neat piles, with the most attractive samples on top. She was an expert haggler, a skill she inherited from her father, the farm broker.

Later, as the agricultural economy began to die, she took in knitting like her sister Alfonsina, and they became outworkers for one of those new factories they were building, as did many other women in the village. She too kept the sadness at bay by working hard. No other woman made as many pieces of knitwear – jumper sleeves, fronts and backs – in a day as she did.

The Flour-Eater had two major defects.

The first flaw was that she never ate a plate of spaghetti or polenta, or a vegetable or a piece of meat in her life, and never touched sweets. She lived on a diet of cheese and a mixture made of milk and wheat flour, to which she would add a few olives, which also found their way into her coffee. While the rest of the family was at the table feasting on Gemma’s renowned rabbit stew, she would be at the stove, a few feet away, stirring the milk and adding bread and flour to thicken it. Because she did not enjoy food, she was unable to cook. The thought of preparing a meal that she could not bear to eat brought her to despair, and if you put her in the kitchen she would panic.

The second imperfection was brought by the Angel of Sadness. It had visited her in Centoni one night soon after she was born. It followed her around for the rest of her life, and she struggled to prevent it from overwhelming her. By throwing herself into her work she barely managed to keep it at bay. Although she did not inherit any of her father’s estate, Giuseppe dei Centoni did bequeath to her his powerful variations of humour. At times of powerful emotion – for example, after giving birth to her first child, Morena, who later emigrated to Australia – she became a sad rag, lost all desire to live and remained in bed for weeks. She gradually resumed her knitting work to help support the family, but remained forever sadder than she was previously. The birth of her second child, Paolo, brought on a recurrence of the earlier condition. Her life was a prolonged sadness for her and for all those around her.

…

Just as Giuseppe Giovannoni was known as Bucchione, so was his sister Gemma Giovannoni known as Galgani.

The real Saint Gemma Galgani was from Lucca, which was just down the road from San Ginese, and because Gemma Giovannoni was a hard-working, patient and selfless creature, everyone associated her with the saint and called her Galgani. All her life she never travelled further than the few kilometres to Lucca, and was the happiest person anyone who knew her had ever met. She was not an overly devout woman, simply observing the major religious services. Gemma understood there was an Australia because she knew there was an America that half the village had been to. She wondered if Australians had chickens and electricity.

Gemma appeared to be perfectly content with her life, and if you asked her the secret to her happiness, she would say it was that she did not have a reflection. At this, most people would smile inside their hearts and look at her with sympathy and condescension.

When she first looked in the mirror as a young girl her reflection appeared to her very faint, although to her mother and anyone else standing beside her the reflection was perfectly normal. As she grew older, her reflection became even fainter until, on her sixteenth birthday, it disappeared. She had not seen herself since then, although everyone else could see her, quite clearly. As time passed, however, the rest of the village also started to believe she had no reflection, and after a time hardly anyone would test the belief by standing beside her in front of the mirror. The word spread and soon those who did see a reflection were suspected of being sinners and of having blackened souls. And so her sainthood grew.

Gemma washed the family’s clothes and linen at the communal laundry in the stream that flowed past Vitale’s spring. She cooked meals, gathered edible weeds from the fields and paths, raised and slaughtered chickens and rabbits, sowed and planted and picked corn and other vegetables, loaded hay carts, milked and fed the cows. She ran the household, taking charge of all the domestic chores, teaching Morena to cook, raising her and Paolo as if they were her own children.

She had had one half-hearted suitor in her youth, but decided men were too much trouble and quickly lost what little interest she had. When it turned out that Iose, the woman her brother had married, was an ineffective wife and mother, Gemma assumed the relevant responsibilities. She became the wise spinster sister, who cared for the elderly parents and the young children and was generally in command of the domestic aspects of the household. She discussed important family matters with Bucchione, who always consulted her.

Gemma had a favourite saying that she repeated at every opportunity to anyone who complained about the state of their life: Bisogna mangiare tre sacca di polvere prima di morire (by the time you die you will have eaten three sacks of dust). It was clear this meant that life is long and hard, and if you think you have problems now, be prepared to put up with a lot more.

Gemma died of pneumonia in the new hospital in Lucca, the first of the family not to die at home, in her own bed. The vision of those who saw her last is of a thin, haggard woman with tubes protruding from her nose and mouth far away on the other side of a window in a sterile isolation ward. She had suffered all her life from ipertiroidismo, which kept her extremely thin, even skeletal. In fact, this was probably why men did not look at her. This, and the fact that she had a strong personality.