Saint Fina

~for Valerie

Fina was born during a solar eclipse. As darkness swallowed the afternoon light in the town of San Gimignano, Fina crowned, a pale swirl of hair pushing forth. The midwife held a warm compress against the mother’s widening portal. The baby was coming fast and a bad tear would ensure an early death.

Eyeing the darkening sky, the midwife barked commands. Stop. Breathe. Push. Stop. When a bright ring of light encircled the hole where the sun had been, the midwife quelled the urge to run. She was here to catch a baby. Whispering a prayer for her children, the midwife sunk into a squat and ordered the mother to push. Fina slipped out without a sound.

Even in dimmed light, the midwife noticed Fina’s eyes stayed wide open through the messy process of birth. When the she wiped away the greasy wax of childbirth - a vigorous rubdown that normally made newborns shriek purple - the baby stared upward, her eyes transfixed on the rafters, as if there was something up there invisible to everyone else. After handing the freshly-scrubbed babe to the mother, the midwife stepped outside to settle her heart, which wobbled like the jelly she made from boiling hooves. The temperature outside made her shiver, when just a few hours ago she’d found it uncomfortably warm. There were no shrieking gulls or barking dogs, clopping horses or scraped pots. Just a rush of gloom that bled the town gray. Muttering another prayer, the midwife gathered courage and spun around to return to the new mother, who would need more tending before she could go return home to her children.

After the cord was tied and the placenta birthed, 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 proper nourishment. 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 at her chest, and an urgent need to wash herself sent the midwife out the door. At home, she collected boughs of juniper for a fire and burnt her smock. The embers glowing bright orange, she scrubbed herself in the creek until her teeth clacked. The next morning, she gathered her children and her donkey and moved two towns away.

In the birthing room, Fina’s mother cradled her new baby, trying to ignore the fact that the newborn looked like a corpse. She pulled Fina closer, coo’d and rubbed a nipple against her lips. But Fina stared upward, unmoving. Frustrated, she clapped her hands near Fina’s ear, and she starfished into life, her head wobbling on the thin stem of her neck before toppling to her mother’s shoulder. In this position, Fina’s nose twitched and her lips puckered, stretching toward the headboard.

A coldness spread through the mother’s chest, watching her baby latch to the rag wrung with vinegar. She hollered for her husband, who hated the disgusting process of childbirth. He opened the door, annoyed to be pulled away from the horror outside. He’d been on his knees watching the sun devoured. Now his vision was blurred and his legs ached. Every time he blinked, a painful black hole appeared on the back of his lids. The room smelled of blood and shit, making him nauseous. After a few minutes of tottering and complaining, his wife shoo’d him away, no better than a stray cat.

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 cracked her nipples and they bled, but Fina happily suckled her sour teats. When 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 bad seed.

At age three, Fina’s skin was as pocked and pale as sourdough levain. She did not run naked through the yard or make a racket, 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.

Fina’s mother was relieved when the girl turned old enough to join a small group of children for song school. Perhaps she’d learn to sing, she hoped. But Fina sat alone. After cheese and olives, when the kids poured into the yard to play, Fina climbed the bench by a small window to stare at them. Her narrow silhouette in the window was unsettling to her classmates. Instead of being teased for her bizarre behavior, Fina was avoided like the plague.

At 13, she started cutting herself. Scarlet lacerations ran down her spindly wrists, which she’d carefully reopen with a fingernail before they could scab. Gone missing one afternoon, the submagister found her at the edge of the woods, slapping her thighs with a bundle of nettle - it was the first time he saw Fina smile. Spooked by her behavior, he knelt by his straw mat that evening, recommitting to the paternoster 150 times before bed.

One ugly spring day, Fina did not show up for school. Weeks went by. It was rumored she’d become ill, that three different doctors had been called upon, to no avail. That when the last doctor shook his head and hurried out the door, Fina had crawled atop the oak table by the hearth, covered herself with a thin wool blanket, and stared at the rafters until she fell into a deep sleep. Her malaise was a medical mystery, it was said. Townsfolk suspected ergotism. Pray it will pass quickly, like this vexing March weather, advised the priest. But after a few months of decline, folks began stopping by to see her for themselves. They offered remedies and prayers, but nothing worked. Fina remained on her back.

She grew so thin, her face became pointed, like a stoat. When a schoolmate named Smeralda stopped by with a collection of poems and walnut bread, Fina refused her gift. Instead, she pointed a bony finger at the schoolmate and recited The Confiteor in a voice like a rusted hinge. 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 evening, her nose full of snot, Smeralda told her mother the truth. Waking the next morning to the sound of hooves, Smeralda was yanked from her bed and loaded onto a wagon. Offered to the nuns as an oblation, she was to spend the rest of her life in prayer.

When Fina heard news of Smeralda, she smiled - such a rare event that the corners of her lips split. After months of laying on the table, her skin had thinned into translucence. Rats discovered ulcers where her blood had pooled, and crept from dark corners to snack. Once, Fina even lifted her arms so the flesh along her ribs could be tasted by creatures less fortunate than herself. A priest, observing her selflessness, was moved to tears. After signing the cross, he dropped to his knees and called her Saint Fina.

The name stuck.

Fina’s mother grew so distressed by her daughter’s prodigal suffering that one day she collapsed and died. Her father, angry his wife could no longer fix stew or darn his hose, punched his fists in the air with such petulance he suffered a stroke and died an hour later. After the death of her parents, people visited more frequently. How much more could Saint Fina suffer, they wondered? The small 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 her flesh. Visitors felt blessed to witness the terrible suffering of this teenage girl who spoke of God’s will while rotting in front of their very eyes!

One unbearably humid day in July, still as a stone under her blanket, Fina’s eyes grew wide. She lifted her head and pointed at the rafters with a trembling finger. Garbling something that sounded like “Saint Gaylord the Grape!” she collapsed, her head thudding against the oak table. Fina was dead.

When the nurse arrived to transport her body to the sagrato, a smell so dreadful filled the room that visitors vomited on their shoes. A child gasped and pointed - on the table, a patch of mushrooms with pale caps and stout red stems. Boletus satanas - Satan’s mushroom - normally found on the stumps of dead oak. When a kindly visitor used his knife to scrape the fungus from the table, the blade moved easily through their soft bodies. The mushrooms turned dark blue where they were cut and released a smell so putrid visitors vomited on their shoes a second time that day.

But this is not the story that was told. Instead, her suffering was talked about as a miracle. No one spoke about the smell, the pale mushrooms, the obsession that killed her. Instead, it was told and told again that Fina suffered heroically under the watchful eye of her savior. Told and told again how church bells rang upon her death, even with no sacristan to pull the rope.

Told and told again how white violets bloomed over the oak table, living proof of His Glory.