He was short and tiny, with bulging eyes that looked as if they were trying to leave their sockets. He had a sharp nose and was affected with acute scoliosis, which over time had curved and hunched his back until he looked like a Saxon wood troll. He never spoke, perhaps because he had nothing more to say.
For twelve years he had been working alternately in the Val Canali mine and the Canalet mine, scraping off copper and silver, swallowing a little every week and hiding it at home, running the risk of being hanged in the square named after the emperor.
He lived with another man, a miner who shared his life of poverty and also his secret. They resided in a log cabin just outside Imer, a few minutes’ walk from the wooden crucifix that had recently been put up near the orsara above the town.
There was almost nothing in their cabin, and yet they had managed to set up and equip a little clandestine cast-iron smelting furnace, in which they cast and then solidified all the granules, fragments, powder and chips of silver and copper recovered from their faeces.
On behalf of De Menech, whom he had met years before at the Black Bear Inn, Näckler ate and shat copper, ate and shat silver, but had no real idea of their true market value.
Which was why De Menech regularly paid him back in prostitutes, as well as food and, every now and again, his much-coveted tobacco: as much tobacco as Näckler could smoke, chew and take as snuff for a whole year.
17
THE MINING DISTRICT of Primiero consisted of ten areas of excavation, all of considerable importance, and in addition to these mines there were others that were of lesser value but still quite productive. The richest in metals were definitely those of Val Canali, at the foot of Castel Pietra, from which copper was extracted, and Canalet, near Siror, from which abundant quantities of silver were obtained.
Apart from the most precious metals, siderite, barytes, galena and chalcopyrite were also present in all the mines. Overall, there were about a hundred tunnels, almost all of them fully operational, giving work to almost seven hundred people, men and boys. They all relied on a foundry situated in a nearby town called Forno, where a large furnace and several small forges worked the metals extracted in the area.
The workers employed in the mines of the Primiero Valley, like all miners throughout the world, were the very image of damned souls, expelled from hell and exiled on earth, without hope.
They were physically small and hunchbacked, their faces scorched from the constant explosions set off to make openings in the tunnels in search of new seams, with the dishevelled hair and dazed eyes of those who cannot tell if they are still alive or already dead.
Jole had never seen them at work, she had never been in a mine, but her father Augusto had. Once, standing with De Menech just outside one of the tunnels of the Colsanto mine, a few kilometres from Imer, he had seen these men condemned to work twenty hours a day in the innards of the world, the belly of the earth. Men hidden from life. Forced to lead an existence deprived of air, light, sky, stars. More like demons than human beings.
Augusto had seen dozens of them emerge from that hole that seemed to be ejecting them, spitting them out, spewing them from the depths. He had seen them move slowly and silently like ghosts and had thought about those poor unfortunates who, in an attempt to survive, tried to scrape a little metal from the bowels of the earth and take it into their own bowels.
And he had immediately felt Christian compassion. They were his brothers, men who, like him, were forced by hunger and suffering to do things they would never have done with a little more bread on the table: to deceive the customs men, the laws, the powerful, the king.
These miners had no hope, no future, not even a present.
Some of them, though, had managed one way or another to join the black market in copper, silver, iron, pyrite and lead.
18
NÄCKLER MANAGED to hide a reasonable quantity of metals every year, and when Jole De Boer arrived in the area in the autumn of 1896, De Menech knew that he would be able to satisfy the girl’s requests. Indeed, Näckler had only just put several kilos of copper and silver away in a safe place.
As far as he was concerned, everything that resulted from his business with De Menech was going well. All he needed was a little amusement for his mouth, his throat and his penis.
Especially the latter, given that finding a woman willing to go to bed with him was practically impossible.
19
SWIPING A HANDFUL of walnuts from a large bowl on the counter, Jole quickly left the Black Bear Inn, and without wasting any more time walked back up Pichler Strasse. There was a large moon in the sky, lighting up the walls of the houses, the surrounding woods and, at the far end of the valley, the wonderful Mount Cimone.
She walked confidently back to the main square and from there moved away from the town, climbing back up to the forest where she had left her things.
When he saw her, Samson whinnied with joy.
“Shh!” she said, raising her right index finger to her mouth and stroking him. “Here!” And she fed him the walnuts, duly shelled.
It was cold and damp, and the forest was full of bracken and broad leaves of meadow dock, which she called lavàz and which her grandmother had used to wrap fresh ricotta.
Everywhere there was a mild, delicate scent of crocuses, lichen and juniper berries.
A strange sudden gust of wind, apparently innocuous, rustled the foliage of the forest, announcing that the weather would soon change.
She took off her hat and removed the string that had fastened it, then, aided by the moonlight, recovered her blankets and rifle from the hole and lay down next to Samson, preparing to sleep propped up on the south side of a silver fir’s thick trunk.
“Not much longer now,” she said to Samson, and closed her eyes. There were a thousand thoughts in her head, swinging back and forth between feelings of nostalgia and a sense of foreboding. “If all goes well, we’ll be going home tomorrow, which is All Saints’.”
This was the night when the dead were worshipped, at least in the traditions of her mountains. She shuddered and recited a Requiem Æternam for her dear departed and a special one for her father.
A few hours later, when she had already been sleeping for a while, she was woken by some very strange noises. She thought at first it was a dream and turned immediately onto her other side, but after a few minutes she realized that this lugubrious dirge, this incomprehensible vocalise that sounded like a collective prayer, but a prayer such as she had never heard, was no dream, not even a nightmare. She sat up, then immediately got to her feet and grabbed her rifle.
The voices came from some way behind her. She turned and looked past the silver fir against which she had been sleeping, and there, beyond the forest, she glimpsed a light, a kind of orange lantern, then another, and finally a series of such lights, all identical, advancing in single file accompanied by a grim, chilling chorus, like the voices of evil spirits, of witches. So fearful was this chanting that Jole felt her blood freeze in her veins.
Clutching St Paul for comfort, ready to fire, she stayed hidden behind the tree, with the awful feeling the procession was coming her way—or at least that was the impression she had.
She tried to get a better look, while the dirge echoed ever more loudly through the forest, coming ever more relentlessly towards her.
Now they were within a hundred metres of her, and thanks to the lights of their lanterns she was able to see them more clearly.
She was terrified, her heart in her throat.
The group comprised both men and women, and thanks to what they were holding in their hands she managed to make out their faces. At this point she realized that those lighted objects were not lanterns, but hollowed-out pumpkins in which they had put torches.
Suddenly a long-eared owl rose from a branch above her head and flew towards the procession. Then Jole saw another, soon joined by an owlet and a barn owl.
All these birds had flown straight for the group of men and wome
n, who now stopped and arranged themselves in a circle, ceasing their terrifying chorus and beginning to emit distressing, guttural sounds.
They lit a fire inside the circle and started dancing and shouting, although it was not clear whether their cries were of excitement or of suffering.
Once, as a little girl, she had met a woman in the woods near Stoner. This woman, who was gathering medicinal herbs, was tiny and almost toothless, and without Jole having said anything to her, she had talked to her of the witches’ sabbath, and had also said that you had to be careful not to meet the eyes of certain people on the night of 31 October. Then she had vanished, just as time would later erase her from Jole’s memory.
Now, though, at this instant of terror, the woman came back into her mind, as bright and timely as an object long lost and recovered at the right moment.
With all the fortitude she could find within her heart, Jole begged Samson not to make any noise. She remained frozen behind her tree with the rifle in her hand.
For two hours, she stood and listened to all the disturbing cries emerging from the mouths of those possessed beings.
Then at last it all ended, the people went away and peace was restored to the forest.
Never in her life had she heard or seen anything like it.
20
ON LEAVING the Black Bear Inn, De Menech calmly returned home, stayed there a good half hour making calculations then took his white donkey from the stable and slowly rode out of the town in the direction of Näckler’s cabin. He found him busy cutting into an orange pumpkin, as if trying to carve out two eyes, a nose and a mouth. Stopping between incisions to see how his strange task was coming along, he would knock back generous swigs of home-made pine grappa, while an emaciated, bristly-haired, flea-ridden cat miaowed insistently behind a chair stuffed with straw.
“What would you say to a bit of tobacco, you old bastard?” De Menech asked him from the door.
Näckler grinned in a devilish fashion, then turned and exhibited a smile as eloquent as it was monstrous.
De Menech entered the cabin and closed the door behind him with the heavy, rusty chain that hung on the wall.
He sat down and accepted a little grappa.
He took a swig straight from the bottle and wiped his mouth with his fustian shirtsleeve.
“Give me eight pieces of copper and four of silver, and tomorrow I’ll bring you twenty kilos of the best tobacco!”
Näckler gave that devilish grin again and hissed something that resembled “Good or bad?”
“Tobacco from the Veneto. You know it well. The best in all Europe. For two years now, it’s been impossible to find even a gram of it around here.”
“Twenty?”
“Twenty. But you have to give me the pieces now, I know you have them.”
The ragged cat miaowed loudly, as if trying to join in their conversation.
Näckler left the cabin, returned ten minutes later with a jute sack on his back and put it down right in front of De Menech.
While waiting, De Menech had grabbed hold of the bottle. Without saying a word, Näckler pointed to it, then immediately went back to work on his pumpkin.
Calmly, De Menech drank, looked smugly at Näckler, belched, then went and picked up the sack, which had been left a few paces from him.
He opened it and counted the pieces: it was the right number.
“Now get out,” Näckler said, stroking the black cat. “I have things to do tonight.”
21
ON THE EVENING of 2nd November 1894, Agnese had gathered her children and led them into her bedroom and over to the image of the Madonna hanging in the corner. Two months had passed since Augusto had left, and he had not returned. He should have been away for just a few days, long enough to effect the usual exchange, but he had not come home.
Agnese had asked Jole, Antonia and Sergio to hold each other by the hand, had taken the rosary she kept hidden in an old yew chest and had begun praying.
“Virgin Mary,” she had said, “let us leave the worship of the dead to the Evil One, and as good Christians let us instead commemorate the departed. Amen.”
“Amen!” her children had responded in unison.
“De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine, exaudi vocem meam…”
“Amen!”
Jole had been bewildered by these words that meant nothing to her. Deep down, even her mother did not understand what they meant but repeated them from memory like the cry of a thrush, because thus it was written and thus it had been transmitted from generation to generation. To Jole, it had seemed as if the image of the Madonna and the room and the trees outside and the whole world were all a kind of waking dream, a heavy, hopeless dream into which she had felt herself sinking, even though her mother’s strength and faith were unshakeable.
“Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis. Requiescant in pace. Amen.”
“Amen!”
Jole had looked down at the floor and noticed a little spider between her shoes. She had wondered what it meant to be such a small animal, what life was like for that tiny creature.
“Have you ever missed anyone?” she had asked it under her breath.
To avoid stepping on it, she had picked it up and taken it outside, while the others continued to pray.
Just outside the front door, she had put it down on the stack of firewood.
“Go,” she had said. “And hope you never have to die.”
22
AFTER WHAT SHE HAD SEEN, Jole was unable to get back to sleep.
In those few hours the weather had changed, and a heavy blanket of damp had fallen like a cloak over the woods and the whole valley. An hour and a half before dawn, she hurried to the secret hiding place with Samson, took out what she had hidden there and loaded it, one thing at a time, on her loyal travelling companion’s powerful back. Then she set off, crossing the forest in the direction of the arranged meeting place, which was less than an hour away.
I can’t wait for this whole thing to be over and done with. Jesus, if you’re there, listen to me! I can’t wait to lie down in the meadow in front of our house and listen to the song of the chaffinches. I can’t wait to drink a bowl of warm milk and watch the clouds drifting over our woods. I can’t wait to close my eyes and not have to open them out of fear. I can’t wait to have a true shelter, a protection, a certainty. I can’t wait to be at home and at peace, to be embraced by my family, to caress my mother. I hope it all goes well, just as it has gone well until now. But the truth is, I’m afraid. I’m so afraid.
She still shuddered at the thought of the witches’ sabbath and wondered what could possibly lead some men and some women to perform rituals like that.
Riding Samson, she lightly touched one of her trouser pockets to make sure her little wooden horse was there. She felt safer, and she prayed to St Martin, whose image she also kept in her pocket, to protect her.
She was the first to reach the shrine of the three wise men, and there she waited for De Menech.
The serene sky of the previous days was a distant memory. The whole of the Primiero Valley, including the surrounding mountains and the ascent leading to the Noana Valley, was covered over with low, enveloping clouds heavy with humidity, bringing Jole’s face out in tiny drops of sweat.
Heaps of white clouds moved rapidly from one side to the other of the surrounding woods, as if bouncing here and there, hiding now one forest, now another, in some kind of Dolomite magic trick.
After a while, as dawn broke, De Menech appeared in the meadow below, gradually emerging from the last fog of the night like the shadow of a ghost, on the back of his white donkey, which was all saddled and harnessed and advancing very slowly, as if there were no tomorrow but only a task to be done in the here and now.
Reaching the shrine, De Menech greeted Jole with an upward jerk of his head.
“Let’s be quick about it!” she immediately said.
“Slow down,” he replied, calmly getting off the donk
ey.
He came and stood in front of Jole, lifted the dark cloak in which he was completely wrapped and took out a small assay balance.
Jole had expected this, it was only right that it should be so.
“The tobacco!” he said.
She dismounted and, still keeping the rifle within easy reach, took out everything, laying every case and pouch on a hemp sheet to avoid their getting any damper than they already were.
Wasting no time, he weighed everything, with quick, practised gestures. It was all so fast that Jole was unable to follow his movements with any precision. But she did not miss the grimace on De Menech’s face when he had finished the weighing, and she did not like that at all.
“It’s not right, is it?” he said tersely.
She could feel the sweat on her hands. “What?”
“My balance says it’s forty kilos in total, not eighty! I’ll give you four kilos of copper and two of silver. That’s only fair.”
“It’s eighty! Weigh it all again!”
“I’m not weighing anything again, I’ll give you what you deserve, girl.”
In a rapid move, she grabbed the rifle, aimed it at De Menech and cocked it. “If you don’t give me the kilos we agreed, I’ll be the one to give you what you deserve!”
De Menech stood there frozen. He had not expected anything like this. With the barrel of St Paul aimed at his forehead, all he could say was, “All right, it’s eighty. But put down the rifle, girl.”
Soul of the Border Page 9
