The Fireflies of Autumn

by Moreno Giovannoni

  Meanwhile there was an older sister, an older brother and a younger one too, born eighteen years after Ugo, all of whom needed to be supported by Vitale’s cows, pigs and fields. The late-born brother, Irmo, the Young One, placed an additional and unexpected economic burden on the family. The fortune made by Vitale, and before him Tista, was gone, although the family lacked for nothing.

  …

  Tista owned the longest, widest, most abundant overcoat on God’s dear earth, and Little Ugo hid under it whenever he was afraid of the world (in truth, no matter what anyone might say, there is no other fear than that, the fear of the wide world). Under his grandfather’s overcoat the boy was warm and safe and happy. It could not be said then, let alone now, which of these three qualities – warmth, safety and happiness – took precedence over the other. This was especially the case in the middle of winter, when Tista would walk with him up the hill in the bitter cold of night to the church for the Christmas Novena. As the word novena suggests, they did this on nine consecutive occasions. Seated on the aisle in the first pew, Ugo would disappear under his grandfather’s greatcoat and into the musty old man’s smell, which was sweet to him.

  It was one such Novena night, after Tista and the boy had returned home, and as he lay on his corn husk–stuffed mattress in the gloomy below-stair nook where he slept, that Ugo understood the enormity of what his father, Vitale, had told him earlier in the day. In the dark a screaming horse with a frightful eyeball dangling from a bloodied socket, hanging from the optic nerve, galloped towards him, and Ugo flew up the stairs to the bedroom of his grandparents, Tista and Ancilla, and buried himself under the blankets in the warm space between them. Here again he gladly inhaled the odour of old people, stale perspiration sweetened by age and love and the occasional exhalation of gas gently trumpeted from their ancient guts and trapped under the bedclothes. Fortunately the old saying was correct: farts and dreams stay under the blankets. So when he awoke in the morning, all was well.

  Vitale was a father with a cool heart – not a cold heart, but a cool heart – and Ugo preferred to spend his time with Tista and Ancilla. He followed his grandfather everywhere: to the stable, to the vegetable garden and to the cellar (which the old man still commanded, as his son had not turned out to be a good winemaker). If Ugo misbehaved, Tista gently slapped him on the head with his soft felt hat. Ugo was admonished once for taking Tista’s shoehorn, which was made from a real cow corno.

  Ancilla would send him on errands to the vegetable garden to pick a few carrots or some silverbeet, a sprig of rosemary or some parsley. In exchange he was allowed to taste the food on the stove or in the cauldron over the fire before anyone else.

  It was to Tista and Ancilla that Ugo turned when his legs ached at night, from above the kneecap down the front, along the shin, an ache that required Sloan’s Liniment, which Tista and Vitale had brought back from America and which could also be bought in Lucca if there was any money in the house. Tista patiently rubbed Ugo’s legs for half an hour, and the warmth of the balm and the massage breached his flesh and penetrated his bones until the pain dissolved and he slept.

  He was surprised every time when he awoke in the morning, alone in their bed. Where had they gone? He would jump out from under the blankets and step over to the window that looked out onto the courtyard to see if they were down there, sweeping, feeding the animals or doing other old people’s work.

  …

  One day a pilgrim arrived in the Mattei Courtyard. It was the custom in those days for the devout, who were usually those without work or land to till, to wander the country roads claiming they were on a pilgrimage to some holy site, such as the cathedral that housed the Holy Face of Jesus in Lucca.

  This particular pilgrim, who was mute, made it understood that he was seeking work and a place to stay, and Tista took him in and gave him regular meals and a place to sleep in the stable in exchange for his labour.

  The mute also worked for others in the village and occasionally slept in other stables. In time he became the village mute. It was good for a village to have one in those days, as it was to have a hunchback, for luck.

  Speaking of hunchbacks, there was one from Pontedera who came every September to the fiera at Colle, one of the biggest fairs in the district. At this fair, fires were built and grates set over them for roasting chestnuts and a pig. While the hunchback’s companion played a small accordion, the man with the misshapen back told a story. Little Ugo would always ask Vitale to take him.

  ‘Please … please papà, take me. Let’s go, papà!’

  But Vitale was too busy, so Tista would take him. They would walk one hour to get there and one hour to get back.

  As the hunchback recited his rhyming tale, which was usually about a delinquent priest or an innocent virgin, to the accompaniment of the accordion, a third member of the small carnival troupe walked around the crowd, collecting coins and selling horticultural guides based on the phases of the moon, which were printed in colour on small squares of paper.

  The hunchback later settled in Colle and brought the hamlet much good fortune for many years to come. People hoped the mute in San Ginese would turn out to be as auspicious a presence as his misshapen counterpart in Colle.

  …

  The mute had been living with Tista and his family for six months when one day he started talking. It was such a surprise that when people heard about it they did not believe it. Many villagers visited Tista’s house and poked their heads through the door at dinnertime to hear for themselves. Some said his voice was not like what they thought it would have been if he had been able to talk, while others said he had precisely the voice they imagined he would have had if he had been able to talk. Tommaso said the mute’s voice was deeper than he thought it would be. There was much confusion about whether he could be said to have had a voice when he was mute while others wondered whether he could still be called ‘the mute’, so the discussion was dropped and they just listened and engaged him in conversation so they could hear and marvel at his voice.

  Everyone was amazed at how he had managed to keep quiet all that time.

  Most people decided he had done it to elicit pity and find a warm welcome. Someone got it into his head that what the mute had committed was a kind of fraud, that he had obtained food and shelter under false pretences. Tista defended the man, arguing he had always earned his food and pile of fresh straw. As to why a man wished to be mute, who were they to judge his motives? In any case, he may have been suffering from an illness or he may have been the victim of an evil eye. When they asked the mute, he said that he had lost the ability to speak after receiving a blow to the head from a cow.

  Despite Tista’s best efforts, the mute was reported to the carabinieri and taken away for questioning, whereupon the judicial authorities charged him with having no fixed abode and lacking identity papers, which were not really serious charges. The roads were full of pilgrims with nowhere permanent to live and, anyway, who had an identity card?

  Tista appeared at the hearing before the magistrate and spoke in favour of the mute, praising his hard work, punctuality and modest habits. Tista’s reputation carried such weight that the court dismissed the charge and scolded the person who had reported the mute to the authorities. The mute decided to continue his pilgrimage and left soon after, thanking Tista and all those who had been good to him. Unfortunately he did not settle in the village, which consequently missed out on the good luck he would have attracted.

  …

  Tista died in his bed in his son’s house (which had been his house once), surrounded by Vitale and Irma and his grandchildren. He was the second male head of the family to die in that house, after Genesius. Tista was seventy-five years old and had been in bed for a year. It was the summer of 1942 and Vitale was working at the Metato near his olive grove, spraying copper sulphate on the grapevines. Ugo’s aunt Leonide told him to run to get his father because Tista wasn’t well. Ugo was fifteen years old and as he stood at the foot of
Tista’s bed, the old man said: ‘Ugo, muoio. I’m dying.’ And he did.

  Tommaso the Killer

  At the start everyone insisted that although Tommaso Giovannoni had the same surname as almost everyone else in San Ginese, he was not related to them. There were no murderers in their family, they would say. Later, everyone would proudly point to their family relationship with Tommaso the Killer.

  Anyway, here’s the story.

  Tommaso Giovannoni and Folaino Dal Porto were the best of friends. They went to America, worked together on a ranch in California and made a lot of money. One day when Tommaso went into the town for some business, the boss rancher handed over their year’s earnings to Folaino to be split between the two of them. Folaino up and left, taking it all with him to Canada. The news slowly made its way back to San Ginese.

  Seven years later and within three months of each other they returned to San Ginese. Folaino arrived first, and always denied that he and Tommaso had had a falling out. ‘Vaffanculo, pezzo di merda!’ he would say to whoever asked him. The matter always seemed to get him more excited than it should have if there had been no truth to the rumours.

  Everyone remembers the day Tommaso returned to San Ginese. His two sisters were waiting for him in front of the house, wearing their good Sunday dresses, although it was a Tuesday. Giorgio della Rana, riding his horse back from the market, had seen him walking along the road from Lucca, detoured to San Ginese and knocked on their door mid-morning to tell them Tommaso was on his way. He had ridden past him at Pieve San Paolo, so it would probably be another hour before he got home.

  His sisters had been expecting him after receiving his letter. They said Tommaso had caught the train across America from San Francisco, and when he got to New York he wrote to say he was disembarking at Genoa in about a month. Some people wondered what he was going to do in New York all that time, given that a transatlantic crossing took less than a week. Ugo’s cousin Gino said Tommaso was probably hanging around Manhattan going to whorehouses. As we found out later, he wasn’t visiting houses of ill repute. He was buying a gun.

  Soon after Giorgio’s visit the whole village knew that Tommaso was back and on his way to San Ginese and a possible confrontation with Folaino. A kind of relay system was set up to monitor Tommaso’s progress. Sandrino the postmaster at Castello had the only telephone in the district, so when the postmaster at Carraia rang him and told him that Tommaso was just then walking past, Sandrino sent his son Federico quickly down the hill to Villora to tell the sisters where their brother was.

  Pretty soon all the surrounding villages heard the news of Tommaso’s walk. It seemed to precede him, on horseback and in handwritten notes gripped in grubby hands by small children who were told to run, or ride bicycles, to tell so and so that Tommaso, the enemy of Folaino, was on his way.

  When Folaino was given the news by Michelino, the son of the local butcher, who had been told by Federico, who had ridden his bicycle to Il Porto after visiting the sisters, Folaino stood just inside his door and called Tommaso a figlio di puttana (son of a whore), loudly proclaimed that he was innocent of any wrongdoing, said Tommaso could get fucked (lo mando affanculo) and that there was no money owed to anyone and he could stick it up his arse (se lo ficchi nel culo), and so on.

  Folaino prefaced his outburst against Tommaso with another outburst, calling Our Lady a whore too (puttana la Madonna), and God a dog (Dio cane). This was quite common in these parts, and no-one really meant anything by it, but if Tommaso had heard him speaking like that he would undoubtedly have laid into him. Tommaso had a horror of that kind of language.

  When the first villagers saw him, he was walking along the bottom of the long San Ginese hill in bright sunshine. Soon a crowd was lining the road in silence. A flock of sparrows flew overhead and performed acrobatics, and a cow mooed at its calf in a stable next to the dairy cooperative.

  In about twenty minutes Tommaso would be at the crossroads. To get to Il Porto, where Folaino lived, he would have to keep walking straight, passing the turn-off, which was on the right. Everybody was waiting to see what he would do.

  There was talk that he and Folaino had fought, not over money, but over a woman or a horse. It was even suggested that Tommaso had made inappropriate advances to Folaino and been rejected. Whatever the reason, it was accepted that Tommaso bore a mighty grudge and felt justified in exacting his revenge.

  What form this might take was also the subject of much speculation. Someone said that in California Tommaso had become an expert knife wielder, having worked on a big ranch where he castrated thousands of calves. Some were certain this was what he intended to do to Folaino. Others who had seen too many Tom Mix movies at the Palazzo Cinematografico in San Leonardo believed he carried a six-gun inside his belt under his collarless peasant shirt, and indeed you could see people peering at him from a safe distance to see if he was carrying any concealed weapon.

  The crowd grew. Women who were sweeping, spreading corn out to dry in the sun, shelling peas and hanging out their flaxen bedsheets, which flapped gently like pale gold sails in the wind, left their courtyards and made their way to the roadside. Men dropped their scythes or tethered their working cows and ran to join the women.

  Only the occasional ‘Salve, Tommà!’ and ‘Bentornato, Tommà!’ broke the silence. ‘Hello! Welcome back!’

  Everyone was thinking about the horrible fate that awaited Folaino. Tommaso was known to be a deeply religious man, quiet and hard-working. Religion can make some people kind and forgiving. They’re the ones who read the New Testament. Tommaso was one of those who only read the Old Testament, believed in an eye for an eye and was hard and unforgiving, like you can imagine Abraham was, who was prepared to slit his own son’s throat.

  As he approached the turn, Tommaso would either continue straight towards Il Porto and a fateful meeting with Folaino or he would turn sharp right, towards Villora and his little house in le case di sopra, the row of houses opposite Vitale’s place.

  Tommaso turned right and headed home. There was a collective gasp and a murmur among the watchers that turned into a sigh and faded away. It was the sound of disappointment.

  That more or less ended that.

  He strode into Villora a lonely figure, wearing a sad grey hat, carrying a dilapidated brown suitcase, almost as though he’d never been to America. To greet him, his sisters left their doorstep, which they hardly ever did, as if the threshold were an invisible wall beyond which lay danger. It would not have surprised anyone if Tommaso had told them to stay inside until he got back from the other side of the world. They were church-going spinsters who took up the collection during Mass and were always arranging flowers for the church altar.

  Tommaso was back and life in the village continued as usual. As he had done before he went away, he waited for his neighbour Irma to milk the cow in the late afternoon, and when he heard the dull dong of full milk cans he would cross the street with his little aluminium saucepan and come down the side alley to the courtyard.

  Clacaclac. You could hear him coming in his wooden clogs as the sun went down. He would hand Irma a penny for a little milk for the next day’s breakfast and clacaclac his way back home. We even started calling him Clacaclac. Here comes Clacaclac, people would say.

  On the Saturday after the Tuesday of his arrival, Tommaso walked out of his house and turned right. His fields, his cellar and his stable were to the left. The church was that way too, as was the village bar. But he turned right. That was the way to Il Porto and Folaino.

  If you had been looking out for him, you would have seen him from the steps built into the roots of the old fig tree on the path that led down into the vegetable patch at the back of Vitale and Irma’s house. He would have disappeared and then reappeared from behind Julio’s stable, heading towards the drained swamp. The clacaclac sound of his wooden clogs carried clearly across the fields.

  At the crossroads this time, he turned towards Il Porto. By the time he was at the Metato, th
e bend in the road named for the chestnut kiln, all of Villora knew where he was going. This time there was no doubt.

  The men and women out in the fields dropped their shovels and hoes and pitchforks and followed at a safe distance, so that by the time Tommaso reached the bend in the road at Il Porto he had quite a following.

  Folaino was at the side of the house, squatting near the hutch and skinning a rabbit. He looked quite ordinary, even undignified, for a man who had made a lot of money in America.

  ‘Dal Porto Folaino! Scoundrel! It’s me, Giovannoni Tommaso,’ boomed the voice. He would have made a good Abraham, or even God of the Old Testament.

  Folaino came out from behind the house, holding the skinning knife, and hesitated when he saw Tommaso and the crowd of onlookers. Then he clenched his jaw around a bad set of teeth, as if he’d made up his mind to fight, stepped over to the gate, which was chained and padlocked, and stood there defiantly. He gripped the handle of the knife so tightly that the knuckles of his right hand were white.

  ‘Away from my property or I call the police!’

  ‘I have come to advise you that at the moment I have no need of the money you stole from me. But I am not a rich man and eventually I will need it. Until that time you can keep it. However, one day I will return to ask you for it – with the interest!’

  ‘I don’t owe you anything, figlio di puttana! Son of a whore.’ With every imprecation that he uttered – and there were many others, referring to God’s Mother and God himself – Folaino shook a menacing fist and spat through the bars at Tommaso, who did not even bother to wipe himself clean.

  At Folaino’s blasphemy the crowd saw Tommaso’s eyes open wide with horror and his face set with determination. Everyone had come expecting at least a punch-up, if not a fight with knives, and maybe some blood, but Tommaso swivelled around and headed back where he had come from. Clacaclac.