In the end, the prosecution and defense made a deal, at Armando’s expense. The prosecution asked the court to take into consideration testimony from several more reliable witnesses who were present at the moment of the shooting, and came up with a more believable motive for the murder than the phrase that Armando had purportedly shouted in anger when the doctor had ordered his wife to be sent back into the psychiatric hospital.
The deal was this: the court would lighten the sentence as long as the defense agreed to pass Bruni off as the town idiot. They played their part with a vengeance: “He’s a poor half-wit, as anyone can clearly see. He can’t even pronounce two words in a row, the man is mentally deficient . . . ”
Armando was weeping with humiliation and shame, sobbing and covering his face with his hands as those present in the courtroom snickered at the scene. But then an individual who had never been seen during the trial suddenly rose to his feet. No one had noticed him there before or knew who he was or what he was doing there.
He shouted: “That’s enough!”
Floti.
He had, somehow, made his way down from his mountain haven and reached the scene of the trial in the middle of the Alps. Before anyone could stop him, he strode towards his brother and held him close, as if to protect him from that hostile, hurtful gathering. A deep silence fell over the courtroom; the presiding judge, about to call out some stern injunction, paused with his gavel in midair. Nothing was threatening the regular proceedings of the court, nothing was endangering the safety of those present. He decided that it was best to leave room, if only for a brief moment, for the human emotions unfolding there, for the humble actors of a tragedy much bigger than they were and whose victims they had become.
“He’s suffered enough,” said Floti in the silence weighing so heavily in the air. His voice trembled with disdain. “Leave him in peace or I’ll come looking for you, and then we’ll see whose turn it is to cry!” And he walked out.
Floti went back to town, for a short time, without letting anyone know. He wandered through the fields like a stray dog. Unseen, he observed his brother Savino, the boldest and most courageous of his brothers, prematurely white-haired and haggard, marked by adversity. He watched his nephew, handsome young Fabrizio, lurching along on his crutches, making his way down to the irrigation ditch that bordered their land and sitting on its bank, grimly staring at the flowing waters.
He went to the cemetery and left his dog tags on the tomb of Captain Alberto Munari who had sawed the arm off one of his comrades in war, with the hope of saving the boy. Then he started down the road that would take him back up to his mountains. The troubles he had suffered reopened his old wounds; the unhealable grief at losing his son finished him off.
No one in town would ever see him again.
EPILOGUE
The trial concluded with reduced sentences, which were later completely amnestied. But Armando spent one more year in prison than the other defendants because his lawyer had neglected to sign the release papers.
The homecoming of Montesi and the others was greeted with great celebrating on the part of their supporters and comrades in the party.
No one noticed Armando’s absence, no one tried to do anything about it. When he got back home he was unrecognizable.
One evening in mid-autumn, Fabrizio came to town along with his father Savino, who was driving their small methane-fuelled truck. Savino was going to the mill to load up some fodder for the pigs and Fabrizio got out to buy the newspaper. He told his father that he’d wait for him in front of the café and Savino agreed to pick him up on his way back. Every now and then he would raise his eyes from the paper to check and see whether his father’s truck was coming around the bend. All at once he noticed a young man walking down the middle of the road in his direction; he was wearing a pair of fustian trousers, a gray-green high necked sweater, boots and a brown leather jacket. His long hair covered his forehead, and his beard only partially covered a scar that crossed his face from his left cheekbone to his upper lip. Greatly changed, but surely him.
Rossano.
Fabrizio was the only one to have taken notice; none of the others sitting out in front of the café showed any signs of recognition.
He leaned into his crutches, pushed himself up and went towards Rossano. They stopped, standing face to face, at less than a meter’s distance. A gust of wind carried the smell of their childhood on it and the colors of the fall.
“It’s you,” said Fabrizio, almost with relief.
Rossano looked at his leg. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well. Stuff happens . . . ” Fabrizio fell quiet. “I can’t even say I’m happy to see you.”
“I guess not, given the circumstances. And we can’t even shake hands . . . ”
“No. Sorry.”
“Maybe, one day or another we’ll . . . talk?”
“Maybe,” replied Fabrizio in a breath, “maybe, talk . . . ”
“See you around,” said Rossano as he started off again amidst the drifting dry leaves.
“See you around,” thought Fabrizio, but he said nothing.
When the plowing season came, Iofa showed up one evening in the courtyard to talk to Savino.
“What’s going on, Iofa?” he asked.
“What’s going on is that Bonetti wants to level the Pra’ dei Monti hills to turn them into arable land.”
“So what? It’s his land and he can do what he wants with it.”
Iofa took him by the arm and led him a few steps away with a secretive air. “One night, many years ago, your brother Floti and I took a walk out that way after a vagabond appeared at the Osteria della Bassa, a fellow with fire in his eyes and a beard down to his waist, saying that he’d seen the golden goat there.”
“So did you find what you were looking for?”
“No. But we found something else. D’you remember the umbrella mender?”
“Vaguely.”
“That’s who we found. He was inside a hole on the third hill, all curled up like a dog. Dead.”
Savino scowled: “What the hell is this story? Floti never said a word to me about this.”
“It’s the pure and simple truth. We found some tools in the grass and buried him with a few shovelfuls of dirt . . . ”
“So get to the point, Iofa.”
“What if they find him now?”
“He’s not going to mind if they find him. Where’s the problem?”
“You had leased out that land until just last year. With that carabiniere sergeant we’ve got now, he’s likely to think that it’s one of the fellows who have gone missing over the last few years. It’s you he’ll come looking for, asking questions . . . Given what happened to Armando, that’s all you need . . . ”
“I see what you’re getting at. But what can I do about it?”
“I know exactly where he is. We’ll go there tonight and we’ll dig him out. There won’t be anything left but a few bones; it won’t take us long.”
Savino took a long breath and tried to sort out his thoughts.
“Let’s go,” Iofa pressured him. “The sooner we get this done, the better. I told you. It’ll only take us ten minutes.”
“All right,” replied Savino. “We’ll use your cart. It’s less likely to attract attention.”
He loaded up a basket, a sack, two shovels and a lantern and they set off, after he’d told Linda she should go to bed if she wanted to, that they would be very late.
When they got to Pra’ dei Monti it was pitch black out. They began to dig at the spot which Iofa pointed out. When they were about four or five strokes down, they found the head and then all the rest. They put everything into the sack and the sack into the basket, and they didn’t even bother to shovel the dirt back in, because one hole more or less, on those heaps of ground, wouldn’t make any difference. They were getting re
ady to leave when Iofa noticed something in the middle of the freshly turned soil and shone the lantern on it.
“What is it?” asked Savino.
Iofa picked up a sort of oilcloth sack. It was smallish, and contained a leather cylinder, which he opened. Inside was a sheet of paper with about fifteen lines written in a very simple, regular hand. He passed it to Savino.
“What does it say?”
“I really can’t tell . . . it must be Latin.”
Iofa called out to the horse; he didn’t want to stay in that place a moment longer. They headed for home through the open countryside. It was cold, but Savino barely noticed. His mind was on the words written on that piece of paper and he racked his brains trying to find an explanation. How had the umbrella mender died? Who had left that message, and why was it written in a language which had been dead for centuries?
A solution suddenly came to mind. “Amedeo!” he exclaimed. “Amedeo Bisi. He studied at the seminary with the priests and he knows Latin. He lives only a kilometer from here . . . ”
“Wait, you want to wake him up now?”
“Why not? He’s not going to shoot me.”
“You never know these days . . . ” grumbled Iofa.
Bisi, rudely awakened in the middle of the night, opened a crack in the shutters with the barrel of his rifle and peered down: “Who’s there?”
“It’s me, Amedeo,” replied Savino in a whisper, “and Iofa’s with me.”
“What are you doing here at this time of night?”
“We need to talk to you. It’s urgent.”
Bisi’s wife had become alarmed. “Who is it? What do they want from you? Don’t go . . . ”
“Calm down. They’re friends.”
Bisi went down in his pajamas, turned on the light and opened the door.
“I was about to shoot you,” he muttered.
“Just what I said,” commented Iofa, shaking his head, “but there was no stopping him.”
Savino pulled out the leather case and told the story of the umbrella mender. “Maybe you remember him yourself.”
“I do, I think I do. He was a client of Hotel Bruni, wasn’t he?”
“That’s the guy. Iofa told me that Bonetti is planning to level Pra’ dei Monti and that maybe, given the situation, it would be best to dig up the body before someone else does. I was leasing out that land until just last year and you know, with what’s been happening lately . . . ”
“Do you have him with you?”
“Yeah, in a bag. But then, as we were about to leave, Iofa found this. It looks like Latin to me, and I thought that you . . . Sorry about waking you up and everything, but I started feeling I just had to know what it said.”
Bisi took the paper. “It’s been a while since I’ve read any Latin,” he sighed. “Let me see . . . ”
He put on his glasses and started to slowly scan the lines. Every now and then he’d scribble something using a pencil stub, on the back of the Old Farmer’s Almanac. He got to his feet. “I must have a dictionary around here somewhere.” He opened a cupboard. “As luck would have it, here it is.”
He got back to work, his expression becoming more and more intent as the words took shape. His eyes, behind the thick spectacles, became wide and filled with wonder. Savino was trying to interpret every furrow in his brow, every flicker of his eyelids.
“Holy Christ!” exclaimed Bisi in the end.
“What does it say? Don’t keep me hanging!”
“Do you know who the umbrella mender was?”
Savino shrugged. Iofa hobbled closer; he didn’t want to miss a word of this.
“Don Massimino, the old pastor who was said to have died in a state of grace.”
“That can’t be!”
“His beard, his long hair, the years of living rough as a beggar, the remorse over a tragic mistake committed in his youth, the years of penance . . . made him unrecognizable.”
“What are you saying? When the umbrella mender used to come to Hotel Bruni, Don Massimino had been dead for years. He’s buried in the cemetery, under an oak tree.”
“Don Massimino is inside a sack on Iofa’s cart.”
“Well then who’s there in the graveyard?”
“Who knows? Sand, stones, someone else’s body . . . you’d have to open the tomb to find out. Remember, it was Don Giordano who held his funeral. Maybe he knew the whole story, but he decided he would rather have the tomb of a saint in the cemetery than the memory of a disgraced priest in town.”
“But why would Don Massimino have organized his own funeral?”
“So he could drop out of sight, and atone for his sins. Here it says that he had a relationship with a girl when he was a young pastor up in the mountains. The girl became pregnant and, for fear of a scandal, poisoned herself. Her mother lost her mind.”
“Oh holy God,” exclaimed Savino, “that’s Desolina’s story!”
“Right,” confirmed Iofa, “right you are!”
They told Bisi they story of the poor madwoman who would come to Hotel Bruni to seek shelter and warmth in the middle of winter.
“Maybe the umbrella mender used to come back here,” suggested Bisi, “to the town that considered him a saint . . . I’m not saying he wasn’t fond of your family, but maybe he would come to Hotel Bruni so he could meet up with this Desolina, to ask for her forgiveness. Anyway, he never found the courage. In the end, he decided to die like the girl he loved, by poisoning himself. A horrible death, to be sure. Look at this:
“‘Venenum quod semper mecum habere consueram, sumpsi.’
I drank the poison that I always kept with me. The Latin is quite easy to read, it’s taken from an author that we did our first translations from in the seminary . . . He ends up with a phrase which begs for God’s mercy. ‘Miserere mei Domine.’”
“But why did he choose to die there, on Pra’ dei Monti? He always said it was possessed by a demon.”
“To drive the demon away? Did he sacrifice his own life to exorcise this demon? We’ll never know.”
“So that’s why the umbrella mender was so strange. That’s why he spoke like a fortune teller, or a prophet . . . Don’t tell anyone what happened tonight, Amedeo. Nor you, Iofa.”
They both nodded in silence. Savino and Iofa returned home and buried the bones of Don Massimino at the foot of a century-old oak tree, on the edge of the field that bordered on the consecrated land of the cemetery.
The winter that followed was particularly harsh and, just before Christmas, there was a big snowfall. It was said that a wanderer surprised by the storm hurried down a road followed many a time in the past, sure to find refuge at the end and a bowl of warm soup. It wasn’t a man, but a woman. A ragged old woman, dragging herself through the deep snow in her broken shoes, clutching a worn shawl around her shoulders. It was Desolina, who had vanished without a trace such a very long time ago.
She entered into the Bruni family courtyard, strangely plunged into darkness. She looked around in bewilderment, as if she couldn’t quite recognize the place. Her eyes set on the jumble of burnt beams and crumbled walls where the enormous stable had once stood: the great Hotel Bruni. The house was still there. There was no doubt about it, that was the house. She knocked again and again, calling out with a querulous voice: “It’s Desolina, poor Desolina. Open the door for Desolina . . . ”
But no one could answer her from the dark, empty house. The old woman looked around, at the ancient walnut tree lifting its naked branches into the twirling white flakes and then, again, at the closed door. She curled up on the threshold to wait, unable to believe that Hotel Bruni might not welcome her. Surely Clerice would soon show up in her white apron, with the soup ladle in her hand.
Iofa, the carter, found her like that the next day, covered with snow, her head leaning against the door, the tears frozen on her ashen fac
e, her eyes staring in pained surprise.
THE END
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Valerio Massimo Manfredi is a professor of classical archaeology at Bocconi University in Milan. He is the author of many works of fiction, including the Alexander trilogy, Spartan, and The Last Legion, which was made into a film starring Colin Firth and Ben Kingsley, directed by Doug Lefler. His novel about the assassination of Julius Caesar, The Ides of March, was published by Europa Editions in 2010.
Cover
Start
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A Winter's Night Page 36
