Lives of the Saints

“If this story has a beginning, a moment at which a single gesture broke the surface of events like a stone thrown into the sea, the ripples cresting away endlessly, then that beginning occurred on a hot July day in the year 1960, in the village of Valle del Sole, when my mother was bitten by a snake.”

This is the first sentence of the novel and it describes the inciting incident of the plot: Cristina, Vittorio’s mother, getting bitten by a snake. It uses a metaphor of a rock being thrown into the sea to describe the event, which echoes the final line of the novel when Vittorio’s lucky lira coin falls into the ocean, creating a link between the beginning and the end of the book.

“Bumbling Di Lucci, man of light. Did he know something of what had gone on in our stable, of those blue eyes that had swooped down on me? Or was he just following the villager’s instinct that beneath every simple event there lurked some dark scandal?”

The word for “light” in Italian is “luce,” which is why Vittorio refers to Di Lucci as the “man of light.” Di Lucci is immediately suspicious of the “dark” secret that Cristina is hiding about her affair and he seeks to bring it into the light. Cristina’s unconventional sexual behavior introduces the theme of Traditional Values Versus Personal Freedom.

“I decided finally it had been my father now who’d made me move out of my mother’s bed, as if in some strange way he was able to control my life and see into it from whatever world he lived in across the sea, the way God could see into my thoughts. It did not surprise me that he had that power, because in my mind my father was like a phantom, some dim ghost or presence who could sometimes harden into the mute solid substance of a human form and then suddenly disperse again, spread out magically until he was invisible and omnipresent.”

The narrative is related from Vittorio’s point of view. As a sign of his childhood innocence, he engages in magical thinking to make sense of the world around him. In this instance, rather than understand that it was his grandfather insisting that he sleep in his own bed, as shown by the events unfolding, he ascribes this forced separation from his mother to his absent father, who he does not entirely understand.