The young man made a low rough sound in the back of his throat. It was supposed to be an affirmation but was almost a nervous purr. He said, “But do you want him to know what happened?”
For a short while Eve said nothing.
Phelan stretched his long legs, adjusted his position, then fixed his eyes on hers again.
“Why are you interested in all this?” Eve asked.
Phelan said, “Did you ever lose someone in a cave?”
Eve thought he must be talking about the Blessed Martine Raimondi and her miracles. That would make sense. This young man had lost someone—in a cave perhaps—and had chosen to take the Blessed Martine as his saint. He had only just learned about her cult. For some reason his role in the recovery of Martine Dardo’s body from the sea cave had raised the ghost of an old failure, an old loss. He was looking for something, a sign or an altar on which to lay down his trouble. That made sense. All Eve had to do was treat him gently, take his helm and navigate him back into the public waterways.
Eve said to Phelan that she guessed he was talking about the Blessed Martine Raimondi’s first miracle.
“Am I?” Phelan unlocked his arms from the gate and sat down on the road, one shoulder to the bars and three-quarters of his face toward her. “Tell me about that.”
Chapter 5
THE BLESSED MARTINE RAIMONDI’S FIRST MIRACLE
In early June 1944, a young nun, Martine Raimondi, returned from Turin, where she was a pharmacist in a hospital, to her village, Dardo, in the Roya Valley. She came to help her grandfather bury her aunt. Martine helped sort her aunt’s house. She visited cousins and friends, dandled babies, and talked to her former teacher, Father Paolo. She had her papers inspected by the Germans—in a fairly cursory way—when she first arrived.
In 1944, the mountain village of Dardo was as permeated by partisans as any other mountain village—but had so far exported its resistance, individual men and boys, into the surrounding mountains. The village supported the partisans with sacks of bread, olives, wine, and vegetables, which were carried to the top terraces at evening and left. Toward the occupying forces the villagers were wary and cold and uncooperative. By 1944 the village’s few Fascists were, for the most part, trying to reshape themselves as patriots unwelcoming to any foreign army. Of course there were always some more friendly—like the girl who entertained the handsome German corporal.
In May 1944, in Turchino, near Dardo, partisans bombed a movie house, killing six soldiers. The Führer had a standing order for reprisals—ten for one. Frederich Engel, the man who enforced the Führer’s rules in Liguria, executed fifty-nine civilians, men and boys. Engel earned himself a title: the Butcher of Genoa. Two of his victims were a brother and nephew of another butcher, Dardo’s, who—in better times—would slaughter and dress one or two animals a week in his narrow flag-floored house beside the hotel. This man was a peasant landowner, like every other person in the village, except for the priest, Father Paolo, and the schoolteacher. The butcher owned four terraces under the long slanted escarpment that hung above the valley. A narrow path ran on from the cemetery above the town and passed the butcher’s gate. The foothills of the Maritime Alps are seamed by paths for foot traffic and mule trains, for centuries kept clear by local travelers, now by hikers on walking tours. This mule track ran from the cemetery, through the butcher’s property, and on up to the Castel Abelio.
Three days after the execution the butcher saw, from his window, ten soldiers set off up the path to relieve part of the force at the Castel. This was their normal practice, and the butcher knew that, by dusk, the ten men they had relieved would pass down the path to the town. Or, rather, nine men would go all the way down to the stone bench under the morello cherry tree by the gate of the cemetery, where they would wait for just under an hour before being rejoined by the handsome corporal. The corporal would visit his girlfriend, whose father’s property was immediately adjacent to the butcher’s.
Once the nine soldiers went by his house, the butcher went down his path to wait for the corporal. By dusk he was hidden in a bay in the path. It was a place where walkers had to go slowly, even by daylight, because an old cypress tree had ruptured the paving stones and scattered its rolling bearings of seed everywhere. It was fully dark under the cypress and dim anyway on the path, the sun behind the mountains and the moon nowhere near the horizon. Everything was set, and the butcher waited, holding a billhook and his breath. He had stolen the billhook from the corporal’s girlfriend’s father. This butcher was a little simple, so sincerely believed that the Germans would take the murder as the act of an enraged father, not partisans.
The corporal eventually appeared. The butcher tensed, readied himself—then the soldier stopped on the path above the leaning cypress. He stopped and stooped and looked at something.
On those terraces there was always someone watching, if there was any light at all. On those perpendicular properties you were always in someone’s line of sight. Someone had seen the butcher go in under the cypress and not emerge. Someone had followed the soldier and seen him pause to appreciate the sight of a thin grass snake winding its way down the slope, in the pale dust beside the paving stones, like a quick rivulet of some black, mercurial liquid.
The butcher was troubled. In motion the soldier was merely a figure; still, he was a man, bent at the waist, hands spread at his sides, and smiling at the ground. The butcher surged out of his hiding place and swung the billhook. The soldier looked up and lifted his hands to fend it off, and the hook cut his throat and partly severed several fingers. The soldier fell face-first on the path and slid down into the dark beneath the cypress. The butcher flung the billhook away and ran.
The following morning the Germans rounded up the first ten men they could lay hands on—including the butcher, who was in his shop cutting up a chamois he’d found on his step at dawn. The chamois’s neck was broken. He had assumed it was a gift from the men in the hills. That the partisans knew, and approved, of what he had done.
The Germans marched the villagers to the Church of St. Barthelemy and locked them in. The local SS officer, Hauptmann Giesen, gave the village two hours to tell him where they could find the persons—the partisans—responsible.
Martine Raimondi was at the church, in the confessional, when the men were pushed inside. Father Paolo came out of the confessional and remonstrated with the Germans but was thrust back into the church and told he could hear the condemned men’s confessions.
Martine didn’t emerge till the doors were barred. Then she went to comfort her grandfather, who was among the men. It was Martine’s grandfather who suggested to the priest that he should begin to hear their confessions. They should consider Turchino, the old man said, and abandon any hope of rescue or of mercy.
At this the butcher burst out crying, and when he could be soothed into coherence he told his story. Then he rushed to the church doors and beat on them, calling out that he was the one and that the soldiers should open up and take him away. Eventually they did open the doors, to find the priest beside the weeping, wildly gesticulating butcher, a huddle of men in the pews, blinking and glaring, and a nun wearing the pale fawn habit of the Order of the Daughters of Grace. For a moment the Germans looked at Martine Raimondi as though she were an apparition, polished plaster come to life. Then the butcher flung himself down the steps and confessed. He confessed, and since in his state he was only able to muster Ligurian, Father Paolo translated for him. Giesen, who had till then been rather more predictable than some SS officers, abruptly exploded. He hauled the butcher through his men and drove him off with punches and kicks, then rounded on the priest and said, Was there only one hero among them? Had they drawn lots and sent out that little imbecile hoping to save themselves? Well then, he’d spare the villagers’ chosen sacrifice but shoot their priest instead, just to make up his ten. He ordered the doors closed again—for one more hour. He didn’t even acknowledge the nun.
No one knows quite what happened ne
xt, what decided Giesen on his following actions. He had a meeting with Dardo’s mayor. He had an espresso. He telephoned his superior in Breil and then Engel in Genoa. Neither Engel nor the man in Breil are likely candidates for Hauptmann Giesen’s inspiration. What he chose to do was untidy, un-German, and dependent on local knowledge, on local dread. It is possible he may have acted in what he saw as the spirit of clemency or with an inquisitor’s sense of malice or perhaps merely from fastidiousness. For if Martine Raimondi hadn’t performed her miracle, Hauptmann Giesen would have gone down in history as a murderer and a grave robber. Because Giesen had meant to rob Dardo’s men of their graves, and the family plots—Truchi, Raimondi, Vail, Villouny—of the bones of their men. Whatever his motivation, on that day, June 1, 1944, somewhere between mayor, espresso, and telephone calls, Hauptmann Giesen came up with the idea that damned him. He went back to St. Barthelemy’s and had his men open the doors. He sent his men into the church and had them carry out all the candles. Then he dispatched some down into the crypt and had them unseal the passage he had ordered cemented up when he and his men first arrived in Dardo. The soldiers broke the cement with hammers and pushed the grate in. Beyond the grate—as everyone local knew and as the valley’s guidebooks will tell you—there lay a cavern, a long sloping tube of rock that led up to the Grotto of the Hermit where, centuries before, a famous holy man had lived and fasted and prayed. The grotto looked down fifty meters of sheer cliff face—the spur on which the village was built—to the Roya River. The grotto was also the only known outpost of a great unexplored cave system. No one then knew how extensive the system was or where it came out. (Thanks to speleologist cartographers, it is now known that its nearest exit was two kilometers away through caves that were dry, yes, and never so tight that a person had to crawl but were nevertheless narrow, labyrinthine, and utterly dark.)
“There is your hole,” said Giesen. “Go down it.”
He went up into the body of the church and, before leaving and barring the door for, he said, another hour, he stopped by Martine Raimondi, touched her sleeve but didn’t meet her eyes, and said that, naturally, if the sister was found in a hour alone and at her prayers she would be spared. “Ten, not eleven,” he said.
Martine held her grandfather close to her. She whispered to Giesen, “Eleven, not ten. The eleventh commandment is: Love one another.”
Giesen and his men went out, and the door was sealed.
Father Paolo took Martine aside and showed her where he kept the oil for anointing—for extreme unction. He decanted half from the jar into a cup and Martine made wicks from twists of silk. The priest then told the villagers that he would say mass, then they should go into the cave and put their trust in God. Perhaps they could hide for a time, he said, tentatively, then, rallying his faith, “God will provide.”
Martine had taken communion that morning and had confessed, so, before he began, she said to Father Paolo that she would like to pray in the Grotto of the Hermit. Father Paolo blessed her and she climbed up to the grotto, which looked out into blue air, and at the interleaved slopes south. Martine Raimondi got down on her knees on the smooth place in the rock where the hermit had knelt to pray six times daily every day for twelve years. She made her appeal to God.
Saints are saints because God answers their prayers.
In 1965, when the testimony of witnesses was first taken officially, Father Paolo testified that, when he’d finished giving communion, he found Martine Raimondi before him at the rail. She was white and, he said, she seemed to have grown. She was, he said, a tall taper, a candle in the dark church. Martine told the priest, her grandfather, and her neighbors to follow her. She took up her cup of oil, and her grandfather lit its wick with one of the ten matches he carried. Bearing the single floating flame, Martine led them away through the crypt and into the caverns.
The caves were such—tilted, winding, pinched, fringed with flowing rock—that the men even three back from the light could only see its glow receding, funneling along the rock walls. Martine Raimondi held her grandfather’s hand, and he for the most part watched his feet, watched where he placed his stick. His testimony—in a letter to a nephew written in 1947—said that he had looked up once, and swore he saw a white bird flying through the cave ahead of his granddaughter’s feeble floating candle. A bird like a beckoning hand.
The first jar burned down. They lit the second. Martine Raimondi hurried them on. Eventually that light, too, burned blue, then shrank to nothing. The men clung together in a blackness like blindness, like the lives of creatures who haven’t ever had eyes. It was a dry cave, and there were no sounds other than those they made.
Martine’s grandfather lit a match.
He saw the faces of his neighbors, the black eyes like opened mouths blowing his match out. It burned his hand. He dropped it. He lit another. Someone said, “No, you fool, don’t waste them.” But then whoever it was thought better of it and let the old man go on lighting them, one by one—flare, fail—against the dark. At the seventh the old man turned to look once more on the granddaughter he loved. But he saw her veiled head turned away toward the darkness. She pulled at his arm. “Come on,” she said.
The match went out.
Grandfather pulled at the man behind him and said, “She’s walking. Martine is going on. Follow her.”
She said, “Come.” Sometimes she said, “The roof is low here,” and raised her grandfather’s hand to show him—and he raised his other hand to show the next man, who showed the one following, and so on. Sometimes she said, “Ah, I see,” breathless with awe or fear and as if she could see and hear something the men were unable to. And, after six hours in the cold and dark, Martine led the men out of the cave at a gorge two kilometers above the top terraces of Dardo. It was dusk. They sat down under the trees, while the one who knew where to run ran to find partisans.
Eve Moskelute finished her story, and Bad got up and stretched. He stood and rested his forehead against the gate’s iron filigree.
Eve Moskelute said that there was a shrine in Dardo, at St. Barthelemy’s. “Martine Raimondi was beatified in 1995. There’s now a ‘Concession of Public Worship’—though the people of the parish have been praying to her since she died.”
A man in an apron bustled up behind Bad and asked Eve Moskelute if the stranger was troubling her.
“No.” She pressed a button and Bad pushed himself back from the gate as it began to move. The man—who had come from the restaurant across the road—stood ostentatiously wiping his hands on his apron and looking at Bad with a narrow gaze.
“Thank you,” Eve told him. “I’m quite all right.”
The restaurateur shook his shoulders and head gently in opposite directions, signaling his dubious concession. He went back over the road.
Eve Moskelute invited Bad to follow her into her house. There she gave him water and told him she was going into her garden to pick some fava beans.
Bad went out onto her terrace and watched her climb down to her garden and cut a head of broccoli, gather a handful of young fava pods, and pull some leaves from a pale, frilly lettuce. She placed the vegetables on the step in the shade. Then she disappeared into a small shed and emerged with a ball of string and some green plastic stakes. She began to restake the blue-green thicket of favas. She was trying to construct a flimsy fence to contain the stand, which had begun to lean, but the plants kept jostling in the wind and making the stakes bristle out at all angles. Bad watched Eve push her gray hair back and curse quietly. He went to help her.
He knelt on the ground beside her and scooped the mass of plants back with his arms. Eve fastened the string in a tight double row from stake to stake. “Thank you,” she said. Then, “I’m going to make you something to eat.”
Bad looked up the valley. He asked her what wind this was.
“It’s from the northwest, moving ahead of that storm, which might only travel along the mountains and not come down here,” Eve said, then added that she thought it wo
uld, though, by its persuasive piled blackness and the way the leggy smoke bush at the edge of her terrace was whipping about. She picked up the vegetables and led Bad back indoors.
They had the leaves dressed in olive oil, lemon juice, and thin shavings of pecorino. Eve grilled several cicolini and let the favas simmer for a minute before tossing them with olive oil and black pepper. She put out a loaf of bread shaped like a crown of thorns.
Bad ate and looked at his hostess from time to time, abashed and appreciative. Eventually he wiped his hands on his napkin but then went on pulling off little lumps of bread and sopping up the oil from the dish of beans.
He told Eve Moskelute that while he was in Martine Dardo’s house in Genoa the police had an expert looking at the contents of her computer. “Martine Dardo was conducting a few correspondences, the detective said. That’s when he mentioned your name. That’s when he said you’d identified her.”
Bad’s hostess waved her hand at him, asking him was this going anywhere.
Bad told her he was only passing on what the detective told him. “For instance, Martine Dardo was writing to a Father Octave.”
Eve Moskelute made a little noise of encouragement. Then she just stared at Bad over the remains of the meal, like a poker player over a fence of fanned cards.
Bad said, “Do you know Father Octave?”
“I know who he is,” said Eve. She told Bad that Daniel Octave was the postulator. Father Octave wrote the Process for the Cause of Canonization. He was present at the exhumation in 1991. The village of Dardo had pushed for an exhumation for some time. It was argued that Martine Raimondi’s body really belonged in the crypt at St. Barthelemy’s. But Raimondi’s open tomb did not exude the fragrance of “little fennel-scented apples.” In fact, her tomb was occupied by another body. The exhumation was an obstacle on her journey to sainthood. However, in 1992 there appeared a very persuasive candidate for a second miracle—after an earlier proposed second miracle had been disproven. Father Octave’s Process picked up momentum again, and the absence of a body was, in the end, not an obstacle that was insurmountable to the saint-making John Paul II. In 1995, Martine Raimondi was beatified.