Saint Fina

~for Valerie

Fina was born during a solar eclipse. As darkness swallowed the afternoon light in the town of San Gimignano, the top of her head appeared, swirled with pale hair. Her mother bit down on a square of leather, fighting the urge to push. Squatting between her thighs, the midwife pressed a warm compress against her widening portal. The baby was coming fast, and a bad tear ensured early death. Trying to ignore the darkening sky, the midwife barked commands. Stop. Breathe. Push. Stop. When a ring of light appeared around the hole where the sun once was - which she could through a small window - the midwife quelled the urge to run. She was here to catch a baby, even if the sun was snuffed like a candle. The midwife whispered a prayer for her children and braced herself. She ordered the mother to push, and Fina slipped out without a sound.

Fina’s eyes stayed open through her birth. Even when wiping away the greasy wax of childbirth - a vigorous rubdown that normally made newborns shriek purple - Fina’s eyes remained open, transfixed on the rafters. It was as if there was something up there that only she could see. The midwife cracked a window to settle her nerves. The air outside had cooled, when just a few hours ago it was almost too warm. No shrieking gulls or barking dogs, clopping horses or scraped pots. Just a rush of gloom that had bled the town gray. The end hadn’t come, but something was very wrong.

Once the cord was tied and the placenta expelled, the midwife wrung a rag dipped in vinegar and draped it over the headboard. An astringent for bleeding, she explained. Usually she’d stay another hour, prepare a mug of broth for the new mother. She liked to check the color of the temporal vein after the baby’s first cry, run a fingernail over the wrinkled bottoms of the feet. But a sudden pain needled her chest, and an urgent need to see her children sent her out the door. Back home, she collected boughs of juniper and burnt her bloody apron. As the ashes cooled, she scrubbed herself in the cold creek until her teeth clacked. The next morning, she gathered her children and her donkey and moved two towns away.

Under a sheepskin blanket, Fina’s mother cradled her baby, trying to ignore the thought that the newborn looked like a corpse. She pulled Fina close. Coo’d and rubbed her nipple against her lips. But the baby stared upward, unmoving. Clapping her hands together, near Fina’s ear, the baby starfished into life. She blinked once before her head lolled and fell over her mother’s shoulder. In this position, her nose twitched. Her lips puckered, stretching toward the headboard.

A coldness spread through the mother’s chest, watching her newborn latch to the rag wrung with vinegar. She hollered for her husband, who was disinterested in the gross process of childbirth. He opened the door, annoyed to be pulled away from watching the light sucked from the sky. He’d been on his knees, outside, ready to die. Now his vision was blurred and his legs ached. Every time he blinked, the hole in the sky was etched on his eyelids. The room smelled of shit and vinegar, which disgusted him. After a few minutes of tottering around and rubbing his watering eyes, his wife shoo’d him away like a stray.

The sun came back that day, but Fina’s oddness persisted through childhood. She refused to nurse unless her mother dipped her nipples in vinegar. The acid worsened the chapping and they bled, but Fina happily suckled her sour teats. When she was old enough for solid foods, Fina refused everything but boiled cabbage and gorgonzola, a predilection that made her mother so anxious she lost her hair in clumps. By the time Fina was two, her mother was as bald as her elderly husband, whom she secretly blamed for his bad seed.

At age three, Fina’s skin turned the color and texture of sourdough levain - pocked and pale. She did not run naked through the yard or make a racket in the house, like most toddlers. Instead, she was so quiet she was easy to misplace. Fina’s mother would find her doing strange things - fingering the edge of an axe, sucking the bitter milk of a dandelion, staring directly at the sun. She’d pick Fina up and plop her in the dirt with a hand sewn doll, only to find her dangerously close to the creek, babbling to a dead eel buzzing with flies.

Her mother was relieved when Fina started school. Perhaps she’d learn things from other kids. But in kindergarten, Fina refused recess. Instead, she climbed the bench by the window to stare at the kids in the yard, her mouth ajar. Her narrow silhouette in the window was unsettling to her classmates. Instead of being teased for her bizarre behavior, Fina was avoided like a disease.

At 13, she started cutting. Scarlet lacerations ran down her spindly wrists, which she’d carefully reopen with a fingernail before they could scab. Gone missing one afternoon after recess, her teacher found her behind the schoolhouse, slapping her thighs with a bundle of nettle. It was the first time he saw Fina smile. Spooked by her behavior, he began kneeling nightly, committing again to reciting the paternoster 150 times before bed.

One bitter day in March, Fina did not show up for school. A week went by. Rumor spread that she had become ill. Three doctors visited her house, and three left in a hurry. Her malaise was a medical mystery, it was decided. Once the last doctor left, Fina crawled atop the oak table in her family’s kitchen, covered herself with a thin wool blanket, and stared at the rafters until she fell asleep.  Townsfolk assumed hysteria - it would eventually pass, said the priest, just like the displeasing March weather. But after a few months, folks began stopping by with remedies and prayers. Since no one in the house but Fina had fallen ill, they came to see for themselves.

Fina had grown so thin the bones of her face were visible, giving her a pointed appearance, like a stoat. When a schoolmate named Smeralda stopped by with a collection of poems and a loaf of walnut bread, Fina refused her gifts. Instead, she pointed a bony finger at the girl and recited The Act of Contrition in a voice like the winter wind. The girl dropped the loaf on the floor. Worried that Fina knew she’d lost her virginity to a farm boy before she was old enough to bleed, Smeralda ran from the house in tears. That night, with a nose full of snot, Smeralda spilled the truth to her mother, who pushed Smeralda from her arms and sent her to convent the next day.

After months of laying on the oak table, Fina’s skin began to rot. Rats discovered her ulcers and appeared out of dark corners to nibble her flesh. Her mother beat the edges of the table and shooed them away, but they’d return, hungry. Once, she even lifted her arms so the flesh along her ribs could be tasted by creatures less fortunate than herself. A young priest, observing Fina’s selflessness, began referring to her as a saint. It stuck.

Fina’s mother was so distressed by her prodigal suffering that she collapsed and died. Her father, upset that she would never cook for him again, punched the air with such unbridled rage that he suffered a stroke and died. After their deaths, people visited more frequently. How much more could Saint Fina suffer, they wondered? Her house packed with visitors, Fina would lift to her elbows and whisper invocations of God’s favor upon the lives of the men and women in the room, then collapse into the wet pile of flesh. Visitors felt blessed to witness the terrible suffering of this teenage girl who spoke of God’s will while dying in front of their very eyes!

On a humid day in July, still as a stone under her wool blanket, Fina’s eyes grew wide. She lifted her head. Pointing at the rafters with a trembling finger, she garbled something that sounded like “Saint Gaylord the Grape!” and fell backward, her head thudding against the table. Fina was dead.

When the nurse arrived to transport her body to the sagrato, she peeled Fina from the table, and her smell filled the room. Visitors bent in half and vomited on their shoes. A small child gasped and pointed - on the table, a patch of mushrooms with pale caps and thick red stems. Boletus satanas, Satan’s mushroom, normally found on stumps of dead oak, highly toxic. A kindly man thought to use his knife to scrape away the mushroom from the sacred spot of her death. The blade moved easily through their soft bodies, which turned blue where they were cut, then released a horrible smell. People ran from the room pinching their noses, but not before a few vomited on their shoes for a second time that day.

But this is not the story that was told. Instead, Fina’s suffering was talked about as a miracle. No one spoke about the putrid smell, the pale mushrooms with blood red stems, or the obsession that killed her. Instead, it was told and told again that Fina had suffered heroically under the watchful eye of her savior. Told and told again how church bells rang with no one to pull the ropes. Told and told again how white violets appeared on the oak table where she died, living proof of His Glory.