by D. L. Smith
It was in the winter of 1944, probably late January or early February, when Nonno had stumbled into Santo Fico from somewhere in the north. He was so gaunt and haggard that most of the villagers thought he wouldn’t survive. In and out of a fever for a week, he raved about terrible things and most of what he said made little sense, but they pieced together that something terrible had happened to him with the Germans. They surmised that he’d been part of a band of anti-Fascists who were pursued by Nazis, driven into the Dolomite Mountains, and he was the lone survivor. How he managed to wander across half of Italy in the dead of winter was to remain forever a mystery.
To make matters worse, a month later a detachment of Germans was assigned to Santo Fico. They simply drove their trucks up the southern road one day, parked in the piazza, and moved into the hotel. They were part of a greater German force that had been sent to Italy to “encourage” the heartsick forces of Il Duce. This small squad had been assigned to Santo Fico because of its quiet harbor and commanding view of the sea. Fortunately, the occupation didn’t last long. The villagers did not like Santo Fico being occupied by the arrogant German soldiers who stayed wherever they chose, took whatever they wanted, and flirted with whomever they pleased. So the villagers fought back—in their own unique way.
According to Nonno, one night when naval and aerial bombardments were occurring all around the region, some of the men sneaked out and shut off all of the water. In the morning it was announced to the Germans that a stray bomb had destroyed the village well and every inhabitant of Santo Fico would undoubtedly die of thirst before it could be repaired. Of course, the villagers had stored away enough water to last them a month. They begged the Germans for help. In only a few days the thirsty Germans were gone and were never seen in Santo Fico again. The water was restored within twenty-four hours—all except the fountain.
Now according to Nonno, the fountain had its own ancient source, a source other than the main well and the water lines that supplied the village. The fountain dated back many centuries and its source was probably established when the cathedral was built—maybe even earlier. In 1944 there was only one very old man who knew where the pipes to the fountain originated and the night they shut down the water, it had been Nonno’s job to accompany that old man and help him turn off the water to the fountain—which he did.
Unfortunately for the village, the old man who knew where the pipes to the fountain originated was very old indeed. Two days after their sabotage raid, he died. In the subsequent months, Nonno was of little help. He was not only a stranger to the region, but only visited the forgotten water pipe once and that was on a moonless night. But, also, in those days his mind was even cloudier than now. So all memories of the old pipe remained vague and the ancient fountain remained dry—Santo Fico’s only casualty of World War II.
At the time, there were certainly larger concerns than the fountain. It was wartime and things were hard. Then, as time passed, the cool water that had once flowed in the middle of the piazza became a topic for idle chat, then a fading memory, and eventually the notion of water in the fountain became only a fable that children joked about.
But for Nonno it was never a joke. For years he blamed himself, that he couldn’t find where the old man had taken him that night in 1944. For years he combed the surrounding hills and firmly fixed his reputation as the official village idiot by continually insisting that one day he was going to make water in the town square. He still insisted, to the present day, that if he could find that unremembered place, he could restore the water to the fountain.
Topo looked from one expectant face to the other. It was an interesting tale, but he was totally baffled as to how Leo expected him to react.
But Leo smiled slyly and said, “Wouldn’t it be something if water did suddenly start flowing out of the fountain again? Maybe as Father Elio was sitting on the edge of the fountain. . . maybe praying that the water would return . . . and all of a sudden . . .”
Topo smiled and nodded. “All of a sudden, water just starts flowing out of the fountain. That would be something all right. That would be . . .”
They shouted in unison, “. . . A miracle!”
Topo saw the beauty of this miracle immediately and the two men launched into their plan of attack. It all sounded exciting to Nonno too, but at the moment he just wanted to get that stupid dog outside before Topo noticed the puddle dripping from the soggy cardboard box containing the discarded parts for a belt sander.
It was true—about many things, Nonno was vague. Cloudy memories from an indistinct past drifted into smoky recollections of things best forgotten, and to say that he tended to become confused was an understatement. But about the water and the fountain, there were a few things of which Nonno was absolutely positive. The first was that the pipe was buried . . . maybe. He distinctly remembered digging. He wasn’t completely clear if the digging came before they found the pipe, or after, or both. Just in case, Leo decided, they should probably carry a pick and shovel. The other point that was clear to Nonno was that the pipe was south of the village . . . Or, maybe he had just done most of his searching south of the village. But for some reason, “south of the village” remained pertinent to his story. So with high expectations and appropriate tools, the trio set out.
When they had been sitting in Topo’s cool shop, on the shady side of the old stone building, their endeavor sounded reasonable. By the time they were ten minutes down the road and the edge of the Toscana sun was cutting through their shirts, Topo, at least, was beginning to question the wisdom of the venture. And he didn’t like carrying the shovel. He complained that the wooden handle was getting too hot and he just couldn’t find a comfortable way to carry it, so Leo traded tools with him. But within a few minutes the pick was too heavy for Topo and he wanted his shovel back.
The two men were so completely absorbed in carping at each other that they didn’t see the exact moment when Nonno, who had been leading them down the gravelly road, suddenly stopped and held up his hand. They nearly walked up his back. Whether the old man saw something, or remembered something, or smelled something on the wind, or just sensed the spirit of some previous adventure—whatever it might be, it was a mystical moment. They had just rounded the last turn in the road that took them out of a treacherous section of crags and cliffs. The dry heat almost crackled in the weeds and cicadas screamed what sounded like a warning. To their right a short field dropped steeply downhill to threatening cliffs and the sea. To their left, a sloping, tawny plane of thistles, cactus, and rocks stretched before them. Their narrow road continued for only another half kilometer before it turned inland and ran across those yellow-brown fields toward a grove of trees that, from this distance, was only a thin puff of green on the horizon.
Nonno gazed out at their options, scratching his white stubble, and mumbling to himself. All waited with expectation—even the dog. The old man was on to something. They waited for what seemed like a long time. Twice Topo started to speak, but both times Leo gave him a quick look and harsh gesture that told him not to interrupt Nonno’s meditation. At last, the old man let out a sigh of understanding. He turned eastward and limped purposefully down into the weeds of the plain. Leo followed.
Topo followed too, but he was troubled. For many years Nonno and his old gray dog had been inseparable. Where one was, there was the other. People had always just assumed that the dog clung faithfully to Nonno’s heels because that’s the nature of the loyal beast. But now Topo was troubled. Was he the only one who noticed that the dog wandered out into the field to investigate a grasshopper just moments before Nonno received his inspiration? In Topo’s mind it definitely raised a question: In this man-dog, master-beast relationship, just who was following whom?
And so the pattern was set for the rest of the day. Either Nonno or the dog would “sense” something and they were off again. Often Nonno would stop and deliberate, study a rock, and debate if they should dig in that particular spot. He usually thought better of it
and they moved on. But Topo made sure he kept his eyes open to see if he could catch the dog either nodding or shaking his head. On rare occasions Nonno would point his cane to a particular rock and that meant they were to turn the rock over and dig beneath it. Turning the rock over was Topo’s least favorite part and then he was glad he had the shovel. He hated and feared snakes—blacksnakes in particular. As a boy, his mother used to tell the story of her younger brother being bitten by a blacksnake. She never tired of describing how he swelled up, turned blue, and then—with his eyes bulging—the boy babbled madness with a purple tongue and foam spewed from every orifice in his body (and other horrible symptoms that varied with her mood). Young Topo and his sisters often wondered at the inconsistency of the boy’s afflictions and how much mad babbling he could have done at three years old, but the story did work its magic. The entire Pasolini family was terrified of snakes—a plight that Leo and Franco never tired of taking advantage of when they were growing up. If they could present a well-timed shriek of “SNAKE!” along with the unexpected appearance of a wriggling length of garden hose, young Topo pretty much guaranteed at least a spastic leap, a girlish scream, and a torrent of curses and tears. Endless amusement.
By late afternoon, Leo and Topo both would have traded a healthy portion of their potential fortune for a tall glass of water, five minutes under a shade tree, or a hat. Then even the dog deserted them. It wasn’t long after they saw him meander back across the plain toward the village that Nonno called it quits too. Topo was now totally convinced that, from the beginning, the dog had been calling the shots. But in fact, Leo had also grown discouraged with Nonno’s perpetual chant of “That looks familiar over there.” He began to wonder why everything that looked familiar was so far away. Why couldn’t anything close ever look familiar? At last, the three of them went the way of the dog—dragging across the plain and then up the steep road to town.
They sat for a long time in Topo’s cool shop, drinking water in silence. They had come close to making themselves sick with too much sun and heat, but at last Nonno said, “You know, I haven’t looked in a long time. But I think I remember something . . . I think we were farther away from the village.”
“How far?” Leo wanted to be supportive.
“Oh . . . Maybe across the fields, maybe . . . but, not as far as the trees. There weren’t any trees . . . maybe.”
Thoughts of walking that far and carrying that shovel made Topo’s head hurt. Luckily, Leo had a better idea.
“Tomorrow we should take the truck. And we’ll go in the morning when it’s cooler.”
“And you boys wear hats,” piped in Nonno.
“And tomorrow we’ll take water,” added Leo.
Topo was too exhausted to speak or protest. He wanted to protest. He wanted to scream at Nonno that he was crazy. He wanted to tell Leo that when he volunteered “the truck,” it was, in fact, his truck, and the thought of going through that inferno again was more than he could bear. He wanted to tell Leo to take the fresco back to the church, then go back to Chicago and leave him alone. He was tired and he needed to rest—especially since, apparently, he was going to have to do this all over again tomorrow.
The next day was better. They had the truck, they had water, and they wore hats. Those parts were better. As far as Nonno being closer to remembering where he had gone on that moonless night in 1944—that was still a little blurry.
The old man wanted to ride in the back of the truck with the dog. The dog liked to lean over the side with his nose into the wind, searching for mysterious smells. Nonno stood behind the cab, with his face also leaning into the wind, and scanned the horizon for the mysterious spot. The plan was to drive down the road, around the bend, and across the plain to the place Nonno indicated the day before. But it was slower going than anticipated, because every thirty meters Nonno would bang on the roof of the cab like a drum and shout, “Stop! That place looks familiar.” The little truck would slide to a halt in a cloud of dust and they’d all pile out. They’d then tramp through the thistles and brambles, Topo’s shovel ever poised, ready for a lurking blacksnake—waiting for Nonno’s magical moment of clarity. Then, after twenty minutes or so, it was back to the truck to tear off down the road for another thirty meters before Nonno would once again bang his cane on his Fiat drum. They followed this ritual all the way down the hill, around the bend, and across the plain toward those trees that were slowly becoming more than just a low hedge along the horizon.
It was afternoon by the time the adventurers finally ran out of yellow-brown fields. The truck was parked at the final turn that carried the road away from the flat plains south of Santo Fico and curved into foothills that continued on toward the highway. Although neither Leo nor Topo noticed, they were parked in almost the exact spot where Topo had parked and waited just hours before the earthquake, when Leo demanded his vomit-stop on their way home from Grosseto. They might have noticed this coincidence, if they had stopped arguing long enough to look around. But the heat and the tension had finally become too much for them. That and an innocent comment by Nonno to which, well . . . to which Topo didn’t react well at all.
Nonno had shouted and banged on their heads, as usual. They’d stopped the truck, as usual. As usual, they’d followed him out into the weeds. They’d waited patiently while, as usual, the old man scratched his stubbled chin and deliberated. Then Leo mentioned, quite casually, that they’d pretty much arrived at the trees and they were, more or less, running out of fields to search. Nonno looked around, considered the truth of Leo’s observation, and then replied softly, “Maybe it was on the north side of the village.”
While Leo was stilled by this speculation, Topo went off like a Roman candle. He screamed at such a pitch, Leo thought the little fellow had actually, finally seen a snake. Topo stomped back toward the truck with the full intention of leaving his two companions (three if he counted the dog) to make their own way home. Leo chased him down and the two men launched into a fiery debate on many wide-ranging subjects from childhood grudges to financial windfalls to mad schemes—none of which Nonno understood. So he ignored them.
Nonno was puzzled. How could he have remembered for so many years that the pipe was on the south side, if it was really to the north? He needed to sit down and think this over, so he looked around for an appropriate resting place and noticed a tall, thin rock that had apparently been recently tipped over. One end of the long stone was crusted with dirt where it had been buried and it lay next to a bowl-like impression in the earth. Nonno squinted at the rock and scratched his chin, trying to puzzle things through. He sat down on this stone that Leo had stumbled over a few nights earlier and studied the bowl-shaped indentation where it had once rested. A small flash of metal glinted in the sun. Something was buried there, so the old man scraped at the dry dirt with his finger.
“Well, what do you know about that,” he mumbled.
All of this was lost on Leo and Topo, and it was only because there was a lull in their shouting that they eventually heard Nonno talking to them at all. They were used to his incoherence, but his current observation struck them both as unusually odd and they responded almost in unison.
“What?”
“I said, it must be the trees. The trees couldn’t have been this big then. Maybe they grew. But then again, maybe they were this big. Maybe I just didn’t see them. It was dark, you know.” He sat on the rock, picking at something shiny in his hand.
“What about the trees?” Leo walked back to the distracted old man.
“I think those damn trees threw me off all these years. Maybe they weren’t so big.” Nonno held up a tarnished old piece of metal. “I found my watch. Doesn’t work anymore. I lost it that night. I hunted all over for it, but it was dark. When I finished burying the pipe, I pushed this rock up on end as a marker. I must have pushed it right up on top of my watch. Something knocked this rock over.”
Leo and Topo exchanged glances.
“You mean . . . ?”
Soon the three of them were standing over a hole that revealed the remains of an antiquated clay pipe with two full meters of it smashed to pieces and one end plugged with rocks and all sorts of odd debris.
“This pipe is smashed,” observed Topo.
“You smashed the pipe,” noted Leo.
Nonno was grinning from ear to ear. “Damn right we did. This thing put up one hell of a fight. Took us a while too. All we had were big rocks. You know, that pipe’s old, but it’s tough.”
“You said you turned off a valve.”
“Did I say that? No, I don’t think I said that. I said I turned off the water. There wasn’t a valve. We just smashed it. Big rocks. Then, ah . . . ohhh . . . Water everywhere! I thought I was gonna drown. We couldn’t stop the water. So I started jamming things up the pipe. I started with my hat. Then my coat. That’s when I took my watch out of my pants. I didn’t want to lose it. Then my pants went up the pipe, but there was still water. That’s when the old man started taking his clothes off. We shoved all our clothes up the pipe and it finally plugged up. But our clothes, they didn’t want to stay. So I started shoving rocks and sticks and mud up the pipe. Then I put that one big rock in front of the end. That stopped it. Then I buried it and we sneaked back to the village—wet, covered with mud. All we had on were our shoes. It wasn’t too cold, but the old man, he got sick. He died.”
