Fists

by Pietro Grossi

  FORTUNATELY, First Deal had managed to get pregnant, and eleven months later gave birth to a splendid black colt. Daniel called him First Born.

  Natan was hardly ever around any more. He’d grown a short beard like a sailor and spent all his time in the city, doing things no one knew about. From time to time, he would come back for a few days, spend all his time riding in the hills and then go away again saying he was going on a trip.

  In the meantime, Daniel and the pharmacist’s daughter had done what there was to do. Daniel spent all his free time with her. He would ride up to her house on his bay, let her climb up behind him, and take her somewhere in the countryside. They talked about houses and children and a life together, and whenever Daniel felt sick he would go to her house to be seen to. This was the way life could be, Daniel thought.

  One day they were in the inn, sitting at a wooden table in the corner, having soup.

  Daniel and the girl heard a commotion from the other side of the room. There at the counter was the man who had sold Daniel First Deal. He was talking excitedly and was being held back by a couple of friends. After a few seconds he broke free, walked heavily across the room and up to Daniel’s table. He had the watery eyes and lopsided stride of someone who has been drinking too much.

  “You stole my horse, you bastard,” he said when he was level with Daniel.

  Daniel glanced at him. “I didn’t steal anything,” he said.

  One of the man’s friends came over and took his arm. “Let’s go,” he said. “We can sort this out another time.”

  “No!” the first man said, pulling his arm away. “This bastard stole a mare from me and then sneaked over and got her pregnant with the German’s stallion.”

  “I didn’t steal anything. I paid for that mare.”

  “A pittance!”

  “She was sick. You were going to send her to the abattoir.”

  “You knew you could cure her,” the man muttered.

  “No, I hoped I could,” Daniel said, glancing again at the man, then took another sip of his soup. “Go home,” he said. “You’re drunk.”

  The man stood there for a couple of seconds, as stiff as a log, and stared at Daniel with his drink-sodden eyes. Then he turned and saw a big glass tankard someone had left on a table beside him. It all happened in a moment, and Daniel did not even have time to raise his hand, but he would remember every instant: the man’s twisted fingers tightening round the tankard, the fingertips and the palm of the hand turning white with the pressure, the tankard coming off the table and leaving a round puddle on the surface, the muscles of the man’s arm tightening, his left foot shifting forwards, his face screwing up with the effort and the anger, those dozens of lines on it like a crumpled leaf, the remains of the froth in the tankard as it came closer, the cold glass against his left eye, the explosion of glass in little drops and that suspended moment when it seemed to him that he was seeing an enchanted world. Then the darkness and his own hands on his face and that sensation like a hundred burning coals. The last thing Daniel remembered was the pharmacist’s daughter screaming.

  The girl rushed to Daniel, who was lying on the ground unconscious, his face covered in blood. The man’s friends dragged him outside. He was still waving his arms about and threatening to finish what he had started, but he didn’t sound very convinced any more.

  The innkeeper ran out from behind the counter with a cloth in his hand, and went and pressed it to Daniel’s face.

  “Let’s take him to my house,” the pharmacist’s daughter said.

  The innkeeper nodded, crouched down and took Daniel in his arms.

  The pharmacist did not know what to think when he saw his daughter come in with the innkeeper carrying a wounded boy in his arms. He preferred not to think about what his daughter had to do with all that blood.

  “Come in, put him in there,” the pharmacist said to the innkeeper, pointing to a door on the other side of the kitchen.

  The innkeeper went through the door and laid Daniel on the big bed that was there.

  “Fetch the doctor,” the pharmacist said at last, going to Daniel to get a better look at him. The innkeeper nodded without a word and ran out. The pharmacist carefully turned Daniel’s head and lifted the bloodstained cloth from his face. A long black cut, gaping like a toothless grin, descended from his left eyebrow to just above his jaw.

  “Go into the shop,” the pharmacist said to his daughter without taking his eyes off Daniel. “Get some disinfectant, some gauze, a needle and some suturing thread, a pair of sterile scissors and some plaster. Then put some water on to boil.”

  “Is he going to be all right?” his daughter asked.

  “Hurry up,” he said.

  When his daughter came back, he took some gauze and disinfectant and tried to clean the wound.

  A few minutes later the doctor arrived. “What happened?” he asked, approaching the bed with his bag in his hand.

  “He’s got a nasty wound,” the pharmacist said.

  The doctor put the bag down next to the bed and leant over Daniel. He put his hands on his face and squeezed the wound in a few places. The blood came out again like water from a weir.

  “Needle and thread?” the doctor asked.

  “Here they are,” the pharmacist said.

  The doctor turned and glanced at the pharmacist’s needle and thread. “Good,” he said.

  By the time the doctor had finished an hour later, a crooked line of stitches ran down Daniel’s face. The doctor went and washed his hands, then came back into the room, rolled down his sleeves and started putting his coat back on.

  “Give him an injection for the pain and let him rest,” he said, picking up his bag.

  The pharmacist nodded and walked the doctor to the door. When he came back, his daughter was still there, looking at Daniel. Her eyes were still swollen.

  “Go to bed,” her father said curtly.

  It took Daniel a few seconds to realise what that white-hot dagger he could feel stuck to his face was, and longer still to try and work out where he was. Slivers of colour floated in front of him as soon as he closed his eyes, and it seemed to him as if his heart was throbbing beneath the skin of his face, trying to rip through the flesh and get out. He touched his face with his hand and felt the gauze over the whole of the left side. In a flash, he remembered the tankard and the rain of glass exploding like a firework. But that was all.

  He tried to recall some other memory, some other image or sound that might give him an idea of where he was. He turned his head towards the window. A pale blue and yellow light was starting to be visible beyond the hills, which stood out against the sky like a piece of cardboard. It looked like being a nice sunny day and he felt like laughing, but if he as much as smiled it was like a red-hot dagger turning in his flesh.

  He pulled himself up into a sitting position and sat there for a couple of minutes with his elbows on his knees. All he wanted was for his heart to leave his face alone and go back to his chest. He got to his feet, picked up his trousers from a chair in the corner of the room, put them on, pulled on his boots, tried to crack his spine, and went and opened the door.

  He saw a dark, bare corridor with a couple of prints on the wall. On the left of the corridor, a series of doors, closed except for one, through which he glimpsed the arm of an armchair. On the right, the corridor led to what looked like a kitchen and on the other side of the kitchen what looked like a door leading outside.

  Daniel touched the gauze lightly with his fingertips, waited a few seconds, and finally headed for the kitchen. His legs felt heavy, as if two ten-kilo sacks were tied to them, and apart from the pain his face now felt unpleasantly itchy. If he closed his eyes, those damn slivers of colour floated in front of him again.

  Slowly, he managed to get through the kitchen and reach the door. He liked this kitchen, he thought, it had a homely feel.

  “You should rest,” a voice said behind him.

  The pharmacist was standing in the doo
r from the corridor, still as a statue, his hands in his pockets, staring at him without expression.

  It took Daniel a few seconds to put everything together, and he never took his eyes off the man’s. “I can’t,” he said at last. “But thanks all the same.”

  Then he turned and opened the door to go out.

  “We need to talk,” the pharmacist said.

  Daniel turned back to look at him. “I know,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

  The pharmacist nodded, and after a couple of seconds Daniel managed to get through the door and close it behind him.

  Fortunately, his bay was there, outside the house. He gathered what strength he seemed to have left, put the saddle on the horse, tightened the girth as much as he could, and got on.

  He let the horse take him to old Pancia’s house. He could not keep his left eye open, and if it had not been for those damn slivers of colour he would have kept the other one closed, too. As the bay carried him calmly towards old Pancia’s, the morning light was starting to illumine and cool the countryside. Daniel remembered his brother’s cigarettes: now would have been the perfect moment to smoke one, he thought. It was as if something was missing from the dawn and the steam from the bay’s nostrils and the bandage on his face and the eye that didn’t want to stay open, and a cigarette would certainly have completed the picture. Life was always like that, Daniel thought: something was always missing, whereas the nice thing about stories was that everything that should be there was there.

  When Daniel reached old Pancia’s, the house was still shrouded in silence. The only sound was the song of two hoopoes somewhere nearby. It was day now, and after the dawn frost the air had already started to warm up. No sooner had the bay’s hooves started to beat on the gravel leading to the house than old Pancia came out through the door with a steaming cup in his hand and his shirt hanging down over his belly as usual like a skirt.

  “You’re early this morning,” old Pancia said, taking a sip from the steaming cup. Then he saw Daniel’s gauze and the closed eye and the purplish-blue tinge that coloured half his face.

  “Good heavens, son, what have you done?”

  Old Pancia walked forwards quickly, took hold of the bay’s bridle and watched as Daniel dismounted with difficulty.

  “Never mind,” Daniel said.

  The boy left the bay where he was, in the open space in front of the house, and walked towards the stables. “Didn’t you hear anything last night?” he asked old Pancia.

  “No. What happened?”

  “Never mind.”

  Daniel reached the stable and opened the little gate. In the second box, First Deal was lying on the straw in a pool of blood, her neck slashed. She didn’t look like herself any more, she was like some grotesque life-size rag doll. And that big cut on her neck, at least two hands long, looked as if it had been sliced in rubber. Only the blood gave the impression that everything was real.

  “Shit,” Daniel said. He tilted his head to one side and held it with one hand, lightly squeezing his closed eyelids.

  He stood like that, without moving, as if something had become jammed.

  “What are you going to do?” old Pancia asked.

  “I don’t know,” Daniel replied, without moving or opening his eyes.

  After a few more minutes, old Pancia had the impression that Daniel had nodded. Then he lifted his head, walked out of the stable, told the old man that he would be back later, got calmly back on his horse and rode off.

  DANIEL RODE ALL THE WAY HOME, went in, took a rifle from the rack, found two cartridges in the drawer of the cabinet and loaded them in the gun. When his father saw him, he asked him what he was planning to do. Daniel turned and looked at him with his one good eye.

  “Don’t worry, Dad.”

  His father had often thought that something like this would happen one day. He had felt it since the day his wife had died and he had felt alone and had seen the two boys going off alone through the countryside. He had never thought, though, that it would happen to Daniel. He would have expected to see Natan come back one day dying or covered in blood, with the police after him. But he would never have thought that it would happen to this other son who had bought a horse with his own money and who got up every day at dawn to work. He wondered if he ought to do something, or stop Daniel from doing something, but he had a kind of feeling that his son had understood what he was thinking. Then it struck him that it had been a while now since, without saying anything, each of them had chosen to live his own life, and that it was pointless to do anything.

  “Don’t do anything stupid,” he said, letting him pass.

  “Don’t worry,” Daniel replied, dragging himself outside. He was hungry, but he would eat later, he thought.

  When Daniel got to the farm where he had bought First Deal, there didn’t seem to be anyone around, and the sun was high in the sky by that time, which made things more difficult.

  Daniel settled down with his bay, right in the middle of the open space in front of the big reddish house, with his rifle resting across the animal’s neck.

  After a few minutes, the man who had sold him First Deal emerged. He also had a rifle in his hand, and was followed by three other men with bowed legs and weathered skin. Two of them were the men who had been present almost two years earlier when the mare was sold.

  They all stood there motionless for a couple of minutes, not sure how to act.

  “What are we going to do?” Daniel said, without moving.

  The man who had sold him First Deal waited a few seconds and tried to swallow. He didn’t like this situation at all.

  Another man came out through the front door. He was wearing a white shirt and a nice greenish jacket. His grey hair was combed back as if it was sculpted, and a small beard outlined his jaw as precisely as a ruler. “Tonino,” he said.

  The man who had sold First Deal to Daniel turned abruptly. He looked worried.

  “What’s going on?” the man in the shirt and jacket asked.

  The man called Tonino turned back and looked fixedly at Daniel. “This kid stole a horse from us, sir.”

  The man in the jacket took his eyes off Tonino and looked at Daniel. He took a couple of steps forwards. “Is this true?” he asked.

  “No, sir, it isn’t true.” Daniel said. “I bought and paid for the horse, sir, fair and square. These men are my witnesses.” He pointed to the men behind Tonino.

  The man in the jacket turned to the two men. “Is this true?” he asked.

  “She was sick,” Tonino snarled without lowering his rifle, “and he bought her at the same price the abattoir would have paid. But he knew how to cure her and didn’t say anything. Then he sneaked over to the German’s place and had her mounted by the German’s stallion and she had a colt. He tricked all of us.”

  “Sir,” Daniel said, “I suspected the mare could be cured, but I wasn’t sure. If she hadn’t recovered, I would have sold her to the abattoir myself. It was the only way I could buy a horse, sir. Luckily she did recover, but I bought her and paid for her.”

  The man in the jacket turned to Tonino’s two companions. “Is this true?” he asked.

  One of the two looked at him as timidly as a little boy. “He never said she could be cured,” he said.

  The man in the jacket seemed to be getting annoyed. He turned to Daniel again and was silent for a few seconds, as if weighing up what to do.

  “As far as the German’s stallion is concerned, sir, it’s true I went over there at night and had the mare mounted. But as soon as possible I would have found a way to repay the German. You can ask anyone, sir, I’m an honest person.”

  The man looked at the bandaged boy and Tonino and their rifles. There was something in all this that still escaped him. “Well, then?” he asked, as if addressing all of them. “What’s the problem?”

  Daniel looked him in the eyes for a couple of seconds. “The problem, sir, is that I’ve paid with half my face and the mare.”

  �
��The mare?”

  “Yes, sir. She died with her throat cut in old Pancia’s stable. I’m an honest person, sir, but I won’t work my arse off for nothing.”

  The white haired man looked at him gravely. “What about your face?”

  “Ask him,” Daniel said, indicating Tonino with his chin.

  The man turned to Tonino. “Well?” he said.

  “He tricked us,” Tonino said curtly.

  The man looked Daniel in the eyes again for a few seconds, and for a moment it seemed to him that there was something romantic in the boy’s tired look, the closed eye, the bandage and the rifle resting on the horse’s neck.

  “Tonino,” the man said. “Go and get our brood mare and bring her here.”

  Tonino turned to the man and looked at him in astonishment.

  “Move,” the man said.

  Tonino looked at the man for another couple of seconds, then shook his head, spat on the ground, and walked round to the other side of the house.

  A few minutes later, he came back leading a big grey horse at the end of a rope.

  “Give her to him,” the man said, when Tonino had come closer.

  Tonino stopped dead, as if to say something.

  “Give her to him,” the man said.

  Tonino walked right up to Daniel and held out the rope without even looking at him.

  “She’s a good brood mare,” the man said. “I’m going to have a word with the German. He’ll let you have the mare mounted as often as you like, you’ll see.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  The man nodded gravely, then looked at Tonino again. “Give me the rifle,” he said.

  Tonino took three steps forwards and held out the rifle to the man.

  “Now, Tonino, you have fifteen minutes to pack your things and get out.”

  Tonino looked at the man in amazement. “But, sir—”

  “Don’t fucking ‘sir’ me. I paid you to look after my horses. You sold a good mare at a price you’d have got from an abattoir without knowing she could be cured. And you just lost me a good brood mare to settle your debt. Not to mention what you did to this boy and his horse. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. If I see you here or anywhere in the vicinity I swear I’ll shoot you in the legs.”