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one by one they stepped through the doorway into the night. They moved in the direction of the main road, my mother walking between the soldiers in her slow, easy pace while I, borne upon my winged bed, watched from above. No one talked now, and for a long time, as they receded into the night, the only sound was that of jackboots trudging along the dry earth. Finally I could no longer make out their forms in the darkness, only the last glowing ember of a soldier’s cigarette.

V
    Sunday was the feast of San Camillo de Lellis, founder of the Ministers of the Sick, a local saint who some said had once cured a cripple at the top of Colle de’ Santi, and in honour of whom a special collection was taken up at the village church for the hospital in Rocca Secca.
La maestra
, for whom the saints were not merely the ghosts of some mythical past but an ever-present possibility, the mundane and everyday verging always on the miraculous—‘Who knows,’ she’d said once, ‘if there isn’t a saint among us right now?’—had told us the story of San Camillo in school.
    ‘When he was a young man he was a ruffian. He drank every night and then fought in the streets. He was as tall as a giant, but it doesn’t matter how big you are because God will always make you pay for your sins.
    ‘So one day San Camillo had to pay. He was drinking and gambling in a bar in the city with some thieves; but he didn’t know that the Lord had sent the thieves to teach him a lesson. Each time he bet, he lost; and the next time he’d bet twice as much to try to get back what he’d lost the time before. But by the end of the night he had gambled away all the money he had in the world. The last thing he had was a gold crucifix his mother had given him for his first communion, and when he lost that too, the thieves picked him up by the neck and threw him in the street.
    ‘That night he started on foot for his parent’s house in Bocchianico, hoping to beg a little money from them. But when he started to think of everything his parents had done for him, and how he had caused them only misery, and when he thought of how he had gambled away even his gold crucifix, he was filled with shame. He fell down on his knees and cried to God for mercy. And because God could see inside his heart, and could see that he had learned his lesson, He made a bright light appear in the sky, to let San Camillo know that he had been forgiven.’
    Until I’d begun hearing these stories from
la maestra
I’d never thought very much about religion. My mother, certainly, had never made an issue of it—she attended church every Sunday with my grandfather and me, shared the front pew, a portion of which was always reserved for my grandfather because of his position in the town; but though I had quickly memorized all the Latin responses and spoke them out in
alta voce
, as the teacher had taught us, my mother did not even bother to move her lips.
    ‘I say them in my head,’ she told me. ‘God can hear what you’re thinking.’
    My grandfather, at least, sang the hymns, his voice risingclearly above the rest, sounding like the wails of old women at funerals, though his face never lost its crusty composure. But towards the religion itself he was skeptical.
    ‘My grandfather used to read the bible,’ he’d said, ‘and it drove him crazy. Before he died he used to see angels coming down on the clouds to get him. All those old stories.’
    But the teacher’s tales of the saints worked on me like a potion. The teacher had me figured wrong—she thought I was a godless boy with a devil in me, because of the cigarettes and my truancy. But if the devil had claimed a hold on my soul, and I was sure he had, he had done so despite my best intentions; for even my truancy was born out of my battle with him, of a hard choice between the lesser of evils.
    ‘You should tell the priest,’
la maestra
had told us when instructing us on sins suitable for confession, ‘if you ever walk