I have to make her shut up, Pipin thought.
“How much do you think we’ll get?”
Pipin stood up. He took a piece of wood, the kind you use to tighten the ropes of a pack saddle.
“I say we’ll fill thirty baskets,” the woman continued.
Pipin saw the gatepost; he left the stick for the saddle and grabbed the post.
“A year like that we’ve never had, right, Pipin?”
Then Pipin il Maiorco began to beat her.
From Father to Son
Not many oxen in our area. There are no pastures for them to graze, no big fields to be plowed: there’s only dry brush to feed on and short strips of earth that you can’t break up without a hoe. And then oxen and cows, broad and placid as they are, would be out of place in these narrow, steep valleys; here you need lean, sinewy beasts that can walk over the rocks—mules and goats.
The Scarassas’ ox was the only one in the valley, and it wasn’t out of place. It was stronger and more obedient than a mule, a small squat stocky ox, a beast of burden; its name was Morettobello. The two Scarassas, father and son, earned their living with the ox, making trips for the various landowners in the valley, hauling sacks of grain to the mill, or palm leaves to the shipping agents, or sacks of manure from the farmers’ cooperative.
That day Morettobello was swaying under a load balanced on the two sides of the pack saddle: olive wood logs to sell to a customer in the city. From the ring that pierced the soft black nostrils the slack rope grazed the ground and ended up in the limp hands of Nanin, the son of Battistin Scarassa, who was gangling and scrawny like his father. They were a strange pair: the ox, with its short legs and low, broad stomach, like a toad, walked warily under the load; Scarassa, his long face bristling with red hairs, his wrists exposed by sleeves that were too short, seemed to have two knees in each leg as he walked, his pants filling like sails when the wind blew, as if there were no one inside.
It was spring that morning; that is, there was in the air that sudden sense of discovery you feel one morning each year, when you remember something that has been as if forgotten for months. Morettobello, usually so tranquil, was restless. Nanin, looking for him in his stall that morning, had found him gone; he was wandering around the middle of the field, his eyes lost. Now, on the road, Morettobello every so often stopped, raised his nostrils, pierced by the ring, and sniffed the air with a brief bellow. Nanin gave a tug on the rope along with a guttural word in the language that’s used between men and oxen.
Every so often Morettobello seemed gripped by a thought: he had had a dream that night, so he had left the stall and in the morning was lost in the world. He had dreamed of forgotten things, as of another life: vast grassy plains and cows, cows, cows as far as the eye could see, who advanced, mooing. And he had also seen himself, running right in the middle of that herd of cows as if seeking. But something held him back, red pincers stuck in his flesh kept him from getting through the herd. In the morning, on the road, Morettobello felt the pincers’ red wound still burning in him, like an ineffable desperation in the air.
On the streets all you could see were boys dressed in white with a gold-fringed band on their arms, and girls dressed like brides: it was confirmation day. At the sight, something darkened in the depths of Nanin’s soul, like an ancient, furious fear. Was it perhaps because his son and daughter would never have those white clothes for confirmation? They must surely have cost a lot. Then a rage, a yearning possessed him, to have his children confirmed, too: he saw the boy in the white sailor’s outfit, the gold-fringed band on his arm, the girl with the veil and train in the shadowy, glittering church.
The ox snorted: he remembered the dream, he saw the herd of galloping cows, as if in a zone outside of memory, and he was right in the middle, struggling to keep up. Suddenly, on a small rise in the midst of the throng of cows, the great bull, red like the pain of the wound, its sicklelike horns touching the sky, appeared and charged at him, bellowing.
In the square in front of the church, the children who were being confirmed began running around the ox. “An ox! An ox!” they cried. An ox was an unusual sight in that area. The boldest ventured to touch his stomach, the more expert looked at him under the tail: “He’s neutered! Look at him! He’s neutered!” Nanin started shouting, punching the air to drive them away. Then the children, seeing him so gangling, scrawny, and ragged, began to make fun of him and taunt him with his nickname: “Scarassa! Scarassa!,” which means “vineyard stake.”
Nanin felt that old fear becoming more vivid, more tormenting. He saw other boys dressed for confirmation who were taunting him, who were taunting not him but his father, gangling, scrawny, and ragged like him, the day his father had taken him to be confirmed. And he felt again, just as intensely, the shame he had felt for his father, seeing the boys jumping around and throwing at him rose petals trampled by the procession, calling him “Scarassa.” That shame had accompanied Nanin his whole life, had filled him with fear at every glance, every laugh. And it was all his father’s fault; what had he inherited from him but poverty, stupidity, the clumsiness of the gangly person? He hated his father, now he understood it, because of the shame he’d made him feel as a boy, because of all the shame, the poverty of his life. And at that moment he was afraid that his children would be ashamed of him as he was of his father, that one day they would look at him with the hatred that was at that moment in his eyes. He decided: I’ll buy myself a new outfit, too, for their confirmation day, a checked suit, flannel. And a white canvas cap. And my wife will also have to buy a new dress, of good-quality fabric, big enough to fit her even when she’s pregnant. And we’ll all go together, in our fine clothes, to the church square. And we’ll buy ice cream from the ice cream cart. But a yearning remained that he didn’t know how to satisfy, after buying the ice cream, after passing through the market dressed in their Sunday best, a yearning to do, to spend, to show off, to make up for that childish shame of his father that had been with him throughout his life.
When he got home, he led the ox to the stall and took off the pack saddle. Then he went to eat: his wife and children and old Battistin were already at the table gulping down a fava bean soup. Old Scarassa, Battistin, was fishing out the favas with his fingers, sucking them, and throwing away the skins. Nanin paid no attention to their conversation. “The children have to be confirmed,” he said.
His wife looked up, with her pinched face, her untidy hair. “And the money for the clothes?” she asked.
“They’ll have to have nice clothes,” Nanin continued without looking at her. “The boy in a sailor suit, with gold fringe on his arm, the girl like a bride, with the train and the veil.”
The old man and the wife looked at each other openmouthed.
“And the money?” they repeated.
“And I’ll buy myself a checked flannel suit,” Nanin continued, “and you a dress of good-quality fabric, big enough to fit you even when you’re pregnant.”
His wife had an idea. “Oh! You found a way to sell the Gozzo property.”
The Gozzo property was an inherited field, stony and brush-covered, on which they had to pay taxes but from which they earned nothing. Nanin was annoyed that they believed that: he was saying absurd things, but he was adamant, angry.
“No, I haven’t found anyone. But we have to have all that,” he insisted, without looking up from his bowl. The others were already full of hopes: if he had found a way to sell the Gozzo property, everything he’d said was possible.
“With the money from the land,” said old Battistin, “I can have the hernia operation.”
Nanin felt he hated him.
“You’ll drop dead with your hernia!” he shouted.
The others were watching to see if he was going crazy.
Meanwhile, in the stall, the ox Morettobello had gotten untied, knocked down the door, gone out to the field. Suddenly he entered the room, stopped, and let out a long, lamenting, desperate bellow. Nanin got up cursing
and chased him back to the stall, hitting him with a stick.
He returned. They were all silent, even the children. Then the boy asked, “Papa, when will you buy me a sailor suit?”
Nanin looked at him, eyes just like those of his father, Battistin.
“Never!” he shouted.
He slammed the door and went to bed.
Man in the Wasteland
Early in the morning you can see Corsica: it looks like a ship laden with mountains, suspended out there on the horizon. If we lived in another country it would have inspired legends, but not here: Corsica is a poor land, poorer than ours; nobody has ever gone there and nobody has ever given it any thought. If you see Corsica in the morning it means the air is clear and still and there’s no rain in the offing.
On one of those mornings, at dawn, my father and I were climbing up the dry, stony gullies of Colla Bella, with the dog on a chain. My father had encased his chest and back in scarves, coats, a hunting jacket, vests, knapsacks, canteens, cartridge belts; from all this, a white goatee emerged; on his legs he wore an old pair of scratched-up leather puttees. I had on a threadbare, too-tight jerkin that left my wrists and waist exposed and trousers, also tight and threadbare; and I took long strides like my father, but with my hands dug into my pockets and my long neck pulled down between my shoulders. Both of us carried old hunting guns, a fine make but neglected and streaked with rust. The dog was a harrier, ears drooping till they swept the ground, a short bristling coat on its bones that seemed to scrape the skin. Behind him he dragged a chain that might have served for a bear.
“You stay here with the dog,” my father said. “From here you can keep an eye on both trails. I’ll go to the other, and when I get there I’ll give you a whistle. Then you turn the dog loose. Watch out: a hare can slip past in a second.”
My father continued up the stony track, and I crouched down on the ground with the dog, whimpering because he wanted to follow. Colla Bella is a height rising from the pale shore, all barren terrain, weeds hard to crop, crumbling walls of ancient embankments. Farther down, the black haze of the olive groves begins; farther up, the tawny woods, made patchy by fires, like the backs of mangy old dogs. Everything lazed in the gray of the dawn as in a half opening of still-sleepy eyelids. At sea no outlines could be distinguished; the water was striped by shafts of mist for all its breadth.
My father’s whistle came. Released from the chain, the dog set off in great zigzags up the stony bed, snapping the air with yelps. Then, silent, it began to sniff the ground and ran off, still sniffing diligently, its tail erect, a rhomboid white spot under it that seemed illuminated.
I kept the gun aimed, resting on my knees, and my eyes aimed, resting on the intersection of the trails, because a hare can slip past in a second. Dawn was revealing colors, one by one. First the red of the wild arum berries, the reddish slashes on the pine trees. Then green, the hundred, the thousand greens of the fields, bushes, woods, which a short time before had been uniform: now, instead, a new green appeared every moment, distinct from the others. Then the blue: the loud blue of the sea which deafened everything and made the sky turn wan and timid. Corsica vanished, engulfed by the light, but the border between sea and sky did not become firm: it remained that ambiguous, confused zone frightening to look at because it does not exist.
All of a sudden houses, roofs, streets were born at the foot of the hills, along the sea. Every morning the city was born like this from the realm of shadows, all at once, tawny with tiles, sparkling with glass, lime-white with stucco. The light every morning described it in the smallest details, narrowed its every doorway, enumerated all its houses. Then the light moved up along the hills, revealing more and more particulars: new terraces, new houses. It arrived at Colla Bella, yellow and barren and deserted, and it discovered a house up there as well, isolated, the highest house before the woods, within range of my gun, the house of Baciccin the Blissful.
In shadow, the house of Baciccin the Blissful seemed a heap of stones; around it there was a dirt terrace, caked, gray, like the surface of the moon, from which rose scrawny plants, as if he cultivated poles. There were some wires stretched, for laundry, it seemed; but they were his vineyard of consumptive, skeletal vines. Only a slender fig tree seemed to have the strength to support its leaves, writhing under the weight, at the edge of the terrace.
Baciccin came out; he was so thin that to be seen he had to stand in profile; otherwise all you saw was his mustache, gray and bristling. He was wearing a woolen balaclava helmet and a homespun suit. He saw me waiting and came over.
“Hare, hare,” he said.
“Hare. As usual,” I answered.
“Shot at one this big last week on that track. Close as here to there. Missed.”
“Bad luck.”
“Bad luck, bad luck. I’m not one for hare anyway. I’d rather stand under a pine tree and wait for thrush. In one morning you can get five or six shots.”
“So you shoot your dinner, Baciccin.”
“That’s right. But then I miss them all.”
“It happens. It’s the cartridges.”
“The cartridges, the cartridges.”
“The ones they sell are no good. Make your own.”
“That’s right. I do make my own. Maybe I make them wrong.”
“Ah, you have to have the knack.”
“That’s right, that’s right.”
Meanwhile he had assumed a position, his arms folded, in the center of the crossing and was not going to move. The hare would never go by if he stood in the way like that. I’ll tell him to move, I thought; but I didn’t tell him, and I sat there waiting all the same.
“No rain, no rain,” Baciccin said.
“Corsica: did you see it this morning?”
“Corsica. All dry, Corsica.”
“A bad year, Baciccin.”
“Bad year. Planted beans. Did they grow?”
“Did they grow?”
“Did they grow? No.”
“They sold you bad seed, Baciccin.”
“Bad seed, bad year. Eight artichoke plants.”
“Damn.”
“Tell me what I got from them.”
“You tell.”
“All died.”
“Damn.”
Costanzina, the daughter of Baciccin the Blissful, came from the house. She could have been sixteen: olive-shaped face, eyes, mouth, nostrils, shaped like an olive; and braids down her back. She must have had olive-shaped breasts, too: all the same style; like a statuette, wild as a she-goat, wool socks up to her knees.
“Costanzina,” I called.
“Oh!”
But she did not come closer; she was afraid of frightening the hares.
“Hasn’t barked yet, hasn’t flushed it,” Baciccin said.
We pricked up our ears.
“He hasn’t barked. No use going away yet,” and he went off.
Costanzina sat down beside me. Baciccin the Blissful had started wandering around his bleak terrace, pruning the scraggy vines; every now and then he would stop and come back to talk.
“What’s new around Colla Bella, Tancina?” I asked.
The girl began to recount, dutifully: “Last night I saw the hares over there, jumping in the moonlight. They went ‘Hee! Hee!’ Yesterday a mushroom sprouted behind the oak. Poisonous, red with white spots. I killed it with a stone. A big yellow snake came down the path at noon. She lives in that bush. Don’t throw stones at her; she’s harmless.”
“Do you like living on Colla Bella, Tancina?”
“Not in the evening. The mist comes up at four o’clock, and the city disappears. Then, at night, you can hear the owl cry.”
“Scared of owls?”
“No. Scared of bombs, planes.”
Baciccin came over. “The war? How’s the war going?”
“The war’s been over a good while, Baciccin.”
“Fine. What’s taken the war’s place, then? Anyway, I don’t believe it’s over. Whenever they
used to say that, it would start up again—every time, in some different way. Am I right?”
“Yes, you’re right . . . Which do you like best, Tancina, Colla Bella or the city?” I asked.
“In the city there’s the shooting gallery,” she answered, “trams, people shoving, movies, ice cream, the beach with umbrellas on it.”
“This girl,” Baciccin said, “isn’t all that crazy about going to the city. The other one liked it so much she never came back.”
“Where is she now?”
“Hmph.”
“Hmph. We need rain.”
“That’s the truth. Need rain. Corsica, this morning. Am I right?”
“You’re right, yes.”
In the distance there was an explosion of yelps.
“Dog’s flushed a hare,” I said.
Baciccin came and stood in the trail, his arms folded.
“He’s hunting. A good hunter,” he said. “I had a dog, a bitch name of Cililla. She’d trail a hare for three days. Once she flushed him at the top of the wood and chased him two yards in front of my gun. I fired twice. Missed.”
“You can’t get a hit every time.”
“Can’t. Well, she went on after that hare for two hours . . .”
They heard two shots, but then the yelping began again, coming closer.
“. . . two hours later,” Baciccin resumed, “she brought the hare back to me, like before. I missed it again, goddamnit.”
All of a sudden a hare appeared, darting along the trail. It came almost to Baciccin’s legs, then swerved into the bushes and disappeared. I hadn’t even had time to take aim.
“Damnation!” I yelled.
“What’s wrong?” Baciccin asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
Costanzina hadn’t seen it either; she had gone back into the house.
“Well,” Baciccin went on, “you know that bitch kept chasing that hare and bringing it back to me over and over until I hit it? What a dog!”
“Where is she now?”
“Ran off.”
Last Comes the Raven Page 4
