I’ve crossed the border! I’ve crossed the border! she kept repeating in her mind, to give herself strength.
It seemed to her that, over and above her final objective, she had already succeeded in a great enterprise.
She thought about the myth of this border, about its legends, and especially about the fact that when it comes down to it, every border is nothing but an imaginary line invented by a few men to subjugate and mistreat other men…
That was what her father had always told her, and it was what she, too, believed.
What is the meaning of borders when the trees in the woods and the birds and the wolves and all the animals are always the same and know nothing of borderlines? As far I’m concerned, borders are something quite different…
The true borders, so her father had repeated to her during their journey together, are those between the powerful and the poor, between those who enjoy food and power and those who starve and have to break their backs for a fistful of polenta. Yes, those are the only true borders.
And if at that moment someone had asked her to give herself a name in this undertaking of hers, she would definitely have chosen Dandelion.
She rode her horse, thinking that her father and her whole family would be proud of her. Of course, it was not the first time she had done this, but it was the first time she had done it alone, and, as she entered this forest that plummeted down to the valley, she felt as if she had passed an important test.
She felt grown up, she felt she had become a real woman.
“Ya!” she said. “Let’s go!”
12
SHE CONTINUED recalling her first journey, which allowed her to get a better sense of her bearings and almost always choose the right direction in which to go, the correct route that would lead her to her destination.
She well knew that the first part of the descent would be simple, interspersed as it was with larch forests and expanses of firs and watered frequently by medium-sized brooks and streams that were easy to cross.
And so it was. During the first hour of the descent, what she had to deal with, more than the dangers and the wild ruggedness of the landscape, was the tiredness and the sudden onsets of sleep, which by now were starting to gain the upper hand. Samson looked exhausted, too, and even his stride grew uncertain, as if he were ever more reluctant to proceed at the same pace.
But things got noticeably worse when the larch and fir woods were replaced by the terrible inclines and smooth overhanging rocks that characterized the depths of the Noana Valley. This valley was a genuine canyon, carved slowly out of the rock over millions of years by the river of the same name.
All the streams and brooks she had encountered so far along the way now flowed into a single, large stream that descended to the bottom of the canyon with devastating force, with foaming rapids that produced waves as much as a couple of metres high.
It was an extraordinary sight for the eyes, but it was also a stretch of the journey that was so dangerous that it had put even her father’s mettle and cool head to a hard test, almost bringing both him and Hector down.
“Tie his muzzle to that oak!” her father had yelled at her amid the din of the water plunging violently to the floor of the canyon.
Jole had taken the end of the rope and was wrapping it around the animal when a small landslide had caused Hector’s forelegs to slide to the edge of the ravine.
“Damn!” Augusto had cried. “I’m falling!”
In two bounds, he had joined his daughter, torn the rope from her hand and in a moment had tied it around the tree, thus saving both the animal and the load.
“You have to be more careful and more alert!” he had yelled at her.
“Sorry, Papà.”
“Remember, daughter. Earning a living is long, but dying is a moment.” And saying this, he had stroked her head.
Jole returned to the present and tried to concentrate in order to stop herself from sliding. In a few moments, the fear and the adrenaline had swept away all her sleepiness, all the symptoms of fatigue, and she had regained the vitality and the speed of reflex of a squirrel when faced with danger.
Remaining on horseback, she gradually managed to find just the right slope leading down to the stream, which she would then have to follow for a few kilometres, until in its last stretch the valley opened out towards Imer and Mezzano.
It took Jole an immense effort to descend that damned rock face. After a while, she was forced to tie herself and the horse to the trunk of a huge oak at least three or four centuries old. The tree must have been waiting all that time for her to pass this way, she thought, just so that it could help her in this undertaking.
When at last she reached the right bank, held impressively tight within the hellish confines of the canyon, Jole suddenly felt her strength fail her. She sat befuddled on her horse, surrounded by the roar of the current, and looked up at the sky.
The sun was directly above her, and a flock of ravens hovered over her head with all the patience of those who know nothing of the passing of the seasons.
Her mouth was as dry as the bark of a spruce.
When she dismounted, she felt dizzy and her hands and feet suddenly lost all sensation. It seemed to her as if she had an ant’s nest in her hair, and her forehead was beaded with cold sweat. As she tried to sit down, she fell to the ground, exhausted.
13
THEY WERE DINING on polenta, ricotta and cardoons. Agnese was sitting at the head of the table, in her husband’s seat: he had been gone for more than a year. Jole was facing her, at the other end of the table, Antonia and Sergio on either side. Nobody spoke. The skin of their faces and hands was as brown and dry as a roebuck’s horns. It was mid-September, and all four had laboured from dawn to dusk among the tobacco plants, gathering the leaves and putting them to soak and dry.
Agnese cut a slice of polenta with the twine and lifted it to her mouth, her eyes half-closed with tiredness.
“Mamma,” Sergio suddenly said to her, “when is Papà coming back?”
Agnese opened her eyes wide and looked at Jole, then at the polenta, and finally at the crucifix hanging above the door post. The sun’s last rays of the day came in through the window, pale and mild but still warm. The room smelt of mould and burnt firewood and tobacco.
Jole rose from her chair and went to put a log in the stove. Antonia took her plate and shuffled over to the window to look at a sunset that was sadder than usual.
“Papà is dead, isn’t he?” Sergio asked.
“Don’t say such things!” Agnese exclaimed. “Don’t even think them!”
Then she rose, leaving her slice of polenta on her plate along with the cardoon leaves and a small handful of ricotta, and walked to the bedroom. Jole went to her little brother, looked him straight in the eyes and said, “If you love a person, that person is always there. Understand?”
“No,” Sergio said. “I miss Papà so much, Jole.”
Antonia came to them and felt the need to embrace them.
Outside, in the meantime, the sun’s last rays came to rest behind the mountains, giving way to evening and then to deep night.
14
WHEN SHE REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS, her head felt numb and her eyes, still half closed, could not yet make out the outlines of anything.
She seemed to see Samson’s muzzle at close quarters and then had the strange sensation that the skin of her face was both damp and rough. She opened her eyes wide and realized that it was all true: the horse was licking her to revive her.
She wiped her face with her shirtsleeve and pulled herself up with difficulty, first raising her torso, then getting back on her feet. Cawing in a melancholy manner, a dozen ravens rose in flight from the branches of the surrounding lime trees. Samson neighed and laid his muzzle on Jole’s right shoulder, and she stroked it. She felt as if she had slept for days, and she had a terrible headache. She looked up at the sky and noticed that the sun was where she had last seen it: above her head. She must have los
t consciousness for only a few seconds.
She remembered her father. God alone knew when he had died, or where, or why. Even though he wasn’t here, she always felt as if he were by her side, with those silences of his, those looks that were cautionary but also capable of expressing so much warmth. She dismissed the memory.
She relieved Samson of his load, placing it out of reach of the fine spray of water that continued emanating from the waterfall, and when she had finished she slapped the horse on the thigh to urge him into the stream at a point where the current was less strong.
Samson was thus able to free himself of the earth and the mud and the dust and the stale sweat, but also of the dozens of insects forever buzzing around him.
At this time of day and at this point in the canyon, totally sheltered from the wind and beaten fiercely by the sun that glared off the rocks of the two walls, it was very hot even though it was autumn. Jole walked to the river bank, a few metres downstream, where over the centuries the current had created a little cove that ended in a natural granite cadino, a pool of dark-blue water at least a metre deep. She washed her face and then, beginning with her boots, stripped completely, garment by garment, savouring the warmth of the sun on her smooth skin. She took a step forward and with her fingers skimmed the seductive surface of the water in the cadino. The skin all over her body, with the exception of her face and hands, was as bright as a lunar dawn, and the shivers gave her gooseflesh.
She closed her eyes, counted mentally to four, and on the count of five plunged into the water, which felt like recently melted snow.
She immersed herself in it entirely, disappearing into it, without thinking, the breath knocked out of her and her skin covered in goose pimples. Her muscles suddenly reawakened. She came back up and opened her eyes. She felt as if she had been reborn, as if the tiredness and the pain, the bruises and blisters on her feet, every scratch and even every bad thought, every fear, had been swallowed by this miraculous water and dissolved in it for ever.
She stretched her legs. The water came up to her breastbone. She stayed like this for a while, motionless, passing both hands through her wet hair. Then she skimmed her face with her palms, stroked her cheeks and lips and neck. She delicately touched her thighs and backside, and then, moving her hands up, her belly and her breasts. She continued touching herself in that blessed water, and the more aware she was of her woman’s body beneath her hands and fingertips, the better she felt.
She remembered a young man she had seen a few months earlier at the marble quarries down in Sasso. For a moment, she thought he was there in front of her and imagined that the hands with which she was touching herself were actually his. He was handsome, tall, dark. She immediately dismissed the thought from her head.
She came out of the water, shivering as the last birch leaf remaining on a tree in December may shiver, and her wet hair was so long that it hung all the way down to the dimples above her buttocks. She made a dash for her things, took a hemp blanket and wiped herself as best she could. She whistled to Samson, who emerged in his turn from the stream and came up to her.
“You look at least two years younger,” she said to him with a laugh.
She dressed, fanned her hair out on a rock exposed to the sun and waited for it to dry at least a little, then wetted the red kerchief in the stream and wrung it out, put it back around her neck, again loaded Samson from head to foot, put her hat on her head and her rucksack and rifle over her shoulder and set off again.
The last two hours of travelling through the Noana Valley were uneventful.
She was now near the Primiero Valley, from which two great Alpine spurs soared to the east, stretching all the way to the mines of Valtiberina and California.
She reached the gates of Imer at about four, after a journey of two and a half days and about sixty kilometres.
Remaining hidden in the forest, she needed before anything else to get her bearings, to remember the exact point where, three years earlier, she and her father had tied the mule Hector and hidden the entire load of tobacco.
She went down a few impracticable paths used by hunters and came to a crag beneath which was a dark wooden crucifix with a dying Christ looking down sadly at a deep ditch half-hidden by branches, most likely an orsara, one of those bear traps very common in these parts.
Jole did not remember that crucifix, which had probably been put there recently, but she did recall both the crag and the bear trap. She climbed again, in a south-westerly direction, and before long found herself in an impassable, labyrinthine forest. It had come back to her that her father had marked certain trees with his initials.
She dismounted, went back and forth like a mushroom picker and at last found them: three spruce trees positioned like the vertices of an equilateral triangle, each side twenty metres long, with three letters clearly carved in the bark: ADB.
She hobbled Samson to one of the marked trees, went to the middle of the space and began searching through the autumn leaves, the moss, the weeds, the branches that had broken and fallen to the ground. After a few setbacks and hesitations, she finally unearthed what she was looking for: four planks of wood, corroded and eaten by termites.
With an effort she lifted them one at a time, bringing to light a big hole dug in the ground by her father and used as a hiding place for the load.
She smiled. She went back to Samson, gradually untied all the merchandise and hid it in the hole, one piece at a time, down to the last pouch of tobacco. Then she also deposited there everything she had been carrying in her clothes, hidden in pockets and folds and seams, and finally laid the planks back down to close up the hiding place.
It was only now that she noticed the sacred image. She found it by chance as she lifted one of the planks.
It was lying face down among the leaves at the rim of the hole: the image of St Martin that her father always carried with him, now discoloured and half-eaten by time and the dampness of the forest.
She reached out her hands, dirty with humus, took hold of it delicately and lifted it to her chest.
She wept, then plucked up her courage and tried to recover the clear-headedness that had helped her to get this far.
Before he died, she thought, Papà must have come this way one last time.
A series of questions without answers crossed her mind. Had that image been lost by her father accidentally, or had he left it there deliberately in the hope that sooner or later she would find it? What if he had been the victim of an ambush and killed on the spot? And finally, what if it had not been lost by Augusto but by someone else?
It took her only a moment to realize that this hiding place was no longer safe, and so, as the last light of day filtered obliquely through the branches and the first owls began to hoot, she decided to quickly find another.
She took the little shovel she had brought with her and moved breathlessly about a hundred metres further south, where she spotted another three spruces an equal distance one from the other, with a large toadstool in the middle.
Here, she started digging in the undergrowth, which smelt of late raspberries and poisonous mushrooms, until she had excavated a hole that was smaller than the other but large enough to contain everything.
She now went back to the first hole, lifted the planks again and took everything out, including the rifle. Two or three things at a time, she transferred the entire load to the new hiding place. Within less than an hour, she had deposited everything there. Everything except something to eat.
She covered the hole with topsoil, moss, leaves and pine branches and finally went to bring Samson, hobbling him tightly to a holm oak a few paces from her. Last of all, she took out the knife she carried at her waist and walked around the three spruce trees, one at a time. At the base of each trunk she carved the letters JDB.
Then she sat down to eat: three slices of old salami, black bread and a small piece of Morlacco.
She watched as a squirrel approached her then immediately changed its mind and
quickly climbed a black pine.
She drank a very small amount of the water left in one of the two canteens and poured what was left into Samson’s parched mouth.
“I’ll be back soon,” she whispered to him, stroking his muzzle.
As the orange-gold setting sun fragmented in the undergrowth into a thousand beams of bright light, she tied her hair, put her hat on her head, slipped her father’s sacred image in her pocket and at last went down to the town, looking about her with the eyes of a lynx.
15
BEFORE LONG, she entered Imer.
The sun had only just disappeared behind the peaks of the Lagorai, but the landscape was still illumined by its sharp rays, which neatly divided the streets and houses of the town into light and shade, and to the north, on the opposite side, seemed to set the rocks of the Pala range ablaze in a stunning alpenglow.
Jole walked down the alleys of beaten earth and cobbles that led to the centre of the town and stopped in the main square, by a fountain. She washed her hands and face, then filled the canteen she carried tied to one of the belt loops of her knickerbockers. A mongrel came up to her, wagging its tail, stood up on its hind legs and licked her hands, which she had placed on the stone rim of the fountain. She stroked its head until a loud whistle called it away and it immediately abandoned her and ran off into one of the adjoining alleyways.
She looked around suspiciously, even though reason told her not to worry, since with the tobacco and the rifle well hidden in the forest she had nothing to fear. All the same, it was best to keep well clear of customs men and prying eyes.
She saw only four people in the street: an old shepherd walking along with a small flock of sheep and the dogs following on; a young man chopping firewood in the doorway of his house; a woman coming towards the fountain with two big empty buckets; and a drunk leaning against the wall of a building singing out-of-tune songs about the beauty of the mountains and something else she could not catch.
Soul of the Border Page 7
