A Winter's Night

by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

  It had been a difficult, curt encounter in which neither one of them had tried to understand the other. The outcome was that Armando kept his wife at home for many months after that, but there were more dark days than bright ones. Lucia was pregnant again, with their second child, and she’d taken it very badly; she had become irritable and moody. At times she was calm and her gestures had a softness about then, her eyes a gentle look. But then she became sullen and bad-tempered and would fly into fits of rage. She had the baby in the middle of January after a wretched Christmas lacking in all the atmosphere that Armando had been accustomed to at home. The only thing that wasn’t missing was food, thanks to the generosity of his mother and some of his brothers, who hadn’t even wanted to be thanked.

  It was Clerice who sent a midwife when Lucia’s labor pains started, and a little girl was born before evening. Everything seemed to go well at first. The baby was hale and hearty, and the mother, who during delivery had screamed loud enough for the whole town to hear, was now resting peacefully, exhausted.

  But things worsened as the days went by. The baby cried constantly; there was no respite, by day or by night. Maybe the mother didn’t have enough milk, suggested the midwife when she was consulted. Everyone knew that if a woman ate little and poorly, her milk would dry up; the baby was crying because she couldn’t get her fill.

  Then one evening, as Armando was just returning from work, he found Lucia at the open window, about to throw the bawling baby out. He stopped her just in time. He said nothing, he didn’t scold her. He tried instead to calm her down, and in the meantime, he cradled the baby in his arms and rocked her, singing a lullaby in a mountain dialect that he’d learned once when he’d taken a job gathering chestnuts. The baby magically became quiet and Armando held her out to his wife, saying, look at what a pretty little thing she is, she looks just like you. And he called the doctor.

  “Convinced now?” asked the doctor as soon as he took stock of the situation. “Do you realize that she might try that again at any moment? So what are you going to do? Stay at home and watch her all day long? And who’s going to go out and earn a crust of bread?”

  Armando burst into tears and surrendered. His wife was taken to the mental hospital in Reggio and remained there all that year. Every now and then he’d go to visit her if someone happened to be going out that way, or even by train or by bus, those few times when he managed to scrape together the money. He would have happily gone by bicycle, but he’d never learned how. He was always distressed at the conditions there. The doctors did take care of her but there were so many patients and so few nurses, and they were always harsh and hurried.

  She was assigned to a female ward and the nurses, who were huge women with a Herculean swagger, monitored Armando’s visits with arms crossed and then accompanied Lucia back to the room she shared with two or three other poor wretches. He would say to her: “Don’t let this awful place get you down; as soon as you’re home again, you’ll feel better. It’s only hurting you to stay here. The girls miss you and they really want to see you,” he lied. “Do you miss them?”

  Lucia looked back with big watery eyes and a confused expression that might have meant anything. Armando went to speak to the doctor, but didn’t understand much because he talked too complicatedly. But he didn’t give up; before taking his leave he asked a clear question, for which he wanted a clear answer: “When can you send her back home?”

  “I can’t say. One month, two. We’ll see.”

  “But how will I know?”

  “Your town doctor will receive a letter from hospital management specifying a date and all the rest, and you’ll come here to pick up your wife and sign that you agree to assume full responsibility for her actions.”

  The letter arrived three months later, not because the patient had been cured, the town doctor told him, but because there wasn’t enough room in the psychiatric hospital for everyone; they had to take turns. Every so often, they let out someone they considered not to be dangerous and took in someone else who was in worse condition. In any case, returning to a more or less normal life, seeing familiar faces, the house she had come to call home, and the town itself, all seemed to do Lucia some good.

  But Doctor Munari wasn’t tender this time around either. “You wanted her home because you couldn’t do without . . . ”

  “So what, even if it is true?” replied Armando resentfully. “She’s my wife, isn’t she? And I love her.”

  “You go ahead and do as you like, I’ve already told you what I think. If you do want one piece of advice, don’t get her pregnant again, you already have enough on your hands.”

  Wasted breath. In a few months’ time, Lucia was expecting again and had become depressed and moody, with sudden fits of temper, quarreling and weeping. A tragedy, said the neighbors. But Armando laid all of his frustrations squarely on Munari’s shoulders. The doctor was the cause of all this, not his wife’s disease. What right did he ever have to get mixed up in Armando’s personal life? He was a bastard. He was vulgar and heartless. And a hypocrite! As if he didn’t like the ladies himself! He, who had a wife who could be his daughter, and where had he found her anyway? There was plenty of gossip in town about that, people were whispering on her account. So the good doctor should take care of his own backyard!

  At home, however, he never ran out of patience. He was always affectionate and understanding with his daughters and his wife. Whenever he could he’d bring some little gift home: a cherry stolen from a tree, a couple of the early peaches that Fonso brought him. How he loved to see the joy that lit up his daughters’ eyes!

  Sometimes Fonso would go to give the doctor a hand with his grounds, because he and Maria lived very close to the house, an Art Nouveau style villa with a raised ground floor and a white cement banister on the outside stairs. In back there was a plot of land with rennet-apple, pear, plum and peach trees that had to be pruned, and a vineyard to be treated with verdigris. Fonso would usually stop by after he’d finished working for the day, to see if the doctor needed any chores done or just to say hello on his way back home.

  “How’s it going, sir?”

  “Badly, Fonso, my arthritis is torturing me. I can’t even move when it really kicks in. I’ve had to sell my horse because I can’t ride him anymore. The only thing I can do when I have an attack is go to bed, fill up on aspirin, sweat it out and hope it’ll pass.”

  “Is that why you always wear boots, if I may ask?”

  “Yes, that’s why, Fonso. They help a bit. You know, Mario Gabella was here the other day . . . do you know who he is?”

  “Who doesn’t? He won an entire estate one night playing tresette, and before dawn he lost another two.”

  “Ahh, he’s a real wastrel, that one,” commented the doctor. “Anyway, he suffers from arthritis as I do and he comes here to break my balls about it every day, practically. You know what I told him? I said, ‘Listen, Gabella, you got arthritis going duck hunting from a blind, I got it operating on soldiers during the war, standing in water up to my knees in the trenches. You know what I say? You keep yours and I’ll keep mine.’”

  ‘That’s why people aren’t fond of him,’ thought Fonso, ‘he’s too blunt and cantankerous.’

  “What do people say about me?” asked the doctor as if he had read Fonso’s mind.

  “It depends,” replied Fonso. “Many of them, most, that is, are ignorant and resentful and they look more at the form than the substance. I say the substance is that a doctor has to know what he’s doing. He has to recognize an illness and cure it as well as possible. That’s all that matters. Everyone has their own personality.”

  “You’re a sensitive man, Fonso, a diplomat, even. There’s meaning in what you say. For some people, talking is just running off at the mouth.”

  “Thank you, doctor. I’m honored.”

  “Have you heard anything about your brother-in-law, the one w
ho had to leave?”

  “He has settled down in Tuscany. He found a job and he’s made a new life for himself. I’m only sorry that it won’t be easy for us to see him again: the place he’s gone to is far away, and not easy to get to. He and I have had words in the past, because he didn’t want me to marry his sister, but he’s an honest, intelligent person and these days, that’s a rare find.”

  Whenever they could, Fonso and Maria went over to Dante’s house to see Clerice, because she was having such problems getting around that they hardly ever met up with her coming out of church after the mass anymore. Armando was so taken up by the troubles he had at home that he thought of nothing else, and Checco refused to have anything to do with the brother his mother was living with and thus it came to be that it was Maria who kept up relations with her brothers and passed on their news. She even wrote Rosina in Florence when she could. She’d give anything to be able to go see her, or to have her come back home for a visit, but now that everyone had gone their own way, it was even harder because Rosina wouldn’t have known who to stay with.

  Once it was Rosina who wrote: a strange, disturbing letter that hinted at problems without saying clearly that anything was wrong. The one thing that came through was her unhappiness, a sort of dark restlessness that Maria had always connected to her sister’s marriage. Before she’d left home to be married, Rosina was a joyful girl, eager to experience life, and now Maria yearned to be with her, to give her back some of that affection and warmth that Rosina had showered her with when she was staying in Florence. She even asked Fonso if it was possible to telephone her.

  “It’s complicated,” replied Fonso, “as well as expensive. You have to find out where the telephone office closest to her is and make an appointment. Then, when it’s time, we would go into town to the post office and call her. But you get no pleasure out of it, because you know how much each minute is costing you and you can’t wait for the call to be over so you don’t end up broke.”

  Four years passed in this way, with Lucia entering and leaving the mental hospital, Floti’s reassuring letters that came less and less often, and Rosina’s often melancholic letters from Florence. That fifth year, one day in mid-August, Clerice began to feel unwell and in the beginning of the fall she took to her bed. One afternoon in October, one of Dante’s daughters arrived at Fonso’s house on her bicycle, saying that her nonna was gravely ill.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Maria was first to arrive, on her bicycle. She had left a note for Fonso, who wasn’t back from work yet, that she’d had to run off to see her mother, who had taken a turn for the worse. Savino was there almost as soon as she was, followed, much later, by Armando who had gotten a ride on Iofa’s cart, and by Fredo. The pastor had preceded them all, because Clerice had called him first: she didn’t want to appear before God without having received the sacraments.

  Savino had sent his farmhand to call Checco, but he didn’t show up, because of the bad blood between him and Dante.

  Maria found her mother in the bedroom, practically sitting up in bed with two pillows behind her back, breathing laboriously but perfectly lucid. “She hasn’t been the same since the night they burned down the stables,” whispered Dante’s wife into Maria’s ear. “She’s never gotten over the fear she felt that night.”

  Although it was still light out, the room was deep in shadow and the priest was administering extreme unction.

  “Mamma, how are you feeling?” asked Maria, holding her hand.

  “Not well, as God would have it, daughter.”

  “The boys are all downstairs. Floti’s not here, though. We wrote him that you weren’t well, but I don’t know if he can leave his work and come up . . . ”

  “I know. It’s better he doesn’t show his face here yet. It’s still too soon. But you tell him that I’ve always remembered him in my prayers and that I’ll pray for him from up there as well, if I end up with the Lord’s own.”

  “What are you saying, mamma? You’re going to get better!”

  “I don’t think so. It’s time for me to give up the ghost. It’s a very bad sign, my daughter, when they come to anoint your feet, a very bad sign,” she repeated with tears in her eyes. Maria clasped her hand more tightly. “You’re never ready to abandon life, don’t think otherwise. There are so many things that hold us here: our feelings, our habits, the sacrifices we’ve made to earn a decent life for ourselves . . . so many things.”

  She didn’t make it to the next morning. She died weeping because she had to go without seeing the son who was the dearest to her heart.

  Checco didn’t go to the funeral for the same reason he didn’t run to his mother’s deathbed, and that was something that, in such a small town, did not go unnoticed. People said all kinds of things, but no one ever found out the truth. The sons who did participate could not carry the coffin on their shoulders as they would have liked to, because Armando was so much smaller than the others that the coffin would not have travelled evenly. In truth, they waited until after their mother was buried to send a telegram to Floti, so that he wouldn’t get it into his head to leave the safety of his shelter and show up at the funeral.

  Clerice’s departure was experienced as the last important event of the Bruni household since they had separated. After Clerice was gone, each one of the brothers took care of himself and raised his own children and the occasions on which the family gathered together became rarer and rarer. In the end, they met only when they happened to run into each other, except for the time when Checco set off with the intention of visiting Floti, just to see how he was doing and if he needed anything. He found that the children had grown up well and that they were very happy with their adoptive mother, who treated them just like her own in every way.

  “Would you consider coming back?” Checco asked his brother the evening before he’d planned to leave, while Mariuccia was washing the dishes. “Sooner or later things will change and . . . ”

  “I don’t think so,” said Floti. “My life is here now.”

  ”Don’t you miss your friends? The family?”

  “Yes, but . . . I’m managing to get used to that too. Do give everyone my regards, please.”

  “Yes, sure,” replied Checco. “As ordered.”

  The next morning at dawn, Floti accompanied his brother to the bus stop. The air was slightly, almost imperceptibly, misty and the autumn foliage was starting to change color. The chestnut leaves, in particular, were a rich, intense orange and the husks were already opening to reveal the fruit inside, shiny as leather. The mountains that towered beyond the forests were already capped with snow.

  “Bye, then,” said Checco.

  “Maybe we’ll see each other again, some time or other,” replied Floti. They looked into each other’s eyes for a few instants, seeking something more to say, but in the meantime the bus pulled up and Checco got on. Floti stood watching until it drove out of sight.

  When Savino found out about Checco’s trip, it really got his back up, because he would have liked to go visit Floti as well. He promised himself he’d do so at the first possible chance, but none came up for a great number of years.

  His relationship with Nello continued despite their deep differences of opinion, because friendship somehow always wins out in the end. Savino couldn’t forget that, if it hadn’t been for his friend, the fascists would probably have burned the house down as well. And that Nello had always warned him when Floti was in danger.

  Both of them had sons. Nello’s son was called Rossano and Savino’s was called Fabrizio. The both attended the nursery school run by the nuns and they played happily together. Nello would often allow Rossano to go by bicycle to visit his friend at the farm where Savino worked. Rossano loved the place because there was a big soaking pond which had fallen into disuse because it wasn’t profitable to plant hemp anymore. The pond had been filled with fish of every sort: catfish, tenches, carp
s and even goldfish, which were the ones he liked best. When they managed to catch one with a net, Fabrizio got one of the glass jars they used for canning tomatoes, filled it with clean water and put the fish in so that his friend could take it home with him.

  As they grew up, the boys absorbed the attitudes and political convictions of their fathers, even if it was obligatory for both of them to sign up for the Opera Nazionale Balilla, the fascist youth organization, and wear the uniform when they did their drill exercises on Saturday afternoons.

  “Do you know what balilla means?’ Rossano asked Fab­rizio one day.

  “It means a fascist child,” replied his friend.

  “No. ‘Balilla’ was the nickname of a boy from Genova who was as old as us. One day a group of Austrian soldiers who had occupied the city managed to get one of their cannons stuck and they wanted to force some men to help them yank it out of the mud. Balilla threw a rock at them and all the other kids followed suit and that’s how they chased the Austrians out of Genova. That’s why we’re called balilla.”

  Fabrizio didn’t answer because his father had taught him never to repeat in public what was said at home, and that is, that the fascists had transformed all of Italy into a barracks and that sooner or later they would drag the country into war.

  After they’d finished elementary school, the boys took off in different directions. Fabrizio went to work in the fields with his father. He learned to use a rake and a hoe and then, when he was a bit older and stronger, a spade and a scythe. Lastly, he learned pruning and grafting, the most difficult of a farmer’s arts. And in the evening, his father sent him to take lessons from an elderly bookkeeper who taught him to keep the accounts for the farm. Savino hoped that one day his father-in-law, who didn’t have any sons of his own, might entrust him with managing his properties.

  Rossano, instead, was sent to a fascist party school, first in Ravenna and then in Perugia. If he studied hard and got good marks, he might go all the way to Rome.