The Fireflies of Autumn

by Moreno Giovannoni

  The women, including Bruna, who had woken up, tidied themselves, slipped their shoes back on, wiped their parts and adjusted their aprons. The boys made complaining noises, mumbled something about not having finished yet and sniffed their fingers appreciatively. Then everyone crawled stiffly out into the open air, stretched, yawned, looked up at the sky to make sure there were no more bombs coming, and wandered home.

  …

  In the night German troop carriers and tanks rolled through the village, gouging holes in the road with their metal tracks when they spun around on the spot. A truck knocked a large piece of stone and mortar from the corner of Vitale’s wine cellar. For days the convoy rumbled past, raising dust and scattering stones and wearing a ditch on the inside of the bend in front of Gino’s house, just under the lamppost, and another near Lida’s place.

  The cannons had gone quiet and the convoy kept coming. It was clear that some kind of retreat had started, but there was one more series of explosions left.

  It came in the middle of the next night, from the Porcari side, to the east, beyond the Baracca tavern. Bucchione heard it and guessed what they were doing. The retreating Germans were blowing up the retaining walls of the Rogio irrigation channel and releasing the water into the low-lying land the villagers called padule, the swamp, although there had been no water in it for twenty years. Now, you must understand that the regular word for swamp is palude (not padule) but the local population, preferring to avoid having soft consonants and vowels succeed each other, which requires the tongue to perform acrobatics (albeit gentle ones in this case), arranged things so that the harder consonant came before the vowel. So palude became padule and was thereafter easier to pronounce. In any case, Bucchione cursed the Nazis, the fascists and the whores who were their mothers who gave birth to them.

  By morning the water from the Rogio had flooded the plain that Mussolini had drained, in the days when he made the trains punctual and performed other administrative miracles. The water covered Monkey’s Field, which Vitale had bought with his American money and would later give to Sucker to build a house on, after Sucker came back from Australia. With the return of the water, it was like in the olden days, when Villora was perched on the edge of a malarial swamp where mosquitoes swarmed and children died like flies.

  Ugo and Gino took a boat out onto the newly formed lake to catch frogs. They looked in the long grass near the embankment where the small brown jumping things would have sought refuge as the waters rose. Gino carried a long pole, one end of which he thrust into the grass. Then he twisted it. And twisted it and twisted it. As he twisted, the grass tore and wrapped itself around the bottom of the pole, forming a large ball. He raised the pole up to the sky and let it fall so the end hit the ground hard. Dozens of frogs fell out, and Ugo leapt from the boat and scrambled about to catch them and throw them in a hessian sack.

  After dipping the only edible part, the legs, in egg and coating them in flour seasoned with salt and pepper, Irma fried them in oil and the entire family feasted on the newly flooded Monkey’s Field frogs’ legs.

  …

  A few days after the last of the trucks had trundled through, on the day Sucker killed the soldier, the krauts who had stayed back sent out a small search party. At the same time, the Americans scored a direct hit on the German artillery unit at Castello, and in the chaos no-one really missed Unteroffizier Hermann Gebauer, whom they assumed had either been blown to pieces or had run away with some plump, soft, rosy-cheeked peasant girl – the war was not going well, and no-one begrudged him that. Still, the Germans had to make a fuss, so they trooped half-heartedly about Villora, smashing doors and knocking people over, looking in cellars and attics in case Hermann had been kidnapped, and stealing any food and wine they hadn’t already taken.

  This went on for a whole day and caused commotion in the village. People hid in cellars and in every hole they could find and, if discovered, peered out at their oppressors with large, pleading eyes.

  That was it. Bucchione’s mind was made up. He told his family that night. ‘Family,’ he said, ‘it’s time to go.’

  Little Morena skipped out into the courtyard straightaway to tell her little friends. Her little friends wanted to go too so they ran home to tell their mothers and fathers: ‘Can we go too? Can we go too?’

  When their parents heard what Bucchione was up to, the fact that he hadn’t said anything to them about his plans made them suspicious. What did he know that he wasn’t telling them? On the other hand, he’d been wrong before. The danger seemed to have passed. The convoy proved that the Germans were running away. They had only left a small artillery battery at Castello to slow the American pursuit. Of course, a few of them had come to the village and stormed around making a lot of noise, yet they hadn’t really hurt anyone and had left, and everything was quiet now.

  But then the Sanginesini started to think about how clever and strong and determined Bucchione was, how he had defied the attempts by the local recruitment office to send him to the Russian front to die or lose his fingers and toes to frostbite.

  The people of the village wondered what he was thinking about. They knew that he had a fanatical devotion to his poor wife, Iose the Flour-Eater, his two children and his mother and father and unmarried sister Gemma, and would never let anything happen to them. If he was going to take them away from the village, he must have a good reason. And then Beo told them what Bucchione had said to himself in the cave, especially the part about loved ones dying in a shithole.

  By morning all one hundred and twenty villagers had looked one another in the eye and decided they weren’t going to miss out, whatever happened. They would go too.

  …

  On Sundays, as God had ordained they should after a hard week’s fighting, both warring armies slept late and then attended their battlefield Mass.

  At sunrise, the Villoresi said goodbye to their cows, pigs, rabbits and chickens. With the help of Julio the Orphan, the animals would fend for themselves until the villagers returned. Julio would sacrifice his safety to stay behind and look after them, for a small consideration.

  Julio was a single man who wore thick glasses, without which he had almost no physical presence in the village. ‘Oh, you mean the one with the thick glasses,’ people would say.

  He was an orphan, but his lack of parents seemed especially significant because his sisters had also died and he had no wife, no betrothed and no friends. It was as if every human being on earth had died and left him bereft, the most orphaned of orphans. In fact, people often forgot he lived in the village, and if they ran into him in the street they wondered who he was. He worked hard and kept to himself and almost never spoke. Whenever he did open his mouth to say something, he made self-deprecating statements that managed to appear high-sounding and not at all practical, so people thought of him as something of a philosopher, although this didn’t seem to make much sense given he did nothing but shovel cow shit out of his stables all day. He had been saying he wanted to emigrate to Argentina, not California, where everyone else was going.

  If you asked him how he was, you might almost regret it because he would start talking and sound as if he would never stop, and just by way of a beginning he would say: ‘How do you expect me to be? I’m as well as can be expected. I expect you would understand, though, if you consider that I am an orphan and that both my sisters have died and that I have no fields but only my stables. Still, there’s no point feeling sorry for me. We are put on this earth to live our lives and to get through each day until the one who put us here removes us from it. Meanwhile, we must do our duty and our work and take what satisfaction we can from our daily travails. It seems to me this is a truth universally acknowledged.’

  So when he heard the others were leaving for a safe location to await the passing of the war, he prepared a short speech, and delivered it standing on the wall on the bend, under the village’s only streetlight, in front of Gino’s place.

  ‘I’m a single man,’ he t
old them, wearing the large, dirty brown overcoat covered in oily stains he wore all year round. ‘I wear glasses with lenses as thick as the bottoms of bottles, and no woman will ever want me. When I look at a woman I have to get so close to her with my nose that my large eyeballs frighten her. My parents and my sisters are dead. No-one will miss me if I am blown to bits. But if I survive, I tell you now, I will emigrate to Argentina, the silver land, named after a refined, elegant, precious metal, not the garish gold of El Dorado, where many of our townspeople perished or whence they returned, but only after losing their hearts and their minds. My mind is made up. Don’t try to stop me.’

  They all had to acknowledge that he was right. No-one would miss him. And no-one tried to stop him. He stayed behind and did the rounds of the stables, the pigsties, the chicken coops and the rabbit hutches. And later, after it was all over, he sailed to Argentina wearing a new brown overcoat he’d bought with the money the villagers paid him, and new thick lenses in shiny new frames.

  The Enchanted Glade and the Babbling Brook

  Bucchione strolled out of casa vecchia, the old family home, closely followed by Iose the Flour-Eater, his unmarried sister Gemma, little Morena and little Paolo, his mother Teresa and his father Paolino, who kept muttering, ‘Tutti i popoli! Tutti i popoli! All the peoples! All the peoples!’ They carried only a few items of clothing rolled up in two bundles, and some food: bread and cheese, half a prosciutto, a flask of wine, two flasks of water and three light but cumbersome sacks filled with corn husks to serve as mattresses.

  Morena held old Paolino firmly by the hand. She was making sure he wasn’t left behind, which had happened once before when they had all fled to the bomb shelter under Villora. It was Morena who ran back into the house to get her sweet old grandfather and found him by the fire, sounding demented. ‘Tutti i popoli! Tutti i popoli!’ he was crying.

  As they marched out, the rest of the village was waiting, each family queued in a line behind its half-opened front door – father, mother, children. Thirty metres along, and the whole of Beàno was behind them. At Il Sasso, another thirty villagers joined in. Those who lived at the Houses Above, and in the Mattei Courtyard, Canaponi and the Winds, waited by the side of the road and, as the procession passed, took their turn at stepping into the line. By the time they reached Monkey’s Field, where Ugo and Gino’s boat was moored, all one hundred and twenty had fallen in behind Bucchione, who was striding ahead, cigar firmly stuck inside his left cheek, straw-strewn greasy sweat-stained hat askew, not quite Moses but almost, arms swinging, humming ‘The Internationale’ quietly to himself. He didn’t want the others to hear, especially the Catholics, who were good people but misguided. If they heard the communist anthem they might cause a ruckus, and that would not be good.

  Bucchione had decided they would go to Ponte alle Corti in Compito, a village one long day’s walk away, deep in a valley between heavily forested mountains that offered protection on all sides – a place unlikely to be caught in the crossfire between batteries launching bombs at each other.

  He described the place to those who came up and walked alongside him for a while. The scene he depicted caused his companions to be overcome by a frenzied kind of joy. Beo, who was highly strung and excitable anyway, ran into the bushes on the side of the road to relieve himself.

  What awaited them, Bucchione said, was an Enchanted Glade (‘Of course, glades are always enchanted,’ they said as they nodded and clapped) hidden under ancient plane trees, whose highest branches formed a protective canopy where at night the flickering fireflies of autumn glided among the bushes. They would set up camp inside the ancient mill, beside which flowed a babbling brook (‘Of course, brooks are always babbling,’ they cheered). Bucchione, having noticed their agitation, decided there and then to stop describing their destination lest they become nervous wrecks. He sighed loudly to show them he had finished and chewed harder on his cigar.

  The line of marchers skirted the newly flooded swamp along the edge of the San Ginese hill. It was a cool, cloudless autumn morning, with a suggestion of the final warmth of summer to return later that day. There was in the air a stillness that crept up and made you scan the horizon and turn around suddenly to look behind you.

  Since the start of the war San Ginese had become a very quiet place, apart from the explosions, and fear made people hold their breath as they listened for approaching bombs. They all walked around as quiet as mice, as the saying goes, heads bowed, looking at their feet, whispering. At Il Porto they strode past Folaino’s house and everyone turned to look, although of course he was long gone, dead and buried. Then they looked at Tommaso, who had fired four American bullets into Folaino’s chest from a Smith & Wesson Model 10 double-action revolver, bought in Manhattan, killing him immediately. Tommaso the Killer stared straight ahead and shuffled along, head swaying from side to side.

  …

  One more kilometre down the road and they were in Centoni, the ancestral home of Bucchione’s wife, Iose the Flour-Eater, and here they stopped to rest in the large courtyard behind the house of her father and mother, Giuseppe Dal Porto and Carolina Luporini, who lived there with Iose’s sad brother Derì and mysterious sister Fulvia. Iose the Flour-Eater ran to embrace her mother, Carolina.

  The group slowly disintegrated as people staggered and stopped, stooped, milled around, and then fell flat on their backs as if shot, stretched out on the ground, or sat on the low stone wall that separated the house from a vineyard. The men scratched themselves here and there, as did the less elegant women. The children chased one another behind the outhouses and among the vines, shrieking and laughing and tumbling around on the grass.

  Vitale, like many men, only washed himself when the water ran freely in the irrigation ditches, after the sluice gate had been opened by some local official at certain times of the growing season. Usually he washed himself like a cat would. When the irrigation water was released, though, he would jump in, bare-chested and trouser-less, and throw water on his important bits, meaning his armpits, chest, neck, face and head, and scrub everything between his legs, the front and the back. It was quite a scene when suddenly all the men in the fields were standing in water up to their waists, removing clothes, splashing, rubbing various body parts frantically, gasping at the cold and shouting at one another like playful children. This cleansing went on for at least three minutes, after which they considered themselves clean enough to last until the next time.

  But there hadn’t been any water in the ditches for several months and Vitale, who had worn the same clothes for a long time, stank. He unrolled a trouser cuff and three pieces of shrapnel tumbled onto the ground. Normally a quiet, unassuming man, he became animated when he showed the jagged bits of metal proudly to anyone who revealed the slightest interest, putting them back and pulling them out repeatedly and making sure you knew how close he had come to having his leg blown off and even being killed. Everyone marvelled at how fortunate he was. Beo, who was jealous of the attention, said Vitale had put the bits of metal in there himself so he would have something to talk about and appear more interesting than he was. He waved his hand dismissively and looked away while rolling his eyes and saying, ‘Bah!’

  At Centoni urns of water and flasks of light red wine did the rounds, wheels of pecorino and caprino cheese were cut up, prosciutto was sliced, dried grapes and figs were distributed, loaves of bread were torn apart and devoured. It soon became a feast – not the wedding at Cana or the miracle of the loaves and fishes, but almost. There was no work to do that day, no prospect of any for at least a week. They had their families with them and they were being fed by friendly neighbours. What more could they want? And it was then that the ever-present thought in the back of every peasant’s mind started to recede, until a few days later, in the depths of the Babbling Glade, or by the Enchanted Brook, it would disappear altogether.

  …

  They drank wine, Zena (who was Bulletta’s brother) plucked a note or two on his mandolin, someone s
tarted singing and everyone joined in. The favourable movement of the air and the conformation of the landscape carried the song as far as the church on the hill.

  They sang ‘Lo Spazzacamino’, that well-known song about a wandering chimney sweep who visits a widow, eats well and drinks his fill, and then goes up the hole, the hole in her chimney, which she shows him. She expresses her worry that her chimney is narrow and feels sorry for him that he may not be able to go up. He reassures her that he is an expert and has been at it for many years and knows how to do his duty and will have no trouble going up. The song goes on about the sweep going up the black hole and managing to squeeze in quite easily and being good at it and in fact quite expert, and ends with the expression of the widow’s gratitude for the chimney sweep’s skill. Four months later, of course, there is a large crescent moon, and not just in the sky, and five months after that a beautiful baby boy is born, who all the villagers can see is the spit and image of the chimney sweep.

  This song, sung by a choir of one hundred and twenty exiles, echoed around the hills and through the nearby hamlets like some heavenly hallucination for the ears.

  When they finished singing, they all fell asleep, and by the time they awoke three hours later they realised they would have to hurry to reach Compito before nightfall. Reluctantly they got to their feet.

  Fifty metres down the road, once they had reached the outskirts of Centoni, they left the foothills of San Ginese behind and struck out across a narrow strip of flat land alongside a tobacco field for a few kilometres, passed the disused railway station whose roof had caved in, and headed for the Compito crossroads, to the butcher’s shop on one side and the police station, where Tommaso the Killer had been locked up temporarily, on the other.

  At the crossroads they turned right and started to climb, the road winding its way up the sunny eastern side of the Compito hill, through terraced olive groves and vineyards. It was a Sunday so there was no-one about. The locals were asleep in their houses.