A Winter's Night

by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

  The procession headed to the cemetery and the gravediggers didn’t even need to be relieved of their burden, because old Callisto was skin and bones and didn’t weigh a thing. Checco didn’t have the heart to watch them put him in the ground, his father, and he left. He wandered through the fields for a long time. A bit of fog was beginning to rise, and he realized that he would be the one to worry now about who was or wasn’t coming back. He thought of when the postman would arrive with a letter carrying bad news and how he would have to tell his mother. That would be tough; as the proverb said, “A husband gets into your dress, but a child gets into your heart.”

  When he got home he had a bowl of soup brought out to the stable, as if he were a traveler who had happened upon Hotel Bruni for the night, and he stretched out on the hay because he knew he wouldn’t be able to fall asleep in his bed. It was late when he heard Clerice come in. She pulled his army overcoat up so that it covered his shoulders, like when she would come to tuck him in when he was little, but he said nothing and pretended to be sleeping.

  A week later Gaetano returned. He was all in one piece but he was dumbfounded to hear that their father had died and that they’d just buried him. He wasn’t expecting it; he’d long dreamed of the moment in which he would set foot in the courtyard and embrace his parents again before he went to see the cows and oxen in the stable, and instead it was a very sad moment, sadder than any he’d had in the war. He took it out on Secondo, the farmhand, who was not to blame, and told him he wasn’t needed anymore. When he learned that the boy had fallen in love with Maria and was crazy about her, and noticed how yellow his ears were, a sure sign that he was whacking off, he told him to pack up and get out the next day.

  Checco took his brother aside: “Let it go, Gaetano, there’s nothing wrong with falling in love, and he’s never been disrespectful towards our sister. You know she’s in love with Fonso the storyteller, and she won’t even look at anyone else. Sending him away now at the beginning of the winter is dooming him to cold and hunger. His family up in the mountains is so poor that they can barely scrape by and all they eat is chestnuts. We’ve given food and drink to so many vagrants even if we didn’t know who they were. Think about it, while we were away at war he helped our parents get by here, for just a bowl of soup and a chunk of bread. He’ll give you a hand in the stables; he knows how to bottom a chair with straw and fix the tools . . . We’ll decide in the spring, all right?”

  Gaetano muttered something under his breath that meant all right and they carried on. Clerice went to the cemetery every other day to pray on her husband’s tomb, and since there were no flowers to be had she put two hawthorn branches in a jar, which looked nice anyway with their red berries. When she finished praying she would let Callisto know how things were going, sure that he would be listening. That Checco and Gaetano were back and that they were well. Checco had a bit of a limp, but it wasn’t too bad. She couldn’t complain. “You can see them all, our boys, from where you are now. Help them if you can; the Lord will surely listen to you because you were always a good man and you never hurt anyone. You always acted rightly. Let them all come home to me.” Here she had to stop for a moment because she got a lump in her throat. “If . . . if by chance some of them are there with you, better for you and worse for me.” Then she blew her nose, dried her tears and step after step, went back home.

  Even with all this worry and distress, there was a laugh to be had at times. Like when, a week after Checco’s return, Pio Patella showed up in the courtyard wailing like a banshee. “Clerice, Clerice, open that door wide! I’ve been cuckolded and the horns I’m wearing are so big I can’t fit through!”

  Clerice knew well that when men stayed away for years, there were always some of the ladies in town who sought solace with someone else, but she also knew that horns were the least of their problems and that it was best to forget the past and start anew.

  “Why would you say such a thing, Pio?” she asked.

  Pio replied that when he got home he found that his family had grown without any help from him. Not one, but two children, and he was having none of it.

  Clerice had him sit down and poured him a glass of wine to lighten his spirits. Goodness, a extra child was one thing, but two? She had to find a solution and a way to comfort him.

  “How long were you away, Pio?”

  “Eighteen months.”

  Clerice’s face lit up. So? Where’s the problem? Nine plus nine is eighteen, she figured. Since one pregnancy lasts nine months, two pregnancies doubles the time. All fine and dandy.

  Pio Patella looked puzzled for a moment but, considering that Clerice was a woman of experience and she knew everything there was to know about such things, he hugged her, thanked her and told her that she was the wisest and the best person in the whole town and that she had taken a weight from his heart. He returned home in an excellent mood and, now that he knew his honor was not at stake, he apologized to his wife for having thought badly of her and he pointed to the stairs that led up to the bedroom, the place where all problems were solved, or at least those that can be put right.

  After Gaetano, Dante came back. Then Armando, then Savino, then Fredo and, last of all, Floti. His lung had been pierced by shrapnel during the Battle of the Solstice and he’d been kept in the hospital for a month until he was capable of travelling. None of them knew that their father had died and each of them thought it was a cruel trick of fate that poor Callisto had tortured himself to the end thinking that out of seven sons he would surely have lost two or three or maybe even more. He’d heard about battalions that were decimated, entire divisions annihilated. Why would the Black Lady spare his own, why hadn’t she swept her scythe over the field of the Brunis?

  Clerice reasoned, instead, that the Madonna had listened to her and that in some way, the sacrifice of her husband had served to allow his boys to come home, one after another, none of them left behind.

  Truly, all seven had survived: even Savino, the youngest and greenest. Only Floti had returned disabled, but you couldn’t see anything from the outside; he was still the good-looking boy he had always been, who girls turned to look at when he walked down the road. It was only that the doctors had prohibited him from overexerting himself or doing heavy labor of any sort, since they hadn’t been able to operate on him and the fragment, a very small piece of metal, was still stuck in his left lung.

  At first no one noticed much, because it was only natural that Floti would spend his time looking after the family’s business, which meant going to the market, eating out in the osterie with livestock dealers or negotiating with the landowner. He was the brightest, after all. But as time went on, the others began to feel that he was taking advantage of his position, while they did the hard work in the fields, the stable, the farmyard. And thus the seeds of envy were sown, or at least of malcontent.

  One day Floti came back from the market with a worn-out, skinny mare. Her eyes were glazed and her coat was bristly and dull, her tail smeared with excrement.

  “Why on earth did you waste money on this nag?” Gaetano demanded. “She’ll die before the month is out and we won’t even be able to sell her hide.”

  “No she won’t. She’s only been mistreated by a mean, stupid owner.”

  “Well, I don’t know how you can say such a thing. You don’t know the first thing about livestock.”

  “A horse is not a cow. But you can see it’s true; look, here and here, the signs of the whip, and these wounds at the sides of her mouth. Someone who flogs a horse and jams the bit that way is not only evil, he’s an idiot, because he’s damaging his own property.”

  Gaetano clammed up but you could tell from his expression that he was skeptical.

  “What’s more,” concluded Floti, “she cost me practically nothing. Give her a month and you’ll see a miracle.”

  Floti saw to all her needs himself. He gave her clean well water and alfalfa
hay which he knew was the most nutritious. When she started regaining strength, he started giving her a mix of fodder he made himself: barley, spelt, wheat, oats, vetch and horse beans. He even added dried peas when he could find them. After a week, her ears had straightened, her eyes were wide-open, dark and glittery, and her muzzle had become as soft as velvet. Her coat got shinier and denser day by day, and her mane and tail seemed made of silk. A miracle. Even Gaetano had to admit he’d never seen anything like it.

  In a month’s time, Floti was able to saddle her up to the shafts of a little carriage he had bought from a secondhand dealer and fixed up a bit at a time. He’d sandpapered all the wood and puttied the cracks, then painted it a rich black and shined up the shafts until they gleamed. A jewel. When he hitched up the mare, everyone was speechless: a real high-class ride! Floti’s six brothers, along with Clerice and Maria, stood in a semicircle around the magnificent carriage, their hands on their hips, astonished. Not even Signor Barzini’s steward had anything like this.

  “But isn’t this too much?” asked Clerice. “You’re not thinking of actually riding around on that contraption?”

  “Why not, mamma?” answered Floti. “Sunday morning I want to take you to mass on this, like a real lady.”

  Clerice shook her head, scandalized. “You’re not in your right mind, Floti. I won’t even consider it!”

  Gaetano was even more alarmed: “When this reaches Barzini’s ear, he’ll say we stole his money.”

  Floti let his head drop, irritated by the negative reaction to his success. “Signor Barzini won’t say a word when he sees that we’re increasing production and profit, for him and for us. As far as this carriage is concerned, yes, I will use it. Not only will I enjoy it, seeing all the work I put into it, but most of all, the people who I do business with will see who I am. They have to get the idea that it’s them who need me, not the other way around. If you have little, you do little. You can’t achieve anything on a shoestring. Trust me. I learned a few things in the war, I thought things through and what’s more, I talked to people who knew what they were on about, because there’s all kinds in the army.”

  The words slipped out of his mouth easily and earnestly, summoning to mind his friend Pelloni and what he used to say about socialism, justice and injustice, and the rights of the working class. Floti had seen a lot during the war, and he was afraid that the victory that had cost so much blood would bring no riches to the foot soldiers who had defended the Piave and chased the enemy back to the other side. If they wanted their rights, they’d have to win them in peacetime, like they’d won back the last pieces of Italy in wartime. As he was thinking of all this, the image in his mind’s eye was Pelloni’s Frera on the ground, like a horse wounded to death, the wheel spinning and spinning . . .

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Even the dead came back home, at least those who had been identified, and they were turned over to the grief-stricken parents who had watched them leave healthy and full of life, and who had to welcome them back now inside a fir-wood box ready to be buried. Others never came back, because their bodies were simply destroyed by the bombs, carried away by raging rivers, wedged deep in some mountain crevasse. Whatever was left of them was all mixed up with the scattered remains of other soldiers, waiting for big cemeteries of stone and marble to be built in those places where the most ferocious battles of the Great War had been fought.

  But people wanted to forget. The men wanted to return to their old occupations, to the trades they’d left behind, to the rhythms of a peaceful life, without the screams of pain, the groans of dying soldiers, the explosions and blinding bursts of fire. They craved a life lit by the moon and the sun, sustained by regular, hard, day-to-day work.

  In the early spring of the following year, Gaetano began to see a girl from town called Iole who mended clothes for a living. One day, his mother had asked him to accompany his sister Maria to have a few dresses hemmed, since she couldn’t see very well anymore and Maria was never very good with a needle. His sister would much rather tend to the calves in the stable, or go looking for nests in the spring so she could raise a pretty blackbird or a goldfinch or nightingale and listen to them sing when they grew up. She didn’t like sedentary work.

  And so Gaetano went with his sister, carrying the bundle of clothes to be mended. As the two girls chatted, he couldn’t take his eyes off Iole because she was really beautiful: dark haired, with green-blue eyes, a nice full bust and wide hips. The kind of girl he’d always dreamed about. She had noticed and had met his gaze without lowering her eyes, a sign that she wasn’t shy. When it was time to pick up the mending, Gaetano went on his own, and he asked Floti to borrow the horse and carriage. Floti gladly let him use it, because he was pleased when Gaetano cut a fine figure, wherever he was going, as long as he left the whip home because they needed it there.

  Iole couldn’t hide a glint of pleasure in her eyes when she saw him, or her curiosity for that posh, shiny carriage that contrasted in no small measure with the image of the farming family she knew so well, and the young farmer before her.

  “What a lovely carriage you have, Gaetano,” were the first words out of her mouth.

  “I’m glad you like it,” he answered.

  “It must have cost an arm and a leg.”

  “It cost what it cost,” replied Gaetano, respecting the rule that the family’s interests should never be aired openly, “what’s important is that it looks fine and that it does its job.”

  “You’re right! I didn’t mean anything by that.”

  “Maybe you’d like to have a ride, now that the weather is getting nicer. The fair of San Giovanni will be starting soon. We could go together; people would be impressed.”

  The girl looked at him with a sparkle in her eye: “We’ll have to see what my mother says. She might think you’re a bit . . . cheeky!”

  Gaetano gave an embarrassed smile, but inside he could barely believe that he was talking to Iole face to face, and that she was smiling at him and leading him to believe she was happy to be in his company. Just three years ago, before he left for the war, he never would have dared to set eyes on such a prize and now it all seemed so easy and spontaneous! As she was calling him cheeky, she came close and he could smell the lavender scent of her linen blouse that made his head spin like a glass of Albana on an empty stomach.

  “Your mother knows that I’m an honest person and that I hold you in respect.”

  “If that’s the case, I give you my permission to ask her. She may even say yes.”

  Gaetano thought that he’d already gone a long way in a short time, at least talking-wise, but perhaps it was best to strike while the iron was hot. He realized that Floti’s carriage and the mare with the shiny coat and intelligent eyes had been a good investment and that, if all went well, he’d be asking to borrow them again, for the fair of San Giovanni.

  “Where is your mother?” he asked.

  “She’s inside shelling peas. Go on, then, what are you waiting for, for me to change my mind?”

  Gaetano entered, asking permission.

  “Come in, young man,” replied a voice from inside.

  “I’ve come to ask how much I owe you for your daughter’s work.”

  The mother, whose name was Giuseppina, replied: “It’ll be four cents in all.”

  Gaetano counted the coins onto the palm of her hand and before she could finish thanking him, he continued: “I also wanted to ask you . . . ”

  “Go on, young man,” she encouraged him.

  “I wanted to ask if you would be pleased for me to accompany your daughter to the fair of San Giovanni, eight days from now, in my carriage.”

  The old lady got to her feet, setting the basket with the peas on the table, and she went to the window to look outside: “Is that your carriage?”

  “Yes, Signora Peppina,” replied Gaetano, confident that hearing herself calle
d “signora” would nicely endear him to her.

  “Well, you’d certainly make a fine figure, you and my Iole.”

  “Then I can take her to the fair?”

  “Certainly, if you give me your word of honor that you’ll behave properly.”

  “My word is my bond, Signora Peppina,” replied Gaetano and he ceremoniously took his leave.

  He walked out and towards Iole who had gone near the horse. “She said yes. I can come and collect you and take you to the fair of San Giovanni. If you’re still happy to come, we’ll go together.”

  “I’ll be waiting for you, Gaetano,” said the girl, with a tone of voice and two eyes that would have weakened the knees of the fiercest of brigands. Gaetano would have turned somersaults in joy, but he knew well, or rather, he’d often heard, that you should never let a woman know how much in love you are. You didn’t want her thinking she could twist you around her finger. He felt happier than he ever had his whole life, and everything around him looked radiant. One moment had wiped away all the horrors he’d seen in the war, and he thought of nothing but Iole as he returned home with the bundle of mended clothes.

  Floti could see from a mile away that his brother was floating on air. “How’d it go?” he asked.

  “Well. I’ve brought home the mending and didn’t spend much at all.”

  “Oh come on, don’t give me that! You know what I’m talking about. You’ve fallen for Iole, haven’t you? All she had to do was smile at you and now you’re head over heels.”

  Gaetano turned bright red. “So what? Maybe I do like her, what’s wrong with that. And anyway . . . ”

  “Anyway what?”

  “She said she’d come to the fair of San Giovanni with me.”

  “So you need the horse and buggy . . . ”

  “Well, only if you don’t . . . ”

  “And to think that I’d done something so stupid, and that I’d let myself be duped, that I’d brought home a nag whose hide was not even good enough to make the skin of a drum . . . ”