A Winter's Night (2 page)

Gaetano hadn't spoken a word, nor had his brothers, as they silently envisioned the creature that the stranger had described to the card-playing men. He finally said: “I don't believe a word of it. He's some wise guy who comes from lord knows where, out of work and without a penny. He ends up here, hears this story somehow and thinks, I wonder just how gullible these simpletons are . . . ”

“Right, he's just looking for someone who will put him up for a few days so he can tell his story again and again, until the roads have cleared up and he can head back to wherever he came from,” added Checco.

“That could be,” replied Iofa, “but just listening to his voice made shivers run down your spine. He had this rough voice, a voice that . . . sounded like it came from another world. Bastiano, who's big and broad as a bear and not afraid of anything, was trembling like a kid. How do you explain that none of us had ever seen him around here before, and yet he knew about the golden goat . . . ”

“So where is he now?” asked Armando, who hadn't uttered a word until then.

“Who knows,” replied Iofa. “He disappeared.”

“What do you mean, disappeared?” asked Gaetano.

“He asked for another glass of wine and gulped it down, then he left ten cents on the table and walked out. We all ran over to the glass door to look outside but he wasn't there anymore. So what do the lot of you think it means?”

“It means nothing,” replied Gaetano. “Tomorrow he'll show up again. He'll have slept it off in some hayloft.”

“You're just saying that to set your mind at ease,” broke in Cleto the umbrella mender. “The truth is you're afraid.”

“Afraid?” protested Floti. “Of what?”

“You know what . . . the golden goat. You know well what it means when the golden goat appears suddenly, on a night like tonight, to a solitary wayfarer. It can only mean that something terrible is going to happen. Folks say that the first time was three hundred years ago. The golden goat appeared and then the next year the plague broke out and carried off five hundred people from this town alone. It appeared again sixty years later to a Capuchin friar who was directed to the monastery in Vignola. He was travelling by night to avoid the heat of the day, it was in August. A few months later the Turks invaded the eastern regions and then Austria and it was a miracle that they didn't invade Italy to take Rome! It would have been the end of Christianity! Twenty soldiers from this very town were killed in the battle of Vienna.

“The golden goat was last seen again just eighteen years ago on a stormy night by a swine merchant on his way back from the market at Sant'Agata. It was pitch dark, and pouring rain, but the goat was lit up like broad daylight by a bolt of lightning. Six months later his three sons died in the battle of Adwa in Abyssinia, along with thousands and thousands of our soldiers . . . ”

“Stop that,” said Floti. “That's all just idle talk! The superstitious prattle of ignorant people who, when some disaster happens, drag the golden goat into it. That's all it is. It's nothing.”

“Really?” replied Cleto. “Well then, if that's the way things are and if you're not afraid of these silly superstitions, what do you say we go to take a look for ourselves? Go to Pra' dei Monti, now?”

“You're crazy,” said Floti. “No way on earth! It's too damned cold out there and the snow's coming too fast. We're likely to end up falling in a ditch and freezing to death, and they won't find us until next spring.”

“You don't go to church very often,” shot back Cleto, “but I remember well what Don Massimino used to say in his day, God bless him. He said that the goat is a symbol of the devil, a symbol that goes way back in time. How do you know that the golden goat wasn't worshipped as a pagan idol around here once, long ago, maybe even right there at Pra' dei Monti? You've heard what they dug up there, haven't you? The remains of an ancient settlement, with amulets, bracelets shaped like snakes, grotesque masks. And people say that it was there, almost two thousand years ago, that a great battle was fought and that thousands and thousands of dead bodies were left unburied in the swamps that covered this territory. Nothing happens by chance, my friend. There's always a reason why certain things take place . . . And while we're on the subject, what do you have to say about what happened here tonight? A ray of sun the color of blood piercing through the falling snow . . . Who's ever seen something like that before?”

Armando, the most easily spooked of the brothers, got to his feet. “Sorry, but I don't like the turn things are taking here! I wish you all a good night. I'm going to sleep myself.”

“Go, go,” said Cleto, and waited for Armando to leave so he could pick up where he had left off. “Well then? Since you say all this is just idle chatter, why don't we go take a look? We'll cover up well, put on our long-legged clogs and we'll head out. We can be there in less than an hour.”

“Come on now,” said Floti with a shrug. “You really think the golden goat will be waiting there for you? Aren't sudden appearances supposed to be brief and unexpected? Me, I'm going to bed. Good night to everyone and you, Iofa, be careful getting home. You don't want to meet up with the goat and get strung up on his horns!”

Iofa made the sign of the cross, muttering: “It's nothing to joke about. You should have seen that guy: he would have scared anyone.”

Floti left and the other brothers behind him. Iofa lingered, as did Gaetano, who still had a few questions to ask Cleto. He'd always suspected that the man was something more than what he seemed: a wandering handyman who turned up every year at the first snowfall and left again at the end of February, sometimes without having mended a single umbrella. Every Saturday without fail Cleto would wash his stockings, drawers and undershirt and put them to dry near the mouth of the oven where the bread had been baked; not your usual beggar. The Brunis took him in year after year, just as they did with anyone who knocked at their door asking for a place to rest for the night and a bowl of soup. In exchange he told stories of distant lands and extraordinary events that farming men in a small village couldn't even begin to imagine.

“Tell me the truth, now that there are only the three of us here: do you believe those things that Don Massimino said?” he demanded.

“I do. And you should believe them as well, Gaetano. Your brother is a bit stubborn at times; he's convinced that there's a simple reason behind everything. He's wrong. Many things have no explanation. There's a whole world around us that we can't see or hear, but it exists and it can change our lives from one moment to the next. What's more, it's best not to challenge certain . . . forces.”

“Then why were you trying to convince Floti to go to Pra' dei Monti with you?”

“Walking in the dead of night under the falling snow on a country road towards an abandoned place where an ancient legend was born . . . would help your brother to understand that we are surrounded by mystery.”

Gaetano wasn't sure he grasped what the umbrella mender was getting at, but he felt a chill run down his spine. Iofa's eyes were wide and white and full of fear; Gaetano took one look at him and said:

“Why don't you sleep here, tonight? Tomorrow you can give me a hand with the milking and then we'll have breakfast together: eggs and pancetta and a glass of the new wine.”

“Well I'll be sincere,” Iofa replied eagerly, “with weather like this out I won't say no. There's plenty of hay here, it's nice and dry, and my cape makes a good blanket. Who could wish for anything more?”

“Then I'll say goodnight,” said Gaetano.

As soon as the stable door was shut, the umbrella man started up again: “Don Massimino was no ordinary man. I met him the first time I ever came here, many and many a year ago. I remember once, at the end of June with the fields full of wheat blond as gold and the cherry trees bent with the weight of ripe red fruit, that a storm came up like nothing we'd ever seen before: clouds black as ink but rimmed in white and thunder grumbling in the distance. We knew that hail was coming, and that it would be big as eggs. A downfall that would ruin a year's work and leave our families without bread.”

Iofa could feel the winds of the storm chilling him to the bone.

“Well, Don Massimino walked out of the front door of the church,” continued Cleto, “and he left it wide open so that Jesus Christ in the tabernacle could feel that icy gale, just like when he was nailed naked on the cross. Then he raised his eyes to that pitch-black sky and he opened his arms as if he could protect the whole town. He was muttering something—I don't know what it was, prayers or exorcisms—and, despite the cold, he was dripping with sweat. His knees were trembling, as if he were bearing the weight of those ice-laden clouds on his own fragile shoulders.

“I hid behind the portico columns to watch, and I didn't lose sight of him for an instant. After almost an hour of that unequal struggle with the elements, Don Massimino won: the sky slowly opened and a strip of blue appeared. The clouds scattered and the thunder vanished in the distance. I saw him collapse to the ground in a faint. When he came to, I was there next to him. He said: ‘If I had failed, it would have been a disaster. A catastrophe!' And I had no doubt that he was telling the pure truth. So now you know why I believe everything he said. He knew what he was talking about. Even when he spoke of that image of the devil: the golden goat!”

When Gaetano had crossed the courtyard and reached the door of the house, he turned back to look at the stable. He saw the dim red glow of the lamplight go out, all at once.

The next day, some time before dawn, the snow began to fall more lightly, and then as fine as powder. It stopped completely as day was breaking. The men got up early, took their shovels and began to clear a walkway towards the road. Iofa helped Gaetano milk the cows and then sat down at the table to have breakfast: eggs and pancetta and a piece of bread warmed on the embers. The man who'd appeared at the Osteria della Bassa the night before was nowhere to be seen in town, and those who had been there playing
briscola
began to doubt whether they had really met him, or heard his words.

The town's children couldn't leave for school until the buzzard had passed, towed by three pairs of oxen, to clear the roads. They called it that because it had two big wooden boards spread wide to push the snow to the edges of the road, just like the wings of a buzzard. The poorest children had had nothing to eat for breakfast and went from house to house asking for alms. They wore wooden clogs made with cowhide that got soaked instantly and then shrunk to squeeze their freezing feet. The lucky ones got a chunk of bread, others a scolding or a kick in the rear. They were happy to go to school because there was a nice clay Becchi stove that radiated warmth and the fragrance of oakwood kindling.

Those were wretched years: the late frosts in the spring and hailstorms in the summer had decimated the harvests, and Don Massimino was no longer around to fight off gales bare-handed. He was at rest in the old cemetery, in the shade of an oak tree that had sprung up by chance from an acorn. In town, there was a story to be told for every event, and this one was no exception.

Don Massimino had been a poor man his whole life and even in the parish, where he could have enjoyed the generous revenues coming in from its five prebendal properties, he never used a whit more than what he needed, dividing the rest between the diocese and the poor. He'd asked to be buried in a simple shroud, without a coffin, because that amount of money could be used to buy enough wheat to feed a family for a whole week. But the devil, who he had defeated so many times in his life, made sure to give him payback in his final place of rest. Nettles and weeds grew on his grave and a big snake black as ink had burrowed in to stay, so that no one dared to get close enough to clean it up a bit or lay down a bunch of meadow flowers.

Until one day, when a white and black magpie hid an acorn that soon took root. An oak tree grew quickly and spread a dome of green leaves over the grave. The weeds and nettles died, and emerald green grass as fine as cat's fur grew in their place. A hawk nabbed the snake as it left its den and devoured it. And every springtime since then, the humble grave of Don Massimino was covered with daisies.

The people took heart at stories like this one and many others, invented to lead them to believe that there was someone who was thinking of them in their moments of pain, hunger and despair. The poorest families faced the winter as a scourge sent by God, living in hovels where their piss froze in the urinals at night and all the rosaries the women said did not suffice to protect them from malnutrition and disease. Babies were born small and didn't thrive, as their mothers had no milk. Thin, almost transparent, they struggled on until a fever took them away. The women had no tears left. They would open a window so that the little one's soul could fly up to the sky, and whisper: “Saints in heaven!”

At least the child had stopped suffering, whereas they had not. There would be another pregnancy and more trouble and tribulation and more children who cried with hunger until they lost their voices, because men would never give
that
thing up, and it didn't count to close your eyes and say the rosary to stop from getting pregnant. There was never an easy day in the homes of the day laborers, who went into debt in the wintertime for as long as the shops would give them credit, hoping to pay it off in the springtime, when they could earn a day's pay.

 

The Brunis had lived in the same house and worked the same land for one hundred years, or maybe even more: no one had ever kept records, after all, and no one remembered where the family came from. They had no money but they had never gone hungry: they could always count on enough milk, cheese, eggs, bread, prosciutto and
salame
, because the landowner lived in Bologna, the steward showed up once in a blue moon and the Brunis took what they needed to stay strong.