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around in your underwear or naked in front of other people.’
    And thereafter, whenever I passed
la maestra on
my way into school—she stood in the schoolhouse doorway each morning to welcome us into class, her face registering, as each of us passed before her, what place we held in her affections, smiles for the good children, stern frowns for the bad—I had a sudden vision of her standing
tutta nuda
, thick arms crossed against massive pink breasts, and a dark mound pulsing between her legs like a heart. This vision, which forced itself all the more surely into my head the more I tried to suppress it, filled me with excitement and horror, and I paid for it every week with ten Hail Marys, whispered surreptitiously as I sat beside my mother at Sunday mass. And whenever Fabrizio had filched a few cigarettes from his father and stood waiting to head me off before I got to the schoolhouse, I’d sneak off with him to the top of Colle di Papa, to be spared that day another vision of
la maestra’s
awful nakedness.
    Valle del Sole’s church, with its high stucco walls, bell tower, and spire, sat overlooking the village from the embankment that rose up behind Di Lucci’s bar, the shadow of its tower inching daily across the square with the movement of the sun like the large slow hand of a clock. On the feast of San Camillo, my mother and my grandfather and I walked up to church together, circling as we always did up the path that cut in behind Di Lucci’s from the square instead of taking the stairs, because of my grandfather’s legs. Inside the church people nodded to my grandfather the way they usually did; but though the church filled to capacity before the service started, a few people even standing back in the porch, a long stretch of pew remained empty beside my mother. The priest, Father Nicola—
Zappa-la-vigna
, he was known as, hoer-of-the-vineyard, because that was what they’d called his grandfather—preached a sermon about San Camillo and about how we had to help the sick. Somehow from San Camillo he led into a story about a king and a man named Daniel, the only one who could read what God had written on the wall, and I couldn’t understand what he meant; though the story made me think of my father, and the strange way he wrote in the letters he sent to my mother. Finally, as if to take full advantage of the large audience the feast day had brought in, he closed with a warning about the villagers’ superstitions, which he said he would not name but which he assured us came from the devil. This last theme was by no means an uncommon one with Father Nick, and he never lost a chance to bring it up; but today as he spoke he seemed to cast a significant glance at my mother, as if pregnant with some secret meaning he wished to share with her.
    Outside, though, my mother said: ‘He was sweating like a pig today—and we like idiots still give him money for his wine and sausage, and eat stones all week. I’d like to see how muchof what he took in today ever gets to the sick.’
    My mother called Father Nick ‘our fatted calf’—since he’d taken over the parish, she said, the church had gone to ruin, because all the money he collected went into his own pocket. Other people made fun of him too, behind his back; but if they saw him in the street they would still bow respectfully towards him and speak to him shyly, with their eyes averted downwards. At school we feared him because he would come to test us on our catechism, administering three thwacks to the buttocks with a short paddle for every incorrect answer, one for the Father, one for the Son, one for the Holy Ghost. Since the school sat just behind the church, only five paces from the back door of the rectory, Father Nick had only to slip on his shoes and retrieve his paddle from whatever dark place he kept it hidden whenever the whim took him to test us; and then suddenly he’d appear unannounced in the school doorway, like a dark angel, his black robes