A Winter's Night (17 page)

What would be the right time to ask her to marry him? In the fall or in the spring? The fall, for sure, so then they could plan for a spring wedding; he would be the first in his family to marry after returning from the war. Every time he thought about it and decided it was time to speak up, he would get cold feet and put it off for next time. In the end, he resolved to ask for her hand on Saint Martin's Day. He practiced often for the crucial moment, looking at himself in the mirror as he shaved and talking out loud in a self-confident, natural way: “Iole, I love you and want to marry you. If you feel the same way, I was thinking that Saint Joseph's Day would be a good time.” How could anyone say it better? Not even Floti could do better than that.

Sometimes he considered the idea that she might say no, but he didn't even want to think about it, because that would be exactly what Floti had guessed would happen, and he really would end up looking like a fool.

When the day came, he rode up in the carriage with a basket in which he'd put a
salame
, a chunk of
parmigiano
cheese, a dozen fresh eggs and a piece of focaccia straight out of the oven. Who could resist? In fact, Iole, and even more so her mother, were overjoyed at the sight of such abundance. Signora Giuseppina, with the excuse of emptying the basket so she could give it back to him, disappeared into the kitchen, leaving Gaetano alone with Iole. He said: “Would you like to take a walk? there's something I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Why, sure,” replied Iole, putting a shawl over her shoulders.

They sat outside on a wooden bench at the side of the house, where they'd spent hours chatting on the long summer evenings. The November sun was tepid and the grapevine creeping up the wall was covered with big scarlet leaves.

“You look well,” started Gaetano.

“You too,” replied Iole.

“I meant to say that you look marvelous.”

“Thank you for the compliment, but I don't deserve it.”

“I have to ask you something.”

“Happily, if I can.”

Gaetano swallowed hard, the moment had come. “I love you, Iole, I do nothing but think about you all day, and every night before I fall asleep . . . ” He was surprising himself; words that he had not even prepared were flowing spontaneously. “I love you and I want to marry you. I was thinking that St Joseph's Day would be perfect . . . ”

“Not so fast, Gaetano! You've already decided the day?”

Her words turned his blood to ice.

“I'm sorry, it doesn't have to be then. For me any day is good, and if you'll marry me I'll be the happiest man on earth. You choose the day, the month . . . the year. I don't want to hurry you.”

Iole looked up at him and he saw a total indifference that made his heart sink. In that moment he thought of everything she'd let him do to her, how she'd taught him to kiss with his tongue, how she'd let him touch her breasts and thighs and everything else except for that one thing. Wasn't that love?

“Gaetano, I don't feel I can.”

“But why? I thought that you . . . ” but he couldn't go on because of the knot in his throat.

Iole bowed her head, but not out of embarrassment or for any other reason. She looked like she was trying to come up with an excuse.

“Because . . . because you plant too much hemp, you Brunis.”

Gaetano's courage came rushing back. “Too much hemp? No, no, you don't need to worry: it's true, we do plant a lot of hemp but the men take care of it. There are seven of us and we don't mind hard work. Women are respected, in my house. They only do light work, like holding the lead on the oxen, gathering eggs in the morning, feeding the hens and rabbits. And when a woman is pregnant she stays comfortably at home to prepare the baby's diapers and blankets, three months before and four months after. Honestly.”

Iole put a hand on his shoulder, as if to interrupt his heartfelt pleading. “They all say the same thing. And then it's one pregnancy after another and the washing and the ironing and the chickens and the pigs, the hoe and the shovel. Your hands end up looking like shoe leather and your face fills up with wrinkles . . . No, Gaetano, seriously, I just can't.”

Gaetano got up and said: “But after everything we've done together . . . I thought you loved me.”

“We haven't done anything, Gaetano,” she replied in a tone of voice that might have been saying, “Go ahead, cut your throat for all I care.” The matter was closed.

He left on the carriage while Giuseppina, who had appeared on the threshold in the meantime, shouted: “The basket! Your basket!”

Gaetano was miserable as miserable could be: he acted completely stunned, as if the roof of the hayloft had caved in on him and hit him square on the head. Clerice stole sidelong looks at him during the day. She imagined all too well the source of his grief, because nothing going through her children's minds escaped her. It went without saying that in such a small town what had happened became public knowledge in a matter of days. Not that Clerice felt offended that her son had been rejected; like Floti, she had always known that it would end up this way. It was hardly customary for a woman to leave a man, and when such a thing happened it meant that she was one of those who didn't mind having more than one man, and had no problem going back and forth between them.

 

“You haven't lost a thing,” said Floti when he found Gaetano in the hayloft one day with his head against a column, weeping silently. Gaetano didn't answer and Floti was intelligent enough to avoid adding that loathsome phrase, “I told you so.” “She doesn't deserve you,” he started up again. “She would have made you suffer and she might have even betrayed you. She would have betrayed you, Gaetano. You are a good man, you're good-looking, strong as a lion, not afraid of the devil, and the most big-hearted person I know. There are lots of women out there and every one of them would be happy to have you. You're a man of few words, but your word is your pledge; a woman feels protected and respected and safe with you. Try not to dwell on her,
Tanein
. It hurts a lot now, but that will go away. You know like when the hammer slips and you pound it into your finger? It hurts like hell and you feel like you're going to die, but then little by little the wound heals and your nail grows back. That's just the way we are. You really suffer over something but then, with time, you get over it.

“Death is the only thing there's no remedy for,
Tanein
. You know something? Sometimes I go to
papà's
tomb and I stand there looking at the photograph on the gravestone. He looks alive, but there he is, under the ground, decomposing, until there will be nothing left but his bones. Now that's a terrible thing. You know how many times I say to myself, ‘If
papà
were here I'd ask his advice about this or that,' but instead he's not here and I can't ask him anything, while all seven of us were spared, thank God. Just think of what we went through in the war: the wounds, the bayonet attacks, the corpses of our buddies rotting under the rain for days and days because no one could bury them, because if you tried you'd get a bullet hole in your own head. It's a pity that we've lost
papà
but we're fine, otherwise, aren't we? We're doing well, Gaetano. Come on, buck up. When you want to talk, you know I'm around. And you can take the carriage any time you like.”

Gaetano snuffled noisily and mumbled something like “thanks.” He started cutting up chard for the animals, with enough vigor to be chopping off heads.

The summer was a scorcher. The sun beat down on people's heads like a blacksmith pounding an anvil. It made some people sick, some went off their heads and some even went raving mad. The son of Martina Cestari, a widow who had fifteen or twenty furlongs of land to plow, hung himself on a mulberry tree one August afternoon when the air was still and overcast, so hot and suffocating that not even the cicadas were saying anything and the leaves drooped lifelessly from the trees.

Fortunately, Don Giordano, the new pastor of the parish, would bury them in sacred ground even though they were suicides, because he knew that those poor people hadn't taken their lives to offend God, but only because they couldn't bear the tedium and despair of their daily existence. Because life could be a much heavier burden than death. He would bless them anyway and recite “
Requiescat in pace, amen
,” sprinkling a liberal amount of holy water.

He made a point of visiting the lad's mother and said: “Have faith, for God will not abandon you.” Pretty words, but Martina wept like a fountain and would not be consoled.

“It's easy to say that we'll see them again on the other side,” observed Clerice, who was there to console her, “but in the meantime, they're gone.”

Martina cried and cried, and kept saying, between one sob and the next, a phrase in her bizarre mountain dialect: “My poor little bastard!” “Bastard” for them was an affectionate way of saying “son.” There was a reason behind it; young girls would come down from the mountainside where their families had nothing to eat, and take positions as servants on the plains. In no time, they'd find the landowner in their beds and they'd soon find themselves pregnant and sent back home to give birth to exactly that, a bastard. But that wasn't true in Martina's case, she'd had a husband for as long as the Lord had left him with her, and he had been a good sort at that.

Floti and Gaetano and Fredo and Dante carried Martina's son on their shoulders to the cemetery, because they were his friends and because they were the same height, so the casket travelled on an even level. He didn't weigh a thing, poor devil, reduced to skin and bones by all the hard work he'd had to do alone on all that land. Their brother Armando never came to funerals because he was afraid of the dead, despite all the ones he'd seen during the war; he just didn't want to think that one day it would be his turn. Savino, on the other hand, who'd learned to kill at the front when he was only nineteen, was not afraid of the devil in person. He was even a bit too cocky at times, and Floti had to raise his voice with him sometimes, as their father would have done.

From then on, whenever there was work to be done in the fields, two or three of the boys would go to give Martina a hand, seeing that there was no way she could handle the farm on her own. When it was plowing time, they showed up with two oxen as big as houses, strong enough to pull down a church. In three days the work was done and the soil turned by the plowshares let off a light steam that smelled of dead leaves.

 

Winter that year cut cold as a knife blade. The soil hardened and all the leaves fell off the trees in a single night. Luckily, firewood was not lacking, but Floti said it was best to sell it so they could make money on it, and to use as little as possible for themselves. On the long December and January nights everyone would gather in the stable. The fire that Clerice would keep going in the hearth was barely big enough to heat the “priest” that would warm their beds.

They whiled away the time playing cards or listening to stories. After the first snowfalls, wayfarers began to show up, and they had a host of tales to tell, since that was how they earned a bowl of soup and a straw mattress to sleep on. One day, a knife grinder happened by. A stranger who spoke a strange dialect, which only Floti could recognize because he'd spent months in Friuli. He was very good at his trade, sharpening knives until they cut like razors, but he also knew how to make really nice chairs. He'd take a piece of acacia wood and with four or five strokes of a bill hook he carried with him, he'd make the legs and then the rails and then last of all the spindles, and then he'd add a straw seat that was made just right. But his stories were really scary ones. And sometimes you had the impression he was a little crazy. Maybe it was the war, and what he'd experienced. Everyone said that in the house where he lived all alone up on a mountaintop he heard things and saw things. More than once, he'd seen his wife who'd died three years earlier walking across his bedroom carrying their child who'd died as well in an artillery bombing. The child was as limp as a rag doll and the woman stared at him with eyes red from weeping, but if he tried to talk to her she would not answer.

Everyone fell silent at that point because no one felt like saying, what a bunch of nonsense, or giving him a reason to go on with his tale. Clerice said, however, that maybe what he said was true and what he was seeing were souls from purgatory.

“But what about the baby?” Maria would ask. “What could such a small child need to atone for, mother? What sins could he have committed, poor creature?”

“Even if he didn't do anything, he has to stay with his mother. He's too little to be on his own,” Clerice said, making the sign of the cross and murmuring prayers under her breath.

Even Fonso, the storyteller, had survived the war and there was no one who could spin a tale like him. The Brunis were always happy to see him, except for Floti, who didn't want him courting his sister Maria. He was not handsome in the least and he was just a day laborer. What's more, he'd come back from the war half deaf, because he'd been at the Battle of Mount Montello, with those eight thousand cannons firing all together and making a horrible din, and his hearing had never been the same.

Even so, when he arrived in the evening wrapped in his long
tabarro
cloak, even the women started to drift into the stable, with the excuse of spinning hemp. Maria sat and listened openmouthed and his stories were so beautiful that he became beautiful as he told them. At least in her eyes. When he started up, using the set phrase, “You should know that once upon a time . . . ” the silence that fell was so complete you could hear the oxen slowly chewing on their cud. Sometimes he'd come accompanied by friends who hoped to share in his privileges: a few glasses of wine or even, when he'd finished his story, a cockerel fried right then and there, with a loaf of crusty bread. But this happened rarely and anyway, when the gang that showed up wasn't too numerous.