The Fireflies of Autumn

by Moreno Giovannoni

  edera hedera, common ivy; the subject of another popular song, ‘L’Edera’

  rogna untranslatable dialect; has a yellow flower

  trifoglio clover, trefoil (genus Trifolium); literally ‘three leaves’

  fiore di trifoglio clover flower

  agagio a species of acacia that has invaded the abandoned hillsides and fields

  menta selvatica wild mint; perennial

  cipressi pencil pine cypress; often featured in tourist brochures

  sambuco elder, whose white flower is of no use at all, for anything, according to some Sanginesini, while others cook them in fritters; generally toxic

  rovo blackberry, combining with the agagio to make hillsides and terraces impenetrable

  gelso mulberry; has an edible fruit; used in silkworm breeding, as an ornamental plant and for firewood

  pioppo poplar; popular for firewood. Tuscans are fond of this tree.

  The Visitor would recommend that for best results the English reader pronounce aloud the Italian words in the table.

  The Visitor would notice how the agagio was invading the abandoned vineyard terraces and olive groves and the hillsides. He would come to understand that the agagio is a great infester of land. It is a tree and a weed at the same time. It is ambitious and aggressive – not merely assertive but aggressive. It was useful as long as there were peasants working the land and it was kept under control. It is a hard wood, ideal for making wheels for carts, spokes for the wheels and posts for supporting grapevines.

  ‘Ne tagli uno ne spuntano dieci,’ they say. ‘Cut one and ten will grow.’

  His cousin would tell him that as firewood it is despised because it does not burn well, yet it is popular because it is cheap. His cousin would also tell him that the flower of the agagio is sweet and edible and is often added to a frittata. He would ascertain directly that the agagio will quickly form isolated copses that reach out to one another and form entanglements until they become complicated, snarled forests inside which razor-sharp blackberry vines proliferate.

  The Visitor would walk on, past the church with the ancient belltower where he was baptised. Here the bones of his ancestor Genesius lie in an ossuary under a monument to the fallen of the Great War, in a courtyard from which you can see the smoking, steaming chimney stacks of the Porcari pulp mills and the paper and cardboard factories. He would continue past the old house on the right, on the edge of the road, below which the hillside drops away steeply. The house grips the earth on the side of the hill, holding on for dear life. This is the school that Ugo attended as a little boy.

  On the high side of the hill on the left is a large agricultural estate Ugo almost purchased on his first failed attempt to abandon Australia and return home.

  From the hill near the church the Visitor would see the hamlet of Pierini, in a narrow valley that, if San Ginese were a lizard, would be between the flank and the resting rear right leg of the lizard.

  …

  After the botanical walk the Visitor might decide to walk between the agglomeration of small hamlets that make up the village of San Ginese. If he did, he would walk through the centre of Villora, past Tista’s house, where he, the Visitor, was born, and where Ugo was born; past the house opposite, where Tommaso the Killer lived and was arrested by the running police in their spectacular uniforms; past the house where the imbeciles lived; past the place on the corner where the Albanians live now; past the house of Julio the Orphan, who cared for the animals when the villagers fled to Compito during the German retreat; down past Lida’s house; and to the house of Sucker in Monkey’s Field (which Vitale bought with money he brought back from America), where the widowed Adulteress lives. Then he would follow the road on the right below the hill as far as Centoni (the same road the villagers took when they marched out to seek refuge in the Enchanted Glade). Just before entering Centoni, inside the cutting with raised terraces on each side, he would meet a migrant from Naples, a woman planting onions, whom he had never seen before because he had been away for so long and she had arrived after he had left. He would stop to talk to her and tell her that, like her, he was from outside (that’s what they say there, literally, ‘outside’), having come from Australia.

  He would not tell her that he had been back twice before, for one year and then two years, to attend the high school in San Leonardo and later the university in Pisa. On both these occasions his mother and father would decide to return permanently to San Ginese and bring him with them. Their two attempts at resettlement would fail. Then, after staying away for twenty years, he would begin a series of short visits, each a few years apart, of which this was one.

  After leaving Centoni (where Derì lived), the Visitor would climb the steep servette section of road with two sharp bends and, at Lecci, instead of turning left, towards the refuge in the hills, he would turn right, towards Castello.

  But before we follow the Visitor to Castello, let him take us back two kilometres or so …

  The Adulteress

  The Adulteress sits at the front window on the right of the house as the Visitor approaches, walking down the slope from Villora. She waves to him briefly when she recognises him, and gives a little square smile. It’s a short wave, as if she has waved at him and has lost interest and is now searching for someone else to wave at as she sits at the window, pedalling her little machine to keep the blood circulating through her ancient legs. This is the woman people say has not yet died because she has forgotten to.

  The Adulteress sits at the front window of the house her husband, Sucker, built with the money he made in Australia. Sucker and his brother Ugo worked long and difficult hours at Buffalo River. One year, after a monstrous hailstorm shredded the leaves, they laboured ankle-deep in mud and plant debris to bring in every scrap of prime tobacco leaf. The soil was good, rich and friable on the river flat, and the tobacco grew well, and Ugo made a lot of money in those paddocks over many years. His brother joined him for three of those rich harvests.

  …

  The Adulteress sits at the front window and remembers Sucker, her unfaithful husband, who at the start courted her the way he courted anything with two legs and a skirt (or so they said). One day she announced she was pregnant. By the time it was clear she was not, they were married.

  The newlyweds rented a house. One day Sucker saw his wife walking out of a neighbour’s stable and was suspicious. He set about spying on her to see if he could catch her in the act. The night it happened he was in a neighbouring town, Viareggio, visiting the wife of another man. He left Ugo on watch.

  On the night in question Ugo saw Beppino, the milkman from neighbouring Picchio, whose inhabitants were notorious good-for-nothings, enter through the front door of the house. Beppino came out two hours later adjusting his belt, of course, and his hat. He entered through the front door and came out the back.

  Sucker prevailed on the men of the village to sign statements as evidence of his wife’s adultery. His own absence on the night of the crime was explained by the need to discuss the purchase of a cow, to which the vendor usefully testified. The sale, of course, did not go ahead and there was never a word uttered about Sucker’s own infidelity on the same night.

  When questioned, the Adulteress admitted only that she and Beppino had met and talked about the milk collection and delivery. She was grateful for Beppino’s company, as her husband was away. Her husband’s mother and father and her sister-in-law were visiting neighbours that night and were not free to keep her company, and, besides, the strength of their relationship was not such that she could impose on them her presence – the presence of a lonely, abandoned wife, whose husband was a philanderer.

  When she raised with the investigating magistrate an accusation against her husband, it was quickly dismissed by the man in black for lack of evidence. She had no witnesses, whereas her husband had half the village supporting his account of events.

  The law she had broken, which was enacted by the fascist government in 1930, clearly spe
lled out that a single instance of adultery by a woman constituted a violation of the legislator’s decree. For a man, a husband, a breach would have to be repeated, and would need to culminate in the abandonment of the family before he could be charged and possibly punished. Nothing of the sort could be proven against Sucker, although he was indeed guilty of adultery, and his poor wife did not even try.

  …

  The Adulteress sits at the front window on the right of the house as the Visitor walks down the slope from Villora. She waves to him briefly when she recognises him.

  She was convicted of adultery and her punishment was left to her husband to decide, subject to a prohibition against physical punishment. The normal consequence of her conduct was banishment from the village, and banished she was, to a small abandoned house at Castello, near the hamlet of Collina, which was her birthplace, while their boy, Vito, lived with his grandparents. She took in piecework, knitting jumpers and scarves, and with her mother’s help was able to feed herself for a year, although her life was a misery.

  Sucker, meanwhile, pursued with renewed vigour his previous pursuits, involving multiple women. He was invigorated now and imbued with a strong sense of justification – the same sense that ensured that for the rest of his life he would bed one woman after another and ignore his wife entirely, without any compunction or guilt. He always reminded her that she was lucky he had taken her back, which by the way he did, most of all for the sake of Vito, who was eight years old at the time his mother met Beppino in the dark house in the row of houses in front of the Aia dei Mattei, the Mattei Courtyard, while Sucker visited his woman in Viareggio, on the Tuscan Riviera.

  Sucker took his adulterous wife back because no-one knew what else you could do with a wife like that, especially as there was a child to raise. He took her back and, in her, had himself a servant to raise Vito – who remained unusually short, having inherited the blood of the short men like Vitale and Tista, not that of the tall men from Colognora, on Irma’s side of the family – and a housekeeper to cook and clean with no expectation that he, Sucker, ought to contribute anything other than a roof over their heads and food on their table.

  And so the family lived in the house Sucker built with the money he brought back from Australia, built in a field bought with the money his father made in America.

  The Visitor would reflect on this – the field, the house, Australian money, American money – as he approaches.

  After his return from Australia and for the rest of his life, Sucker worked as a skilled bricklayer and mason on building sites with his cousin Gino. He was a good provider. He doted on his son and later his grandchildren. He never bedded his Adulteress again, and she was celibate for the next sixty years and more. He treated her badly, with disdain, showing her no respect, but she always spoke well of him, as if there were a great love between them.

  …

  Sucker died at a relatively young age many years ago, his Clark Gable hair grey but still thick, his teeth perfect, and he is buried in the New Cemetery of San Ginese with his failed liver. At first people said it was cirrhosis caused by a combination of Malta fever, which he had contracted when he was young, and excessive consumption of wine. In the end it was determined he had caught an infectious liver disease from the instruments of a dentist who practised poor hygiene in his clinic. Sucker was proud of his perfect hair and his perfect teeth. The hair was always full and undulating, gently preserved in a net as he lay his head on his pillow at night. He took great care to maintain both his coiffure and his dentition as he aged, thus preserving his attractiveness to women.

  …

  So Sucker dies, and by the time his widow comes to be sitting regularly at the window in her husband’s house, to the right of the front door, everyone who had been a party to, first, the criminal charge against her, brought ten years after the war ended, and second, her conviction for adultery, is also dead (except, at the time of writing, for Ugo).

  She sits there, her feet on the pedals of the leg exerciser, and looks up along the length of the road winding down from the village and sees the Visitor walking towards her. Her accusers are dead: the witnesses who testified, the policeman who arrested her, the investigating magistrate; all those who banished her from the village are dead. The innocent who watched and were silent are dead too, including her mother, who lived to be ninety-three. She pedals, and is also now ninety-three years old. Only Ugo is alive, and he went to Australia, three years after he reported her infidelity to his older brother.

  She has outlived Sucker by thirty years. At every opportunity she shows you photographs of her handsome husband. What lovely hair. What perfect teeth.

  Beppino emigrated to South Africa with his wife and children.

  The 1930 adultery law was repealed in 1969.

  The Dinner of the Pig

  Giuseppe Dal Porto was born a moody man. When he returned from la guerra del quindici–diciotto, the war of fifteen to eighteen, which is what the Italians call it, during which he was a prisoner of the Austrians, under whom he endured enormous suffering due to cold and hunger, he was even moodier. Like all the men of his time he yearned for a male heir, so his wife, Carolina, had to bear him three daughters before Derì was born. The moody Giuseppe made arrangements, while living, to disinherit his daughters with little compensation so that the estate could go entirely to the newly born Derì.

  In his final years Giuseppe often visited Villora to stay with his daughter Alfonsina, who had married Gino. They would position him on a kitchen chair on the outer gravel shoulder of the hairpin bend (where he eventually died), in front of the place where the mythical stone was buried in the foundations of Gino’s house.

  The warmth of the sun gave comfort to his bones, the movement of the air brought inspiration to his skin, and the passing people brought interest to his eyes and ears. There he sat, a dapper old man wearing a brown tweed trilby hat, asleep in the sun, the crook of his walking stick hooked over his knee or, arms extended, both hands resting one on top of the other on the stick, which was planted firmly in front of him in the dirt.

  As his ageing, diseased brain deteriorated, the arms and hands retreated to his lap where he held them gently cupped, one inside the other. He had been a medium-sized compact man, always impeccably turned out in a leather jacket, his bearing elegant, in the days when appearances counted. No-one would have guessed he was once the most astute and admired livestock broker in the district. He had been to America twice and had done well and, having laid the foundation, continued to build his fortune from shrewdness in business in San Ginese and the surrounding district.

  …

  Of course, everyone expected Derì to take over the family business, but the signs were not good from the start.

  As the boy grew, the effect of the Great War on Giuseppe produced a kind of silent conflict between father and son. The father’s moodiness was converted into secret discontent at the imperfections of the son. The father consoled himself with the thought that it could have been worse, that the son could have been born a hunchback, but this attempt at consolation was to no avail. The son matured in fits and starts. Everyone waited for the young boy to become a man, but the father’s hidden disappointment created in the boy a wavering uncertainty. That Giuseppe Dal Porto had enjoyed enormous respect in the district and brought his family material comfort did not make life easy for Derì, who found it impossible to live up to his father’s example. And so it happened that as he struggled to rise above his father’s moods, Derì was always either in ecstasy about some plan he had just excogitated or else was sinking under the weight of his sins. The coming of the Second World War and the economic decline that accompanied it did not help him, although no-one believed it was the reason for his lack of business success.

  When Derì’s blonde wife produced, at the first attempt, a male heir, whom they named after the grandfather, well, that was that. Derì came under an immediate paternal injunction to stop producing offspring for fear of diluting t
he family fortune. He and his blonde wife acquiesced. Giuseppe, the grandson of Giuseppe, remained an only child.

  …

  For a hundred years America had been El Dorado and everybody had gone looking for it, but when America came to neighbouring San Leonardo in the form of the Palazzo Cinematografico, Derì could see no point in sailing across the seas. He went to the cinema instead. Thinking he could become a star didn’t make him one, however, and as the years passed the suspicion that he would never be a star started to weigh on him and, when he wasn’t being playful, he felt thwarted, became gloomy and drank the cloudy light-red wine of San Ginese.

  When Giuseppe’s son Derì got drunk, he sang ‘Signorinella’. It was one of those popular songs from the time before the factories were built at Porcari, on the other side of the swamp. After the electricity came you could hear the song coming out of people’s windows all over San Ginese. They played it on the wireless, and the entire nation sang along to it for thirty years.

  The words of the song tell the story of young, thwarted love, remembered many years later when the burden of middle age starts to wear you down. The sentiments expressed belong to another time and place and are not easily understood nowadays. In any case, men no longer think of women that way, and certainly don’t address them as the song does.

  The song perfectly described the permanent state of Derì’s heart, which to him was by far the most important organ, as it could sweep you on waves of passionate melancholy away from San Ginese, out over the Mediterranean, across the Atlantic Ocean, past the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, and overland by train to California, a real journey his father had twice undertaken and which he only dreamed about. During these reveries, overcome by emotion, from the corner of his eye he saw himself on a cinema screen, the wrist of his cigarette hand cocked, elbow pressed against hip, a quizzical eyebrow raised, scrutinising with heavy-lidded eyes the red-lipped blonde who was watching him through wisps of curling smoke. The yearning for a long-lost young love became the yearning for his long-lost young life.