Soul of the Border

by Matteo Righetto

  They had little food, but they shared it among everyone. They ate a little bread and barley soup and drank water mixed with raspberry and elderberry spirits.

  While Jole amused herself playing with the two children, Augusto told Tomaso what had happened and how he had been reunited with his daughter, who said goodbye to the two little imps and sat down again at the table next to her father. Her back still hurt, but that was nothing now.

  Then her father asked her to bring him the rucksack and she handed it to him.

  Augusto took out three kilos of silver and put them on the old spruce table. “These are for you, as a mark of gratitude. Without your help, I wouldn’t be here with my daughter.”

  Tomaso’s eyes suddenly opened wide, then closed again. “We can’t accept that!” he replied promptly.

  “You have to. In the name of our friendship.”

  Unaccustomed to receiving gifts, Tomaso bowed his head. Then he stood up and clasped Augusto in an embrace, the universal mark of affection and gratitude.

  After a few moments, Augusto looked at his daughter and said:

  “Now we can go home.”

  19

  THEY TRAVELLED FOR THREE DAYS.

  Three days of exertion and impatience, during which Jole felt changed for ever.

  In those few days away from home many things had happened to her, much more than had ever happened to her before. She was not only exhausted, she had lost weight, she was dirty, made rough and wild by the sun and the night and the wind, and her muscles and nerves were in pieces.

  She was confused in her feelings, but right now the one that prevailed was happiness. She was going home, back to her mother and siblings, and above all she was going back there together with her father, carrying the future in the form of coarse, shapeless bars crammed into her rucksack. And that was a lot.

  They crossed the beech woods and oak woods of Lasen, again tackled the slopes of Mount Pavione, which they greeted as if it were a kind of high altar, penetrated the infinite expanses of conifer forest that led from the Vette Feltrine to up above Fonzaso, keeping themselves always at altitude and at a due distance even from the smallest towns and villages. They hunted for hares and fished for trout.

  They passed lakes, looked at streams, rode through meadows and stretches of yellowed pastures and over hills of broad-leaved trees now stripped of their foliage. They looked down at the town of Arsiè from up above in the woods, then plunged into the mountains on the left-hand side of the Brenta.

  They descended the steep slope that led down the mountainside, heard the whistle of the new locomotive echo through the great valley, crossed their sacred river and climbed the slope on the right-hand side of the Brenta, towards the Asiago plateau, moved along tracks and paths and lanes first opened up by Augusto, and at last came to the first masiere of tobacco.

  Augusto almost always rode in front and Jole would keep ten metres behind. Sometimes, though, they proceeded side by side, and at other times it was Jole who led the way.

  At the end of the third day they reached Nevada.

  Before leaving the dense, thorny wood that had led them to their house, Augusto said to her, “Go, it should be you.” And he let her pass in front of him so that she should arrive first.

  When Jole saw the walls of her abode, she loosened the red kerchief she wore around her neck and burst into tears.

  It seemed to her that she had been away for months, years. And, as far as she was concerned, she really had been.

  They left the horses in the meadow in front of the old farmhouse and walked towards the meléster, the mountain ash, on which only a handful of orange-coloured berries still remained.

  Reaching the tree, they heard the cries of joy of their nearest and dearest, and then saw them run out with open arms.

  Agnese embraced her husband and daughter and knelt to thank God, weeping with joy.

  Antonia and Sergio went crazy with happiness.

  Once they had entered the house, Jole and her father realized that they had a fever. The strains of the journey and the tiredness that remained in their damp, fatigue-cracked bones, bones that had several times seen death and at last again life, had reduced them to a sorry state.

  “Here, Papà,” Jole said, giving him back his rifle. “I don’t ever want to see it again.”

  Augusto took it from her hands and hid it for ever alongside St Peter.

  He, too, wanted nothing more to do with it.

  A few days later, when they had recovered, Augusto hid the silver and copper in safe places, then rearranged the shed for the two new horses and began mending everything that had rather been left to its own devices in the last few years, including the roof of the house, through which rainwater had started to percolate.

  Then he retook possession of the masiere and put order back into many of the things that had been neglected in his absence.

  20

  DURING THE FIRST DAYS after her return, Jole spent much time alone, in silence. She felt a kind of inner darkness. She wanted to understand herself. She would walk through the woods barefoot, as she had done as a little girl, planting the soles of her feet now on the sharp brushwood, now on the soft, spongy moss. Through this direct contact with the earth, she felt as if she were becoming a nymph, she felt at one with the woods. Sometimes she would sit down on a rock and listen with eyes closed to the cries of the blue tits and the long-tailed tits and imagine that she was jumping from branch to branch of the highest spruces, just like those little birds. Then she would dream of opening her arms and flying away, soaring between the earth and the sky. The song of the birds made her feel good, as did contact with the trees. Every now and again she would embrace one, clinging as tightly as she could to its hard bark, taking strength from it. Strength and serenity. Then she would sigh and resume walking, gathering a few late flowers, or a few pine cones. Once she even found an eagle’s feather.

  Five days after her return, with pride and tenderness, she showed Sergio her little wooden horse and told him it had been of great help and comfort to her. That evening, she went to recover the dandelion that the mysterious shepherdess had given her. She had hidden it in the woodshed the day she had returned home, placing it among the logs of Alpine maple. She was convinced she would find it more wilted and faded, perhaps even rotted away. Instead, the flower was much yellower, healthier and more beautiful than when she had left it a few days earlier. It was as if it had been reborn.

  Jole could not believe her eyes. She carefully picked it up and ran into the house. She took the heavy Bible from her parents’ room, opened it and put the flower inside it, placing it delicately between the pages of the Wisdom of Solomon, which was more or less halfway through, and closed the book. Thus pressed, the flower would be preserved in a dry state for ever.

  I’ll make a beautiful charm or pendant out of it! she thought with a smile. My sister will teach me how to coat it in spruce resin, and I’ll create a magnificent pendant!

  21

  AGNESE THANKED GOD for a whole week, praying every hour of every day. After seven days, when she was able to get back to looking after her children, Augusto went down to Bassano del Grappa with a small part of their treasure. Jole asked if she could go with him, but he had said no, he would go alone.

  The following day, he returned with a huge cart crammed with food—sacks of beans, salt, sugar, flour, pulses, maize—and even a number of animals, including eight chicks, a rooster, ten hens and two kids. There was also leather and some fabrics.

  Two weeks later, he went down again and brought home two Burlina heifers and three piglets.

  For the rest, everything went back to being more or less the way it had been before, except that for a while life was better for De Boers, although they were still poor mountain peasants, servants of the Royal Tobacco Company and of the land, and they still lived in constant awareness of the inevitable arrival of one famine then another, one misfortune after another, one war followed by another.

  22<
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  AUGUS TO NEVER AGAIN thought of smuggling tobacco, and nor of course did his daughter.

  Both kept silent about what had happened to them, and the others never asked them any questions.

  Before long, Jole’s beauty once again shone forth like that of a Dolomite undine, even though there remained a melancholy light in her eyes, something that had no name, no voice, no colour, and yet dwelt in her like a vague memory or a dream never dreamt.

  That extraordinary adventure had tested her, made her adult before her time and shown her the most terrible aspects of the world and men and life.

  Augusto again stopped speaking and resumed chewing tobacco. That magnificent tobacco for which the people of other lands beyond the border were ready to do anything.

  Then came winter and the cold and with them the first great snowfalls, which cloaked Nevada and the uplands in a deep white blanket.

  And everything fell silent.

  It was the end of 1896.

  For a few more years, the border with Austria remained where it was, where father and daughter had known it, crossed it and challenged it many times, where the wind of altitude and injustice blew, where Jole had heard the deep, disquieting voice of its soul, where men confronted and killed each other.

  Where, above all, she had learnt to know the deep meaning of the border, that border that has always clearly divided the world into crowns of gold and crowns of thorns, into the powerful and the poor.

  But more than anything, she had learnt to know a deeper, more private border, the thin border that separates good from evil, the invisible line of demarcation between reason and madness that is hidden in every human heart, transforming angels into demons and demons into angels.

  Whereas, way up here, the expanses of grass and the stones and the dandelions would continue to know nothing about any border.

  And Jole continued in the same way, in imitation of the nature she loved so much, hoping privately that one day nobody would have to feel, one way or another, like a stranger.

  Either in her mountains, or in this world.

  Author’s Note

  In the planning of this novel, I found valuable inspiration in a number of sources, including Storia di Tönle by Mario Rigoni Stern and La strada delle piccole Dolomiti by Arturo Zanuso.

  The description of the charcoal pile on pp. 171–3 owes a lot to Pietro Parolin and his book Saltaboschi (Panda edizioni, 2016).

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  Copyright

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  Original text © Matteo Righetto 2017

  English translation © Howard Curtis 2018

  Soul of the Border was first published as L’anima della frontiera

  in Italy by Mondadori in 2017

  First published by Pushkin Press in 2018

  Published by agreement with Piergiorgio

  Nicolazzini Literary Agency (PNLA)

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  ISBN 13: 978–1–78227–466–7

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