A Winter's Night

by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

  “Good night,” Checco told him. “Welcome home.”

  They entered the house together and Floti went up to his room. From the window he saw Fonso saying goodbye to Maria in front of the stable door; the storyteller threw his tabarro around her and drew her close. Floti felt the blood rush to his head and he felt like running downstairs, but Fonso was already walking off.

  Floti was convinced that, now that he was home, things would go back to the way they were before, but he was wrong. In his absence, the family situation, which had already begun to show its cracks, had further deteriorated. The inclusion of so many women had multiplied the occasions for tension and disagreement. Each of them thought she saw her sisters-in-law enjoying privileges and advantages that she didn’t have, or felt that her own husband wasn’t receiving the right amount of respect, or that some of the brothers were expected to do too much while others did too little. As for the husbands, they wanted to appear attentive and worthy in their wives’ eyes, and thus tended to attach importance to imagined snubs or perceived acts of discourtesy that they never would have even noticed in the past. On top of everything else, Clerice was becoming worn down by all of the knocks life had given her, and no longer had the spunk she once had, nor the energy to manage such a numerous tribe.

  Floti took the reins in hand again, but the family’s bad habits had already become entrenched and it wasn’t easy to go back. He needed a stroke of luck to help him regain his undermined prestige. The opportunity unexpectedly presented itself towards the end of that spring. Barzini, the notary who owned their land, had gone to meet his maker, and since none of his heirs was interested in agriculture, they had decided to sell the plot and to split up the proceeds equally among themselves. The Brunis were given the chance to buy the land that the family had been farming as tenants for over one hundred years, and what was more, at deferred payment conditions.

  The family council was immediately convened: Clerice and her six sons. All of them participated, including Armando, who in the meantime must have convinced his wife to grant him her favors, since she was pregnant. The meeting took place in the kitchen, around the table where they had their meals, and Floti immediately took the floor: “You all know the reason we’re here together today. The last time we met, it was to decide whether to pay for mother’s trip to Genova so she could claim her inheritance. You all remember how that turned out: the inheritance was handed over to the government. Now we’ve been given another opportunity and I don’t think we should this one slip: the landowner’s heirs are willing to sell us this property.

  “We’ve been farming this land for more than one hundred years, but the fruit of our labors has always gone to Barzini. At first, he barely left us enough to live on until, thanks to the cooperative league, we managed to get him to agree to more humane conditions. But whatever we had to turn over to him was still too much, considering that all the labor was ours and he never came to help us a single day, for a single hour.”

  Dante was afraid that his brother would start up on politics, and said: “Get to the point.”

  “I will,” replied Floti, without hiding his irritation, “what I want to say is that we should buy our farm. The heirs have proposed that we pay for the property a little at a time over the next ten years. This is a positive gesture on their part: it means that they recognize that we’ve always worked the land and that we deserve to own it. We have a bit of money set aside in the bank . . . ”

  “We have money in the bank?” asked Fredo.

  “That’s right,” replied Floti, “everything I managed to save was put into an account in mother’s name, and we’ve even earned interest on it.”

  “I didn’t know we had money in the bank either,” broke in Dante.

  “How much?” asked Armando.

  “Enough to pay the first two installments of the debt we’re going to incur, while allowing us to get along comfortably.”

  Floti realized that each one of his brothers was mentally calculating how much he would get if the money were to be divided up equally, and he thought it best to interrupt the process: “I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong. If we use that sum of money together, we’ll all stand to gain. If we split it up, each one of us will have some money in our pockets but it won’t get us anywhere. Strength lies in unity, you know that. They want thirty thousand liras, payable over ten years’ time, which means that they’re giving us the land for a song, even though the figure may seem high to you now. If we stick together we can do this, I promise you. Once we’ve bought the land, we’ll be our own bosses, no one can tell us what we can do and what we can’t do, no one can send us packing from one day to the next. And the forty percent that we’ve been turning over to Barzini will be ours to split up every year. Or we’ll use it to buy more land and build a future for our children.”

  Floti concluded his plea without realizing that all of the enthusiasm and energy that he’d put into his speech, rather than convincing the others, had made them suspicious. When he noticed their reaction, he could have bit his tongue. He understood what they were thinking: if Floti is getting so excited about this, he’s hoping to get something out of it himself. The atmosphere around the table felt heavy, and the silence that greeted his speech promised no good. If they wanted to buy the land, they would have said so right away.

  But Clerice supported him this time: “Floti’s right. Land never betrays you. If you have land, you’re sure you’ll never suffer hunger, no matter what happens. If you need to, you can always sell it again, and make a profit. Think about it, boys, Floti’s never been wrong about things like this. I can barely believe it myself: the Brunis, who have been working someone else’s land for a hundred years, becoming property owners!”

  No one responded. Armando cracked a joke that made no one laugh.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Floti. “Don’t you trust me? Are you afraid we’ll sink into debt? That won’t happen. If you borrow money without any capital, you’ve got a problem waiting to happen, but if we have capital, that is, our own land, we can always sell it and make our money back, if we need to. We can do this, together: we can set up a company, so that each one of us is protected and no one is running a risk. Think about it, please.”

  The brothers said they would think about it, that it wasn’t something you could decide on the spur of the moment, that thirty thousand liras was no small sum and, finally, that they’d give him an answer in a couple of days’ time.

  Two days later, when Floti went to market with the cart to sell a sow, his brothers took advantage of his absence to meet and discuss the matter amongst themselves. After they’d hashed it out for more than an hour, each of them went to talk to their own wives, which further worsened the situation. Clerice realized what was happening and it saddened her greatly because it meant that the family had split apart and would perhaps never be like it once was.

  Floti heard their verdict when he returned home for dinner. Dante spoke on behalf of the others: “It’s too much money and we’ll have to make too many sacrifices to pay the installments. And what if something goes wrong? The toil of a farmer is at the mercy of the weather. What if a hailstorm comes up and destroys the whole harvest? Or if the season is too damp and the wheat and hemp get moldy before we can pick them? I say, let’s go on as we have been. After all, we’ve always had what we needed.”

  Floti made a last ditch effort: “But can’t you see that if we don’t buy the land someone else will? And it might be someone even worse than Barzini who, if nothing else, at least left us alone. When the land is sold, we’ll be sold with it, in a certain sense, and you know that. If we buy it we’ll own ourselves and our destiny.”

  Nothing doing. The true reason for their refusal was another; each of them, some more than others, thought that in reality nothing would change for them: they’d still be slogging away in the fields, milking the cows, emptying out the stable, hoeing and shoveling,
spreading manure, beating hemp in the heat of summer, pruning the vines with freezing hands in the winter. While Floti couldn’t do any of all that, poor thing, he had a piece of shrapnel in his lung. And so he had to go to the market, eat at the osteria with the brokers and the dealers, wheel around in a carriage, dress in a suit, shirt and tie because he had to make a good impression, especially when you go to the bank to deposit your money. He would have become the real boss, he would have decided the family interests, and this didn’t suit them in the slightest, not them and not their wives, for whom every occasion was good to fan the flames.

  When he learned about what had happened, Fonso, who had studied in books, said that this sorry state of affairs was exactly what had happened in the fable told by Menenius Agrippa, but no one paid any attention because no one had ever heard mention of any Meno Grippa.

  Word got out in town because Armando couldn’t keep piss to himself, let alone a secret. Many attributed the family’s failure to buy the land to the envy Floti’s brothers felt towards him and the influence that their wives had on those boys. But Dante and the others weren’t all wrong. A debt of that size and an investment so important could certainly scare people who were used to conducting a life that was harsh but predictable, always the same, a life where the only surprises came from nature.

  Whoever was right or whoever was wrong, the truth was that this was the last opportunity that fate offered the Brunis to deliver themselves from a state of eternal subservience and prepare a different future for themselves and their children. Now it was just a question of time: the time that it would take for the Barzinis to find a buyer. Then the Brunis would, of necessity, have to make a decision.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Floti had got it in his head that he didn’t want Fonso to court his sister Maria. He had nothing against the man personally, on the contrary, he was a serious lad who didn’t mind hard work and enjoyed a good reputation in town.

  It was a gut feeling. He felt that Fonso wasn’t suited to Maria, ugly as he was, with that big, prominent jaw of his. And half deaf to boot. He knew that he and his sister had already been talking, and that talk might already have gone pretty far. He needed to break things up now if he didn’t want to find Fonso in the house one day asking for Maria’s hand in marriage.

  As for Fonso, he knew that he needed to offer his fiancée and her brothers some assurances, and that meant a steady job, something that was not easy to find in that day and age. It was simply a question of supply exceeding demand; physical labor just wasn’t worth much. But that didn’t frighten Fonso: the important thing was getting an in and then showing the boss just what you could do.

  An employment exchange existed, but the bosses preferred the do-it-yourself approach, which involved a visit to the “wall.” This was a brick parapet that overlooked the now dry medieval moat which surrounded the town. Four artificial mounds marked its four corners. All of the laborers looking for work would gather there in the morning and lean against or sit on the wall, chatting with the others and waiting for someone to come along and hire them for a day or two or, if they were lucky, for the entire season. Fonso didn’t go too often because if he wasn’t already working someplace, he preferred to help someone who needed it, free of charge, rather than loiter around with the others. Even if he worked for free, there was some recompense at the end of the day: a flask of wine, a piece of loin, a slice of lard to make a tasty soffritto for pasta, or some chicken feet, neck, wings and innards for broth.

  One morning, as he was passing by the wall, a couple of friends who were there looking for work stopped him and just at that moment, the steward of the Baccoli estate showed up. Baccoli was a lawyer in Bologna, and he owned vast tracts of farmland just outside town. He pointed his finger at six of the men, one after another: “ . . . you, you, you and you go to over the farm on Via Emilia, there are ten furlongs of stubble to be turned over so we can sow the alfalfa.” Those who’d been called upon got onto their bicycles and rode off in a group towards their destination. At that same instant, the overseer noticed Fonso’s sturdy build and added: “And you go with them!”

  Fonso thanked him and jumped on his own bicycle, pedaling hard to catch up with the others, who had a few minutes’ head start. Given his experience, he already had an idea of why they had been recruited. To prepare a stubble field for planting alfalfa, it wasn’t necessary to dig up ten furlongs of soil: a couple of oxen with a plow and then a final go with the harrow would accomplish the task much quicker and much better. This was certainly a test of strength, and Fonso knew very well what it entailed: the diggers would be lined up at the starting line and each would have to dig as fast as he could under the careful eye of the steward, who would be checking from behind whether anyone was cheating by not digging the shovel in deep enough so as to make quicker progress. In the evening, the slowest would be eliminated.

  And that’s just how it went. By dusk, Fonso was a length beyond the rest; the second guy was at least twenty meters behind him. It was a ruthless test, but everyone accepted it: it was right that the best man win. But in many cases, the problem was that some of them were undernourished and didn’t have enough energy to sustain such backbreaking work. They had all figured that there was something important being tested here and had participated with all the strength and stamina they could summon up. The weakest of all proved to be a fifty-year-old farmhand named Mario. He collapsed twice that first day, pale and sweat-soaked, and when he got to the end, he had tears in his eyes, knowing that he would never be able to win the job.

  He was, in fact, let go the next day. Another was sent home the day after, a third the next day, two on the fourth day and another on the fifth. On the sixth day, Fonso was the only one left.

  ‘We need a foreman,’ the steward told him, ‘and you’re it. We’re hiring you at a fixed salary, you’ll be paid by the week. If the landowner likes you, you’ll even get a bonus at Christ­mas.’

  Fonso thanked him, hiding his satisfaction but, once he was out on the road, he started singing his stornelli at the top of his lungs, because he’d finally had a stroke of good luck! If his friends hadn’t stopped him in front of the wall exactly at the moment that Baccoli’s steward showed up, no one would have noticed him and he certainly wouldn’t have been called upon to dig up the land on Via Emilia. Now he was a man with a sure salary and a steady job that could last him his whole lifetime. Now he could maintain a family and he could ask for Maria’s hand in marriage, knowing that he’d be able to offer her a decent life.

  Should he talk to Floti first, or Clerice? He thought it would be best to start from the toughest. If her brother said yes, the others would certainly fall in. But you could see from a mile away that Floti wasn’t thrilled about the situation; he was jealous of his sister, somehow. Clerice, on the other hand, was very fond of him and would almost certainly accept his proposal without opposition. He decided to wait a couple of days, plucking up his courage and waiting until the news got out in town that he had become the foreman of a big estate, a stable job with a fixed salary, ready cash at the end of the week.

  It was a Thursday evening in late April when he walked into the Bruni courtyard and asked if Floti was there so he could have a word with him.

  “He’s in the shed,” replied Fredo, “unhitching the mare from the carriage.”

  Fonso went in that direction and met up with Floti as he was coming out of the shed.

  “Nice evening, isn’t it, Floti?” he said.

  “It’s a fine evening indeed, Fonso. What brings you here at this time of day?”

  “I’d like to talk with you.”

  “I’m listening,” said Floti.

  “It’s about Maria.”

  “Maria’s not here.”

  “She’s not here? Has she gone to do the shopping?”

  “No, she’s gone to Florence and she’ll be there a long time.”

  “Floren
ce? Without saying a word?”

  “You know I have a married sister in Florence. She’s not well just now and needs company. We thought that it would do Maria well to have a change of air, to stay in the city for a while. In Florence, everyone speaks Italian, so she can learn some there; it may come in handy.”

  Fonso lowered his head and frowned: “‘Far from your eyes, far from your heart.’ Is that what you’re aiming for, Floti?”

  Floti sighed, “It’s no use playing games here, Fonso. It’s true, that’s one of the reasons I sent her to Florence. It’s not that I have anything against you, you know. You’re a good, honest man, a hard worker. I know what you’re thinking: that when I was in prison you were always here helping in the fields, beating hemp at midday when the heat and the strain are enough to kill you, pulling the water-soaked hemp out of the pond when it’s slippery and heavy as lead. See? I haven’t forgotten and I’m no ingrate; I’ll find a way to make good on my debt. You don’t have any vices, Fonso, but I don’t think you’re the right man for Maria, and there’s no way I’ll let you marry into this family. Women don’t understand a thing when they’re in love, but then . . . if someone had pointed certain things out to them while they were in time . . . ”

  Fonso held up his hand: “Stop, Floti. That’s enough. I don’t understand, although I already knew you felt this way about me. You lost your own wife: she was beautiful and you were in love, just like me and your sister. It’s not our fault! We love each other and we want to marry, to have a family. It’s true, she’s much more beautiful than I am handsome, but what does it matter? And now I’m a person with a steady job and a pretty good salary that will come in regularly. You’re making a mistake here. Who says that she’d be happier with another man? You could ruin her life by giving her to someone that you like but that she doesn’t. We’ll be happy together. Why do you want to separate us?”

  Floti scowled: “That’s my business, Fonso, don’t get mixed up in it. Maria’s in Florence now and we’ll see how that goes. As they say, ‘if they’re roses, they’ll bloom, if they’re thorns, they’ll prick you.’ Time will tell. But I’m against you marrying her and there’s nothing I can do about that.”