The Girl Who Rode the Wind

by Stacy Gregg

  Together we went into the kitchen and while she sat down at the table I made the coffee. I added an extra teaspoon of sugar to give her energy. She looked so exhausted.

  “I am the one who is sorry, Lola,” she said as I handed the coffee to her. “I shouldn’t have got so upset. And you are right, I should have warned you. I thought I was ready to return and face my past but the pain of it all is so deep I wonder if it is best to forget it all and go home again …”

  “No,” I said. “You are stronger than that, Nonna. We didn’t come all this way to turn back just because of one stupid old man.”

  I sat down at the table beside her and took her hand. “But I need to know. Please, Nonna. All of it. About the Palio and what happened to you. Will you tell me?”

  Nonna gave a wan smile.

  “Very well, Piccolina,” she said. “But I must start at the beginning because this story is not only about me, it is also about my brother, Carlo, and of course Stella.”

  “Stella? Who was she? Your sister?”

  “No,” Nonna said. “Stella was my horse.”

  I ‌always think of Stella as my horse, but in truth ‌she belonged to Carlo. She loved Carlo with all her heart – but then all the horses loved my big brother. He had the best instincts of any horseman I have ever met. At our farm he was responsible for breaking in the young wild ones and he never once got thrown off. My papa would say that Carlo was so skilled he “could tame a hurricane and ride the wind”.

  Stella was a hurricane on four legs. She was born in the fields beside our farm. Her mother was one of our best racing horses, an Anglo-Arab mare with excellent bloodlines. The mare was put to stud with a famous stallion called Titan. But when Stella was born jet-black we suspected the handsome chestnut could not have been her father after all. So we never knew for sure who her real sire was.

  Regardless of her bloodlines she was a beauty, with these big wide eyes and a perfect white mark on her forehead from which she took her name – Stella. It means star. I loved her from the moment I saw her, but it was Carlo that she adored. Stella would follow Carlo around the fields and chase him in a game of tag as if he were a horse too. By the time she was old enough to be backed and ridden, their bond was so close that it seemed the most natural thing in the world for Carlo to climb on her back and gallop her across the fields without a saddle or bridle.

  We all rode without saddles. There were plenty of them in the tack room, but Papa said that it was better to train without them. Our horses were all intended for the Palio and the race had to be ridden bareback so it was vital that we should develop the ability to grip onto a slippery horse at full gallop.

  We were a racing family for many generations. The Palio was in our blood, so it was destiny that Carlo would ride in it. He rode his first Palio when he was fifteen and won it by almost two lengths, leading from start to finish. His second Palio was much harder fought. His horse, Serafina, was slow to start and they had to battle their way through as just about every rider on the course colluded to try to stop them. The Wolf contrada has a great many enemies and in the Palio these enemies are determined to destroy you, even if it means forfeiting their chance to win.

  Carlo had to endure the kicks and punches of the jockeys as he pushed past them and drove Serafina on to the finish line, but despite all their efforts to beat him he was too good and for a second time in a row, he won.

  The year that followed was 1940. As the Palio drew near, the Capitano, who is in charge of all preparations for the race, announced that for the third year in a row Carlo would be the fantino – the jockey who would ride for the Contrada of the Wolf. No one would dare to disagree with the Capitano – and besides, the whole contrada agreed my brother was the best rider by far and would ensure that once again the Wolf would claim victory.

  Everywhere that Carlo went, the people would whisper “Fantino” with admiration. He was a handsome boy with black curly hair and soft grey eyes and small white teeth and the girls threw themselves at him. To be the girlfriend of the fantino was considered very glamorous – like the girls today who dream of marrying professional footballers.

  It wasn’t just the girls he was popular with. If Mama sent him to the market, Carlo would return home with all sorts of things that she had never asked for, such as olives and cheese, without having spent a cent because the stallholders lavished gifts on him.

  As the Palio approached, Carlo and I began to train the horses. Stella was still too young for him to ride in the race and he had decided that once again he would be riding Serafina. The bay mare was seven years old – a good age to race. For fitness we would take her out into the hills around Siena. I would ride Stella and Carlo would be on Serafina. Most of the time we would trot, going long distances into the high hills to build up their muscles and stamina. I remember that day, the way Carlo kept insisting that we trot when I wanted to gallop.

  “We’re supposed to be training for a race,” I complained.

  “You want to ruin their tendons by pushing the horses before they are ready?” he shot back.

  “You are so boring!” I teased him. “Come on! Let’s go! I’ll give you a head start and … hey!”

  Carlo was gone. He had leapt forward at a gallop on Serafina and was already two lengths ahead.

  “You cheat!” I shouted after him. “Is this how you win the Palio?” I urged Stella to chase after them and the black mare responded instantly and broke straight into a gallop. Carlo and Serafina already had a good four lengths’ head start.

  “We’ll catch you by the top of the hill!” I shouted after him into the wind.

  The climb was steep and halfway up the hill I felt Stella starting to flag beneath me. “You can do it!” I urged her to gallop on, and when she responded despite her tiredness, I felt the power in her. Her strides began to open up, devouring the ground, and by the time we came around the next corner where the road twisted again she was stretched out flat at a gallop and I was certain we were going to beat Carlo and Serafina.

  “We’ll catch them on the next hill,” I murmured to Stella as I watched my brother and his horse disappear around the bend ahead of us. And then we came around the corner and suddenly I was pulling hard on the reins to avoid colliding with Carlo and Serafina who had stopped in the middle of the road.

  A big black car was parked sideways, blocking the way through. Carlo had come to a halt in front of it, dismounted, and was talking to a man beside the car.

  I had never met the man before. He had taken his hat off and was totally bald with a thick, bull neck that seemed to sprout into his face. His nose was squashed flat, like he’d been punched many times in a fight, and his mouth turned down at the edges in a permanent frown.

  “What is going on?” I asked. “Move your car!”

  “Young lady.” The man put up a hand to silence me. “If you could go away and give us a moment, please? I need to talk alone with your brother.”

  “No!” I said.

  The man was taken aback. “It will just be a moment, it is very important.”

  I scowled at him. “Who are you anyway? Were you waiting here for us? I nearly hurt my horse because of you and …”

  “Loretta!” Carlo silenced me. Then in a softer voice he said. “It’s OK, kid. Take the horses and walk them for a bit so that they cool down. This won’t take long.”

  Reluctantly I did as Carlo asked, taking both horses and walking them in long loops up and down the hill road, all the while keeping an eye on my brother and the strange bald man.

  The man was doing most of the talking. He was gesturing vigorously, his hands opened out warmly to Carlo. My brother didn’t say anything. His face was a mask. He stood and listened for ages. Then, at last, he spoke and whatever he said turned the man’s face puce with anger. The man’s gestures became furious. He was punching at the air right in front of Carlo. Carlo didn’t flinch as the fists came inches in front of his face. He shook his head and then he turned and walked away.

&n
bsp; “You are making a mistake!” the man yelled after him. “You will be sorry for this!”

  “Come on, Loretta,” my brother said, taking back Serafina’s reins and mounting up. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “What was all that about?” I looked over my shoulder at the man who was stomping back to his car.

  “He is the Prior from the Contrada of the Istrice,” Carlo said. “He came here today to bribe me.”

  “He wanted you to swap teams and ride for him?” I asked.

  “No.” Carlo curled his lip in disgust. “Worse. He wanted me to cheat, to lose on purpose and throw the race. He offered me a lot of money. And when I said no, he threatened to have his rider break my legs in the race.”

  I was horrified. “Carlo! We must tell the police!”

  My brother laughed. “Loretta,” he said. “This is the Palio. Bribery and threats are part of the game. Do you not think the police officer will have a favourite contrada that he too wants to win?”

  “But I don’t want anyone to break your legs!” I said.

  “No one is going to get anywhere near me, so how can they break my legs?” Carlo said. “Don’t worry, Loretta. This is the usual pre-race stuff. A load of nonsense if you ask me! Why do people get so worked up about a horse race?”

  There was the roar of a car engine and our horses both spooked a little as the black car skidded close by us, and the Prior of the Istrice contrada drove at breakneck speed back down the hill.

  “The people of the Porcupine are taking things too far this time,” I said.

  “Loretta, the people of our own contrada are no different,” Carlo said. “Right now they will be scheming and doing deals too. Every contrada is the same. To the contradas, the Palio is everything. It is more important than life and it is worth dying for. If our own Prior even saw me speaking to that man right now there would be fighting in the streets. That is why you must not tell anyone, Loretta. All this hatred between our contradas – what is it for? We should be one people, united. Instead we squabble and shout taunts at each other like children. We tell the people of the Scallop Shell that they stink of fish, the people of the Eagle that they are yellow cowards and the people of the Porcupine we belittle as fools …” Carlo sighed. “The Palio makes people crazy. When I ride out onto the piazza I must deal with cheats and thugs who try to stop me crossing that finish line. And then, once I am across and I have won the race it is even worse! The crowds surge upon us. The first time it happened I felt like screaming at them to leave us alone. My poor horse! She had just run the race of her life and her reward was to be crushed and terrified by a frenzied mob!”

  “If you don’t like the Palio,” I said with genuine confusion, “then why do you ride in it?”

  “Because it is not all like that,” Carlo said. “When I line up behind the rope and I wrap my legs tight around Serafina I can feel her heart pounding and I whisper in her ear and she tunes in to my voice instead of the roar of the crowd, then my horse and I are truly one. It is the best feeling in the world to ride a great horse in a race like that, Loretta. I hope you will get to feel it too, someday. But do not think for a moment I do it for fame or for glory or even for our contrada. I do it for the horses. Because I love them.”

  We were all so proud of Carlo for being chosen as fantino for a third time. Mama and I decided to surprise him.

  Piccolina, you have seen the mural of the tree on the stairs and the one of the peacock on my wall. What you haven’t yet seen is that there is a third mural, in Carlo’s bedroom. It was painted as a gift for him by Mama.

  I watched her create this picture, stunned in my admiration of her artistry as she began with an outline in pencil and then worked back over it in oil paints, blending shades of charcoal and silver to capture perfectly the texture of the fur, the steel grey eyes and the curl of the lip above the white fangs, until at last she was finished. Ten times life-size, so large that it covered Carlo’s entire wall, she had painted the head of a she-wolf, the Lupa.

  Once that was done we set about decorating the whole house in the colours of the contrada – orange and black and white. I even made a costume for our dog, Ludo. It was a black-and-white chequered coat, which I buttoned up along his belly and chest, tying a big orange frill around his neck. The idea was that he was supposed to be a wolf, but Ludo wouldn’t cooperate. He kept rolling about and chewing at his outfit trying to get it off. I suppose he must have been hot because he was a shaggy creature. I don’t know what breed he was or if he was even a breed at all, probably just a street mutt. He was a dirty-brown colour with floppy ears and this tail, which looked ridiculous because it was too long for his body and it always stuck straight out like a stick.

  Mama had prepared a special dinner, but just before Carlo was due to arrive home from the stables she realised we did not have any bread. “Run quickly into town will you, Loretta?” she said. “Grab two loaves for us.”

  You know the path, Piccolina, for it is the same way I sent you today. Nothing changes in Siena.

  I ran the whole way down the avenue of trees and through the Porta Ovile and into the piazza. The usual stalls were set up there in the sunshine, but that day something was different. Standing around the square in small clusters were groups of men – soldiers dressed in black and carrying guns.

  “The Blackshirts are all over town,” I told my mama when I returned with the bread. “They were running around and yelling with excitement and calling out Duce! Duce! One of them told me I was a good Italian girl getting the bread for my family and he ruffled my hair until it stuck up on end. I think they were drunk!”

  “Loretta!” Mama told me off. “You must never speak like that of the Blackshirts. They are the soldiers, the men of Il Duce, our great leader.”

  “Well I don’t care – I don’t like them,” I replied. “Nobody gets to touch my hair and talk to me like I am a child because I am almost twelve.”

  Carlo loved his mural. And the dinner was delicious. I had helped Mama to cook the meal – stuffed zucchini flowers, and pasta with clams. There was a block of the best chocolate for dessert. I remember it now as one of the happiest nights of my life, when my whole family was still together and we were united and ready for the great battle that was to come very soon, in August, when Carlo would become the hero of our people and win the Palio for a third time. I didn’t give another thought to the Blackshirts in the piazza that day. Even if I had, I could never have suspected what was to come.

  For over four hundred years, the Palio had been held in the piazza. It had never occurred to anyone that the race would not be run, for nothing in living memory had ever stopped the Palio before. What I didn’t realise that day, the first of June, 1940, was that Italy had declared war. The Palio was cancelled and the events that were to follow would change my life for ever.

  Nonna stopped her story and took a sip from her cup.

  “This is very good coffee you have made, Piccolina,” she said. “I feel much better now.”

  “Did they really cancel the Palio?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Nonna said. “It would have been impossible to run it once war was declared. The whole of Italy was now devoted to the fight and already we felt the pinch of rationing as food became scarce. After a while we found ourselves with barely enough to eat. Bread and pasta were a luxury. Mostly we survived on the vegetables in our garden and the eggs our hens laid. The only meat we had was whatever Carlo managed to hunt in the woods.

  Ludo would go with him on his hunting trips and fetch whatever he shot. The poor dog was so thin you could see his ribs sticking out through his shaggy fur. The horses were getting thin too. There was little grass to graze in summer in Siena and so we relied on grain and hay, which we used to buy in. But the war made the prices so crazy we could not afford it any more. We had only enough left in the barn for a few months before we would run out completely. Before Papa went away, he told me what to do when things reached their worst …”

  “Your father
went away?” I said.

  “He had to,” Nonna said. “Once Italy declared war, Il Duce commanded that all men should join the army. My father was given a uniform and conscripted to the army in Yugoslavia. Mama, Carlo and I went to the station to say goodbye. I had embroidered Papa a handkerchief with his initials and when I presented it to him, he looked enormously sad. I thought maybe he didn’t like it, but then I saw that his eyes were welling with tears at saying goodbye to us all. He hugged me tight, and of course by then I was crying too and he wiped away my tears and spoke to me about the horses. ‘Look after them, Loretta, for they are the innocents in this and yet they are going to suffer if the war goes on much longer,’ he said. ‘There will be barely any feed left so ration it carefully and make sure that the mares and foals get the lion’s share of anything so they do not grow weak and starve.’

  “I told him of course I would care for them. I couldn’t bear the idea that our horses would go hungry and I thought if it came to it, I would rather starve myself than watch a mare unable to feed her foal.”

  Nonna smiled. “My father was clever. He knew how much I loved the horses and I think on the station platform that day he stopped my tears by giving me a job to do, something to think about apart from my own fears. I never heard what he said to Carlo, but I remember that was the only time I saw my brother cry. His cheeks were wet with tears as he saluted my father as he got on the train and Mama threw her arms around Papa while he was in the carriage, hugging him through the window until the train pulled away from the platform …” Nonna wiped her eyes. “Anyway, that is enough talk of war for one day. It was a long time ago, Lola. We should think of today. I have a special mission for you if you are brave enough. I want you to go back to the red-brick building by the fountain in the Via di Vallerozzi. I want you to take the Prior a letter from me.”

  Nonna went over to the sideboard in the corner of the kitchen and pulled out a block of writing paper. The pages were creamy and thick and stamped with the crest of the Lupa, a wolf’s head against two crossed swords. I watched her handwriting like the tendrils of a vine growing across the page. She was writing in Italian. She finished with her signature and then she folded the paper sharply in three so that it would fit neatly into the envelope and handed it to me.