Soul of the Border

by Matteo Righetto

  Once I’m back home, if I ever do get back, it won’t be easy for me to go on living. How will I be able to tell my family any of this?

  It was in this despondent state that she came to a secluded clearing protected by the south side of Mount Pavione and used as pasture for the flocks of sheep that came back down to the valley bottom at this time of year. She decided to stop for a while before resuming her journey.

  She felt safe here, although not completely. It was mid-afternoon by the time she set up camp. Although her back hurt, there could not have been anything broken because she could move quite well. Samson immediately began to graze placidly on the highest tufts of grass sticking up from the ground.

  She was hungry, but had nothing left to eat, or to drink.

  The usual thoughts were moving about in her mind.

  She took a deep breath but it hurt her: the jolt she had got in falling from her horse had been a strong one.

  She closed her eyes and listened to the total silence that enveloped her.

  I feel like a pine needle in an anthill, like a blade of grass in a prairie, like a small stone in the middle of the scree I just came through on Mount Pavione.

  She opened her eyes again. There in front of her was the mountain, and she looked at it the way her mother looked at the high altar during Easter mass.

  With trepidation, loyalty, fatal attraction, submission, passion and awe.

  The mountain was lit up by the warm early-November sun and to Jole’s eyes it seemed so calm and impassive, and yet so powerful, so treacherous, so formidable.

  As only mountains can be.

  As only some mountains can be.

  4

  WHEN SHE TURNED to the other side she saw in front of her a young woman who had sprung up all of a sudden without making any noise. Caught by surprise, Jole took fright. She tried to get to her feet, with difficulty because of the shooting pains in her back.

  “It’s all right, don’t be afraid!” the unknown woman said. “I’m a shepherdess.”

  She was tall and her face was dirty, as were the rags she wore as clothes.

  A hat made from the fur and tail of a fox covered most of her hair, although a few black strands fell over the back of her neck.

  Behind her, a pair of spotted long-haired dogs appeared, and then a flock consisting of about a hundred Feltrina sheep.

  “My name’s Maddalena,” she said, coming closer to Jole and confidently sitting down next to her. “You’re the first woman I’ve met up here in many months.”

  She had dark, gentle eyes, and the look in them immediately reassured Jole.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Jole De Boer. I come from a village above the Brenta Valley, near the Asiago plateau.”

  “What do you need that rifle for?”

  “Nothing.”

  Maddalena opened the bag she had on her back, took out some fresh cheese, a canteen full of water and some rusks and handed them all to Jole.

  Jole’s eyes opened wide. She thanked her and shyly started eating and drinking, at last able to quench her thirst.

  “What are you doing here?” Maddalena asked her.

  “Running away,” she said, promptly rising again, ready to go on her way.

  “Running away? What from?”

  “From a black man with a black horse… and my nightmares.”

  “When a lamb is lost on the mountains, it bleats loudly. Sometimes a wolf comes, but sometimes its mother comes.”

  Jole looked at her in bewilderment, as if she had not understood her words.

  The shepherdess said nothing else but looked at her with a gleam of compassion in her eyes.

  She gave her more cheese and rusks and embraced her.

  It seemed to Jole that there was something sisterly in that embrace, and she felt a sense of profound comfort, a regenerative warmth in her heart that made her melt in Maddalena’s gentle, affectionate arms.

  The shepherdess picked a dandelion from the ground and delicately placed it between Jole’s hair and right ear.

  “Always remember that you have to be strong,” she said, looking straight into her watery eyes.

  Jole felt a strange sensation, a kind of vibration growing in her chest that gave her strength and dried her tears.

  I’ll call myself Dandelion Flower, she thought suddenly, and Dandelion Flower will be my battle cry!

  She passed the back of her hand over her eyes and sniffed.

  “You know something?” she said to the shepherdess, before setting off. “We’ve only just met, but I feel as if I love you like a sister.”

  “Have a good journey!” Maddalena said with a look of calm confidence.

  “Have a good life!”

  Jole mounted her horse and resumed her homeward journey.

  5

  SHE FOLLOWED THE TRAIL she had been along during the outward journey and, after a few hours, reached the dense wood further down the mountain, cloaked now in the light of sunset.

  Only then did she feel a little safer.

  But I’m sure that bastard is still hunting me. I must be careful.

  All the same, amid this vast expanse of conifers, so dense and compact, a multitude of trees at least twenty metres high, she felt protected, like a child in the safe, warm arms of its own mother. She calmed down and her breathing slowed.

  Coming to a stream, she filled the two canteens, and at last Samson, too, was able to drink.

  She closed her eyes and after a few seconds opened them again, as if turning a page.

  She felt almost as if she had reached safety. She thanked God and the stars, and the sun and the moon, and those majestic trees, and the clouds and the mountainsides and all creatures, since she, too, felt like a creature among many others.

  She looked for and found a meadow in which she could spend the night. She gathered leaves and dry sticks from the undergrowth and with the help of a stone flint lit a small bonfire, fed with bigger and sturdier conifer branches that immediately crackled, scenting the air with fresh resin and dry wood.

  She took from a bag the big piece of strong-smelling, sharp-tasting cheese that Maddalena had given her and ate a good half of it, putting what was left back in the bag.

  Remembering the shepherdess, she took the dandelion flower from her ear and placed it delicately on her chest.

  She lay down on the ground and covered herself with the blankets. Her back hurt, but she told herself that the pain would soon pass.

  She listened to the majestic, disturbing sounds of nature.

  In this life, everything is nothing. Prey and predators, souls that flee and other souls that pursue, souls that die and souls that kill. Everything is nothing, like clouds that form and a moment later are no more.

  She heard the guttural, cavernous belling of the stags, a sound at once fascinating and frightening.

  She heard the howling of wolves to the north.

  She listened to an owl screeching.

  She perceived, around her and in the surrounding meadow, the swarming and chirping of the nocturnal insects that had relieved the diurnal ones, tiny sentinels that have been alternating since the dawn of time, keeping watch over a world tormented by men.

  The sky filled with stars: bright, beautiful and honest.

  She wanted to weep, and she wept.

  And it seemed to her as if even the firmament above her was weeping.

  Then she fell asleep.

  6

  SHE SLEPT DEEPLY that night and woke late the following morning, when the sun was already high and shining in a blue sky cut across by a number of very high clouds that looked like scars. She opened her eyes and heard the gentle, rhythmically repeated sound of a chaffinch. The cries of thrushes and jays, some sweet, some sharp, also echoed through that patch of earth between the wood and the meadow. It was cold and the grass of the meadow was covered in a layer of dew.

  She got laboriously to her feet. The pain had not passed. On the contrary: it was worse than
it had been the previous evening.

  She saw two hares in the middle of the little expanse in front of her.

  They were in an erect position and were looking at each other as if exchanging confidences, perhaps even talking about her.

  She yawned, stretched her arms and legs and ran her hands through her hair. She went to the bank of the stream and washed her face, then stripped quickly in order not to catch cold and washed her chest and legs. Each time she did this, she had the feeling that she was beautiful and seductive, along with the thought that nobody would ever marry her. Who could be interested in her, a poor peasant girl and smuggler?

  She tied her long blonde mane of hair and put on her boots and the poncho she had made for herself by tearing into a blanket.

  She sighed, and was walking slowly towards Samson, thinking of which direction to go in if she wanted to avoid further problems, when all at once she felt herself being hurled violently to the ground, face down. It only took a moment, and in that moment the black-clad man dragged her in silence for a few metres and finally turned her face up, aiming his rifle at her as he got back on his horse.

  Jole brought him into focus. There was a gash on his face where the sharp stone had caught him, as well as streaks of dark blood on his forehead and temples, clotted in places.

  “End of the road!” Mos cried.

  She closed her eyes.

  Nothing mattered any more. She sensed that this time there was no way out.

  She thought about the little wooden horse and the dandelion flower she had in her pocket and cursed the fact that she had to die without being able to touch them and hug them to herself.

  It seemed to her as if the world had suddenly turned purple.

  The man cocked the rifle, and a moment later a loud shot echoed across the sky.

  Dozens of birds rose in flight.

  The shot echoed several times, bouncing between the trunks of the conifers and the walls of the surrounding mountains.

  Jole managed to open her eyes, just enough to allow her to see Mos in front of her, with the rifle lowered, astride his black horse. He seemed to be motionless and in a strange position, as if bent over himself. A second later, she saw him bend even more and then collapse to the ground, stone dead.

  Jole thought she was dreaming. She touched her head and arms and legs. She felt no pain.

  She looked at herself: there was no trace of blood on her body. To her right, she made out a shadowy figure moving on the edge of the wood. She half-closed her eyes to see better: it was a man, and he was holding a smoking rifle still aimed at Mos. It was he who had fired the shot.

  She tried to stand, but her breath failed her. Her nerves were in pieces and she felt an immense gratitude to this stranger, who with one shot from his rifle had killed her tormentor.

  This tall, sturdy man came out of the wood with his rifle over his shoulder and she was able to see his face.

  She was able to see, and recognize, the man who had saved her from certain death.

  That man was Guglielmo, the charcoal burner.

  He did not say anything. He went over to the man in black to make sure he was dead and then loaded him back on the same horse, now riderless, intending to take them both somewhere else.

  “You’re lucky,” he said to her from a distance. “I never usually go this far from my pile to hunt.”

  She could not move a muscle. It was as if she were paralysed. This man must have been sent by God, it seemed to her.

  “I was hunting nearby,” he went on, coming towards her, still holding the reins of the black horse with Mos’s body across the saddle.

  She tried to say something, but all that emerged from her mouth was a weak “I can’t… I can’t…”

  “You’ll have time to thank me,” he said, then, when he was close to her, “Take your horse and your things and follow me. You need a drink to perk you up.”

  Still incredulous and with her own death in her eyes, she summoned up the strength to move.

  7

  BEFORE GETTING TO THE CHARCOAL PILE, Guglielmo threw Mos’s body from a nearby crag, in a place that was inaccessible and impossible to find except by the ravens, which immediately began to fly up into the sky, attracted by the carrion.

  Then he shot a roebuck and loaded it on the black horse where the dead man had been.

  He said not a single word while doing either thing, and Jole did not dare open her mouth.

  A few hours later, when they got to the clearing in the centre of which was the charcoal pile, now well on its way and emitting smoke, Jole dismounted and Guglielmo began to skin and dismember the roebuck. When he had finished, he roasted two big pieces and put the rest away in a little hole that he himself had lately dug behind a promontory in the woods above.

  In the meantime, the clouds that resembled long cuts and scars were swept away by the wind and the sky turned deep blue.

  While Jole was at last eating meat and finally doing so in peace, savouring the taste of being alive and free, Guglielmo did not move from his enormous charcoal pile for a single moment.

  The dome-shaped construction was at least four metres high and so large that it took a minute to go all the way around it. It was dark and covered in clay so tightly pressed that it looked like black mortar.

  The broad layer of dry leaves under the topsoil could only be seen where there were air vents.

  From these vents, dense, light-coloured smoke gradually emerged, heavy and scented with resinous bark, and rose slowly, undisturbed by the wind, protected by the tree trunks in the forests and by the mountains that enveloped the area. Guglielmo was working at the top of a ladder propped against the side of the pile.

  He struck with the shovel, cleared the air vents with a long blackened stick and, when necessary, threw in firewood to bake the charcoal and make it “sing” its shrill song.

  Guglielmo seemed not to sweat, moved no more than he needed to, and each blow he landed with the shovel ended up exactly where it was meant to, once and for all.

  After a while, when he obviously knew that everything was going to be all right, at least for the time being, he came slowly down the ladder with the shovel in his hand, mopped his face and brow with a smoke-blackened handkerchief and knocked back a full swig of grappa.

  Then he came over to Jole, holding the shovel in one hand and the bottle of grappa in the other.

  Guglielmo was pleased to see her eat. He smiled at her. His face was much darker and more smoke-blackened than when she had seen him that first time. The whites of his eyes, veined with numerous red and yellow capillaries, stood out in that black but benevolent face.

  “I don’t know how to thank you,” she said, removing with her teeth a piece of roebuck meat that was stubbornly sticking to the bone.

  “You don’t have to thank me.”

  “Seems like your work is going well,” she said, indicating the big, smoking dome in the middle of the clearing.

  He turned to look at the pile and gave a self-satisfied smile. “Yes, it is!”

  “How much charcoal will you get out of it?”

  “It’s early to say, but I’d say a few quintals, if all goes well.”

  “How do you know when it’s ready?”

  Guglielmo took another swig of grappa. “When the first air vent lets out some nice dark smoke, that means the charcoal is ready. At that point, you need to take the pile down, cover the new charcoal with cold earth and put out the embers with a little water. But there’s time. It’s going to take another eight or ten days.”

  She wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her shirt.

  “Why did that man want to kill you?” he suddenly asked her out of the blue.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think you do.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “I understand,” he said, dropping the subject. Deep down, he did not really care why that man had wanted to kill her, the important thing for him was that she was here now and she was all right. He knoc
ked back the grappa and looked again at his charcoal pile. “And did you find what you were looking for?”

  She snorted, gave a sad grimace, then drank water from the canteen and crossed her legs to be more comfortable, even though her lower back was still hurting her. “To find what I was looking for, I lost everything I believed in.”

  Guglielmo did not understand the meaning of these words, but accepted the answer anyway.

  The sun had started to set, and from the woods the first gentle cries of the nightingales and the last exasperating tapping produced by the great spotted woodpecker both echoed.

  She looked at the forest trees that encircled the clearing like an enclosure and for the first time had the feeling that she was in a kind of natural cage. It was a strange sensation.

  She thought no more about it. Right now, she told herself, her one thought should be of sleeping. She would not move from here until the following day.

  “To find what I was looking for, I lost everything I believed in,” she repeated under her breath.

  From her pockets, she took her little wooden horse and the sacred image of St Martin that had been her father’s. She made sure Guglielmo did not see her do this, partly out of shyness and partly because these objects had a private meaning for her.

  She stroked them surreptitiously, then placed them on the ground behind her back.

  Guglielmo stood up, took the shovel and went and landed a sharp blow on a particular spot on the surface of the charcoal pile. Finally, he went for a few seconds inside the cabin of logs and branches he had built for himself as a night shelter and came back to her with another bottle in his hand, this one filled with a purple liquid.

  “Now the only thing I want is to get home as soon as possible,” Jole said.

  “Of course,” he said, drinking his grappa. “But for now it’s best that you rest, that way you’ll feel fresher when you leave tomorrow.” He held the new bottle out to her, still untouched. “Blueberry and raspberry juice, it’ll do you good.”