The Fireflies of Autumn

by Moreno Giovannoni

  …

  The peasant grew all manner of crops. Agriculture was of the mixed variety: grapes, olives, wheat, corn, beans, hay, milk, cows, beef cattle, working cattle, pigs, chickens, rabbits. The work never ended.

  In Winter the peasant in San Ginese spent his time fixing the vines – pruning them when they were made pliable by the moist air and tying them up, the latter according to the filagna system, so that they would be ready for the growth that came in Spring.

  The peasant farmers grew the salix, a genus of willow tree, in rows around the borders of their fields next to the drainage ditches, and coppiced them, meaning they cut them back regularly to stimulate the growth of young shoots, which they harvested to tie the vines and use as kindling to light fires in their houses. The thicker, sturdier stakes grown from the salix, the calocchie, were used to prop up the vines. Strong agagio poles were used at each end of a line of grape vines to hold up the entire row. The poles were burnt at the tip so the charcoal would stop the pole rotting after it was driven into the ground. They would last three or four years, five if you were lucky.

  Vineyards were sprayed with fungicides, a practice dating back to the times of Tista. Copper sulphate was sprayed on the vines weekly in Spring, and again after rain, to prevent fungi and moulds attacking the plants.

  The earth was sliced and broken up with a shovel, and then turned over in preparation for the planting of new vines. The deeper the soil was dug, the better it retained the moisture when it rained.

  The peasant picked olives in November and December and sent them to the communal frantoio to be crushed for oil.

  In Winter firewood was prepared for the following Winter. This gave the green wood time to dry out so it would burn easily.

  In Spring the soil in established vineyards was tilled. Leguminous plants that had been sown between the rows of vines – lupins, wild peas and broad beans – were dug into the soil for nitrogen.

  All kinds of vegetables were sown in Spring, both for domestic consumption and for selling to contracted buyers and cooperatives. These included corn (for example, the May corn known as maggese), tomatoes and potatoes. Corn was harvested in Autumn.

  At Spring’s end, and in early Summer, hay was cut and left in the fields to air and dry for a few days before being piled high onto hay carts pulled by one or two cows and stored in lofts above the stables so it could be tossed down easily into the mangers from which the cows ate.

  Cows were milked all year round. A wealthier peasant typically kept between four and six cows and one or two calves in the stable next to the house.

  …

  Although excrement is often thought to be present at the end of things, in fact it is there at the beginning too. From excrement (which, if liquefied, is poured over the earth, or if mixed with straw is dug into it) grow corn and grapes, onions and potatoes, carrots and long stringy green beans.

  With this in mind, there is one important feature of that collection of hamlets known as San Ginese that it is well to note and useful to remember, from the very beginning. And that is this: for the entire year, and particularly in Summer, the village and the surrounding countryside are impregnated with the smell of excrement: human, cow, rabbit, chicken and pig. A sickly sweet gas brews in small subterranean cisterns from whence it wafts into the village street and courtyards. It is also released in the fields when the villagers spread the fermented brown liquid, which they call perugino, over growing crops. Visitors gag and flee from Villora, the village on the dark side of the San Ginese hill. Meanwhile the perugino from the other hamlets, clinging to the side of the San Ginese Hill, also seeps into the swampy land below the village, slowly.

  In the life of the village, shit and piss are such staples that there are two sayings to describe someone who is an arsehole (which of course is where the shit comes from). The first is ti manca il manico e sei un getto (all you need is a handle and you’d be a shit-bucket), and the second is sei colmanio – an abbreviated form of sei con il manico, although this longer form is never used (you’ve got a handle, implying that you’ve already got a handle so you are a shit-bucket).

  But this is by the by.

  One final thing to consider on this matter is that the consequences of excrement can be problematic, as you probably know. From excrement comes methane, and from methane come cataclysms.

  …

  The time came when the village was saturated. The miasma had crept into the spaces between the stones and the bricks, filled the spidery hairline cracks and fissures in the mortar and in the tiles on the roofs, as well as the broken concrete underfoot, got into the soil for metres below ground, was trapped in subterranean air pockets, squeezed into the substratum, clawed its way past the bedrock and was absorbed into the water table, easing its way down down down to the centre of the earth. It gathered in corners of stables, filled the emptiness between the straws of hay in haystacks, the spaces under roofs, occupied attics, and rose up to the eaves and collected under them. The gas rested under cloths draped over bread baskets, between rounds of cheese on shelves, inside barrels of salted meat, it wrapped itself around the washing hanging on clotheslines, wafted into empty ovens and sat there, slid into ice-chests through gaps in the lids and waited, and in the last week breezed into the cavities in the red-brick communal bread-baking oven.

  The villagers noticed nothing. They were accustomed to the hydrogen sulphide gas produced by decomposing human and animal waste – sweet manure – but could not detect the methane, which was odourless. They noticed nothing even when it happened, it was so quick. Some were asleep, others had just awoken and were feeding their cows and pigs; no-one was off to the fields yet.

  The Tomato, Il Pomodoro, a short round man with pale yellow skin, so named because he was anything but the colour of a tomato, rolled over onto his side and became aware that his wife was shuffling about in the kitchen downstairs. He heard the noise of pots and pans being handled, sensed her absence from the bed, shifted his foot across to feel her warmth and check that she was really gone, and gathered the courage to make the effort of muscle, bone and cartilage required of his stomach, spine and hips to sit up on the edge of the bed, followed by more stomach, spine, hips and then knees, to stand up. But before he stood he sat, trying to remember something, something. His cigar was on the stone floor against the wall, where he’d placed it the night before after one last wet suck-and-swallow of nicotine saliva. He leaned over and picked it up, fumbling for it twice before wrapping the middle and index fingers and thumb of his right hand around it and shoving it into the corner of his mouth and under his tongue. He was looking forward to hot coffee, and milk poured over stale bread with sugar sprinkled on top so it formed little mounds. His cellar was filling with gas even as he stumbled down the scalloped stairs, worn by two hundred years of feet.

  The village and an area out to a radius of one and a half kilometres was replete. Through some accident of physics and chemistry, the last place into which the gas poured was Pomodoro’s cellar.

  And here comes the overflow now, up the steps and through the trapdoor and into the kitchen. And there’s Pomodoro, delicately placing kindling in the stove and striking a match on the cast-iron top.

  The village exploded in the direction of the sky. The stomach of the earth heaved, the skin of the earth flapped, a tablecloth shaken flicked the cluster of houses towards Heaven, who opened her welcoming arms. There went Bucchione’s house, Lilì’s house, Erica and Claudio’s houses and the other twenty-six in the village, as well as thirty-two stables and outhouses and everything else. For a moment they were whole and sitting on the ground, and then they were twenty metres in the air, still intact, and then they disintegrated.

  Bricks, stones, mortar, chunks of concrete, twisted steel rods, mercurial pools of molten metal, pieces of rafter, shattered terracotta tiles, fragments of flagstones, shards of glass: wave after wave rocketed towards Paradise, closer and closer to where God was. Into orbit it all went. The legendary stone from Gino�
��s garden wall spearheaded the upward thrust of debris and dust, closely followed by a brown tidal wave of liquid manure, a giant fountain of shit. The row of le case di sopra, the Houses Above, followed after.

  The earth broke three metres from the church and the separated mass was sucked down and slipped away in a landslide. The church, with its adjacent ossuary, was left perched on the edge. Looking crazed but still standing, it leaned, adjusted and settled.

  Meanwhile in Heaven, inside the clouds, the wind was spinning wet particles of dust into clusters. As the particles became heavy with moisture and the clusters started falling, they gathered more water until they were delivered to the earth as raindrops.

  If you go to San Ginese, even now you will hear the people talk about the piovuti (those who fall like rain from the sky), which is the name they give to all newcomers.

  The Imbeciles and the Fig Tree

  or, And They Lived Happy and Content

  In Villora, one of the hamlets in the village of San Ginese, there lived an old woman called Ancilla, with her two nieces, Liduina and Mariella. They were the poorest family in the village as they had no fields, no men to do the hard work and only one scrawny cow, which they kept in the stable of their amicable neighbour Bulletta. They also had three scabby, unfeathered hens, a small worm-infested vegetable garden about four metres by four metres in area, and a bruciotto fig tree, which is the Florentine variety. Their neighbours gave them soup and bread, sometimes, and distant family members from Colognora came to visit once a year and always brought them three large wooden tubs of salted pork.

  They lived in the row of crumbling clay-brick houses in which Tommaso Giovannoni, the killer, also lived, the row known as the Houses Above. This was across the street from Tista’s house, where Tista lived with his wife, son Vitale, daughter-in-law Irma and their children, Ugo, Sucker and Lida.

  Tista’s family were the witnesses to everything that happened to Liduina and Mariella.

  Tista’s wife was also called Ancilla, and every Sunday morning after Mass, Ancilla from one side of the road took the poor Ancilla on the other side a bowl of bean soup or a bit of pork or some lard or a few slices of farinata, which is polenta made with vegetables.

  Because they were poor, the three women were often starving, although they disguised it well. As is the way with starvation, it can be difficult to identify after one has reached a certain stage of hunger and physical decrepitude, especially if, as they did, you wear several layers of clothes. Another consequence of poverty is that your excrement is on public display. Because they did not have their own privy, every morning Liduina and Mariella could be seen carrying three chamberpots to the common cesspit to empty them. And as if to remind them of the misery of their lives, ’Nibale, who lived nearby and who enjoyed reminding everyone of the fleeting nature of life, was always walking past and chanting:

  Dura, dura, non durerai

  L’appetito non manca mai.

  It was as if he was the only one who knew that all good things in life passed and that new desires replaced old ones. While you were caught up in everyday matters, your life was trickling away, and sooner or later you would be brought back to reality. Or at least that was what we thought it meant because, to tell the truth, the saying didn’t make sense. Nevertheless, it sounded like a gloomy philosophy, and he made sure he told you in case you’d forgotten or had never known.

  Dura, dura, non durerai

  L’appetito non manca mai.

  …

  Liduina and Mariella were both imbeciles, having been born that way. Liduina was born first and, when her parents saw her – the shape of her head and her eyes and the positioning of her lips, from which a little drool flowed – they decided they would produce another child quickly to make up for the mistake of the first. However, in the throes of the act that generated the second child, the father in his imagination saw a perfect image of the first, and when he looked up at the bedstead, under the rosary and crucifix on the bedroom wall, a small fiend, crouching on its haunches, smiled at him.

  It was unusual for two children in the same family to be born deficient, but that’s just the way it was. People didn’t know what to make of it, except to say the things people say in these cases, which is to question the moral character of the mother and the father and to reflect on the punishments that God inflicts on sinners, nodding wisely as they did so. The girls shared a squat physique – plump, almost round in their first few years – and had the physical attributes that are usually found with imbeciles, such as widely spaced eyes and drooping eyelids and lips, although they smiled easily and were generally good-humoured and friendly, so that you wanted to pat them on the head as they stared cheerfully up at you. Their mother and father, on the other hand, were tall and upright in bearing, the father handsome and the mother stunningly attractive.

  Their mother, who resembled the Virgin Mary of the painting inside the church sacristy, was a dark beauty, with an oval face, a high forehead, large green eyes and long black glossy tresses that swept around her shoulders and down to her hips. She had a habit of winking with her left eyelid, especially at the men, who didn’t know if it was a nervous tic or if she was teasing them. If you walked past her after she had washed her hair you could smell the freshness of the soap and the light dose of vinegar she had run through it. It was after her bath that men appeared from behind buildings and left their stables to wander aimlessly in her vicinity. All of them, and some of the women too, wanted to wrap themselves in her hair entirely. By contrast, her daughters’ hair, which was kept short so it could be easily cared for, was a pale brown colour and looked and felt like rope.

  She painted her lips bright red every day of the year, not just on feast days, and touched up a beauty spot on her left cheek with a small piece of coal from the fireplace. Her poor handsome husband knew what the people of the village said about why she had given birth to two such unfortunate creatures. Her daughters, however, loved their mother beyond human understanding, as children do, and marvelled at her beauty, believing that one day they would grow to be as beautiful as her.

  Apart from being a beautiful woman, she was also impatient. When the municipal workers came every year with their horse-drawn wagons to spread a layer of crushed rock over the single road that ran through the village, she complained of the dust. She’d be out in the street after they had passed through, cursing them, waving her arms, thrusting her hips forward, driving the men mad with desire. Then when it rained she complained of the mud. Now, of course, everyone liked to grumble about the state of the road, which, mind you, would have been worse without the crushed rock, but the way the girls’ mother complained made it obvious that she was going to do something about it. She spoke with such confidence and in such a strong, loud voice they could not help but think that one day she would.

  In fact, she did. After much arguing and persuasion and granting of special favours in the conjugal bed, she finally convinced her husband they should emigrate to America, as many from San Ginese had done.

  It was perfectly normal that they should want to sail over to New York and perhaps catch the train to California or Chicago, where many Sanginesini had gone, so no-one thought twice about it. They would leave the girls, who were then five and six years old, with her sister, Ancilla.

  Ancilla had never attracted a suitable suitor in her youth and, after seeing her younger sister’s first child born and feeling an outpouring of love for the unfortunate child, had decided to dedicate her life to spinsterhood. She would care for her sister’s family, especially the little girl, whom she loved as she would any creature of God. God in His infinite wisdom had made Liduina as she was, and who was Ancilla to question God’s will? Her resolve only strengthened amid the despair that followed the tragic birth of Mariella, when the old maid truly embraced her unmarried fate and lifted the burden of the two imbeciles onto her shoulders, where she carried it for as long as she lived.

  By the way, God’s wisdom is always ‘infinite’
, or it was in those days, and it became such a strong habit for people to think it that people say this even now.

  …

  Entrusting their daughters to the care of their maternal aunt, the mother and father had left for America many years ago and had not been heard from since. It was said later that they fled to leave behind the two imbeciles they had brought into the world, and that even if at first they had intended to return, they soon abandoned the thought.

  From time to time someone coming back from the new world brought news about the mother and father of the imbeciles, about how they were prospering and had produced healthy children. When these recent arrivals spoke, they made sure they could not be heard by the three unfortunate souls who had been forsaken, but the news always reached Ancilla, Liduina and Mariella.

  Their normal state of despair deepened each time this happened and, for the daughters, was accompanied by a sense of shame that they had been abandoned because they were unworthy. Of course America, which was a rich and magical land full of beautiful things, was not for people like them. Their shame sat heavy in their chests, pushed against their foreheads from inside their skulls and gave them headaches. It ate their stomachs and made them look at the ground as they walked. It was only the love of their aunt, the old maid Ancilla, that stopped them from putting an end to their misery. Such thoughts are uncommon among imbeciles; nevertheless, they sometimes occur.

  By secretly listening in on the whispered conversations of the returned, they overheard that they had two brothers in America. They imagined they must be healthy, handsome boys and were overjoyed and made plans for when they would all be together one day. But time passed and there was never any news from their mother and father.