San Biagio

The ball struck the wall and came back wrong. It always came back wrong from that particular stretch of wall, the one beneath the window of the vestry where the cement had buckled and swelled into a ridge no wider than a man’s thumb but sufficient, in the precise and unforgiving physics of a leather ball meeting a hard surface at speed, to send it spinning off at an angle that no foot could have predicted and no goalkeeper, had there been a goalkeeper, which there was not, could reasonably have been expected to save.

“That’s in,” said Ercole.

“That is not in,” said the boy they called Piccio, whose real name was Guglielmo and who had been called Piccio since the age of seven for reasons that no one, including Piccio himself, could any longer recall with certainty, though it was generally supposed to have something to do with either his size, which was slight, or his appetite, which was not. “That is the wall. The wall is not in. The wall is the wall.”

“The wall is the post,” said Ercole. “We agreed. The crack is the post.”

“The crack is there,” said Piccio, pointing. “The ball struck here. Here is not there.”

“Here is near there.”

“Near is not in.”

The argument continued in this fashion for some time, as it had continued on many previous occasions and would continue on many occasions to come, for the rules of the game played upon the concrete pitch beside the parish of San Biagio were not rules in any codified or permanent sense but rather a set of provisional understandings, renegotiated at each disputed moment with the passion and the procedural rigour of men debating matters of genuine consequence, which, in the economy of those afternoons, they were.

The pitch was cement. It had been cement for as long as any of them could remember, which is to say for the whole of their lives, which is to say for not very long at all, though it seemed to them, as it seemeth to all boys, that the world had been arranged in its present configuration at the beginning of time and would remain so until the end of it, and that the cracks in the cement and the weeds that grew through the cracks and the iron posts that had once held a net and now held only rust and the memory of a net were features as permanent and as unquestionable as the hills.

The pitch was too small. It was too small for football and too large for anything else, an awkward rectangle bordered on one side by the wall of the parish hall, on another by a chain-link fence through which the brambles of the adjacent lot had long since made their incursion, on a third by the garden, if garden it could be called, a narrow and neglected strip of earth in which a fig tree of great age and uncertain health presided over an undergrowth of nettles and dandelions and the remains of what had once been, in some prior and more optimistic era, a flowerbed. The fourth side was open, giving onto the lane, and it was from this side that they entered, every afternoon, with the regularity and the solemnity of communicants approaching the altar, though what they were approaching was a cement rectangle with weeds in it and a ball that was losing its leather and two iron posts in a condition of advanced despair.

They came because there was nowhere else.

This is the thing that must be understood, before anything else is understood, and it is the thing that is most difficult to explain to anyone who hath not lived it: that the parish of San Biagio, with its cement pitch and its dying fig tree and its vestry window that sent the ball back wrong, was not a choice but an inevitability, the single point in the geography of their afternoons where the various forces that governed their lives, the school, the family, the street, the particular and unspoken hierarchies of a small town, converged and briefly relaxed their grip, and in the space thus opened they could be, if not free, then at least unobserved, which for a boy is nearly the same thing.

The ivy had taken the eastern wall. It had taken it slowly, over years, with the patience of a siege, sending its tendrils into the mortar and prising apart the joints between the stones and establishing, in each crevice so gained, a foothold from which to launch the next advance, until the wall itself had become as much ivy as stone, a thing of two natures, the mineral and the vegetable, fused into a single surface that was neither quite wall nor quite plant but a third thing, a hybrid, a partnership so long established that the partners could no longer be separated without destroying both.

The boys had carved upon the wall. Not on the ivy, which resisted the knife, but on the stretch of bare stone beneath the vestry window where the ivy had not yet arrived, a pale expanse of limestone that received the blade with a willingness that bordered on the complicit, yielding its surface to the pressure of a pocketknife with a soft and chalky acquiescence that produced, with each stroke, a line of white against the grey, bright and conspicuous for the first days and then fading, as all inscriptions fade, into the general texture of the stone, until only those who knew where to look could read what had been written, and even they, after sufficient time, could not be certain whether the marks they were reading were the marks they had made or merely the natural weathering of the surface, the small and random calligraphy of wind and rain and frost.

They carved names. Dates. The occasional word of profanity, placed high upon the wall and executed with care, as though the obscenity were a form of art and the wall its gallery. They carved the results of matches that had been played upon the cement pitch, setting down for posterity the score of a game that no one but themselves had witnessed and that no one but themselves would ever have cause to remember, and the carving was, in its way, the most serious act they performed in that place, more serious than the football, more serious than the arguments about whether a ball that had struck the ridge beneath the vestry window was in or not in, for the carving was the thing that would remain, the only trace of their presence that would outlast the afternoon and the season and the years, and they knew this, though they did not say it, for to say it would have been to admit that the afternoons were finite, and this was a proposition they were not yet prepared to entertain.

“My mother wants me at the shop before six,” said a boy named Dante, who was not named for the poet but for an uncle who had died in circumstances the family did not discuss, and who had inherited from this uncle nothing but the name and a pair of boots that were too large for him and that he wore nonetheless, stuffed with newspaper at the toes, because they were the only boots he had and because the concrete of the pitch was unkind to lesser footwear.

“It is not yet five,” said Ercole.

“It is past five. The bell rang.”

“That was not the bell. That was Ferruccetti’s dog.”

“Ferruccetti’s dog doth not ring.”

“Ferruccetti’s dog maketh a sound that may be mistaken for the bell by one whose ears are less attentive than his feet, which is to say by thee.”

Dante considered this. “My mother,” he said, with the finality of one invoking an authority against which no argument, however ingenious, could prevail, “wants me at the shop before six.” And he departed through the open side of the pitch, into the lane, his uncle’s boots making upon the cement a sound that was too large for his body, a man’s tread from a boy’s legs, and the remaining players watched him go with the particular expression that boys wear when one of their number hath been recalled to the world of mothers and shops and obligations, an expression compounded of pity and relief and the faint, unadmitted satisfaction of being, for the moment, still unclaimed.

The room.

There was a room at the back of the parish, behind the hall and below the vestry, a room of no stated purpose and no official designation, which had served, at various points in its history, as a storeroom for surplus hymnals, as a place where the parish priest kept his wine, as a refuge for a cat of indeterminate age and extraordinary longevity that had lived in the parish for so long that it was spoken of as an institution rather than as an animal, and, most recently and most consequentially, as the place where the boys went when the football was finished or the rain had come or the afternoon had arrived at that particular hour, neither early nor late, when the body is tired and the mind is not and the combination of the two produceth a restlessness that can only be satisfied by sitting in a small room and talking about nothing.

The room was less world than any one. It had a single window, set high in the wall, through which a portion of sky was visible, and a door that did not close properly, and a floor of tiles, some cracked, some missing, that had once been red and were now the colour of dried blood in uncertain light. There was a bench along one wall, donated by a parishioner whose name was recorded on a brass plaque that had been affixed to the backrest with screws that had subsequently rusted, so that the plaque hung at an angle and the name was partly obscured by the green stain of oxidation, rendering the act of donation both permanent and anonymous, which is perhaps the purest form of charity or perhaps merely the consequence of damp.

They sat on the bench. They sat on the floor. Ercole sat on an upturned crate that had once contained bottles of sacramental wine and that still bore, on its side, in stencilled letters of ecclesiastical formality, the words VINO DA MESSA, which Piccio had amended, with a stub of charcoal, to read VINO DA MESSA IN SCENA, a joke that had been funny the first time and that had, through repetition and the slow accretion of familiarity, ceased to be funny and become instead a feature of the room, as fixed and as unremarkable as the cracked tiles and the crooked plaque.

“I am hungry,” said Piccio.

“Thou art always hungry,” said Ercole.

“I am always hungry because I am always here, and there is never anything to eat here, and yet I continue to come here, which is proof either that the company is excellent or that I am a fool. I suspect the latter.”

“The latter,” agreed Ercole.

The light came through the high window in the manner of light that hath been filtered through too many intervening substances, the glass, the dust upon the glass, the ivy that had begun its advance upon this side of the building and had already sent an exploratory tendril across the lower portion of the pane, and arrived at the interior not as light, properly, but as the rumour of light, a secondhand brightness that was sufficient to see by but not sufficient to read by, which was of no consequence, for none of them were reading, nor had any intention of reading, nor could have found in the room anything to read except the hymnals, which were stacked in a corner and which they had, on one memorable and regretted occasion, attempted to use as goalposts, with results that had drawn from the parish priest a rebuke of such magnificent and sustained fury that it had entered the folklore of the group and was quoted, with admiration and with minor embellishments, for years afterward.

“Father Anselmo said,” Piccio would recite, on such occasions as the memory was invoked, “that we were, and I translate from the ecclesiastical, a pestilence upon the house of God, a disgrace to the memory of the saints whose names we bore and did not deserve, and that if we could not distinguish between the instruments of devotion and the equipment of sport then we were no better than the Philistines, whom he identified, for the avoidance of doubt, as a people who had come to a bad end.”

“He did not say Philistines,” said Ercole. “He said barbarians.”

“He said Philistines first and barbarians second. The barbarians were by way of clarification.”

“I remember only the volume,” said a boy called Sandro, who rarely spoke and whose contributions, when they came, had the quality of verdicts. “It was considerable.”

And yet Father Anselmo did not bar them from the room. This is the fact that none of them spoke of and all of them understood, for it was the foundation upon which the whole arrangement rested, the unspoken compact between the priest and the boys, by the terms of which the room was theirs on the condition that the condition was never stated, that the arrangement was never acknowledged, that the permission was never granted because it had never been sought, and that the boys, in their turn, would refrain from acts of such conspicuous desecration as the use of hymnals for goalposts, and would, on Sundays, attend the mass, or at least be seen to attend the mass, which is not the same thing, though Father Anselmo, who was not a fool, understood the distinction and accepted it, as he accepted all the distinctions between the ideal and the actual that the practice of his vocation had, over many years, taught him to accept.

The room was theirs. It was theirs in the way that a thing is most truly owned when it is owned by those who have nothing, for the ownership of those who have nothing is absolute, admitting no comparison and no competition, and the room, with its cracked tiles and its crooked plaque and its high window through which the rumour of light arrived and its bench and its crate and its hymnals in the corner, was everything, because there was nothing else, and the everything-ness of it was not diminished but rather enlarged by the nothing-ness of the alternative, which was the street, which was the school, which was the home that was not a home, or was a home of the kind that maketh a boy prefer a room in the back of a parish with a floor of broken tiles and the smell of old wine and the company of other boys whose homes were, in their various and undiscussed ways, similarly insufficient.

They spoke of what boys speak of. They spoke of football and of food and of the particular injustices that had been visited upon them by teachers and parents and the world at large, and they spoke of these injustices with the fluency and the conviction of those for whom injustice is not a theory but a daily weather, a thing that is endured not because it is understood but because it cannot be avoided, as rain cannot be avoided and cold cannot be avoided and hunger cannot be avoided, though it can, with sufficient ingenuity, be managed, and the management of hunger was a subject to which they returned with a frequency that reflected less the quality of their discourse than the emptiness of their stomachs.

“If I had money,” said Piccio, and this was the customary opening of a speculation that had been conducted many times and that varied only in its particulars, never in its conclusion, “I would buy a bread from Sanfelice’s, the large one, the one with the sesame, and I would eat half of it now and half of it later, except that I would eat all of it now because the later doth not exist when one is hungry, the later is a fiction invented by those who have eaten.”

“If thou hadst money,” said Ercole, “thou wouldst owe it to someone before thou hadst finished counting it.”

“This is true. But I would owe it in a state of satiety, which is a superior form of debt.”

They laughed. The laughter echoed in the small room and was absorbed by the hymnals and the tiles and the walls that were slowly being claimed by the ivy, and the echo died, and the room was quiet again, and the quiet was of that particular kind that belongeth to rooms in which boys have been laughing and have stopped, a quiet that is not silence but the memory of laughter, a warmth that resideth in the air for a moment after the sound hath gone, as the smell of bread resideth in a kitchen after the bread hath been eaten.

The thirst. There was thirst also. There was always thirst, for the pitch was cement and the sun was generous in its attention to cement, and there was no fountain in the parish yard, only a tap at the back of the garden that ran brown for the first three seconds and cold for the next five and then ceased altogether, requiring a wait of some minutes before it could be persuaded to resume, and the boys would queue at this tap with the patience of pilgrims at a shrine, each taking his turn and drinking from the stream with the earnestness of one performing a sacrament, the water entering the body and the body receiving it with a gratitude that had nothing of the intellectual and everything of the animal, the pure and wordless satisfaction of a need met, a hole filled, a fire quenched.

And the chains. They did not know they were chains. This is the thing that time revealeth, as it revealeth all things, slowly and without kindness: that the place they loved was also the place that held them, that the afternoons they ran to were also the afternoons they could not leave, that the football and the room and the talk and the laughter were not only the furnishings of their freedom but also the boundaries of their confinement, for freedom that hath no elsewhere to go is not freedom but merely the most comfortable form of captivity, and the parish of San Biagio, with its cement pitch and its dying fig and its tap that ran brown and its room with the hymnals and the crooked plaque, was the most comfortable thing they had, and they clung to it as one clingeth to a raft, not because the raft is where one wisheth to be but because the water is deep and the shore is nowhere in sight.

They did not break the chains. The chains broke themselves, as chains do, by the slow and ordinary process of growing up, which is to say by the slow and ordinary process of discovering that there are other places and other pitches and other rooms, and that the ball doth not always come back wrong from the wall, and that some walls are smooth, and that some homes are homes, and that the word home, which they had learned to define by the parish of San Biagio, had a meaning they had not known, a meaning that did not include cement or weeds or a tap that ran brown or the smell of old wine in a room where no wine was drunk but whose memory lingered in the tiles and in the wood of the crate and in the particular quality of the air, which was the air of a place that had been, for want of any better word, and in the absence of any better thing, holy.

Holy. Not in the sense the word was used on Sundays, not in the sense Father Anselmo intended when he spoke of it from the pulpit in his vestments and his conviction, but in the other sense, the older and less orderly sense, the sense that belongeth to any place where human beings have gathered not because they were obliged but because they were lost, and have found in one another’s company, if not a remedy, then at least a respite, a pause in the long march of sorrow on the brow, a room in which to sit and be hungry together, which is less terrible than being hungry alone, and to be thirsty together, which is less terrible than being thirsty alone, and to laugh together at jokes that are not funny and have not been funny for years and that continue to be told not because they amuse but because the telling is the thing, the repetition is the prayer, the ritual is the sacrament, and the sacrament is the company, and the company is the room, and the room is the parish, and the parish is the only place on earth where a boy may sit on an upturned wine crate and be, for the space of an afternoon, sufficient.

Religious was our rushing to that place. And opposite the living of it then.

The ivy twisteth still against the stone. The wall still standeth, or stood when last he saw it, which was not recently, for the distance between the man and the boy is not measured in years but in the accumulation of rooms that have intervened, rooms with smooth walls and proper doors and windows that let in the light without apology, rooms that are, by any reasonable measure, superior to the room at the back of the parish of San Biagio, and yet are not, and can never be, and he knoweth this, and the knowing is not sadness but a kind of gratitude, the gratitude of one who hath been sheltered, however poorly, in the season when shelter was most needed, and who hath carried the shelter with him, in the grain of it, in the memory of it, in the particular sound of a ball striking a buckled wall and coming back wrong, which is the sound of his boyhood, which is the sound of a home that was more a home than any home for men.