Difficult Loves (7 page)

"You can't get a hit every time."

"Can't. Well, she went on after that hare for two hours. ..."

They heard two shots, but then the yelping began again, coming closer.

"... two hours later," Baciccin resumed, "she brought the hare back to me, like before. I missed it again, goddamnit."

All of a sudden a hare appeared, darting along the trail. It

came almost to Baciccin's legs, then swerved into the bushes and disappeared. I hadn't even had time to take aim.

"Damnation!" I yelled.

"What's wrong?" Baciccin asked.

"Nothing," I said.

Costanzina hadn't seen it, either; she had gone back into the house.

"Well," Baciccin went on, "you know that bitch kept chasing that hare and bringing it back to me over and over until I hit it? What a dog!"

"Where is she now?"

"Ran off."

"Well, you can't win every time."

My father came back with the panting dog. He was cursing.

"Missed by a fraction of an inch. This close. A big one. Did you see him?"

"Not a thing," Baciccin said.

I slung the gun over my shoulder and we started on our way down.

LAZY SONS

At dawn my brother and I are asleep, faces buried in the pillows, and already our father's hobnail tread can be heard as he moves around the rooms. When he gets up, our father makes a lot of noise, deliberately perhaps; and he sees to it that he has to go up and down the steps, in his cleated boots, at least twenty times, never for any reason. Maybe this is his whole life, a waste of energy, a great useless exertion; and maybe he does it as a protest against the two of us—we get him so angry.

My mother doesn't make any noise, but she is already up, too, in the big kitchen, poking the fire, peeling things with those hands that become blacker and more scarred all the time, polishing glasses and furniture, jabbing at the laundry. This, too, is a protest against us, her doing housework always in silence and managing it all without any maids.

"Sell the house, and we'll spend the money," I say with a shrug when they start pestering me about how things can't go on like this. But my mother continues toiling silently, day and night, till there's no telling when she sleeps; and meanwhile the cracks in the ceilings widen and lines of ants trace

the walls, and weeds and brambles keep growing higher in the rank garden. Soon nothing will be left of our house but a ruin covered with vines. In the morning, however, mother doesn't come and tell me to get up because she knows it's no use anyway, and that silent attention to the house crumbling around her is her way of persecuting us.

My father, on the contrary, is already flinging open our window at six o'clock, in hunting jacket and puttees, and yelling at us: "I'm going to take a stick to you two! Bums! Everybody works in this house but the pair of you! Pietro! get up if you don't want me to hang you! And make that gallows bird of a brother, Andrea, get up, too!"

In our sleep, we have already heard him approaching; digging our heads into the pillows, we don't even roll over. We protest now and then with grunts when he doesn't let up. But he soon goes away; he knows it's all useless, this is all a play he puts on, a ritual ceremony, a refusal to admit defeat.

We grope our way back into sleep : most times, my brother hasn't even waked up, he's become so used to this and he doesn't give a damn. Egotistic and insensitive, that's my brother: sometimes he makes me mad. I act the same way he does, but at least I understand that it's not right, and I'm the first to be discontent. Still I keep on, though with anger.

"Dog," I say to my brother Andrea, "you dog, you're killing your father and mother." He doesn't answer: he knows I'm a hypocrite and a clown, and nobody's a bigger do-nothing than me.

Ten, maybe twenty minutes later, my father's at the door again, in a stew. Now he uses a different method: kindly, almost indifferent invitations, a pathetic farce. He says : "Well, who's coming to San Cosimo with me? The vines have to be tied."

San Cosimo is our farm. Everything is drying up and there's no manpower or money to keep it running.

"The potatoes have to be dug. Are you coming, Andrea? Well? Are you coming? I'm speaking to you, Andrea. We have to water the beans. Are you coming?"

Andrea raises his mouth from the pillow. "No," he says, and goes back to sleep.

"Why not?" My father continues his farce. "It was all settled. Pietro? Are you coming, Pietro?"

Then he explodes again and calms down again and talks about the things to be done at San Cosimo, as if it were understood that we're going. That dog, I think of my brother, that dog, he could get up and give the poor old man some satisfaction, at least this once. But I myself feel no urge to get up. and I make an effort to be immersed again in my sleep, by now disturbed.

"Well, hurry up. I'll wait for you," our father says and goes off as if we were now in agreement. We hear him pacing and fuming downstairs, preparing the fertilizer, the sulphate, the seeds to be taken up there; every day he sets out and comes back laden like a mule.

We are thinking he's already gone when he yells again, from the foot of the stairs: "Pietro! Andrea! For God's sake, aren't you ready yet?"

This is his final outburst; then we hear his hobnailed footsteps behind the house, the gate slams, and he goes off along the path, hawking and spitting.

Now we could have a good long sleep, but I can't manage to doze off; I think of my father, burdened, climbing up the track spitting, and afterward at work, in a rage with the tenants who steal from him and let everything go to rack and ruin. And he looks at the plants and the fields, where the insects

gnaw and burrow all over, and at the yellowing leaves and the thick weeds, all the work of his life that is falling to pieces like the sustaining walls of the terrace that crumble more with every rain; and he curses his sons.

Dog, I say, thinking of my brother, you dog. Then I prick up my ears and from below I can hear something clatter to the floor, a falling broomstick. My mother is alone in that enormous kitchen, and daylight is just brightening the windowpanes, and she is slaving for people who turn their backs on her. As I am thinking this, I fall asleep.

It's not yet ten o'clock when Mother starts yelling from the stairs, "Pietro! Andrea! It's ten already!" She sounds very angry, as if she were irritated by something extraordinary; but it's the same every morning. "Awright ..." we yell back. And, awake by now, we stay in bed another half-hour, to become used to the idea of getting up.

Then I start saying, "Come on, Andrea, wake up. Let's get up, all right? Andrea, come on, start getting out of bed." Andrea grunts.

Finally, with a lot of huffing and stretching, we're on our feet. Andrea walks around in his pajamas with an old man's movements, his hair all disheveled and his eyes half blind, and he's already licking a paper to roll a smoke. He smokes at the window, then begins to wash and shave.

Meanwhile he has started grumbling, and little by little the grumbling gives way to singing. My brother has a baritone voice, and though in company he is always mournful and never sings, when he's alone, shaving or taking a bath, he strikes up one of those cadenced tunes of his in a grim voice. He doesn't know any songs, so he always comes forth with a Carducci poem he learned as a child: "On Verona's castle strikes the noonday sun. ..."

I'm getting dressed on the other side of the room, and I act as chorus, joylessly, but with a kind of violence: "And the green Adige flows murmuring into the open country. ..."

My brother continues his chant to the end, not overlooking a single stanza, as he washes his head and brushes his shoes. "Black as an old raven, and with eyes of coal. ..."

The more he sings, the more I'm filled with anger, and I also start singing fiercely: "Ill-luck is mine, and an evil beast has bitten me. ..."

This is the only time we make noise. Afterward we're quiet for the whole day.

We go downstairs and warm up some milk, then dip bread into it and eat noisily. Mother hovers over us and talks, complaining, but without insistence, about all the things that have to be done, the chores that could be performed. "Yes, yes," we answer, forgetting immediately.

As a rule I don't go out in the morning. I stay home, dawdling in the halls with my hands in my pockets, or I arrange my library. I haven't bought any new books for some time: it would take money; besides, I've lost interest in too many things, and if I started reading again I'd want to read everything, and I don't feel up to it. But I keep arranging the few books I have on the shelf: Italian, French, English; or else by subject—history, philosophy, fiction—or else I put all the bound volumes together, with the fine editions and the shabby books elsewhere.

My brother, on the contrary, goes to the Caffè Imperia and watches the billiards game. He himself doesn't play, because he doesn't know how: he stays there for hours and hours, looking at the players, following the balls in fancy triple shots, smoking, never getting excited, never betting since he has no money. Sometimes they let him keep score, but often his mind wanders

and he makes mistakes. He transacts a little deal or two, enough to pay for his smokes. Six months ago he filed an application with the Aqueduct Administration for a job that would support him, but he hasn't followed it up; for the present he gets enough to eat, anyway.

At dinner my brother arrives late, and both of us eat in silence. My parents are always arguing about expenses and income and debts and about how to manage with two sons who aren't earning anything; and our father says, "Look at your friend Costanzo, look at your friend Augusto." Our friends aren't like us: they've formed a partnership, buying and selling the timber rights to some woods, and they're always out and about on business, dealing and bargaining, sometimes with our father, too; they earn piles of money and soon will own their own truck. They're crooks and our father knows it; still, he would like us to be like them rather than the way we are. "Your friend Costanzo earned such-and-such an amount on that deal," he says. "See if you can go in with them, too." But our friends hang around with us in their free time, and they never suggest deals to us; they know we're lazy and good-for-nothing.

In the afternoon, my brother goes back to sleep: there's no figuring out how he manages to sleep so much, but he does. I go to the movies : I go every day; if they're showing a film I've already seen, then I don't have to make any effort to follow the story.

After supper, stretched out on the sofa, I read some long, translated novels people lend me; often, as I read, I lose the thread of the plot and can never make heads or tails of it. My brother gets up as soon as he's eaten and leaves, to watch the billiards game.

My parents go straight to bed because they get up early in the morning: "Go to your room; you're wasting electricity here," they say to me as they climb the stairs. "I'm going," I say and remain lying there.

I'm already in bed and have been sleeping for a while when my brother comes back, around two. He turns on the light, stirs around the room, and has a last smoke. He tells me what's going on in the city, expresses kindly opinions of people. This is the hour when he is really awake and glad to talk. He opens the window to let the smoke out; we look at the hill with the lighted road and the dark, clear sky. I sit up in bed and, carefree, we chat for a long time about trivial things, until we're sleepy again.

WARTIME STORIES

FEAR ON THE FOOTPATH

At a quarter past nine, just as the moon was rising, he reached the Colla Bracca meadow; at ten he was already at the juncture of the two trees; by half past twelve he'd be at the fountain; he might reach Vendetta's camp by one—ten hours of walking at a normal speed, but six hours at the most for Binda, the courier of the first battalion, the fastest courier in the partisan brigade.

He went hard at it, did Binda, flinging himself headlong down short cuts, never making a mistake at crossroads that all looked alike, recognizing stones and bushes in the dark. His firm chest kept the same rhythm of breathing; his legs went like pistons. "Hurry up, Binda!" his comrades would say as they saw him from a distance climbing up toward their camp. They tried to read in his face whether the news and orders he was bringing were good or bad; but Binda's face was shut like a fist, a narrow mountaineer's face with hairy lips on a short bony body more like a boy's than a youth's, with muscles like stones.

His was a tough and solitary job, being woken at all hours, sent out even to Serpe's camp or Pelle's, having to march in the dark valleys at night, accompanied only by a French

tommy gun, light as a little wooden rifle, hanging on his shoulder; and when he reached a detachment he had to move on to another or return with the answer; he would wake up the cook and grope around in the cold pots, then leave again with a panful of chestnuts still sticking in his gullet. But it was the natural job for him, because he never got lost in the woods and knew all the paths, from having led goats about them or gone there for wood or hay since he was a child; and he never went lame or rubbed the skin off his feet scrambling about the rocks, as so many partisans did who'd come up from the towns or the navy.

Glimpses caught as he went along—a chestnut tree with a hollow trunk, blue lichen on a stone, the bare space around a charcoal pit—linked themselves in his mind to his remotest memories—an escaped goat, a polecat driven from its lair, the raised skirt of a girl. And now the war in these parts was like a continuation of his normal life; work, play, hunting, all turned into war : the smell of gunpowder at the Loreto bridge, escapes down the bushy slopes, minefields sown with death.

The war twisted closely around and around in those valleys like a dog trying to bite its tail; partisans elbow to elbow with
bersaglieri
and Fascist militia; each side alternating between mountain and valley, making wide turns around the crests so as not to run into one another and find themselves fired on; and always someone killed, either on hill or valley. Binda's village, San Faustino, was down among fields, three groups of houses on each side of the valley. His girl, Regina, hung out sheets from her window on days when there were roundups. Binda's village was a short halt on his way up and down; a sip of milk, a clean vest ready washed by his mother; then off he had to hurry, in case the Fascists suddenly arrived, for there hadn't been enough partisans killed at San Faustino.