Saint Fina

~for Valerie

Fina was born during a solar eclipse. As darkness swallowed the afternoon in the town of San Gimignano, Fina crowned, a 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 ring of light appeared around the black 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.

Though the room was dim, the midwife couldn’t help but notice that Fina’s eyes stayed open through the gory process of birth. Even when wiping away the greasy wax of childbirth - a vigorous rubdown that normally made newborns shriek purple - Fina stared, her eyes transfixed on the rafters. It was as if there was something up there only she could see. Handing the freshly-scrubbed babe to the mother, the midwife stepped outside to settle her heart, which wobbled like the jelly she made from boiled hooves. The temperature outside made her shiver, when just a few hours ago it was too warm. No shrieking gulls or barking dogs, clopping horses or scraped pots. Just a rush of gloom that bled the town gray. Muttering a second prayer aloud, she spun around and returned to the mother and her newborn. She’d finish the job, then throw extra wood on the hearth once she was home.

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 the 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 wash herself sent her out the door. At home, she collected boughs of juniper for a fire and burnt her smock. As the embers cooled, 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.

Under a sheepskin blanket, Fina’s mother cradled her baby, trying to ignore how the unblinking newborn resembled a corpse. She pulled Fina closer, coo’d and rubbed a nipple against her lips. But the baby stared upward, unmoving. Frustrated, she clapped her hands near Fina’s ear, and the baby starfished into life. Fina’s head wobbled on the thin stem of her neck before toppling to her mother’s shoulder. In this position, her 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 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 be 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 vinegar, making him nauseous. After a few minutes of tottering and complaining, his wife shoo’d him away. He was no better than a stray.

The sun came back that day, but Fina’s oddness persisted through childhood. She refused to nurse unless her mother soaked her nipples in vinegar. The acid worsened the cracking 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 was pocked and pale, like 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 kids for song school. Perhaps she’d learn to sing and laugh, 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 a contagious 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, 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 bitter day in March, Fina did not show up for school. A week went by. Rumor spread that she had become ill. Three different doctors were called upon. When the last doctor shook his head and hurried through the door, Fina crawled atop the oak table by the hearth, covered herself with a thin wool blanket, and stared at the rafters until she fell asleep. Her malaise was a medical mystery, it was said. Townsfolk suspected ergotism. Pray it will pass quickly, like the vexing March weather, advised the local priest. But after a few months of continued decline, folks began stopping by to see the girl for themselves. They offered remedies and prayers, but nothing worked. Fina remained on her back.

Fina eventually 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 offering. Instead, she pointed a bony finger at the schoolmate and recited The Confiteor in a voice like a rusted hinge. Suddenly 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 lids pink and 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 the ulcers that formed where her blood pooled, and crept from dark corners to nibble her flesh. 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 a day 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 spoiling 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 back, 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 bent in half and 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 sacred spot of Fina’s death, the blade moved easily through their soft bodies. The mushrooms turned dark blue where they were cut and released a rot. People ran from the room, pinching their noses, but not before a few vomited on their shoes a second time that day.

But this is not the story that was told.

Instead, it was a miracle, Fina’s suffering. No one spoke about the smell, the pale mushrooms, or the inexplicable obsession that killed her. Instead, it was told and told again that Fina suffered like a hero under the watchful eye of our savior. Told and told again how church bells rang as she died with no sacristan there to pull the ropes. Told and told again how white violets appeared on the oak table, living proof of His Glory.