The Moon and the Bonfires  

• 33

Irene and the doctor’s son and said he’d give him a piece of his mind one day. The Signora made out that she vras hurt, but Irene shrugged her shoulders and said she wouldn’t have that boor Arturo even for a £irm-hand, but she couldn’t do anything about it if he came to visit her. Then Silvia said it was the man from Tuscany who was the fool and Signora Elvira pretended to be hurt again.

Irene couldn’t carry on with the young man from Tuscany because Arturo kept an eye on them and he bossed his friend. So it must mean that Arturo was after them both, and, while he hoped to land Irene, amused himself with the other one. All you had to do was to wait for the good weather and go behind them through the fields and then you’d soon know.

But in the meantime Sor Matteo got a hold of this Arturo — ^we got the story from Lanzone who happened to be passing by the porch — ^and told him that women are women and men men. Isn’t that right? Arturo who had just picked himself a buttonhole, tapped his boots with his riding-crop, and, sniffing the flowers, looked askance at Sor Matteo. “All right then,’’ Sor Matteo went on; “when they are well brought-up, women know the kind of men they want to marry. And they don’t want you,’’ he said. “Do you get me?’’

Then Arturo had muttered a lot, damn it all, they’d been kind enough to invite him to the house, naturally when a man . . .

“You’re not a man,’’ Sor Matteo had said, “you’re a filthy so-and-so.’’

So the episode of Arturo seemed to be closed, and that

• 34

of the man from Tuscany, too. But the stepmother didn't have time to be hurt because other young men came, lots of others even more dangerous. The two officers, for instance, the ones who came the day I had stayed all by myself at La Mora. There was one month — ^there were fireflies, for it was June — ^when you saw them appearing every evening from Canelli. They must have had another woman who stayed along the main road because they never came from that direction but cut across from the Belbo over the footbridge and through the fields of millet and the meadows. I was sixteen at the time and begin- ning to understand all this. Cirino had a grudge against them because they trampled down his fodder, and he remembered besides what bastards officers like that had been in the war. And as for Nuto . . . One evening they played a dirty trick on them. They lay in wait for them coming through the grass and set a snare. The officers came along and jumped the ditch, looking forward to their evening with the young ladies, and fell headlong, splitting their faces open. It would have been a good joke to make them fall into tl-e manure, but after that evening they didn’t come through the fields again.

When the fine weather came there was no holding SiMa in. In the summer evenings they hac started to come out of the gate and walk up and down with their young men on the road, and when they passed luider the lime trees we pricked up oiu* ears to catch a few words of what they said. The four of them started off together and they came back two and two. Silvia would walk arm in arm vdth Irene laughing and joking and talking im- pudently to the two men. When they passed back again

into the scent of the lime trees, Silvia and her sweetheart were walking along together, whispering and laughing. The other pair came more slowly, walldng a bit apart from each other, and sometimes they called to the pair in front and carried on a conversation with them in a loud voice. How well I remember these evenings, the farm- hands sitting on the cross-beam, among the strong, strong scent of the lime trees.

XXIV

Little Santa, who was three or four at the time, was a sight worth seeing. Her hair was turning out golden like Irene’s, and she had Silvia’s black eyes, but if she bit her finger when she was eating an apple, or tore the heads off the flowers in a temper, or wanted us to lift her up on horseback whatever might happen and kept kicking us, we said she took it from her mother. Sor Matteo and his two daughters took things more calmly and weren’t so overbearing. Irene was particularly calm ; she was tall and always wore white and never got cross with anyone. She didn’t need to, for when she asked for anything she always said please, even to Emilia, and to the rest of us, too, looking at us while she spoke, looking us right in the eyes. Even Silvia looked at us that way, too, but she wasn’t so cool or so fiank. The last years 1 was at La Mora I was getting fifty lire and used

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to wear a tie at the Testa, but I knew I had got there too late and I couldn’t do anything now.

But not even during these last years had I dared to think of Irene. And Nuto wasn’t concerned about her either because now he played the clarinet all round the countryside and had a girl at Canelli. The talk about Irene was that someone from Gmelli was courting her, for they were always going there and buying things in the shops and giving their cast-off dresses to Emilia. But II Nido was opened up again and there was a supper party to which the Signora and her daughters were invited and that day the dressmaker came from Canelli to dress them. I drove them in the gig as far as the bend on the hill and I heard them talking about the big houses in Genoa. They told me to come back for them at mid- night and to come right into the courtyard of II Nido — ^in the dark the other guests wouldn’t see that the up- holstery of the gig was shabby. They told me to put my tie on straight, too, so that I wouldn’t look a sight.

But at midnight when I came into the courtyard among the other carriages — se^ n from below the house was enormous and the shadows of the guests passed across the wide-open windows — ^no one showed up and I was left there among the plane trees for a good while. When I got fed-up listening to the crickets — ^there were crickets even up there — I climbed down from the gig and made my way to the door In the first room I found a girl in a white apron who looked at me and made off. Then she came back and I said that I had come. She asked me what I wanted and I said that the gig for La Mora was waiting.

»37

A door opened and I heard the sound of laughter. There were pictures of flowers on all the doors in this room and on the floor gleaming patterns in stone. The girl came back and told me I could go away because someone would a'tcompany the ladies home.

When I was outside again I was sorry I hadn’t taken a better look at that room which was more beautiful than a church. I led the horse over the gravel which crunched under its hooves beneath the plane trees and looked at them against the sky — seen from below it didn’t seem a wood any longer but each tree made its own archway of shade — ^and at the gate I lit a cigarette and came down the road slowly among the bamboo and acacias and the gnarled trunks, thinking what sort of a stuff it is, this earth, that bears all kinds of trees.

Someone in the big house must have been courting Irene because I heard Silvia sometimes making fun of her and calling her “your ladyship’’, and soon Emilia got to know that the man had about as much life in him as a corpse, one of the crowd of grandsons the old lady kept purposely at arm’s length so that they wouldn’t eat her out of house and home. This grandson, this poor relation, this little count, never deigned to come to La Mora, but he sometimes sent a barefoot boy to carry letters to Irene telling her he was waiting at the side of the road to go for a walk. And Irene went.

From among the beans in the kitchen garden where I was watering them or tying them up, I heard Irene and Silvia sitting under the magnolia tree talking about it.

Irene was saying, “Well, what about it? The countess

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is very particular. A boy like him can’t possibly go to the festa at the Station. He’d find himself among his ovm servants.”

‘‘And what’s the harm in that? He meets them in the house every day in life.”

‘ ‘She doesn’t want him to go hunting either. You know his father died that way, it was tragic.”

‘‘He could come and see you, anyway. Why doesn’t he come?” said Silvia unexpectedly.

• • He doesn’t come, either, to see you here. Why

doesn’t he come? Be careful, Silvia. Are you sure he’s telling you the truth?”

‘‘No one tells the truth. If you think about the truth, you* go off your head. Don’t you go telling him now . . .”

‘‘It’s you that sees him,” said Irene. ‘‘It’s you that’s taking the risk. I only hope he’s not coarse like the other one.”

Silvia laughed softly. I couldn’t keep still for ever behind the beans, they would have noticed me. I struck the earth with my hoe and list ned.

‘‘Do you think he’ll have heard?” Irene said.

‘‘Not him, he’s only the farm-boy,” said Silvia.

But there was the time when Silvia waj weeping, twisting about in her deck-chair and weeping. In the porch Cirino was hammering at a bit of iron and I couldn’t hear. Irene stayed beside her and stroked her hair which Silvia had been tearing at with her nails. ‘‘No, no,” wept Silvia, ‘‘I want to go av*ay fi’om here. I want to get away. I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it.”

I couldn’t hear for Cirino and his damned bit of iron.

“Come,” said Irene and touched her. “Come up on to the terrace and keep quiet.”

“I don’t care,” wept Silvia. “Nothing matters any more.”

Silvia was going about with someone from Crevalcuore, who had a bit of land at Calosso ; he owned a sawmill and went about on a motor-cycle. Silvia climbed up behind and away they went along the main road. In the evening we would hear the noise of the motor-cycle stopping and then starting again, and after a bit Silvia would appear at the gate with her black hair in her eyes. Sor Matteo knew nothing about it.

Emilia said that this man wasn’t the first, the doctor’s son had had her already in his father’s consulting room in his own house. But no one ever knew the truth of this ; if Arturo had really been going to bed with her, why had they stopped in summer of all times, when the weather was getting better and it was easier to meet? Instead, the motor-cyclist had come on the scene and now everyone knew that Silvia behaved as if she had gone off her head and got him to take her among the reeds and up the watercourses; people would meet them at Canio or at Santa Libera or in the woods at Bravo. Sometimes they even went to the hotel at Nizza.

To look at, she was always the same with these dark burning eyes of hers. I don’t know whether she hoped to get herself married, but this Matteo from Crevalcuore was a quarrelsome fellow, a woodcutter who had already hopped in and out of a good few beds, and no one had

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ever stopped him yet. “Now,” I thought, “if Silvia has a child, it will be a bastard like me. That’s how I was bom.”

Irene was worried about it, too. She must have tried to help Silvia and she knew more about it than we did. It was impossible to imagine Irene on the back of that motor-cycle or among the reeds with someone or lying in a watercourse. Santina, now, would be more likely, when she was bigger; everyone said she would do the same. Their stepmother didn’t say anything, she only insisted that they came home at the proper time.

XXV

I NEVER saw Irene give way to despair as her sister did, but when two days passed without a summons to II Nido, she kept just inside the garden ^:e, all on edge, or else took a book or her sewing and sat in the vineyard along with Santina, and from there she watched the road. When she set out with her parasol towards Cai elli, then she was happy. What she found to say to this Cesarino who was about as lively as a corpse, I don’t know; once when I passed pedalling like mad towards Canelli and caught a glimpse of them among the acacias, it looked as if Irene was standing reading a book while Cesarino was sitting on the bank in front of her looking at her.

One day Arturo, complete with riding-boots, had

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turned up at La Mora; he had stopped beneath the terrace and spoken to Silvia, who was scanning the road from up there, but Silvia hadn’t invited him to come up and had only said the day was close and these shoes with the low heels — she lifted a foot — ^you could get them at Canelli now.

Arturo had winked and had asked her if they still played dance music and if Irene still played the piano. “Ask her yourself,” said Silvia, and looked away beyond the pine tree.

Irene hardly played at all now. It appears that there were no pianos at II Nido and the old lady couldn’t bear to see a girl wearing out her hands on the keyboard. When Irene went to visit the old lady, she took her bag with her sewing in it, a huge bag sewn with green flowers in wool, and in the bag she brought home books from 11 Nido that the old lady had given her to read. They were old books boimd in leather. In return she took illus- trated fashion magazines — ^she sent to Canelli for them specially every week.

Serafma and Emilia said Irene was setting her cap at the count and that Sor Matteo had once said, “Be careful, girls. There are some old people who never die.”

It was difficult to work out just how many relations the countess had at Genoa — it was even said there was a bishop among them. I had heard tell that the old lady didn’t keep any staff now, either outdoors or in — she had enough grandsons and granddaughters. If that was how it was, I couldn’t see what hope Irene had, for, however well the affair went, Cesarino would have to share with all these others. Unless Irene was prepared to content

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herself with being a servant at II Nido. But when I looked round the farm, at the stable, the haylofts, the wheat, the grapes, I thought perhaps Irene was richer than he was and maybe Cesarino courted her to get his hand on her dowry. This idea, although it made me furious, was all the more attractive to me since it didn’t seem possible that Irene could be so infatuated as to fling herself away merely because she was ambitious.

But then, I said, it’s easily seen she’s in love, that she likes Cesarino, that he’s the man she’s longing to marry. And I’d have liked to be able to speak to her, to tell her to be careful not to throw herself away on that half- baked creature, that fool who never emerged from II Nido and &t on the ground while she read a book. Silvia, at least, didn’t waste her time like that but went about with someone worth while. If it hadn’t been that I was only the farm-boy and not eighteen yet, Silvia would perhaps have gone with me.

And Irene was having a bad time of it, into the bargain. This little so-and-so of a count must have been worse than a spoilt girl. He had tantiums and made her run after him and exploited the old lady’s name shamelessly, and to everything Irene told him or asked him he answered no, that they would have to see, that they wouldn’t have to make any false moves or forget who he was, or the state of his health, or his likes and dislikes. And now it was Silvia who had to listen to Irene’s sighs on the few occasions when she didn’t run off up the hillside or shut herself up in the house. At table, so Emilia said, Irene would sit with her eyes down and Silvia stared her father in the face as if she had a fever. Only Signora

• 43

Elvira talked on as dry as you please and wiped Santina’s mouth, harping maliciously on the lost chances of the doctor’s son, the man from Tuscany, the officers and the others, and about some girls in Canelli, younger than they were, who were married already and well on the way to having a christening. Sor Matteo muttered away, he never knew anything.

Meanwhile with Silvia it was the same old story. When she was not beyond herself with rage, and would stop in the farmyard or the vineyard, it was a pleasure to see her or hear her. Some days she had the gig harnessed and went off on her own to Gmelli and drove it herself like a man. Once she asked Nuto if he would be going to play the clarinet at Buon Consiglio where they held the horse races, and she wanted more than anything to buy a saddle at Canelli and learn to ride a horse and race with the others. Lanzone, the grieve, had the job of explaining to her that a horse that pulls a gig has bad habits and can’t race. Then it came out that Silvia wanted to go to Buon Consiglio to meet Matteo there and show him she could sit a horse, too.

This girl, we farm-hands said, was going to end up by dressing like a man and going roimd the friirs and walking the tightrope.

This very year there had appeared at Canelli a great booth in which there was a merry-go-round made up of motor-cycles which went round with a din worse than the threshing machine, and the tickets were given out by a fat red-haired woman, getting on for forty, who had her fingers covered with rings and smoked cigarettes. Wait and see, we said, when he’s tired of her, Matteo

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di Crevalcuore vdll put Silvia in charge of a merry-go* round just like that. At Canelli they said, too, that when you paid for your ticket all you had to do was to put your hands down on the counter in such and such a way and the red-headed woman told you right ofiF when you could come hack and go into the caravan with the curtains and make love to her on the straw. But Silvia wasn’t at that stage yet. For all that she seemed crazy, she was crazy for Matteo, but she was so beautiful and so healthy that many men would have married her even now.

There were the wildest goings-on. She and Matteo were going to a hut now in the vineyard at Seraudi, a half-ruined )iut on the edge of a gully which the motor- cycle couldn’t reach, but they used to walk and carry the rug and cushions. Neither at La Mora nor at Cre- valcuore did Matteo let himself be seen with Silvia, not to save her good name at all but so that he wouldn’t get involved and have to commit himself. He knew he didn’t want to go on with it and in this way he saved his face.

I looked in Silvia’s face for signs of what she and Matteo were doing together. When we started to harvest the grapes that September either she or Irene bame into the vineyard with the green grapes, just as they had done in other years, and I crouched down imder the vines and watched her, watched her hands feeling for the clusters, watched the curve of her flanks, her wu.8t, her hair in her eyes, and, when she went down the path, how she walked, the spring in her step, the quick turn of her head — I knew all of her from top to toe, yet I could never say.

K

“Look, she’s changed. Matteo’s been herel’’ She was the same, she was Silvia.

The grape-harvest was the last merry-making for La Mora that year. On All-Saints’ Day, Irene took to her bed; the doctor came from Canelli, the doctor came from the Station — ^Irene had typhus and was dying of it. They sent Santina to Alba with Silvia to stay with relations away from the risk of infection. Silvia didn’t want to go at first but then she resigned herself to it. Emilia and the stepmother had plenty of miming about. There was a stove alwrays burning in the rooms upstairs, and they changed Irene’s bedclothes twice a day; she was delirious and they gave her injections and she lost all her hair. We went back and forward to Canelli for medicine. Until one day a nun came into the courtyard and Cirino said, “She won’t last till Christmas.’’ The next day the priest came.

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XXVI

What is left of it all, of our life at La Mora? For years afterwards, a gust of perfume from lime trees in the evening had been enough to make me feel a different being, to feel my real self, without quite knowing why. One thing I always think about is how many people there mus{ be living in this valley and in the world, for that matter, and the very same things are happening to them now as happened to us then, and they don’t know it and never give it a thought. Maybe there’s a house with girls living in it, and old people and a little girl — and a boy like Nuto and a place like Canelli and a Station, and there’s probably someone like me who wants to go away and make his fortune — and in summer they thresh the grain and gather the grapes, and they himt in winter, and there’s a terrace, too, and every- thing happens the way it happened to uk. That’s how things are. They haven’t changed a bit, boys or women or the world. They don’t carry parasols any more and on Sunday they go to the cinema instead of the festa, and they send their grain to the grain ppol, and the girls smoke, and yet life is still the same and they don’t know that one day they’ll look round about them and for them, too, it will all be over. The first thing 1 said when

• 47

1 got off the boat at Genoa among all the war-damaged houses was that each house, each court 3 rard, each terrace has meant something to someone and the thought of so many past years of life, so many memories vanished thus in the space of a night without leaving a trace is even more saddening than the material loss or the num- ber of those who died. Or am 1 wrong? Maybe it*s better like this, better that everything should go up in a blaze of dry grass and that people, shoiild begin again. This is what they do in America — ^when you’re fed up with something, with a job or a place. Over there whole villages are empty now — ^the inn, the town hall and the shops, too — ^like a cemeteiy.

Nuto doesn’t like to spejJc about La Mora.but he asks me often if I really haven’t seen anyone. He was thinking of the boys from round about, the people he played bowls and palloae with and met at the inn, and the girls we danced with. He knew where all of them were and what they’d done ; when we were at his house on Salto and one of them passed along the road, Nuto asked him half-closing his eyes, ”Do you still know who this is?” Then he would enjoy the other’s expression of as- tonishment and pour out wine all round. We would talk away together. Someone used the formal “roi” to me. “I am Anguilla,” I interrupted, ”what nonsense is this? How did they die, your brother, your fether, your grandmother? And is the bitch dead, too?”

They weren’t much changed but I was changed. They recalled things 1 had said and done, jokes 1 had played, and blows, and stories I had forgotten. ‘*And Bian- chetta,” one of them said to me, “do you remember

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Bianchetta?** Of course 1 remembered her. ‘^She’s got married,** they said. “She*s getting on fine.**

Nearly every evening Nuto came to see me at the Albergo dell*Angelo and dug me out of the group where I was standing with the doctor and the local secretary and the sergeant-major of the carablaieri and the sur- veyors, and got me talking. Like two brothers we went along the village street under the trees and listened to the cicalas and enjoyed the breeze from the Belbo— in our time we had never come to the village at that hour of the day for we led a different life.

In the moonlight with the black hills round about us, Nuto asked me one night how I had’gone about embark- ing for Anjerica and whether I would do it now if I got another chance and could be twenty again. I told him that it hadn’t been America that had done it so much as the rage at not being anybody, the wild desire, more than to go away, to come back one fine day after everyone had given me up as dead of hunger. In the village I*d never be anything but a fium-hand, an old Cirino (he had been dead, too, for a while, he*d broken his back fiilling off a haystack and had lived on for more than a year) so I might as well have a shot at it, and get rid of my uige to cross the sea, now that I’d crossed the Bormida.

“But it isn’t easy to get on board ship,** said Nuto. ‘ ‘You had courage . ’ *

It hadn’t been courage, 1 said to bjm. I ran away. I might as well tell him about it.

“Do you remember these talks we had with yovu: fiither in the shop? Even in those days he said people

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who don’t know any better will always be in the dark because the power lies in the hands of men who take good care that ordinary folk don’t understand, in the hands, that is, of the government, of the clerical party, of the capitalists. Here at La Mora, it was nothing, but when I had done my military service and wandered through the vennels and the docks at Genoa, I realised what owners and capitalists and the army were. At that time we had the fascists and you couldn’t say that sort of thing. But there were the others as well. ’ ’

I had never told him about it so that we wouldn’t get on to the subject — ^it was pointless, anyway, and now that twenty years had gone past and so much had hap- pened, I didn’t even know myself what to bqlieve — ^but that winter in Genoa I had believed in it and we’d spent so many nights in the conservatory at the villa arguing with Gviido and Remo and Cerreti and the rest of them. Then Teresa got the wind up and wouldn’t let us in any more and so I told her she could keep on being a servant and being taken a loan of, it served her right, but we wanted to make a stand and fight back. And so we had gone on working in the barracks and the pubs and, after we were discharged, in the shipyards where we found work and in the technical schools we attended in the evenings. Teresa listened to me patiently now and said that I was quite right to study and try to get on and she gave me something to eat in the kitchen. She didn’t go back to the subject again, but one night Cerreti came to warn me that Guido and Remo had been arrested and they were looking for the others. Then Teresa, without a word of reproach, spoke to someone — her brother-in-

iso

law, her former boss, I don’t know which — and in two days she had fovind me a job as a deck-hand on a boat leaving for America. “That was how it was,*’ I said to Nuto.

“You see how it is,*’ he said. “Sometimes one word is enough to open your eyes, one word heard when you are a boy, spoken by an old man, by a poor old man, like my &ther. I’m glad you didn’t only think of making money. And these friends of yours, how did they die?’’

We walked like this along the main road beyond the village and discussed our lot in life. I listened in the moonlight and far off I heard the brake of a cart creaking — a soimd jhat hasn’t been heard for a bit on the roads of America. And I thought of Genoa, and the offices, and what my life would have been if they had foimd me too that morning in the shipyard where Remo worked. In a few days I was going back to the Viale Corsica. Every- thing was over for the summer.

Someone was running along the road in the dust, it looked like a dog. I saw it *.as a boy; he was lame and ran towards us. He was on us before I realised it was Cinto ; he flung himself at my legs and howled like a dog.

“What’s the matter?’’ '

At first we didn’t believe him. He said his father had set fire to the house.

“I bet he has!’’ said Nuto.

“He has set fire to the house,’’ repeated Cinto. “He tried to kill me. He has hanged himself ... he has burnt down the house.’’

“They’ll have upset the lamp,’’ I said.

• 'No» no,” he cried. **He has killed Rosina and my

grandmother. He wanted to kill me but 1 didn't let him. Then he set fire to the straw and kept on looking for me, but I had my knife and then he hanged himself in the vineyard. . .

Cinto panted and whimpered; he vtnas all black and covered with scratches. He had sat down in the dust on top of my feet and clung to my leg and said again, ”My fa^er has hanged himself in the vineyard and burnt the house, and the ox, too. The rabbits ran away but I had my knife. . . . Everything’s burnt, the farmer from Piola saw it, too.”

XXVII

NuTO TOOK him by the shoulders and lifted him up the way you lift a yovmg goat.

“Has he killed Rosina and your grandmother?”

Cinto trembled and couldn’t answer.

“Has he killed them?” and Nuto shook him.

“Let him alone,” I said to Nuto. “He’s half-dead. Why don’t we go and see?”

Then Cinto clutched my legs and wouldn’t hear of it.

“Stand up,” I said. “Who were you looking for?”

He was coming to find me and he didn’t want to go back to the vineyard again. He had run to call the fiumer from II Morone and the people at Piola ; he had wakened

them all, and others were running from the hill already and he had shouted to them to put out the fire, but he wouldn’t go back to the orchard — he had lost his knife.

“We won’t go into the vineyard,*’ I said to him. “We’ll stop on the road and Nuto will go up. What are you frightened of? If it’s true they came running from the forms, it’ll all be out by this time.’’

We set off, holding him by the hand. We couldn’t see the hill at Gaminella from the road with the trees, it was hidden by a spur. But as soon as you left the main road and came round onto the slope which overhangs the Belbo, you’d be boimd to see a fire through the trees. We didn’t see anything except the misty light of the moon. ,

Without saying a word, Nuto jerked Cinto’s arm and the boy stumbled. We went on, almost running. When we got below the reed-bed, it was evident that some- thing had happened. From up there we heard the sound of blows and people shouting to each other as if they were felling a tree, and in the cool night air a cloud of stinking smoke came down .ver the road.

Cinto didn’t offer any resistance, but came on, quickening his pace to match ours, aud squeezing my fingers more tightly. People came and ^nt up there at the fig tree, talking all the time. From where I stood on the path I saw in the moonlight the empty space where the hayloft and the stable had been and the gaping walls of the cottage. A red gleam was dyii^ at the foot of the avails, which gave off a black smoke. There was a stink of burnt wool and flesh and dung which caught at the throat. A rabbit made off imder my feet.

Nuto halted at the level of the threshing-floor and made a grimace, raising his clenched hands to his forehead.

“That smell,” he muttered. “That smell.”

The fire was out now, for all the neighbours had run to lend a hand. There had been a moment, they said, when the blaze lit up the watercourse, and you saw the reflection of it in the waters of die Belbo. Nothing had been saved, not even the manure heap at the back.

Someone ran to get the sergeant of the carabinieri; they sent a woman to bring something to drink from 11 Morone, and they made Cinto swallow a little wine. He asked where the dog was, if it had got burnt, too. Each told his own version of what had happened ; we sat Cinto down in the meadow and he told his story in gulps.

How it had begun he didn’t know, he had gone down to the Belbo. Then he heard the dog barking and his fiither tying up the ox. The Signora from the Villa had come with her son to get her share of the beans and potatoes. The Signora had said that two rows of potatoes had been dug already, and so they would have to be made good, and Rosina had cried out at that and Valino had cursed, and the Signora had gone into the house to get the grandmother to speak, while her son kept an eye on the baskets. Then they had weighed the potatoes and the beans and come to an agreement, giving each other dirty looks the while. They had loaded the stuff on to the cart and Valino had gone to the village.

But in the evening, when he came back, he was in a black mood. He had begun to shout at Rosina and the grandmother because they hadn’t gathered the beans

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before. He said that now the Signora was eating the beans that should have been theirs. The old woman was weeping on her mattress.

Cinto himself stood at the door, ready to make off. Then Valino had taken off his belt and begun to beat Rosina. You would have thought he was threshing grain. Rosina had flung herself against the table and was scream* ing, keeping her hands on her neck. Then she had uttered a more piercing cry, the bottle had fallen, and Rosina, tearing her hair, had thrown herself on top of the grandmother and flung her arms' round her. Then Valino had started to kick her — you could hear the sound of the blows — to kick her in th'e ribs, and he had pounded her with his he^vy boots, and Rosina had fallen to the ground and Valino had gone on kicking her in the face and in the stomach.

Rosina was dead, said Cinto, she was dead and blood was pouring from her mouth. “Get up, you fool,” said his father. But Rosina was dead, and the old woman was quiet now, too.

Then Valino had started I'^oking for him and he had made off. From the vineyard you couldn’t hear anything now, except the dog who tugged at its wire and ran backwards and forwards.

After a while, Valino had begun to call Cinto. Cinto said you could tell from his voice that it wasn’t to beat him, but that he was only calling him. He had opened his knife then and made his way to the ftr^yard. His ftther was waiting for him on the doorstep, in a black rage. When he saw him "with the knife, he said, “You bastard, ’ ’ and tried to catch him. Cinto had made off again.

Then he had heard his father kicking at everything, he had hea^ him cursing and reviling the priest. Then he had seen the flames.

His father had come outside with the lamp in his hand ; the glass was off. He had run all round the house and set fire to the hayloft, too, and the straw, and dashed the lamp against the window. The room where the struggle had been was full of smoke by now. The women didn’t come out ; he seemed to hear them crying and sobbing.

The whole cottage was ablaze now and Cinto couldn’t get down into the field because his father would have seen him as clearly as if it were day. The dog went mad and barked and tore at its wire. The rabbits bolted. The ox was burning, too, in the byre. ,

Valino had run into the vineyard to look for him with a rope in his hand. Cinto, still clutching the knife, had made off up the watercourse. There he had stayed hidden and seen the glow of the fire above him, reflected against the leaves.

Even from there he could hear the roar of the flames, like a furnace. The dog kept on howling. In the water- course it was as bright as day. When Cinto didn’t hear the dog any more or any other sound, he seemed to wake up suddenly and didn’t remember what he was doing in the watercoiu^e. Then very quietly he had climbed up towards the walnut tree, clutching the open knife, and on the alert for any sound or sight of the fire. And under the vaulted branches of the walnut tree he had seen his . father’s feet hanging in the glow from the flames, and the ladder lying on the ground.

He had to repeat this story to the sergeant of the

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carabinieri and they showed him his dead father stretched out under a sack, to see if he recognised him. hi the meadow they made a heap of the things they had found — the scythe, a wheelbarrow, the ladder, the ox’s muzzle and a saddle. Cinto was looking for his knife; he kept asking everyone, wd coughing among the stench ofsmoke and burnt flesh. They told him he would find it all right and that they would be able to get the blades of the hoes and the spades, too, when the embers had cooled. We took Cinto across to II Morone ; it was almost morning and the others had to search the ashes for the remains of the two women.

No one was asleep at II Morone. The door was open and the fire lit in the kitchen, and the women offered us something to drink; the men sat down to break&st. It was cool, almost cold. I was sick of arguments and talk- ing. Everyone kept saying the same things. I stayed beside Nuto and walked about the farmyard under the last stars and from up here we saw, in the cold air which had almost a violet tint, the clumps of aspens in the plain and the gleam of water. I h^i forgotten that the dawn was like that.

Nuto was walking about, hunched up, his eyes on the ground. I said to him at once that we mdet take charge of Cinto, which was more or less what we’d been doing. He looked at me, his eyes swollen — ^he seemed half- asleep.

What happened next day was enough to make your blood boil. I heard in the village that the Signora was furious about her property and, seeing that Cinto was the only member of his femily living, she claimed that he

should pay her compensation or they Would put him inside.

It was common knowledge that she had ^ne to get her lawyer’s advice and that he had had to argue with her for an hour. Then she had gone to the priest, too.

The priest made a better jot> of it. Since Valino had died in mortal sin, he wouldn’t hear of pronouncing the benediction over him in the church. They left his cofiin outside on the steps while within the priest mumbled over the few blackened bones of the women tied up in a sack. Everything was done secretly, towards evening. The old women from II Morone, with veils on their heads, went with the dead to the cemetery, gathering daisies and clover by the roadside. The priegt didn’t go, because when you thought of it, Rosina, too, had lived in mortal sin. But only the dressmaker, who was an old woman with a spiteful tongue, said that.

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Irene didn’t die of typhus that winter. I remember when I was in the stable or walked along in the rain behind the plough, I tried not to swear any more as long as Irene was in danger, but to think good thoughts instead to help her — ^for that was what Serafina told us to do. But I don’t know, if we helped her, perhaps it would have been better if she had died on the ^y the priest came to give her the benediction. For when she came out of doors at last, in January, and they took her, as thin as a rake, in the gig to hear mass at Canelli, her Cesarino had left for Genoa a while back without having once asked for her himself or got anyone else to ask. And 11 Nido was shut up.

When Silvia came back, sb*; had a big disappointment, too, but for all they said, she felt it less. For Silvia was used to these tricks of fate by now md knew how to take them and how to recover from them.

Her Matteo had taken up with someone else. In January Silvia still hadn’t come back from Alba, and even at La Mora we began to say that if she didn’t come back there was a reason for it — she. was pregnant, of course. The ones who went to the musket in Alba said that some days Matteo from Crevalcuore went through the square like the shot from a gun, or passed in front of

the caf<6. Not that they'd ever been seen going off arm* in-arm or even meeting. So Silvia couldn’t go out, so she was pregnant. The truth is that when she returned in the fine weather, Matteo had already taken up with another woman whose fiither owned the caf£ at Santo Stefiino and he spent his nights diere. Silvia came bapk along the main road, holding Santina by the hand; no one had gone to meet them off the train and they stopped in the garden to touch the first roses. They chattered away together as if they were mother and child, red-cheeked after their walk.

It was Irene now who was deadly pale and thin and kept her eyes fixed on the groimd. She seemed like the autumn crocuses which come in the meadoivs after the grape harvest or the grass which keeps on living under a stone. She wore a red handkerchief on her hair, which left her neck and ears imcovered. Emilia said she could never have the head she used to have — Santina would be the golden-haired one now, for her hair was even more beautiful than Irene’s. And Santina knew already that she made an impression when she stood behind the gate to let herself be seen, or came amongst us in the fiirmyard, or along the paths, and chattered away to the women. I asked her what they had done in Alba and what Silvia had done, and if she felt like it she answered that they lived in a fine house with carpets, opposite the chturch, and some days ladies came with little boys and girls and they played together and ate sweet cakes, and then one evening they had gone to the theatre with their aimt and Nicoletto, and everybody was dressed in their best, and the little girls went to a school kept by the nuns and in

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another year she would go, too. I didn’t manage to learn much of how Silvia spent her time, but she must have danced a lot with the officers. She hadn’t ever been ill.

The young men and the girls they had been friendly with began to come to La Mora again. That year Nuto went to do his military service and I was a man now and the grieve no longer took his belt to me and nobody called me bastard. They knew me in many of the farms round about ; I came and went in the evening and through the night for I was courting Bianchetta. I was beginning to understand all kinds of things — ^the scent of the lime- blossom and the acacias had a meaning for me, too, now that I knew, what a woman was, knew why the music at the dances made me want to roam about the country- side like a randy dog. The window giving on to the hills beyond Canelli where the fine weather came from and the storms and where the dawn broke, was always the place where the trains steamed away and the road ran past to Genoa. I knew that in two years I would take that train myself, like Nuco. At t e festas, I used to go about with the boys of my age group — ^we drank and sang together and talked about ourselves.

Silvia had lost her head again. Once more Arturo and his friend from Tuscany put in an appearance at La Mora, but she didn’t even look at them. She had taken up with an accoimtant from Canelli who worked on contract and it seemed she must get married this time, for even Sor Matteo appeared to b». agreeable — the accountant would come to La Mora on his bicycle, he was a fair-haired boy from San Marzano, and always

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brought almond cake to Santina — ^but one evening Silvia disappeared. She didn’t come back till the next day, with an armful of flowers. This is what had happened — at Canelli there wasn’t only the accountant, but also a fine fellow who knew French and English and came from Milan, tall and grey-haired, a real gentleman — ^they said he was buying land hereabouts. Silvia would meet him in a villa belonging to friends of theirs and they would lunch together. This time it had been supper and it was next morning when she left the house. The accoimtant got to know of it and wanted to kill someone, but this Lugli went to see him and talked to him as if he were a boy and the affair ended there.

This man, who was perhaps fifty and hjd grown-up children, 1 never saw except in the distance, but for Silvia he was worse than Mattco from Crevalcuore. Matteo and Arturo and all the others were people whom I understood, young men grown up round about, not up to much, certainly, but from our own district, who drank and laughed and spoke like ourselves. But no one knew what this chap from Milan, this Lugli, was doing at Canelli. He gave supper parties at the Croce Bianca, he was on good terms with the mayor and with the local fascists, and visited their factories. He must have pro- mised Silvia to take her to Milan, or some other place, far from La Mora and the hills. Silvia had lost her head and would wait for him at the Caf6 dello Sport and would go about in the car belonging to the party secre- tary, driving round the country houses and the castles as far as Acqui. I think Lugli was for her what she and her sister could have been for me — ^what Genoa and America

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were for me later. I knew enough by this time to picture them together and imagine what they would say to each other, how he would tell her about Milan and the theatres and the people with money and the races, and how she would listen eagerly, pretending to know about everything. This Lugli was always dressed like a tailor’s dummy, with a pipe in his mouth and a gold ring and gold-filled teeth. Silvia said to Irene once — and Emilia heard her — that he had been in England and was going back there.

But the day came when Sor Mattco lost his temper completely with his wife and daughters. He shouted that he was tired of long faces and late hours, tired of for- tune-hunters around the place, tired of never knowing in the evening who was going to do them a bit of good through the night, tired of meeting friends who poked fun at him. He laid the blame on their stepmother and people with too little to do and said all women were whores. He said he’d bring up Santa by himself anyway, and they could marry if anyone would have them, as long as they got out of his road and went back to Alba. Poor man, he was old and couldn’t control himself or give orders any more. Lanzone had noticed it, too, when he presented the accoimts. We had all noticed it. The end of it was that Irene went red-eyed to bed and Signora Elvira put her arms round Santina and told her not to listen to that sort of thing. Silvia shrugged her shoulders and stayed away all that night and the day after.

So the Lugli episode came to an end, too. It got about that he had made off, leaving huge debts behind him. But this time Silvia turned on him like a cat. She went to the

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party headquarters at Canelli; she went to the local secretary, she went to the villas where they had had a good time and slept together, and in the end she managed to discover that he must be at Genoa. Then she caught the train to Genoa taking with her what gold she had and the little money she could find.

A month later Sor Matteo went to Genoa to bring her back, after the police had told him where she was because Silvia was of age now and she couldn’t be sent home. She was starving on the station platform at Brignole. She hadn’t found Lugli or anyone else, and wanted to fling herself under the train. Sor Matteo calmed her and said that it had been an illness, a misfortime, like her sister’s attack of typhus, and that they were all expecting her at La iMora. They went home, but this time Silvia was really pregnant.

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XXIX

Round about the same time another piece of news reached us — the old lady at II Nido had died. Irene didn’t say anything, but you could see she was in a fever of excitement, and the colour came back to her cheeks. Now that Cesarino could please himself, they would soon see what kjnd of a man he was. Rumours flew thick and fast — that he was the sole heir, that the property was divided up, that the old woman had left everything to the bishop and the convents.

Instead, a lawyer came to inspect 11 Nido and the lands belonging to it. He didn’t speak to anyone, not even to Tomasino. He gave out instructions about the work and the harvest and the sowing. * the house itself he took an inventory. Nuto, who was on leave at that time for the harvest, got to know everything at Canelli. The old lady had left all her possessions to the childien of a niece who weren’t even counts, and had appointed her lawyer as guardian. So II Nido remained shut up and Cesarino didn’t come back.

At that time I was always around with Nuto and we would speak about all sorts of things 'bout Genoa and soldiers and music and Bianchetta. He smoked and got me to smoke, too, and asked me if I wasn’t fed up yet

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with walking behind the plough and said it was a big world and there was room for everyone. When he heard the tale about Silvia and Irene, he shrugged his shoulders and said nothing.

Irene didn’t say anything either about the news from II Nido. She was thin still, and deadly pale, and would go and sit with Santina on the banks of the Belbo. She would keep the book on her knee and gaze at the trees. On Stmdays she went to mass with a black veil on her head — her stepmother and Silvia, they all went together. One Sunday, it hadn’t happened for a long time, I heard her playing the piano again.

The winter before, Emilia had given me a loan of Irene’s novels which a girl from Canelli leant to them. For a while back I’d felt like following Nuto’s advice and studying something. I wasn’t a boy any more to content myself with hearing them speak about the stars and saints’ days sitting on the beam after supper. And I read these novels beside the fire to learn something. They told of girls who had guardians and aunts and enemies who kept them shut up in beautiful houses with gardens where there were maids who carried letters and administered poison and stole wills. Then a handsome man would arrive, who kissed them, a man on horseback he was, and at night the girl would feel she was suffocating and go out into the garden, and they would carry her off, and she would awake the next morning in a woodcutter’s hut where the handsome man would come to rescue her. Or else the story would start with a boy running wild in the woods, and he was the natural son of the owner of a castle where all sorts of crimes and poisonings took pLice,

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and the boy was accused and put in prison, but then a white-haired priest would save him and marry him to the heiress of another castle. I realised I had known these stories for a long time, for Virgilia had told them to Giulia and me in Gaminella — they were the story of the Sleeping Beauty with the golden hair, who was soxmd asleep in a wood and a hunter awoke her with a kiss; and the story of the wizard with the seven heads who, whenever he had won a maiden’s love, became a hand- some young man, the son of a king.

I liked these novels, but could Irene and Silvia, who were ladies and had never known Virgilia or cleaned out the stable, really like them too? I realised that Nuto was quite right when he said that to live in a hovel or in a palace was one and the same thing, that blood is the same coloiur everywhere, and that everybody wants to be rich and in love and make their fortune. On these evenings, coming back beneath the acacias from Bianchetta’s house, I was happy ; I whistled to myself and thought no more of jumping on to the train.

Signora Elvira had begui to invite Arturo to supper again, but this time he was fly and left his friend from Tuscany at home. Sor Matteo raised no objections. That was before Silvia had told them the state she had come back from Genoa in, and life at La Mora seemed to go on in its accustomed way again, though lalher jerkily. Arturo began at once to pay court to Irene, and it was Silvia now, with her hair about her fere who would look at him as if she was laughing at him, bu- hen Irene began to play the piano she was off like a shot and leant on the terrace or went for a walk through the fields. She didn’t

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take her parasol any more, for now the women went about with bare heads, even in the heat of the sun.

Irene didn’t want to have anything to do with Arturo. She was docile towards him but cold, and she walked with him in the garden and as far as the gate but they hardly ever spoke to each other. Arturo was always the same — ^he’d used up some more of his father’s money and would even wink to Emilia, but we knew that, apart from playing cards and shooting, he wasn’t worth much.

It was Emilia who told us that Silvia was pregnant, Emilia got to know it before Silvia’s father or any of the rest of them. The evening that Sor Matteo heard the news — Irene and Signora Elvira told him — he started to laugh evilly instead of shouting, and lifted his hjind to his mouth. “And now,’’ he sneered through his fingers, “let’s get a father for it.” But when he made to get up and go into Silvia’s room, his head reeled and he fell to the groimd. From that day he remained half-paralysed, with his mouth awry.

When Sor Matteo left his bed and was able to take a few steps, Silvia had already seen to things. She had gone to a midwife at Castiglione and had had a clean sweep made. She didn’t say anything to anyone. We found out two days later where she had been because the train ticket was still in her pocket. She came back with circles round her eyes and the face of a dead woman — she went to bed and filled it with blood. She died without saying a word to the priest or the others, but she called for her father in a low voice like a little girl.

For the funeral we picked all the flowers in the garden and in the gardens of the farms round about. It was Jime

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and there were a lot of flowers. They buried her without her father knowing of it, but he heard the chanting in the next room, and got frightened and tried to say he wasn’t dead yet. When later on he came out onto the terrace supported by Signora Elvira and Arturo’s frther, he had a cap over his eyes and he stayed in the sim without speaking. Arturo and his father took turn about and were always at his side.

The one who didn’t take a good view of Arturo any more was Santina’s mother. Since the old man was ill it didn’t suit her now that Irene should marry and take away her dowry. It was better for her to stay at home immarried and act as nursemaid to Santina, and so, one day, the little girl would have everything.

Sor Matteo didn’t say anything any more — it was all he could do to put a spoon to his mouth. The Signora settled with the grieve and with us, too, and poked her nose in everywhere.

But Arturo was in great form and got his own way. He was doing her a favour if he married Irene now, because after what had happened i Silvia, people were saying that the girls at La Mora were a couple of whores. He didn’t say that, but he always came looking terribly serious and kept the old man company and went the errands to Ginelli on our horse and gave Irene the holy water in church on Sundays. He was always about, dressed in black; he didn’t wear his riding-boots any more and saw to the medicines. Even before he qot married he was about the house from morning tih . ght or walking round the farm.

Irene took him so as to get away, so that she wouldn’t

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see II Nido on the hill any more or hear her stepmother grumble and rage. She married him in September the year after Silvia died and they didn’t make a great splash because of the mourning and because Sor Matteo hardly ever spoke now. They went off to Turin and Signora Elvira complained bitterly to Serafina and Emilia — she’d never have believed that a girl she’d treated as a daughter wovild have been so vuigrateful. At the wedding, Santina was the beauty, all dressed in silk — she was only six, but she looked as if she were the bride.

I went to do my military service that spring and the goings-on at La Mora didn’t concern me much any longer. Arturo came back and began to give orders. He sold the piano, he sr/id the horse, and some of the gracing rights. Irene, who had thought she was going away to live in another house, began to look after her father again and put on his poultices. Arturo was always out of the house now ; he took up his card-playing again and his himting and entertaining friends to supper. By the next year, the only time I came on leave from Genoa, the dowry, half of La Mora, was already spent, and Irene lived at Nizza in a single room and Arturo beat her.

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XXX

I REMEMBER a Sviiiday in summer when Silvia was still alive and Irene was young. I must have been seventeen or eighteen and I was beginning to go the rounds of the villages. It was the first of September, the day of the festa at Buon Consiglio. What with all their tea-parties and visiting and suitors, Silvia and Irene couldn’t go — I don’t know what was the matter — either it had some- thing to do with their clothes or else they were in a bad temper — in any case they hadn’t wanted their usual company, and now they were lolling about on deck- chairs, looking at the sky above the dove-cote. I’d given my neck a good wash that morning and changed my shirt and my boots, and was com-.ig back from the village to have a bite of food and then jump on my bicycle. Nuto had been at Buon Consiglio since the day before, because he was playing for the dancing.

Silvia called to me from the terrace to ask where I was going. She seemed to want to talk. Now aiid again she spoke to me like this and smiled to me, Lke the good- looking girl she was, and then 1 dHn’t feel I was a servant any longer. But that day I wa. .a a hurry and I was on tenterhooks. Why didn’t I take the gig? asked Silvia. I would get there sooner. Then she called to Irene,

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“Are jou not coming to Buon Q}nsiglio, too? Anguilla will take us and look after the horse.’’

I wasn’t very pleased, but I had to stand and wait. They came downstairs with the lunch-basket and parasols and rugs. Silvia had on a flowered dress and Irene wore white. They climbed up in their high-heeled shoes and opened their parasols.

I had given my neck and back a good wash and Silvia stayed near me under the parasol and smelt of flowers. I saw her little pink ear, pierced by the ear-ring, the white nape of her neck and, behind her, Irene’s golden head. They were speaking away among themselves about the young men who came to visit them, criticising them and laughing, and they would look at me sometimes and tell me not to listen ; then they would start guessing who would be at Buon Consiglio. When we started to climb the hill, I jtunped down, not to tire the horse, and Silvia held the reins.

As we went along, they would ask me whose house this was, or whose farm, or what tower that was, and I could judge what the grapes were like, hanging there on the vines, but I didn’t know the people who owned them. We turned roimd to look at the bell-tower at Calosso and I showed them where La Mora lay now.

Then Irene asked me if I really didn’t know anything about my own people. I answered that I managed to live quite happily all the same, and it was at that moment that Silvia looked me over from top to toe and said quite seriously to Irene that I was a good-looking boy and didn’t even look as if I came from these parts. Irene, not to

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offend me, said I must have nice hands and I hid them at once. Then she laughed like Silvia, too.

Then they began again to talk about their quarrels and their clothes and we came to Buon Consiglio, xmder the trees.

There was a confused mass of stalls piled with almond cake and little flags, and there were carts and shooting- booths and you heard from time to time the crack of air- guns. I led the horse into the shade of the plane trees where there were poles to hitch them to, and I un- harnessed the gig and shook out the hay. Irene and Silvia kept asking, “Where are the races, where are the races?” but there was time yet, so they began to look for their fnends. I had to keep an eye on the horse and see the fair as well. It was early and Nuto wasn’t playing yet, but the air was full of the noise of the instruments, trumpet- ing and squeaking and snorting, each one enjoying a private joke. I found Nuto drinking lemonade with the boys from Seraudi. They were standing in the open space behind the church from where you could see all the hill opposite and the watercoiu. s, as far as the distant farms among the woods. The people who were at Buon Con- siglio came from up there, from the most remote stead- ings and from further away still, from the village beyond the Mango with the little churches, where tlie only tracks were for goats and no one ever passed by. They had come to the fair in carts and flics, on bicycles and on foot. The place was full of girls, and old women going into the church, and men who were looking i. -nd about them. Even the better-off ones, well-dressed girls and little boys wearing ties, were waiting at the door of the church

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for the service to begin. I told Nuto I had come with Irene and Silvia and we saw them laughing among a crowd of their yoimg men. There were no two ways about it, that flowered dress was the prettiest one there.

We went with Nuto to see the horses in the stables at the inn. Bizzarro from the Station stopped us at the door and told us to keep watch. He and the others uncorked a bottle and half of it spilled on the ground. But they’d no intention of drinking it. They poured out the wine still foaming, into a bowl, and made Laiolo, who was as black as pitch, lick it up, and when he had drunk it all, they gave him four cuts with the handle of a whip on his hind-legs, to waken him up. Laiolo began to let fly with his feet, arching his back like a cat. “Not a word about this,” they said. “You’ll see, we’ll win the flag.”

At that very moment, Silvia and her young men ap- peared on the threshold.

“If you’ve taken to drinking already,” said a fat youth who was always laughing, “_you’ll be running instead of the horses.”

Bizzarro began to laugh and mopped his face with a red handkerchief.

“It’s these young ladies who should do the running,” he said, “they’re lighter on their feet than us.”

Then Nuto went off to play for the procession with the Madonna. They lined up in front of the church and then the Madonna came out. Nuto winked to us and spat, wiped his mouth with his hand and put the clarinet to his lips. They played a tune you could have heard down at the Mango.

I liked being in this open space among the plane trees,

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hearing the sound of the trumpets and the clarinet and seeing all the people kneeling down and r unning about and the Madonna coming out of the big door, swaying on the shoulders of the sacristans. Then came the priests, the boys in their surplices, the old women, the gentry, the incense, and all the candles in the sunshine, the brightly coloured dresses, and the young girls. And the men and women from the stalls, from the cake stall and the shooting-booth and the merry-go-round, were all standing watching, vmder the plane trees.

The Madonna was carried round the square and some- one set off crackers. I saw Irene with her golden hair, putting her fingers in her ears. I was happy because it was I who’d brought them in the gig and because I was at the festa with them.

I went over for a moment to draw the hay together again where the horse could reach it and I stopped to have a look at our rug and shawls and lunch-basket.

Then came the race and the music began again while the horses were coming out on to the road. But 1 had one eye always open for thi. lowered dress and the white one; I saw that they were talking and laughing and I’d have given anything to be one of these young men and partner them in the dancing.

The race passed us twice, once downhill and once up, under the plane trees, and the horses made a noise like the Belbo in flood; Laiolo was carrying a young man we didn’t know ; he rode hunched up and was using his whip like a madman. I was standing beside bi,- .rro, who began to swear, then he shouted Hurrah, when another horse lost its footing and came down on its nose and lay like a

17 J

sack; then he swore again when Laiolo raised its head and jumped; he tore the handkerchief from his neck and said, “You bastard!” and the boys from Seraudi were dancing about and butting each other like goats; then the people began to shout somewhere else, and Bizzarro turned a somersault, big as he was, and hit his head on the ground; everybody was still shouting; a horse from Neive had won.

Afterwards I lost sight of Irene and Silvia. 1 made the roimds of the shooting-booths and the card-tables and I went to the inn to listen to the horses’ owners who were quarrelling and drinking one bottle of wine after another and the parish priest was trying to make peace amongst them. Some were singing and some were cursing and some were eating salami and cheese. No girls were going to come into this courtyard, that was one sure thing.

By this time Nuto and the band were sitting on the dancing floor and getting down to it. You could hear them playing and laughing in the still air ; the evening was cool and clear and I wandered about behind the booths and saw the sackcloth partitions billowing up, and the young men were joking and drinking and some of them had already begun to lift the skirts of the women at the stalls. The boys were shouting and pinching almond cake from each other and making a din.

I went to watch the dancing on the platform in the big marquee. The boys from Seraudi were dancing al- ready. Their sisters were there, too, but I stayed to watch because 1 was looking for the flowered dress and the white one. I saw them both in the light of the acety- lene lamp, in the arms of their young men, their faces

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on their shoulders as the sound of the music bore them along. “I wish I was Nuto,” I thought. I went along beside Nuto’s seat and made him fill my glass, too, as if 1 were one of the band.

Then Silvia found me lying in the meadow, beside the horse’s head. I was lying stretched out counting the stars through the leaves of the plane trees when, all of a sud- den, I saw her happy face and her flowered dress between me and the vault of the sky. “He’s here sleeping,’’ she shouted.

Then I jumped up and their yovmg men got noisy and wanted them to stay longer. In the distance, behind the church, girls were singing. One of the young men offered to walk hojne with them. But there were the other young ladies who said, “And what about us?’’

We set off by the light of the acetylene lamp, then 1 went slowly downhill along the dark road, listening to the soimd of the hooves. The choir behind the church were still singing. Irene had wrapped herself up in a shawl. Silvia went on and on talking about the people and her partners and the summer, and she criticised them all and laughed. She asked if I had a girl of my own. I said I had been with Nuto watching him play.

Then gradually Silvia calmed down and the wonderful moment came when she laid her head on my shoulder, and smiled at me and said could she keep it there while I drove. I held the reins and kept my eyes on the horse’s ears.

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XXXI

NuTO TOOK Cinto into his house to make him leam car- pentry and teach him to play the clarinet. We agreed that, if the boy turned out well, 1 would get him a job in Genoa in due course. Another thing we had to decide was whether to take him to the hospital at Alessandria to let the doctor see his leg. Nuto’s wife protested that the house at Salto was too full already, between apprentices and joiner’s benches, and she couldn’t keep an eye on him properly. We told her that Cinto was a good child. But I took him aside again and explained that he must be careful, here it wasn’t like the road at Gaminella— cars, trucks and motor-cycles, coming and going to Canelli, passed in front of the shop, and he must always look before he crossed.

And so Cinto foxmd a place to live in and I had to leave the next day for Genoa. 1 spent the forenoon at Salto and Nuto was always at my heels. “So you’re going away,’’ he said. ‘ ‘Aren’t you coming back for the grape harvest?’ ’

“But I’m maybe going on a ship,’’ 1 said. “I’ll come back for the festa another year.’’

Nuto pursed his lips, as he always does. “You haven’t been here very long,’’ he said to me. “We haven’t really spoken to each other.’’

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I laughed.

“I’ve found you another son, anyway.’’

When we rose from the table, Nuto made up his mind. He snatched up his jacket as he went past and looked up.

“Let’s go over to the other side,’’ he muttered, “that’s your part of the world.’’

We crossed the plantation and the footbridge over the Belbo and came out on to the road at Gaminella, among the acacias.

“Let’s have a look at the house,’’ I said. “Valino was a human being, too,’’

We climbed up the path. It was a skeleton with black, gaping walls, and now above the rows of vines we could see the walnut tree which looked enormous.

“Only the trees are left,’’ I said. “It was a good job Valino took the bill-hook to them. . . . The watercoiuse has had the best of it.’’

Nuto stood silent and looked round the courtyard, full of stones and cinders. I wandered about among the stones and I couldn’t even find the mouth of the cellar, the ruins had blocked it. Ii the watercourse birds were making a din and some of them were fluttering, un- checked, about the vines.

“I’m going to eat a fig,” I said. “Thei'i’s no harm in it now.’’

I took the fig and remembered the taste.

“The Signora at the villa,’’ I said, “I wouldn’t put it past her to make me spit it out. ’ ’

Nuto said nothing and looked at the hill.

“And now they are dead, too,’’ he said. “What a lot of people have died since you left La Mora.’’

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Then I sat down on the beam which was still the same and told him that even all these deaths couldn’t put Sor Matteo’s daughters out of my head. “Let’s leave out Silvia, she died at home. But Irene and that good-for- nothing, living the life she has lived. And ^tina, I wonder how Santina died?’’

Nuto was playing about with some stones and now he looked up.

“Don’t you want to go further up the hill? Come on, it’s early.’’

So we set off and he went in front along the paths through the vineyards. I remembered the pale, dry earth, the smooth slippery grass of the paths, and the smell of grapes which belongs to the hill and the vineyard, with its promise already of harvesting grapes in the sunshine. In the sky there were long mare’s-tails and white flossy clouds which seemed like the bright drift we see at night in the darkness behind the stars. I was thinking that tomorrow I’d be in the Viale Corsica when suddenly I realised that the sea, too, is veined with the lines of the currents and that when, as a child, I watched the clouds and the path of the stars, I had already started on my travels without knowing it.

Nuto waited for me on the bank and said, “You didn’t see Santa when she was twenty. It woxild have been worth it. She was more beautiful than Irene with eyes like the black heart of a poppy. But she was a bitch, a damned bitch. . . .’’

I stopped to look down into the valley. As a boy, I’d never climbed as far as this. You could see a long way, as far as the little hoiises at Canelli and the Station and the

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dark wood at Calamandrana. I knew that Nuto was going to tell me something, and I remembered Buon Consiglio, I don’t know why.

“I went there once with Silvia and Irene,” I said for something to say, ”in the gig. I was a boy then. From up there you could see even the most distant villages, the farms, the farmyards, even the marks above the windows where the vines have been sprayed. There was the horse-race and we behaved as if we were all mad. . . . I don’t even remember now who won. I remember only the farms on the hills and Silvia’s dress, pink and mauve, with flowers on it.”

‘‘And Santa, too,” said Nuto, ‘‘once got us to take her to a fair at Bubbio. There was one year she would come to dance only when I was playing. Her mother was still alive . . . they were still staying at La Mora.”

He turned round and said, ‘‘Are you coming?”

He started to go in front of me a^in up the slopes. From time to time he wovJd look about him, trying to find a path. I was thinking how everything happens again as it has happened b'*fore — I saw Nuto in the gig driving Santa up the braes to the fair, as I had driven her sisters. In the rocks above the vineyards I saw the first of those little caves where they keep “^he hoes, or, if there is a spring beside it, there in the shade, hanging over the water, grows maidenhair fern. We crossed a vineyard ; it wasn’t in good heart and was full of bracken and those little yellow flowers with the hard stem which seem to go with motmtains — ^I’ve always known that you chewed them and put them on a cut to make it close up. And the hill still rose in front of us ; we had already

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passed several &nns and now we came out into the open.

“I might as well tell you,” said Nuto imexpectedly without raising his eyes; “I know how they killed Santa, I was there myself.”

He started to go along the road which was almost level and led rovmd a crest. I didn’t say anything but let him do the speaking. I watched the road and barely turned my head each time a bird or a hornet swooped at me.

There was a time, began Nuto, when he looked up to see if the curtains moved every time he was in Canelli and passed along the road behind the cinema. There was plenty of talk about it. Nicoletto was at La Mora and Santa, who couldn’t bear him, had run off to Canelli the moment her mother was dead, taken a room, and begun to teach. But being the girl she was, she’d at once found a job in the fascist party rooms, and there was talk of a militia officer, of a podesta, of the local fascist secretary, in fact of all the most criminal types in the neighbour- hood. Such a well-brought-up girl with such fair hair, it was right and proper for her to jiunp into the car and drive aroTund the district and have supper in the villas and the big houses and go to the Spa at Acqui, if it hadn’t been for the company she kept. Nuto tried not to see her in the streets, but when he passed under her window, he looked up at the curtains.

Then, with the summer of 1943, this good time came to an end for Santa, too. Nuto, who was always about Canelli to pick up news and pass it on, hadn’t looked up at her curtains any more. People said that Santa had run off to Alessandria with her militia lieutenant.

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Then September came and the Germans returned and the war with them; the soldiers came home to hide, in other people’s clothes, barefoot and starving, and the fascists kept on firing all night long and everybody said, “We knew it would end like this.’’ This was the republic. One fine day, Nuto heard that Santa had come back to Ginelli and taken on her job again at the party rooms ; she was getting drunk and going to bed with the blackshirts.

He hadn’t believed it. Up to the very last, he hadn’t believed it. He saw her once crossing the bridge, she was coming from the Station and she was wearing a grey fur coat and suede shoes and her eyes were shining with the cold. She had stopped him.

“How are things at Salt- ? Do you still play? Oh Nuto, I was afraid you were in Germany, too. It must be bad up there. Do they leave you alone?’’

To go through Canelli in these Ciys was always dangerous. There were the patrols, the Germans. And a girl like Santa wouldn’t have spoken to a boy like Nuto in the street if it hadn’t been for the war. He was on edge that day and merely answered yes and no.

Iben he had seen her again at the CafiFib dello Sport ; it was she who had called to him as she came out of the door. Nuto was watching the people going in, but it was

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a peaceful sunny morning, one of those Sundays when people go to mass.

“You used to see me when I was so high,” said Santa, “you believe what I say. They’re a bad lot in Canelli, some of them. They’d bum me if they could. They don’t want a girl to make anything of her life. They’d like to see me finishing up like Irene and kissing the hand that strikes me — ^pitiful creatures that haven’t even the guts to be blackguards.”

Santa was smoking cigarettes which you couldn’t get at Canelli and she’d offered some to him.

“Take some,” she said; “take the lot. There are so many of you who smoke up there.

“You see how it is,” said Santa. “Just because I was friendly with someone once and had my fling, even you turned away and looked in the windows when I passed. Yet you knew my mother, you knew me and what I’m like, you took me to the festa. Do you think I wasn’t angry, too, with that set of cowards we used to have? — the ones we have now at least stand up for themselves. Now I’ve got to live and eat their bread, because I’ve always worked for myself — ^no one has ever kept me, but if I were to speak out, I would lose my temper.”

Santa was saying this at the marble table, looking at Nuto without a smile on her face, with that delicately formed shameless mouth of hers and her great moist angry eyes, like her sisters’. Nuto tried hard to see if she was lying and eventually told her that these are times when you have to make up your mind to be on one side or the other and that he had made up his mind and was on the same side as the deserters and the partisans and the

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communists. He should have asked her to act as their spy at the command posts, but he hadn’t dared — ^he couldn’t stomach the idea of making a woman, especially Santa, run such risks.

But Santa thought of it and told Nuto a lot about troop movements, about the circulars the command sent out and what the repubblichini were saying. Another day she sent word to him not to come to Canelli because it was dangerous, and the Germans did indeed raid the squares and the caf6s. Santa said that she herself ran no risks, that they were old acquaintances of hers and worthless ones at that who came to her to get things off their chests and that they’d have sickened her if it hadn’t; been for the information she was able to pass on to the partisans. The morning that the blackshirts shot the two boys under the plane trees and left them lying like dogs, Santa came on her bicycle to La Mora and from there to Salto and spoke to Nuto’s mother, telling her if they had a rifle or a pistol to hide it in the watercourse. Two days later the blackshirts came that way and turned the house upside down.

And there came the day when Santa took Nuto by the arm and told him she couldn’t stand it any longer. She couldn’t go back to La Mora because Ni'ioletto was im- bearable and the job at Canelli, after all these deaths, was too much for her and driving her out of her mind ; if this sort of life didn’t end quickly, she’d lay hold on a pistol and shoot someone — she knew whom — ^herself maybe.

“I’d take to the hills, too,’’ she s'ld, “but 1 can’t. They’d shoot me on sight. I’m the woman from the ftscist headquarters.’’

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Then Nuto took her up the watercotirse and got her to meet Baracca. She told Baracca what she’d done already. Baracca stood and listened with his eyes on the ground. When she’d finished, he said only, “Go back to Canelli.’’

“But I can’t . . .’’ said Santa.

“Go back to Canelli and wait for orders from us. We’ll send you them.’’

Two months later — it was the end of May — Santa ran off from Canelli because she had been warned they were coming to arrest her. The owner of the cinema told me that a German patrol had gone in to search the house. It was the talk of Canelli. Santa took to the hills and joined the partisans. Nuto happened to hear about her from someone who was passing through with a message during the night, and they all said she carried arms like the rest of them and had won their respect. If it hadn’t been for the sake of his old mother and ^e fear of the house being burnt over their heads, Nuto woiild have joined the band, too, to help her.

But Santa didn’t need his help. When the mopping-up operations took place in June and so many died along these paths, Santa fought a whole night through with Baracca in a farm building behind Superga and came to the door herself to shout to the fascists that she knew every one of them and they didn’t put the wind up her. The next morning she and Baracca made off.

Nuto told me all this in a low voice, stopping every so often to look around him ; he gazed at the stubble-fields, at the bare vineyards, at the slope which was beginning to get steep again, and said, “Let’s go this way.’’ The

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point we had reached now couldn’t even be seen from the Belbo ; everything was small and far away and hidden in the mist; round about us were only distant ridges and high peaks. “Did you know that Gaminella stretched so far?’’ he asked me.

We stopped at the top of a vineyard, in a hollow sheltered by acacias. We saw the blackened ruin of a house. Nuto said quickly, “The partisans were there. The Germans burnt it down.

“Two boys with guns came to get me at Salto one evening. I knew them. We took the same road as we came today. We walked on although night had already fallen, for they couldn’t tell me what Baracca wanted. When we passed by the farms the dogs barked, no one stirred, not a light showed — ^you know what it was like at that time. I wasn’t very happy.’’

Nuto had seen a light under the door. He saw a motor- cycle in the courtyard, and blankets, and one or two boys, not many — ^thcir camp was in the woods, fiirther down.

Baracca said that he’d sent for him to hear an ugly bit of news — there was proof ^hat this Santa of theirs was acting as a spy, that she had directed the mopping-up operations in June and had brought about the collapse of the committee of national liberatioi. at Nizza, and even captured Germans had had her messages on them, reporting dvunps to the fascist headquarteis.

Baracca was an accountant from Cimeo, he was all there, he’d been in Africa, too, and lie didn’t talk much — ^you know he died with the boys af ’.a Neve. He told Nuto he still didn’t understand why Santa had fought beside him that night of the mopping-up operations.

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“It would be because you have a way with women,” said Nuto, but he was in despair and his voice shook.

Baracca said that Santa had a way with people, too, if she felt like it. And that was what had happened. She’d smelt danger and — ^this was the last straw — she’d gone off with two of their best men. Their job now was to take her at Canelli. The orders were already in writing.

“Baracca kept me three days up there, partly to relieve his feelings by talking to me about Santa, and partly to make sure I wouldn’t get mixed up in it. One morning Santa came back, under escort. She no longer wore the windbreaker and the slacks she had worn all these months. To come out of Canelli she had put on women’s clothes again and when the partisans had stopped, her up by Gaminella, she’d got a shock. She had on her informa- tion about orders the hiscists were sending out. But it didn’t help her any. In our presence Baracca read out to her the numbers of those who had deserted at her in- stigation, the number of dumps we had lost, the number of men who had died because of her. Santa sat on a chair and listened, completely disarmed. She stared at me angrily, trying to catch my eye. Then Baracca read out the sentence and told two of them to take her outside. They were more bewildered than she was. They’d always seen her wearing her jacket and belt and they couldn’t get used to the idea that now they had a hold of her, she was dressed in white. They took her outside. She turned rovmd at the door and looked at me and made a &ce just like a child. But, once outside, she tried to run away. We heard a cry and someone nmning and a burst of tommy-gun fire which seemed endless. We ran

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out, too, and saw her lying on the grass in front of the acacias."

Even more clearly than Nuto did, I saw Baracca — ^he had been hanged, too, until he was dead. I looked at the black ruined walls, I looked round me and asked if Santa was bviried here.

Mightn’t they find her some day? They found the other, too. . . .

Nuto had sat down on the wall and looked at me with his obstinate eyes.

‘‘No, not Santa,” he said. ‘‘You won’t find her. You can’t cover a woman like her with earth and leave her like that. There were still too many men who wanted her. Barac<;;a saw to that. He made us cut a lot of twigs in the vineyard and we piled them on top of her until we had enough. Then we poured petrol on the pile and set fire to it. By midday, everything was burnt to ashes. Last year the mark was still there, like the bed of a bonfire."

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