The Path to the Spiders' Nests

by Italo Calvino

  Sometimes, at night, Pin is told to be quiet by Long Zena, also known as Wooden-Beret, who has reached a good part in his book and wants to read it out loud. Long Zena spends entire days without leaving the hut, lying stretched out on the dirty straw, reading a big book called Super-Thriller, by the light of a little oil-lamp. He has even been known to take the book into action with him and go on reading it, leaning it on the magazine of the machine-gun, while waiting for the Germans to appear.

  He reads out loud in a monotonous Genoese cadence; it’s a story about men disappearing in a mysterious Chinatown. Dritto likes hearing him read and tells the others to keep quiet; Dritto has never in his life had the patience to read a book through, but once, when he was in prison, he had spent hours and hours listening to an old convict reading The Count of Monte Cristo out loud and had enjoyed that very much.

  But Pin cannot understand the pleasure of reading and is getting bored. He says: ‘Hey, Long Zena, what will your wife say that night?’

  ‘Which night?’ asks Long Zena, who is not yet used to Pin’s jokes.

  ‘The first night you go to bed with her and spend the whole time reading!’

  ‘Porcupine-face!’ exclaims Long Zena.

  ‘Bull-lips!’ replies Pin. The Genoese has a long pale face with two enormous lips and pale eyes under the peak of a leather cap that’s so stiff it might be made of wood. Long Zena gets angry and starts getting up. ‘Why bull-lips? Why d’you call me bull-lips?’

  ‘Bull-face!’ repeats Pin again and again, keeping out of range of his huge hands.

  Pin feels he can risk this as he knows that the Genoese will never make the effort to run after him, and will always decide after a bit to let Pin go on talking, and start reading again from where his big finger is holding the place. He is the laziest man in the whole brigade; though his shoulders are like a stevedore’s he always has some excuse, on marches, for not carrying a load. One by one all the detachments had got rid of him until he’s ended up in Dritto’s.

  ‘How cruel it is,’ says Long Zena, ‘that men have to work all their lives.’

  But there are countries, such as America, where men can get rich without much effort; Long Zena will go off there as soon as the boats begin sailing again.

  ‘Free enterprise, the secret of everything is free enterprise,’ says he, stretching his long arms lying on the straw, moving his lips while spelling out the words with a finger, in the book describing life in that free happy country.

  At night, when everyone is asleep in the straw. Long Zena folds back the page he has begun, shuts the book, blows out the oil-lamp and goes off to sleep with his cheek resting on the cover.

  Chapter Seven

  The dreams of the partisans are short and rare, dreams born of nights of hunger, linked to food which is always scarce and always to be divided among so many; dreams about chewing bits of bread and putting them away in drawers. Stray dogs must have dreams like that, about gnawing bones and burying them. Only when the men’s stomachs are full, when the fire is lit, and there has not been too much marching the day before, can they dream of naked women and wake up in the morning with spirits free and soaring, with all the exhilaration of the start of a voyage.

  Then the men lying in the straw begin to talk about their women, about those in the past and those in the future, to make plans for when the war is over, and to pass each other faded yellow photographs.

  Giglia sleeps by the wall, the other side of her dumpy little bald husband. In the morning she listens to the men talking with so much yearning, and feels their glances slithering towards her like snakes in the straw. Then she gets up and goes out to the well to wash herself. The men remain in the darkness of the hut, thinking of her opening her shirt and soaping her breasts. Dritto, who has been silent throughout, gets up and goes out to wash too. The men swear at Pin for reading their thoughts and mocking them.

  Pin feels among them as he felt among the men in the tavern, only this world is more brightly coloured, more savage, with these nights in the hay and those beards crawling with lice. There is something else which attracts and frightens Pin, apart from that absurd fixation about women which is common to all grown-ups; every now and again they return to the hut leading some yellow-faced man whom Pin has not seen before, and who looks around as if incapable of opening his eyes wide or of unlocking his jaws to ask something he longs to know.

  The man goes docilely out with them, into the misty dry meadows that lie at the edge of the woods; no one ever sees him return, and sometimes his hat or jacket or nailed boots appear on someone else. Pin finds this fascinating and mysterious, and he tries every time to join the little group of men walking off into the fields; but they push him away with curses, and Pin is left jumping about in front of the hut and poking a broom made of ferns at the hawk, thinking meanwhile of the secret rites taking place in the misty damp grass.

  One night, to play a trick on Pin, Dritto tells him that in the third field up the mountain there’s a surprise for him.

  ‘Bloody hell, Dritto, tell me what it is,’ says Pin, bursting with curiosity, but at the same time feeling a hint of fear for those grey clearings in the dark.

  ‘Just keep walking along that third field until you find it,’ says Dritto, laughing a cruel laugh.

  So then Pin walks on his own through the dark, with fear penetrating his bones like the dank mist. He follows the strip of field which lies in between outcrops of the mountain, and has by now lost sight of the glow of the fire visible through the door of the hut.

  He manages to stop just in time: one step more and he would have walked on it! Beneath him he sees a huge white shape sprawled over the field: a human body, already stiff, lying face down in the grass. Stunned, Pin stares at it: a black hand jumps out from the earth on to the corpse, slithers down its flesh, and tries to grab on to it like the hand of a drowning man. But it’s not a hand: it’s a toad; one of those toads that roam the fields by night and that is now leaping on to the belly of the dead man. With his hair standing on end and his heart in his mouth, Pin races as fast as he can from the field.

  One day Duke returns to the camp after having gone off with his three brothers-in-law on one of those mysterious expeditions of theirs. He arrives wearing a black woollen scarf round his neck and carrying his fur cap in his hand.

  ‘Comrades,’ he says, ‘they’ve killed my brother-in-law Marquis.’

  The men come out of the hut and watch Count and Baron arriving, also wearing black woollen scarves round their necks, and carrying a stretcher made of vine poles and olive branches on which is lying the body of Marquis, killed by the Black Brigade in a field of carnations.

  The brothers-in-law put the stretcher down in front of the hut and stand round it with their heads bare and their chins lowered. Then they notice the two prisoners. These are Fascist prisoners captured in an action the day before, who are standing there peeling potatoes, unkempt and with feet bare and torn uniforms where the badges had been ripped off, explaining for the hundredth time to anyone near them that they had only joined the Black Brigade because they were forced to.

  Duke orders the two prisoners to take picks and spades, and carry the stretcher to the meadows, to bury their brother-in-law’s body. They set off; the two Fascists carrying on their shoulders the stretcher of branches with the corpse on it, followed by the three brothers-in-law. Duke in the middle with the other two on each side of him. They are holding their caps in their left hands at the level of their hearts; Duke his round fur cap, Count a woollen balaclava, Baron his big peasant’s hat; in the other hand each of them carries a pistol, cocked. A short way behind follow all the others, in silence.

  Then Duke begins reciting the prayers for the dead; the Latin words sound heavy with anger in his mouth, like curses; the two brothers-in-law intone the responses, with their pistols still cocked and their caps held to their chests. The funeral advances through the fields, at a slow pace; Duke gives the Fascists a few sharp orders every now and again,
to go slowly, to hold the stretcher level, and to turn; eventually he orders them to stop and begin digging a grave.

  The others also stop, some distance away, and stand looking on. Beside the stretcher and the two digging Fascists stand the three Calabrian brothers-in-law, their heads still bare, still with their black woollen scarves and cocked pistols, saying Latin prayers. The Fascists work quickly; soon they have dug a deep trench and look up at the brothers-in-law.

  ‘Keep digging,’ says Duke.

  ‘Deeper?’ ask the Fascists.

  ‘No, wider,’ says Duke.

  The Fascists go on digging and throwing up earth, making a trench two or three times wider.

  ‘Enough,’ says Duke.

  The Fascists lower the body of Marquis into the middle of the trench; then climb out to throw earth on top.

  ‘Down,’ says Duke. ‘Cover it from down there.’

  The Fascists throw spadefuls of earth up on to the dead man until they are each standing in separate ditches with the corpse between them. Every now and again they turn round to see if Duke will let them get up again, but he tells them to go on throwing earth on the body, earth which has already formed a high tomb above the corpse.

  Then the others leave the brothers-in-law standing there with their bared heads and their cocked pistols; and the mist comes up, a thick mist that blurs outlines and muffles sound.

  The story of the Calabrian’s funeral, when brigade headquarters found out, aroused considerable disapproval, and Giacinto the commissar was called once again to report. Meanwhile the men in the hut seem gripped by a wild exaggerated gaiety as they listen to the jokes of Pin, who, sparing the mourning brothers-in-law for that evening, has launched out against Long Zena.

  Giglia is kneeling by the fire, handing bits of wood one by one to her husband, who is trying to coax up the flames; meanwhile she is following what’s said and laughing and swivelling her green eyes around the room. And every time her eyes meet the shadowed ones of Dritto, she laughs and Dritto laughs too, that evil sick laugh of his, and they gaze fixedly at each other, until she lowers her eyes and looks serious again.

  ‘Pin, stop a second,’ says Giglia, ‘and sing that song which goes: Who is it knocking at my door …?’

  Pin leaves the Genoese in peace and starts on her.

  ‘Say, Giglia, who would you like to come knocking on your door?’ asks Pin, ‘when your husband’s not at home!’

  The cook raises his bald head, reddened by the heat of the fire, with the sour little laugh he gives when he is being made fun of: ‘What I’d like is to see you come knocking at my door, with Duke behind you waving a big knife and saying, “I’ll bbblow your bbbrains out!” and then I’d like to close the door in your face.’

  But the attempt to bring in Duke again is a clumsy one and does not work. Pin takes a step or two towards Mancino and says with a frown and a sideways grin: ‘What, Mancino, you mean to say you really didn’t notice that time?’

  Mancino has learnt by now that it’s best not to ask Pin what he means.

  ‘No, I didn’t, did you?’ he replies, but gives his sour laugh, because he knows Pin won’t spare him and that the others are hanging on his lips to hear what he’ll come out with.

  ‘That time after you’d been at sea a year and your wife had a baby and took it off to the orphanage and you came back and noticed nothing?’

  The others, who have held their breaths till now, burst into roars of laughter and try to draw the cook on: ‘Oh, Mancino, what happened? You never told us about that!’

  Mancino laughs too, but sourly as a green lemon. ‘Why?’ he says to Pin. ‘Did you meet the child when you were at the orphanage for bastards yourself?’

  ‘That’s enough,’ says Giglia. ‘Can’t you say anything that isn’t malicious, Pin? Now sing us that song; it’s so lovely.’

  ‘If I feel like it,’ says Pin; ‘I don’t work to orders.’

  Dritto gets slowly to his feet, stretching: ‘Go on, Pin, sing that song she’s told you to, or straight out you go on guard duty.’

  Pin shakes the hair off his eyes and grins at him. ‘Hey, let’s hope the Germans don’t come. The chief’s feeling sentimental tonight.’

  He is all ready to parry the expected blow; but Dritto is looking at Giglia from his shaded eyes, above the cook’s big head. Pin then gets into position, with his chin up and his chest out, and begins:

  Who is it knocking at my front door, at my front door?

  Who is it knocking at my front door?

  It is a wild haunting song which Pin learnt from an old woman down in the alley; perhaps it was sung once by storytellers at fairs.

  ’Tis a Moorish captain with all his slaves, with all his slaves,

  ’Tis a Moorish captain with all his slaves.

  ‘Firewood,’ says Mancino, and reaches out a hand towards Giglia. She takes up a broom made of ferns, but Dritto holds a hand out over the cook’s head and takes it.

  Tell me, woman, where is your son, where is your son?

  Tell me, woman, where is your son?

  Mancino still has his hand out and Dritto is now burning the sticks. Then Giglia holds out a handful of millet leaves above her husband’s head and her hand meets Dritto’s. Pin is following their movements with attentive eyes as he goes on singing.

  My son has gone to war and can’t return, and can’t return,

  My son has gone to war and can’t return.

  Dritto has taken Giglia’s hand with one of his, then seized the millet leaves in the other and thrown them on the fire; after which he lets go of her hand and they look at each other.

  May he choke on the bread he eats, on the bread he eats,

  May he choke on the bread he eats.

  Pin is following every movement with eyes blazing; he is throwing more and more into his singing at every couplet, as if his very soul were in it.

  And may he drown in the water he drinks, in the water he drinks

  And may he drown in the water he drinks.

  Now Dritto is climbing over the cook and is near Giglia. Pin’s voice thunders in his throat as if it would crack open.

  May he be swallowed by the earth he treads, by the earth he treads.

  May he be swallowed by the earth he treads.

  Dritto is now crouching down by Giglia’s side; she is handing him bits of wood and he is putting them on the fire. The others are all intent on the song, which has reached its most dramatic point.

  Woman, what are you saying, for I am your son, for I am your son;

  Woman, what are you saying, for I am your son!

  The flames on the fire are too high now; some of the wood should be taken off, not more put on, or the hay on the floor above will catch fire. But Giglia and Dritto are still passing each other twigs and leaves.

  Forgive me, son, for speaking ill of you, for speaking bad of you,

  Forgive me, son, for speaking ill of you.

  Pin is sweating from the heat, and trembling all over with the effort he is making; the last high note was so piercing that a flapping and raucous screech can be heard from under the dark roof; the hawk Babeuf has woken up.

  He drew out his sword and cut off her head, cut off her head,

  He drew out his sword and cut off her head.

  Mancino has now put his hands on his knees, he has heard the hawk wake and is getting up to feed it.

  Off went the head and spun into the hall, spun into the hall,

  Off went the head and spun into the hall.

  The cook always has a sack by him filled with intestines of slaughtered animals.

  Now the hawk is perching on one of his fingers and Mancino is feeding bits of blood-red kidneys into its beak.

  On the floor of that room will grow a beautiful flower, a beautiful flower,

  On the floor of that room will grow a beautiful flower.

  Pin draws in breath for the last lines. He moves near Dritto and Giglia and shouts almost into their ears:

  The flower
of a mother killed by her own son, killed by her own son,

  The flower of a mother killed by her own son.

  Pin flings himself to the ground, exhausted. Everyone breaks into applause. Babeuf squawks. At that moment there is a shout from the men sleeping above: ‘Fire! Fire!’

  The flames have grown into a huge bonfire, crackling and spreading over the hay covering the logs above.

  ‘Out! Out!’ The men are all stumbling about in confusion, snatching at weapons, boots, blankets, falling over others lying down.

  Dritto has regained control of himself and jumped to his feet. ‘Quick! Clear the place! First automatics and ammunition, then rifles. Last the sacks and blankets. And remember the rations!’

  The men, some of whom were lying barefoot, are seized with panic, snatching at anything that comes to hand and flinging themselves at the door. Pin plunges in between their legs and opens himself a way out, then runs to find a place from which to admire the fire. What a wonderful sight it is!

  Dritto has pulled his pistol out. ‘No one leaves before everything’s saved! Out with the things and go back! The first man I see making off I’ll shoot!’

  The flames are already licking the walls, but the men have got over their panic and are now leaping back into the middle of the flames and smoke to save the weapons and rations. Dritto enters too and shouts orders, coughing amid the smoke, then comes out again to call others and prevent their escaping. He finds Mancino in a bush with the hawk on his shoulders and all his belongings round him and with a kick orders him back to the hut to get the cooking-pot.