The Fireflies of Autumn

by Moreno Giovannoni

  …

  In a small coop they kept three unhappy hens that, because of the general gloom of the proprietors, and because they had few scraps to eat, only laid one egg a day between them. So every third day Ancilla, Liduina or Mariella ate an egg. They also had a goose tied by one of its legs to the fig tree to guard it. The two girls, who loved reading, and Ancilla, who taught them tirelessly, knew that a flock of geese had saved Rome from an invasion, so one goose would have no trouble saving a single tree.

  Their father had bought the cow before leaving. He scraped together enough money by selling their only field, calling in every small favour he was owed and begging some distant relatives for help, and even stole the money in the poor box at the church up on the hill at Castello, a final paternal gesture to assuage his guilt before abandoning his daughters. It was a plump cow at first, but had become thin as time passed and it had little to eat. With the cow’s milk they made just a small quantity of butter and cheese. Because they had no pasture, all they could do to feed her was graze her along the side of the road for a few hours each day.

  One of the girls, usually Liduina, who was the oldest, walked her slowly to Centoni or Lecci or Il Porto and back. They would head off in the morning as the sun was coming up. The cow waddled and the girl waddled, both with their eyes downcast, the latter intent on guarding the former, reluctantly greeting people along the way.

  ‘Ehi, Liduina. Come sta la zia Ancilla?’

  And she would grumble a bit under her breath because the passer-by was interfering with her supervision of the cow. ‘My aunt is well. Leave me alone, I have to mind the cow.’

  The cow would stop, swing her tail backwards and forwards and sideways down her flanks to shoo away the flies, and Liduina would wait patiently for her to tear a few mouthfuls of grass from the verge, take a few steps forward and pause again. From time to time the cow suddenly spread her back legs apart a little, raised her tail and released a flood of piss on the ground. Other times she would shit. Out it came in wet clumps, forming a neat round pat of concentric rings of semi-liquid grass onto the ground. On later excursions, Liduina would collect the cowpats after the sun had dried them and throw them in a sack she carried over a shoulder to add to the pile they used to fuel the fire at night.

  Liduina was impatient with the cow. She believed the cow was cunning and trying to cheat her by not eating enough. She thought that all the cow wanted to do was sleep on her feet. ‘You’d better eat, cow,’ she would say. ‘We need milk. It’s no good you just standing there in the sun half asleep, chasing flies with your tail. Eat some grass.’

  Liduina believed it was her responsibility to make sure the cow ate enough so that there would be milk every evening.

  …

  Ancilla’s deceased mother and father, the grandparents of the two girls, along with every other person in the village, had taught her (and her beautiful sister) about the value of a cow. The children absorbed the village teaching about cows in their blood and in their bones. The lesson also found its way deep into their hearts and stayed there. Ancilla had passed it onto the girls when their father bought the cow.

  People watched as cows were hitched to carts, watched cows pulling empty carts to the fields and hauling them back piled high with hay, potatoes, corn or firewood. People heard the lugubrious sounds of the cows as they waited for their mangers to be filled for the evening feed. Pitchforks rained hay down from the lofts in the stables. The sound the cows made was deep and mournful and full of anticipation. They were silent when their udders were caressed and tugged for milk, and they grieved when their children were taken from them. Cows by nature were generous, and in return were cherished and never sold, especially by the poor.

  The villagers saw Liduina walking her cow and knew what it meant to her and her sister and her aunt. Everyone knew without thinking. They nodded instinctively even as Liduina scolded them for interrupting her supervision of the grazing cow.

  …

  Of course, apart from the cow, their most valuable possession was the fig, a large, robust, healthy tree with a wide crown, which grew in front of their house in a small raised bed with a low stone wall around it. It was forbidden to sit on the wall, and the two sisters and their aunt gave chase to anyone who came near their exceptional tree, which for three months every year produced dozens and dozens of baskets of fruit. The figs were the dark-skinned kind, with bright red flesh that was plump and sweet, and the tree was renowned throughout the district for its abundant crop and its lengthy fruiting season. They were proud of it and kept it close in their hearts as the one source of hope in their lives.

  They wasted not a fig. If one fell to the ground, they would jump on it immediately, wash it and add it to their store. They made jam. They sold jam. They ran lengths of string through a dozen figs and hung hundreds of these strings on the outside wall of the house in the sun, bringing in the dried figs every night. They sold them at the market.

  They watered the fig tree assiduously, carrying buckets every day to the village fountain and back, all through the spring and even in the blistering heat of summer (into which the fruiting season often extended). They quenched the miraculous tree’s thirst, pouring water over the hard ground and keeping the roots damp and cool. They fed it the miserable chicken droppings their miserable chickens made. They guarded it against thieving boys and other passers-by.

  Mariella and Liduina took turns sleeping on the floor just inside the front door, which was left ajar, a few metres from the tree. They threw rocks at the boys and anyone else who tried to steal their figs. The goose made its loud honking sound at would-be thieves.

  They wanted the fig tree to be healthy and strong for the day their mother and father returned from America, so they could show them they had cared for it, as they had been taught, and were worthy of their parents’ love. On this day their shame would be lifted from their shoulders.

  …

  Ancilla became sick during the tenth winter of their abandonment. After she had been bled using leeches and cupped by the local witch, her fever had not diminished, and they needed money to pay the doctor and to buy medicine, which, in the days before penicillin, almost never cured you. The girls decided they would sell the cow, over the protestations of Ancilla, who was prepared to die rather than agree to this. She knew that it meant the end. The end of a family’s prospects, the end of hope. A cow gave you milk, cheese, butter and more, if you were lucky enough to get it to calf. They were poor, and the poor never sold their cow.

  Despite their imbecility, the two girls were good at commercial affairs and, ignoring Ancilla’s protests, they sold the cow, paid for the doctor and paid for the medicine. The aunt nevertheless died.

  The death of Ancilla was such a tragedy in the lives of Liduina and Mariella that there was no possible comprehension of it. Their loss transported them entirely beyond measurable pain. It was a blow to the heart that was repeated every morning when they awoke. From that moment they lived their lives in a stupor known to them alone.

  Without the cow and their aunt, life was unbearable for the two sisters, and the fig tree became even more important.

  Ancilla died in the winter, and the following spring it seemed the tree would be late in fruiting.

  …

  During Mass on the third Sunday in Lent, the priest told a story from the life of Jesus. In this story Jesus curses a fig tree that has never produced any fruit, causing it to wither and die. Without their aunt, who always explained everything to them, Liduina and Mariella, who were seated in a corner at the back of the church, gasped, buried their heads in each other’s arms and sobbed quietly. Spring had arrived and their tree had not yet produced any fruit, just like Jesus’ fig.

  As soon as Mass had finished, they shuffled quickly out of the church, holding hands, and hurried down the hill to Villora. People saw them and laughed at the two imbeciles whose short, ungainly bodies, horribly thin under their clothes, swayed as they ran, their arms flapping about wildly.r />
  Mariella searched the dust on the ground around the fig tree for Jesus’ footprints. Liduina examined the trunk for marks. She imagined that if Jesus had cursed the tree he would have touched the trunk and charred it.

  Yet they could not remember anyone who resembled Jesus approaching their tree in the daytime. And at night they had slept with the door open, and their sleep had not been disturbed by a tall man with a brown beard and a long white robe near the fig. Nor had the goose caused a ruckus.

  When they visited the priest’s housekeeper to ask her about the significance of the story of the fig tree, the ignorant woman told them it meant that sooner or later God punished the wicked. Liduina and Mariella did not feel they had done anything wicked, except that they were born imbeciles and had been abandoned by their parents. All they could think of was that because their parents had left them they must be wicked. So God would now punish them by killing their fig tree. After their aunt had died. After they had sold the cow.

  The housekeeper told everyone about her visitors, and very soon the news got around. And so we all knew what was going on in the minds of the two imbecile sisters.

  That spring, the figs did not come. The sisters continued to water the tree, which seemed to ignore their entreaties and reject their love, just as their mother had rejected their love all those years ago and had gone away to America.

  They believed that God, and even Jesus directly, had cursed not only their tree but them as well.

  Mostly, for the rest of that spring, and the summer, and then the autumn, they sat on the stone wall under the tree, eating less and less of the little that their neighbours and distant relatives could spare – one egg, a bit of salted pork or lard, some soup every few days. They killed and ate their three chickens and finally even the goose. Their small vegetable patch was invaded by voracious worms that ate all their cavolo nero, including the roots.

  And all that the neighbours – Ancilla across the road, and the other neighbours, Tista and Vitale and Irma and even Tommaso – could do was watch. By the time the winter came around again and the entire village was experiencing hardship and no-one could spare any food, or wood for the fire, Liduina and Mariella had stopped hoping Jesus would return to lift the curse.

  The Angel of Sadness draped its wings over the village and slept.

  The two imbecile sisters were stunned by the cold and the hunger and the deep disappointment of their lives – their imbecility, the disappearance across the ocean of their beautiful mother and their handsome father, the death of their aunt, the loss of their cow and their chickens and their goose, the devastation of their garden and the sterility of their fig tree – and they sat, they sat, holding each other by the hand, just inside the door of their freezing, crumbling, clay-brick house, looking out, sat, guarding their tree, sat, waiting for spring, sat, waiting for the fig to produce fruit, sat, their eyes large and round and sunken in their sockets, sat, their lips thin and the skin stretched with hunger across their cheeks, sat together, sat, waiting.

  Tista and the Mute

  Tista was the first to leave. He went to America in the days when its streets were paved with gold and Lady Liberty newly towered over the entrance to the bay of New York, that ample basin into which almost four hundred years earlier another Tuscan had sailed: his Florentine countryman, Giovanni da Verrazzano.

  At Ellis Island, after passing the medical examination in the large hall, he walked down the stairs at the New Jersey end and turned right into the railroad station vestibule, where he bought a ticket to California. Some years later his son Vitale underwent the same scrutiny – a doctor waiting at the top of the stairs listened for shortness of breath, a possible sign of pulmonary tuberculosis, and inspected his eyes, teeth and throat. Vitale then descended the same stairs and bought the same ticket.

  After sailing to America from Genoa in 1902 on the S.S. Lahn, an express mail steamer of the Norddeutscher Lloyd line, Tista worked in the vineyards around San Francisco and taught the Americans to make wine. He lived at first in the same Italian working-men’s hotel in Fresno where one day Vitale and his neighbour Tommaso would also stay. In fact, on the day Vitale arrived there, the hotel owner pointed to a bunk in the corner and said: ‘Vitale, this is where your countryman Tommaso slept before you.’

  …

  From the moment he returned, they called Tista an americano. They called anyone in the village who went away and came back an americano, even if they had been to Canada or Argentina (where Julio the Orphan went), Venezuela or Australia.

  Tista came back and married Ancilla, the maidservant. Hers was a good name for a young woman and a popular one for a nun in those days, though she did not observe the vow of chastity, bearing him three children and quite enjoying the making of them and the rehearsals for those that were never made. Though it was considered unseemly to make a big show of such matters, everyone in the surrounding houses could hear her triumphant exclamations and his profoundly earnest grunts through the thick stone walls, as the couple went about producing Vitale and his two sisters.

  Ancilla was a local girl, born just one hundred metres from the house where she would later live with her husband. Upon marriage to Tista she did the normal thing and moved into his family home.

  In the old photographs Tista is a funny man with a moustache who some say resembles the Tramp in Charlie Chaplin films. Tista’s wife Ancilla was tall. They said Tista was gentle because of his shortness, and that he was conscious, from the moment he grew into self-awareness, that just as Fate had made him short, Fate could also deal him any other hand it chose, after which there was nothing left but resignation to Fate. In a village that revered Tallness, Shortness taught him Humility as a foil to Humiliation.

  By the time he was a man and his mother and father had died, Tista’s reputation for profound piety and good works had spread throughout the district. Pilgrims knew that if they came down the side alley into the Aia dei Mattei (the Mattei Courtyard) and knocked on his back door there would be bean soup with a small piece of pork sausage and bread to eat, and clean straw and blankets for sleeping near the cow and her calf in the warm stable next to the kitchen.

  Tista’s two daughters married and moved to their husband’s houses, while his son Vitale also did the normal thing and brought his wife home. It was shameful to go to the wife’s house. So everything was as it should be.

  When Tista and Ancilla were old, the daily programme of the family included Bible readings and an evening rosary, which was dutifully observed by the other occupiers of the house: their son Vitale (who was short and gentle, like Tista), Vitale’s wife, Irma (a tall, hard, hard-drinking woman who brought Tallness to the family’s blood), and their children, Lida (who would first lose her first-born son and later be widowed and after that become a living saint, as women who had suffered did in those days); Bruno, the Sucker of the Flat Thumb (known as Sucker for the habit of sucking his right thumb); and Little Ugo, the youngest and the sweetest of the grandchildren, upon whom Tista and Ancilla doted.

  With regard to Sucker, it cannot be left unsaid that even as a mature man, when questioned about his flat thumb, he, Sucker (who had sucked it hard from birth and therefore flattened it), would proudly display this deformed digit, curling his other fingers into the palm of his hand and thrusting the thing right up into the questioner’s face for a close look, while smiling his white even-teeth smile under his neat thick brush of permanently waved hair, which at night he gathered and preserved in a hairnet.

  …

  It was Tista who went to America first, thus starting the tradition of going away. His father, Genesius, had borrowed money to buy land and had not been able to repay the debt, so his son’s purpose was to work and make money to liquidate the loan, which he did.

  After he returned, Tista told stories about his time in California – especially about the different people he had met. The Chinese, for example. ‘Le mani delle persone cinesi sono come le nostre,’ he would say. ‘The hands of the Chi
nese are like ours.’

  He was always glad he had seen the world. He did not want to be the toad who was born in a hedge, lived his life in that hedge and died in the same hedge. One thing he had learnt in America, however, was this: in San Ginese you were just whoever you were; in America you were always someone else.

  He also maintained that a man should avoid a fist fight at all costs. If you are dealing with shit, he would say, get a shovel and keep it at arm’s length. Why would you want to approach it and get your hands dirty?

  When Tista left for America, Vitale was nine years old, and it was nine years before he saw his father again. Soon after Tista returned, Vitale left and was away for ten years, including the period of the Great War.

  In those days a worker in the city earned less than ten thousand lire in a year. Vitale returned from America with fifty thousand, which he deposited in the bank and collected interest on every six months. He bought two new cows, three new fields (including ten thousand square metres situated between Pasquale’s house and Il Picchio, in low-lying land that had its own spring, next to the stream that served as the communal laundry) and a horse and carriage, richly fitted out with a fine harness and accessories for Sunday outings. Other than this he lived modestly in the old paternal home with his wife and children and parents. He could, however, afford to send his family to the seaside for a month every summer, and supported the family of Leonide, his widowed sister.

  As they had with Tista, locals and those from neighbouring villages knocked on Vitale’s door, asking for handouts and loans. They knocked again when they came to make repayments. In the end, by the time the last round of borrowers knocked to repay their borrowings, the currency was worth a fraction of its original value. This was after the great economic disaster that struck the world, and San Ginese too. Money that once could buy you a fertile field was now barely enough to pay for a chicken, so when Vitale’s son Ugo decided to marry Morena the family’s resources were greatly diminished.