She happily seized the bottle, opened it and took a decent mouthful. It was very satisfying. “You know, last night, when I camped out,” she said, taking another swig, “I had no idea that man was going to sneak up on me like that. It may have been because I was nervous, or because I was tired, but I didn’t think I could ever be caught by surprise.”
Her head was starting to feel heavy, her hands growing increasingly numb.
She felt suddenly sleepy and had the impression she was seeing everything out of focus.
Finally, she felt herself growing weaker, ever weaker.
The charcoal burner smiled and after a few moments said, “Actually, I had a feeling you’d be back this way.”
“Why?” Jole said, her voice little more than a whisper now.
“Because I was waiting for you.”
And after these words he drank more grappa, while Jole fell into a deep sleep.
8
WHEN JOLE CAME TO, she had a splitting headache.
Her sight still seemed a little out of focus and her limbs were still slightly numb. She was inside a little cave dug out of the soft damp earth, fully clothed but bound hand and foot and gagged.
She discerned a very strong smell of smoke and burning, but could not work out where it was coming from.
She realized that evening and even night had passed, since the sun’s beams licking the edges of the entrance to this cave had the colour and angle of dawn light.
The first thing she saw beside her was what was left of the roebuck gutted and dismembered the day before, with its stench of wild carrion and congealed blood.
She was alone and isolated, far from the rest of the world.
She did not think the huge man with kindly eyes who had rescued her could have been responsible for reducing her to this state. No, that was impossible.
But then, having by now completely regained her five senses, she realized that the gag constricting her mouth was that same smoke-blackened handkerchief the charcoal burner had used to wipe the sweat from his brow as he worked. Then she remembered that damned fruit juice he had given her. God alone knew what he had put in it. Where is he now? she wondered.
She felt herself swoon with the pain, the discomfort and, last but not least, the terror.
Why had he done this to her? If he had wanted her copper and silver he could have robbed her and left it at that. What was the point of tying her up like a young goat and shutting her in here?
Jole despaired, but was unable to cry out her anguish.
She felt like a tree in the middle of a burning forest.
She felt like that roebuck beside her, like its remains, its dismembered flesh.
At that moment, she realized that she, too, had now fallen prey to the same fierce predator.
And after struggling for a few minutes, trying in vain to loosen the ropes that bound her wrists and ankles, she stopped moving and sank into a mood of total dejection. Where is he now? she wondered again.
In these last few days, she thought, there was one thing she had learnt, a simple but undeniable truth: that in life you should never trust anyone. And she thought about her mother, her brother and sister, who would never know what had happened to her, any more than they knew what had happened to her father. She had done nothing to deserve to die in this way, she thought, but above all, her family did not deserve this either.
They did not deserve a future like the one that awaited them, without a father and without the first-born, who had died God alone knew how, God alone knew when, God alone knew where or why. She felt guilty, because if she did not return they would continue to suffer the pains of hunger and poverty, which had decided to punish the De Boers for ever, poor damned victims of a vile, ungrateful fate.
She hoped one last time that the charcoal burner was not intending to run away and leave her to die of starvation in this hellish place, perhaps in the expectation that the wolves would come and eat her. Where is he now? she kept asking herself without getting an answer to the most disturbing question of her life.
9
AS TIME PASSED, as the rays of the sun became bolder and less oblique, as the fetid odour of the carcass she had beside her rose into her nostrils together with the persistent smell of mould and damp that pervaded this place, as her strength ebbed from her, as her spirit faded and evaporated like dew in the May sun, Jole felt ever more lost.
She abandoned all hope.
He’s robbed me of everything and abandoned me here, that much is sure.
10
ALL AT ONCE, the charcoal burner came back into the cave. She heard him muttering something incomprehensible and tried to turn towards him without, however, succeeding.
The man approached her with a torch in his hand and stopped a pace or two from her. His shadow was projected on the walls of the cave, turning his figure into that of a fearsome monster.
“Did you think I’d abandoned you?” he said, with a nasty laugh.
His voice was different from usual. It seemed to come from beyond the grave.
Jole felt herself die.
“Now I feel like enjoying myself, are you ready?” And he immediately turned serious. “I saw you yesterday morning, you know, at the stream, before that bastard arrived. I got a good look at you, I watched you as you washed, as you touched that body made by the angels…”
He reached out a brawny arm to her and in one move turned her around.
From this new position, Jole had a good view of the entrance to the cave and the light of the sun that was setting on the world, the same old world, a world that never changes from one day to the next. A world where only nature has respect for itself, even when it is cruel. A world where only the earth and the woods and the birds and the rocks and all the animals know the true sense of the sacred and preserve its fire for all eternity.
She could see the charcoal burner’s big shovel propped against the wall of the cave, and the trees of the forest that seemed to be calling her back to them, laying claim to a kind of sincere fraternity.
The man bent over her, grunting and panting like a boar rooting about for food.
Suddenly a noise could be heard from outside.
A rustle of leaves and a muted neighing.
The man turned abruptly, pricking up his ears.
Samson, hobbled next to the other horse, could be heard whinnying briefly, as if alarmed by something.
The man leapt to his feet, cursing.
“I’ll be right back,” he said with a strange evil gleam in his eyes. “There’s no rush, given that we’re forced to be alone here for several days.”
11
LEFT ALONE and bound in the dirt, Jole emitted a moan. Her mind started to wander.
The image of a dying Christ which she had seen as a little girl in the old Cluniac monastery of Campese came into her head. She had gone there with her grandmother Rosa to beg for mercy for her grandfather, who was being taken from them for ever by a terrible cough.
She recalled now the unease she had felt on looking at that figure. She was barely seven and had felt guilty about the pain that man had suffered in order to save all men, of all times and all races.
“But did he manage to save them all in the end?” she had asked her grandmother.
“Yes,” the old woman had replied, holding the rosary in her hands.
A few months later, her grandfather had died anyway, and a year after that her grandmother had died, too, and Jole had never again gone back to that monastery at the entrance to the Brenta Valley.
Twelve years on, she felt like that Christ, with all the weight of the world on his back and all the pain but also all of men’s resentment and anger and hatred transmuted into thorns and piercing his body.
She felt like that Christ.
12
THE CHARCOAL BURNER came back inside.
She had no idea how much time had passed. Her clear head and powers of reasoning had blurred until they were lost in a tangled forest of confused and unclear t
houghts.
Have a few seconds passed? Have whole minutes passed? Half an hour? An hour? A day?
“It was nothing,” the man said softly, as if to himself.
He advanced towards her where she lay defenceless on the ground, in exactly the same position in which he had left her.
He lifted her by her hair, and a strand came loose and fell to the ground, coming to rest on the tawny coat of what remained of the gutted roebuck.
He tore the handkerchief from her mouth and flung it away.
“Go on, scream, nobody’s going to hear you!”
Jole said nothing. It was as if the man had managed to steal her voice, too, as well as her body and her soul.
“I told you to scream!” he cried. But still she remained silent and her eyes closed again in order to see the darkness, in order not to see anything, like when as a little girl she had played hide-and-seek with her sister and closed her eyes in order not to be seen, always ending up letting Antonia win. Now, too, like a conditioned reflex, she played that game, knowing that she would lose everything.
The man slapped her, then again with the back of his hand. Loud slaps that echoed against the damp walls.
Then he looked at the rotting roebuck and exclaimed, “That damned stench!”
Still holding Jole by her long blonde hair, he dragged her outside, taking the shovel with him, too.
How long will it last? A few seconds? Whole minutes? Half an hour? An hour? A day?
He pulled her to within a few paces of the charcoal pile, where he flung the shovel down and threw her to the ground, face down. Then he grabbed a bottle of grappa and took a sizeable swig.
At that moment, he heard a strange noise behind him. He stopped and looked around.
“There’s something not right here.” He again grabbed Jole and took her back inside the cave.
The following afternoon, he returned. He again grabbed her by the hair and took her back out to the jal, the clearing where he had built his charcoal pile. There were no clouds, no birds in flight. Even though his breath already stank of grappa, he continued drinking. He looked around with a mocking sneer.
“How do you like my pile?” he asked her, his eyes steeped in madness.
She managed to turn her face just enough to keep breathing, even though what entered her nostrils was the dust of the clearing and the ash that emerged from the charcoal pile and settled on the ground, covering it in grey snow. She had the taste of blood on her lips and inside her mouth.
To her right, not far away, she glimpsed the two horses, hers and the black one, both tied.
Samson was nervous and very restless. Harnessed as always, with all her things on it.
He kept moving, biting the rope that tied him tightly to a birch and kicking without any hope of freeing himself. Jole was confused, her vision faltering, yet it seemed to her that against the trunk of the pine behind the two horses, where all three rifles—the charcoal burner’s, Mos’s and hers—had been propped the previous evening, there were now only two. Her blurred eyes recognized Mos’s and the charcoal burner’s, but not hers. Not her St Paul.
“Listen to me when I speak to you!” the charcoal burner cried, bringing Jole’s mind back to that hell. He drank some more and then, apparently calmer, said, “So, how do you like it? Look how beautiful it is. You need love to make them like that, you know? You need passion, like in all things.”
She did not emit a single word, but she could feel tears gushing from her eyes, streaking her face and mixing with the blood and the dust and the ash.
I think I’m dead.
He bent over her and with two abrupt gestures filled with brute force tore off first her trousers, then her shirt, and flung them a short distance.
He took her by the abdomen, lifted her and made her kneel.
I believe I’m dead.
“Let me feel…” he said, touching her breasts from behind with a smoke-blackened hand, while with his other hand he pulled his trousers down to his ankles.
Then he stopped groping her and slid the same hand between her legs.
I hope I’m dead.
“Here I am!” the charcoal burner said, beginning to bend clumsily over her back.
13
“STOP OR I SHOOT, devil’s spawn!”
On his knees, the charcoal burner froze.
What he heard from behind his back was an unknown voice, rough and filled with hatred.
“Get up and turn around!” the voice cried harshly.
“Jole!” it next cried.
It can’t be.
14
THE CHARCOAL BURNER tried to get to his feet with his hands up, but drunk and heavy as he was he fell to the ground, landing on his back.
“Jole, it’s me!” the man with the rifle cried.
I must be dead, Jole thought.
It only took a few seconds.
Keeping the rifle trained on the charcoal burner, the man took a few steps forward, dragging one leg. He approached the giant lying on his back on the ground and the almost lifeless girl.
When he saw the stranger in front of him, the charcoal burner closed his eyes.
The man with the rifle spat in his black and ruddy face with all the contempt that might have been lurking in his heart, then hit him hard several times with the butt of the rifle, both in the face and in the genitals.
“Take that, you bastard!” he cried, hitting him high and low.
It can’t be.
“You whore’s son!” And he kicked him in the ribs.
“May Satan carry you away!” Another blow in the face.
It can’t be him.
After a few minutes, he pulled up the rifle and ran as best he could to Jole.
“Papà!”
“Jole!” he said, throwing himself desperately on his daughter.
“Pà…” She could barely manage a sigh, her voice almost gone.
The charcoal burner was lying on the ground, his face like an enormous tomato that has fallen from a cliff, his mouth bubbling with red foam and deathlike sounds.
Augusto De Boer pulled a knife from his waist and cut the ropes binding her wrists and ankles, then took off his fustian jacket and was wrapping it around her chest when the charcoal burner, who had in the meantime somehow managed to get to his feet, landed him a blow on the back with the shovel.
Augusto fell to the ground, stunned, and instantaneously his daughter once again saw the charcoal burner looming over her.
Dandelion Flower is my battle cry, she thought.
Still lying on the ground, she found within herself a strength she did not know she had.
She quickly reached out a hand, grabbed the rifle, aimed it at his head and pressed the trigger.
She fired as if there in front of her was not only that monstrous tormentor, but all the tormentors in the world, all the most repulsive men on the face of the earth, but also all the cruelties of life, her and her family’s misfortunes, the injustices to which they had always been subjected, the oppression, the suffering, the days of hunger and pain and toil and humiliation.
She fired at all that, thinking she could wipe out everything with a rifle shot.
The reverberation was massive.
From the surrounding forest myriads of birds rose in flight, startled by that sudden, terrifying roar.
The echo of the shot spread through the valleys and bounced off the walls of the Vette Feltrine and returned to the clearing as a chilling vibration.
A secret tremor passed through Jole’s blood, a mixture of pain and revenge. It was as if she had freed herself from anguish. While the sound of the rifle shot echoed in her head, seemingly unwilling to leave her ears, dark, blurred images of her childhood came into her mind, like when she had first heard the big bells of the church in Asiago ringing for the dead or when she had heard women singing at her grandmother’s funeral.
In both situations, she had been forced to cover her ears so as not to hear a sound that evoked grief.
The whole of the adventure she had lived through in the last few days passed in front of her and she felt faint. But she forced herself to remain alert, because her eyes wanted to see everything so that she could carry it within her.
She lay still, looking up at that huge man. There was an opening in his head, but for a moment he still stood there, not moving.
Damn.
She fired straight at his head.
She hit him in the face.
I’ve killed him.
The charcoal burner fell to the ground.
I’ve killed him. For ever.
15
AUGUS TO AND HIS DAUGHTER sat in silence by the fire, half an hour’s walk from the place where they had found each other again after years of separation. They were in a daze, like two mountain men who have escaped a devastating landslide. To shield herself from the cold, Jole had wrapped herself in a blue blanket that had belonged to her victim.
It was late in the afternoon of the same day, the day on which Jole had been reunited with her father and killed a man. The day on which she had turned from a victim into a murderer.
After shooting the charcoal burner, Jole had gone to tend to her father. She had approached him with awe and reverence, incredulous at seeing him there in front of her. She had stood motionless for a moment or two, contemplating those features she knew so well, features she had thought she would never see again. Then, as if waking from a dream, she had felt his pulse, touched his brow, checked that he was breathing. Luckily, he had only fainted. After a few minutes, he had opened his eyes and sat up.
“We’re safe,” he had said, when he had got to his feet and seen the charcoal burner’s body. He had immediately embraced his daughter.
They had agreed that the best thing to do was to abandon that place in haste, but that first of all they would have to hide or get rid of the charcoal burner’s body. Jole had suggested leaving it in the cave where she had been confined, but her father had decided to shove it into the lighted charcoal pile, letting it disintegrate for ever in the man’s own creation. And they had done so: they had made a big enough gap in the surface of the pile to get at least part of the corpse through and then pushed him inside with what little strength remained to them.
Soul of the Border Page 12
