Love and War in the Apennines (21 page)

‘Why what will happen when the snow comes?’ I said, and it was suddenly as quiet in the kitchen as it had been that afternoon at the Baruffas’ when Signor Baruffa had told me to go, and again I felt them all looking at me, not in an unfriendly way but as if they all knew what Luigi was going to say because it had already
been discussed on some occasion when I had not been present, and were curious to see what effect his words would have on me.

‘When the snow comes,’ he said, ‘if not before, wherever you are, they will come and take you away.’

Now that we were all well and truly compromised, and as if they knew that it didn’t really matter any more, visitors began to arrive at the Pian del Sotto, as I imagined they always had done before I came, although they never appeared when I was actually in the house; but always when I was far away working in the fields, as in a hospital when visiting hours had been laid down. They were mostly men, stocky figures all wearing felt hats like Luigi’s and all equally invariably armed with the sort of umbrella that he himself carried when he went abroad, which was seldom, made of bright green oiled-cloth, huge things with cane frames and handles which looked as if they had been dipped in red ink, the products of some incredibly rural umbrella factory and as big as a commissionaire’s at a Ritz. They vanished into the house and, after a while, emerged and returned from whence they came.

But as well as these commonplace visitors there were three women who came every day. They used to drift up through the woods in the afternoon dressed from head to foot in black, each carrying a wooden spindle, tapered at either end with a perforated stone at the middle of it, to the top of which the white woollen yarn which they were spinning was attached, and with the rest of the wool rolled round a distaff, a piece of wood which they carried
tucked under one arm. When they reached the plateau they used to walk up and down for hours on end, spinning, quartering the fields, often passing within a few feet of me, but never speaking, not even among themselves, medieval-looking, ghostly-looking, gone into some undiscovered country of the mind to which they alone had passports and visas and from which they would probably never return; until by some, to me, imperceptible signal they used to form up in line ahead and go away. When I asked who these three weird sisters were, who gave me the creeps even more than Mrs Dyer, the Baby Farmer of Caversham Weir in the Chamber of Horrors who was really gone, I was told that they really were sisters who had never married and were probably, because of that,
un po’strane
, a little strange, which seemed to me an understatement. I went on with my stone gathering until the stones were so few and far between that it now took about three times longer to collect a cartload than it had done originally. Personally, if the property had been mine, I would have told the stone gatherer to desist and get on with something else more important but nothing would induce me to say that I thought I had done enough. My experience of specialists and experts had been that they always made a point of holding opinions diametrically opposed to anyone else’s on principle, and I had no desire to be snubbed yet again. It was Luigi’s business to tell me to stop and, if necessary, I would go on picking up non-existent stones until he did. Perhaps I too was going mad.

But finally, one day, when I really thought that I should be reduced to carrying out this ridiculous threat, I found Luigi at my elbow.

‘Enough,’ he said –
‘Basta’
, a word which always sounded vaguely offensive to English ears. ‘Bastards yourselves’ we had replied sturdily to our guards when we had first heard it while being marched through the streets of Catania.

It was a memorable day, too, because everyone with the exception of Agata, downed whatever they were doing to help in removing the big rocks which I had not been able to budge myself, and a jolly hard job it was even for them I was glad to see, carrying them down to the cliff edge on a sort of stretcher and for the biggest which were too heavy for that, harnessing the bullocks to one of the sledges. But there were still some, the ones that I had compared to icebergs, which could not even be levered out of the earth with crowbars and on and around these great boulders Luigi and Nando built fires, making them red-hot and then poured water over them, or hit them with sledgehammers so that they split with a satisfying cracking noise; and I was kept busy trotting backwards and forwards to the trough for water, driving Nero the dog mad with fury each time I appeared in the yard.

When the last boulder had been broken I joined the hoeing squad which was composed of Rita and Dolores, using a
zappa
, an archaic-looking instrument with a shortish handle and two long slightly curved iron prongs like walrus teeth, which was used to break up the clods which the primitive harrow had failed to crush. The earth was heavy clay, some of it pale, the colour of putty, some of it dark and thick and incredibly adhesive, so that great clods stuck to the prongs of my
zappa
like enormous pieces of steak that had been kept too long and had gone off. The only way I could get rid of them was to whirl the
zappa
round my head, like a man throwing the hammer, until they detached themselves and flew away. The girls never got chunks of clay stuck on the
zappa
because they were more skilled in using them.

They were the biggest gas bags I have ever met in my life, talking all the time they were in the fields without intermission and including me in their conversation whenever they were on their favourite subjects which were love, marriage, love after
marriage and the procreation of children, things which they didn’t dare to talk about in the presence of Agata. In this way I exchanged the spiritual advantages of solitude on the Pian del Sotto for more Rabelasian pleasures.

One day they told me with a lot of giggling that there was soon going to be a dance,
un ballo
, at one of the farms just outside the village.

‘Which of us are you going to take with you?’ said Rita, ‘Dolores or me?’

Oh God, I thought, they’ve started again.

‘If I could go, which I can’t, I’d take both of you, if you’d come with me,’ I said.

The effect of this remark, which was dictated solely by diplomacy, was astonishing. They dropped their
zappas
and staggered about among the furrows with their hands over their mouths, uttering great gusts of laughter, until Agata hurled the window open and told them to get on with it, which they did, but it still didn’t stop them carrying on this titillating interrogation and in order that they could continue it they began to hoe on either side of me and so close and in such unison that we must have looked like some song and dance act on a stage.

‘Why can’t you go to the ball?’ Dolores said. A soppy question if ever there was one.

‘Because it’s dangerous.’

At this Dolores whispered something in Rita’s ear and they both went off into hysterics again. ‘All the other boys are going,’ Rita said when they had recovered. ‘Have you
paura?’
What I should have said was, ‘Yes, I have
paura
and so should you have.’ What I actually said was, ‘Certainly not.’

‘Well, if you haven’t
paura
come to the ball.’

‘I’ll have to see,’ I said.

It was now the middle of October. I always knew what day of the week it was but I was never sure of the date and no one in the house seemed to know either. Agata knew that the preceding Sunday, the second one in succession on which I had gone out for the day, but without this time meeting anyone or collecting any fungi, was the seventeenth after Pentecost, but no one else did, not even her daughter. The only calendar in the house was contained in the almanack over the fireplace,
Barba-Nera Lunario dell’ Astronomo degli Appennini
, to which I had recourse on wet days but I discovered when I first opened it that it was already four years old and was no good for movable feasts, and was all wrong about the moon which had been full on the preceding Wednesday, which was my second one at the Pian del Sotto, and was also, according to the book, the day of
S. Eduardo re d’Inghilterra confes.
, which I would have been tempted to celebrate if I had noticed it at the time.

The following day was a Friday and in the afternoon I was left alone on the plateau to carry on with the work of
zappatura
, breaking up clods with the
zappa.
Because it was a fine, warm day Rita had been taken off by her mother to help with the enormous operation which involved changing all the sheets and pillow cases in the house, and washing the dirty ones at the spring at the top end of the plateau where there was a large open cistern of water. There they walloped the linen on a sort of stone washboard. This was done every week and when the washing was finished it was hung on long lines at the edge of the cliff where it became incredibly white in the sun and wind. On this particular afternoon Dolores was not helping with the washing which she usually did; she was somewhere out of sight, working either in the house or in one of the outbuildings; Armando was ploughing, and soon after the midday meal Luigi had gone away up into the woods to decide on what trees they would cut that autumn.

Late in the afternoon, while I was hacking away with my
zappa
, I was consumed with an urgent need to visit the
gabinetto
which was a great bore, not only because it involved a longish walk but principally because it brought me within biting range of the odious Nero who seemed to bear even more murderous feelings towards me than he did to the rest of the family – and they were evil enough – probably because I was something foreign which smelled nasty to him and certainly because I used to throw the contents of the
vaso da notte
at him, which I would not have dreamt of doing if he had been nice to me in the first place. As it was, in order to reach the
gabinetto
, I always used to arm myself with a couple of carefully selected stones, one for the inward run, the other for the run-out of the yard, except when there were other members of the family present in which case they used to take over the defensive duties. Getting past Nero into the yard always reminded me of
Operation Pedestal
, I being one of the practically defenceless merchant ships, Nero a dive bomber.

On this occasion I did what I always did, pretended to make for the door of the house and as he made a rush to intercept me, foaming at the mouth (he was much too enraged to bark), I altered course to port and rushed through what was the equivalent of the Sicilian Channel, the narrows between the house and a pigsty, jumping over his chain as I did so, at the same time raising one of the stones above my head in a threatening manner and roaring at him at the top of my voice, which sufficiently impressed him with my murderous intentions to halt him long enough to let me get through and out of biting distance. And as usual, I succeeded.

When I emerged from the
gabinetto
, still prudently, clasping my stones, I was more or less at peace with the world. Nero was not. As always, he was furious at having been thwarted in his desire to tear me to pieces, and this time his rage lent him a supernatural strength. I was about thirty yards from him when,
practically at the full length of his chain, he executed a fantastic leap in the air very similar to the capriole, one of the most difficult of all the evolutions performed by the horses in the Spanish Riding School at Vienna, of which I had seen photographs in a book in the
orfanotrofio.

In doing so, he broke the running wire to which his chain was shackled and which gave him so much mobility. It parted with a twang like a breaking harp string and he landed on his stomach, unlike the horses in the Riding School, from which position he immediately regained his feet and streaked at me, as much like a rocket as a powerful mongrel dog trailing twenty feet of chain behind it could manage to be; and I took to my heels and fled in the direction from which I had come.

Yet terrified as I was of him, I was damned if I was going to take refuge in that awful
gabinetto
, and wait for him to break through the flimsy outer walls and eat me up inside it.

Having rejected it I had very little of refuge. I might have tried for the
stalle
but all the doors were shut. My best chance of survival seemed to lie in reaching a barn, about thirty yards away in which hay was stored. This barn had a sort of lean-to construction outside it in which the hay was piled until it could be transported to the upper floor. I was doing well with Nero about fifteen yards behind me when I tripped over some large piece of disused agricultural machinery which was concealed in the grass, hurting myself dreadfully, and by the time I got up the bloody dog was almost on me; but fortunately his chain became entangled in the thing and this gave me sufficient time to reach the lean-to under which the hay rose up in a solid, sheer, unscaleable wall above me.

I was just about to turn and make a last desperate stand with the one stone which remained to me (I had dropped the other when I fell over) and with my boots as a last resource, when
Dolores appeared like a chatelaine on top of it, knelt down, extended a brawny arm and hauled me up with Nero holding on to one of the turn-ups of my decrepit trousers which came away in his fangs and left him below, roaring with vexation. Although Dolores was a fantastically strong girl the effort she made threw her on her back in the hay and as I came shooting over the top with our hands locked I fell beside her, not on top of her as I would have done in a film about bucolic peasant life.

For a moment she lay there, with tears of laughter rolling down her cheeks. Then, still laughing, she turned towards me, enfolded me in her arms like a great baby in her arms and kissed me passionately.

It was an unforgettable experience, like being swallowed alive, or sucked into a vortex. It was not just one kiss, it went on and on. I felt myself going.

It was entirely spontaneous. She was obviously not expecting visitors, certainly not me, and because it was a warm evening and much hotter up in the barn where she had been working, she had taken off the tight sweater which she usually wore and was now dressed in nothing but a faded, sleeveless, navy blue vest which displayed her really superb upper works to great advantage, a short skirt and boots.