The Fireflies of Autumn

by Moreno Giovannoni

  These few words give a taste of the mood of the song:

  E gli anni e i giorni passano

  Eguali e grigi, con monotonia

  Le nostre foglie più non rinverdiscono

  Signorinella, che malinconia!

  Days and years have passed since then

  All the same, grey and monotonous

  The leaves on the trees will never be green again

  Oh sweet young girl, there is such sadness in my life!

  It was just the way Derì was, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

  Like Cyrano de Bergerac, Derì had an interesting long nose with a small knob on the tip. It was this that attracted the women, probably for its promise of other possibilities, but so did his thick brown hair – all tight little curls and undulations through which they could run their thick peasant-girl fingers – and his wistful air, wet eyes and misty gaze.

  Derì took after his father in one thing at least: he liked to dress well, and whenever he turned up at Villora to visit his married sisters he was freshly bathed and his hair was neatly combed. He swaggered just enough, the metal press studs on his snug brown leather jacket were fastened and there was just the slightest suggestion of a paunch, which women rubbed when their husbands, fathers and brothers weren’t looking.

  When he was young he was engaged to a girl called Neva, who was from Massa Macinaia. A few years into the betrothal he tired of her but didn’t know how to end the relationship. If he heard she was in the vicinity, he would hide in the house, not going out for days to avoid seeing her. In those times women could be ruined if they were the subject of a long engagement that was later broken off. What ‘ruined’ meant was that their emotional innocence and fresh affection was no longer available for another man to enjoy. Innocence and freshness were prized qualities in a woman. Derì was not a ruiner of women, though. It was the women who sought him out, and you could say they ruined themselves.

  In the end Neva’s father rode his horse all the way from Massa Macinaia, appeared at the door and demanded to know what Derì’s intentions were. It was left to Carolina, Deri’s mother, to give the man the bad news while her son hid in his bedroom.

  There were two other women, twins, beautiful and in love with him, who lived at the top of the hill, near the church. Their fingers were long and slender, with just the right amount of plumpness around the phalanges and pretty, little, sweet kissable creases on each knuckle. Their pink fingertips were in particular nicely full and rounded, the skin so delicate and translucent you could see the blood coursing through them.

  For those days they were also exceptional women, because one was a professor of literature and the other a primary-school teacher. The Italians revere their national literature and worship anyone who has studied it seriously and has become an expert in it, and their primary-school teachers remind them of their mothers as young women and so they adore them too.

  One day Derì went to visit the literature professor to offer his condolences on the death of her mother. He expected (and hoped) to find her in deep mourning, and had prepared himself for an encounter with great, uplifting grief, believing the heightened sensitivity necessary to appreciate and teach great works of art would render her particularly vulnerable to deep emotional pain. Instead she started showing him saucy photographs of herself in her swimming costume at Viareggio, posing on the sand this way and that, hand on hip, looking back over her shoulder at the camera, emphasising her flank and her leg, eyelids half-closed. After that he never thought of her again.

  As for the primary-school teacher, she pined for him for years and often made excuses so she could walk past his house, hoping to be seen by him. She was known to sleepwalk down the San Ginese hill from Lecci in the moonlight and stand perfectly still and silent in the main street below his bedroom window, even after he was married. Although he never laid a finger on her, she was considered spoiled because her intense love for him had rendered her unfit for marriage to anyone else. How could anyone spend their life with a woman whose heart had been ground to dust?

  Derì was a ladies’ man in his youth, but after marrying he stopped his womanising, although the women kept coming. The one he ended up with was a wickedly sensuous and frivolous blonde from the Pieve San Paolo whom he lusted after with such urgency that his groin hurt for months before the wedding night.

  …

  Now, as everyone knows, there are certain events in every life that characterise it.

  Late one night, as Derì was walking home to Centoni from Nedo’s bar, he arrived at the bottom of the Servette, the steep winding road near Palazzo, when he stumbled onto a brawl between a gang of young men from San Leonardo and some Sanginesini. The fight was over the sister of one of the Sanginesini, whose virginity had been questioned. Women were a common source of strife among the peasantry in those days. The Sanginesini were getting the worst of it when Derì charged in and, in a frenzy of punching, kicking, elbowing, head-butting and scratching, single-handedly turned the tables on the rival mob. As he ran towards the affray, he could see the long shot first, then the medium shot and finally the close-up.

  Pittone, a local poet, penned some colourful verses that immortalised the fracas and Derì’s role in it. One verse read as follows:

  Si sentì un gran urlo

  Era Buccello in lite con Piturlo.

  We knew from the deafening shout that arose

  that Buccello and Piturlo had come to blows.

  Buccello and Piturlo were nicknames for the young men from San Ginese and San Leonardo respectively.

  But the occasion that engraved his name forever in everyone’s store of memories was the Dinner of the Pig.

  …

  One December night Derì got drunk. It was during the Dinner of the Pig, a feast of celebration held after the annual pig had been slaughtered and minced into pork sausages and salami of various kinds and hung up to cure, its hams dressed and buried in salt presses, and various other delicacies stored in barrels. The pig was always killed in December because there were no flies then and the cold prevented the meat from spoiling, but the cold also encouraged the men to drink the cloudy local wine, white or red, or a small glass of rum for the physical and emotional warmth it brought.

  It was Gino’s pig, so the Dinner of the Pig was being held in Gino’s house. Gino’s wife, Alfonsina, Derì’s sister, made a large pot of risotto from the unused remnants of the pig, and there was an abundance of beans, bread, cheese and wine to accompany it.

  This was after the war and just before people were starting to leave for Australia and Venezuela. Derì knew that for him that opportunity had passed. He had his father’s business to run and the wrong kind of wife with whom to emigrate (blonde and frivolous). For a few years now he had been married and trying to work steadily at the business his father had built up, and he was finding it difficult to accept his ordinary fate.

  Derì often played the fool, which made grown men and women roll their eyes and sigh. While digging Bucchione’s vineyard on the Leccio hillside with Gino and Sucker, he raced to beat the other two to the end of the row. During the wheat harvest he insisted on doing the most glamorous work, so he was the one to sit on the moa, driving the cows, as the sharp cutting blades and the movie cameras whirred.

  At the Dinner of the Pig, Derì was again playing the fool. First he commandeered the ends of the bread loaves that Gemma had baked, sliced and piled into large baskets. The ends were everyone’s favourite part of the loaf, and he pretended to spit on them to discourage anyone else from taking them.

  Then he was still and silent for a while.

  ‘Thwarted,’ he cried out suddenly, rising to his feet. ‘I have been thwarted. My life has been thwarted. My whole life is a thwarting of the most egregious kind.’

  No-one knew in what sense he had been thwarted, let alone what ‘egregious’ meant, but they could sense that he was unhappy. They were shocked when he stood up and shouted the way he did and then sat down immediately, a
s if shot, and stared straight ahead with blank eyes.

  He slowly came back to life and drank more wine. As he drank, he sang ‘Signorinella’, and occasionally someone would join in. Soon he was so drunk that the others were worried he would die. They had heard about this happening, and some had even witnessed it. The wine flowed so freely into the veins that instead of blood it was wine that fed the heart and the lungs and the brain. Derì drank so much that he was almost unconscious.

  Bucchione, who was also very drunk, removed his battered blue hat, leapt onto the table and, demanding everyone’s attention, exclaimed: ‘Nobody need worry about a thing. I take full responsibility!’ This struck the revellers as a ridiculous thing to say and caused general uproar. Several people jumped up beside him and bellowed into his face that it was a ridiculous statement and what did it mean exactly? Bucchione was adamant. He would be personally responsible for any disaster that might befall Derì. They all shouted him down and, over his protests, pulled him back into his chair and made him put his hat back on. The saying, ‘Nobody need worry about a thing. I take full responsibility,’ became a part of Villora folklore.

  They left Derì to sleep in a corner.

  In the small hours, after the carousing had died down, the silence of the village was shattered by the out-of-control screaming of a motorcycle engine and the sound of its wheels seeking traction on the icy road up near Clementina’s house. No-one had noticed that Derì had left the party. When they rushed out they found him sprawled on the ground, bruised and grazed, bleeding and half-dead, with the bike nowhere to be seen. In fact, its engine was roaring and rear wheel spinning freely at the bottom of the ditch, under some bushes. Gino had to scramble down to turn it off.

  Nedo, who had the only phone in the village in his shop, called the ambulance. As they waited, Derì started to sob hysterically and kept it up all the way to the hospital. He cried for three days.

  He recovered well enough, although the light had gone from his eyes. The war ended. The years passed. His old father died. Life went on.

  …

  The man whose heart ruled his life was later betrayed by it. His coronary arteries became blocked; he had first a small heart attack, then a big heart attack, and died at the age of sixty-seven.

  A few weeks before Derì died, his nephew Paolo spent a Sunday afternoon with him in the big white house. Derì was in a deep depression, partly because, Paolo suspected, depression ran in the family and partly because he had found out that his son, Giuseppe, named after the grandfather, was drowning in debt.

  It is possible that there were two last straws in Derì’s thwarted life.

  His son had married an unsuitable woman whose family sold handbags at a stall in the marketplace. Children are born even of unsuitable marriages, and this marriage produced a little girl who went to live with her grandparents when the inappropriate wife left.

  Derì and his blonde wife raised their granddaughter for five years until the mother returned to collect her. When the little girl was taken away, everyone heard Derì’s heart crack like a bomb over Centoni. It echoed around San Ginese.

  The second straw was a silent event. Two days after the granddaughter was removed from his life, his greatest friend, Bruno, who was the brother of his blonde wife, therefore his brother-in-law, died suddenly.

  Derì and his wife were returning home after a visit to the new widow. As he inserted the key in the door of the big whitewashed house, Derì for the second and definitive time suffered sudden chest pain and discomfort, which travelled into his shoulder, arm, back, neck and jaw. He collapsed half in and half out, on the threshold. He died there and then.

  Some years after Derì died, his son Giuseppe sold the house his grandfather had built and moved his mother, no longer a stunning blonde but still frivolous, into an apartment in San Leonardo.

  The Dead Boy

  They had named him after the Greek island home of Apollo, who was the Sun God and the Christ, and every day of his life was a Calvary and his fingers bled until he died and was the Dead Boy.

  He was born and was a shy little boy, and every morning of his life he woke afraid of what the day would bring. The fear did not go away as he grew older. Even at the age of seventeen you could see it in the nervous tics around his blue eyes, in his squinting and blinking and his darting pupils that avoided looking straight at you. His hair was blond and curly and stiff like a wire brush. He parted it on one side or the other and sometimes, for a change, and to unsettle his mother, in the middle. He bit his fingernails to blood, and he stuttered so that his tongue sat flat behind his front teeth and froze while his lips moved up and down and his voicebox came in too late and he made aahh sounds and eehh sounds and other vowel sounds and then hit a consonant and went t-t-t or gh-gh-gh. And then he shut up. Maybe he was afraid because he stuttered or maybe he stuttered because he was afraid. It was only in order to overcome his fear that he was sometimes a rebel and behaved in a way that adults did not like.

  He was a year younger than the Visitor and he never stuttered when they were together.

  His father, whom everyone knew as Il Bianco for his fair hair, was called Gimi, one of those names that had been brought back from California. Il Bianco was a small tough chunk of a man, tanned to leather from working outdoors, handling bricks and mixing mortar, building houses. He lived all his life in a white singlet, regardless of the weather, and provided well for his family, but though controlled, he was an angry man, impatient with weak, ineffective people who could not build houses. Everyone could see the rage seething in him. On the other hand, Anna, the Dead Boy’s mother, was a gentle, silent woman, who for protection from the world and perhaps from her husband always wore a headscarf. It made her look sweet and kind, so that you felt like letting her be your mother too. She was always asking you to stay for lunch or dinner, to be company for her friendless and frightened Dead Boy. Most of the time when she talked to the Visitor, she looked at the ground. The sides of the scarf were like a pair of blinkers on a horse and kept her from getting spooked.

  The Visitor remembered the day he realised that he could easily have been like the Dead Boy. He’d been born in that village and could easily have stayed and grown up there and then he wouldn’t have been who he was now. The thought of that possibility was overwhelming.

  The Visitor was enrolled in the local high school but in an annexe away from the main school campus and away from the Dead Boy who, it was thought, would be a bad influence on him. As soon as they got home from school every day the corrupting of the Visitor resumed.

  The Dead Boy was already thirteen years old when his mother gave birth to a baby brother. Mother and father had to have another one to make up for the mistake that the first had turned out to be. However, he loved his baby brother, who was weak, defenceless and needy like him.

  …

  The Visitor, who was trilingual, read, in the original language, Italian, French and American novels, including Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi, Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and would tell the Dead Boy about them. In return the Dead Boy, whose fear of the world seemed to disappear when talking to his friend about what his life would be like one day, would become excited and describe the lovers he would have one day, and occasionally he’d go, eh? Eh? and if his friend was close enough he would elbow him in the ribs.

  Years later the Visitor wondered if his friendship had given the Dead Boy courage. He wondered whether in repatriating to Australia, which could not be helped, he had not forsaken the Dead Boy so that he lived in fear again. When he told him he was leaving, a strange stunned silence and a new distance was born between them. But while they were together, life was an adventure.

  …

  When they were older and could drive, they borrowed a car and went to Alfredo’s at Colognora for pizza and beer. There the Dead Boy took control. First, they ordered a platter of sliced salame and prosciutto, olives, artichoke hearts in olive oil, with bre
ad and grissini, breadsticks. They always drank foreign beers: Stella Artois, Tuborg, Elephant and Heineken, which went well with a mushroom pizza or a margherita with anchovies. The Dead Boy could turn an outing with a friend for pizza and beer into a party. Second, they just watched the girls.

  Alfredo operated a roller-skating rink next to the pizzeria, but neither of the two boys was relaxed enough in their body to strap on skates and roll and roll with people watching, especially girls, and other boys rolling better than they ever could. Pizza and beer and watching the girls rolling was more than enough. It was perfect.

  At Alfredo’s there was a dance floor where bands played and young people like them jumped up and down to the music. The lyrics they sang were nonsense English, like crastunoitainisi – ‘Christ, you know it ain’t easy’ from ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’, which was popular at the time.

  Not far from Alfredo’s was an ancient cherry tree that belonged to the Visitor’s paternal grandmother. The two boys sat in the tree talking about girls and eating cherries for two hours until they were both so sick they had to lie down in the grass and wait until the fruit had dissolved in their stomachs.

  These were just some of the things they did. But most of the time they had nothing to do.

  When the two boys became juvenile delinquents it was the Dead Boy who led the way. Maybe he was bored or had read too many Diabolik comics. Meanwhile, the Visitor, a watcher by habit, watched, and if he liked the idea or had no strong objections, went along with his friend, whose excitement was infectious.

  On the occasion of their first delinquency they stood at the crossroads at the top of the Speranza hill and threw stones at the lone streetlight. The Dead Boy was better at juvenile crime and hit the large incandescent bulb and it exploded and the top of the hill suddenly went dark and quiet. Both boys spun around in a complete circle, surveying the landscape, afraid that someone in a nearby house had heard the loud pop.