Gaudenzia, Pride of the Palio

by Marguerite Henry

  Giorgio felt a stab of uneasiness at the tone of voice. He reached down and scratched the dog’s head, trying not to show concern.

  “I doubt the mare is fit for travel,” the doctor went on. “The hurt tendon still gives her much discomfort. Maybe in a month or two she will be ready. And if, in the meanwhile, you wish to stay here and work in the grape harvest, I would be pleased.”

  “A month or two!” Giorgio stared at the man, unbelieving.

  Doctor Celli got to his feet and touched Giorgio on the shoulder. “Follow me,” he said, and he walked down the path to a cluster of outbuildings. “I will show you where she is stabled. I have no groom now, so her bed may be soiled and her white coat stained.” And in the same breath he added, “Poor beast, it was an evil bump she had in the Prova. The cartilage above the hoof is badly damaged, and the nervous tic tortures her. But of these maladies you are already aware.”

  He turned to smile at Giorgio as they came to a halt before the closed door of a narrow stone building. He made no move to open it. “Sometimes with strangers she is quite savage,” he explained. “Therefore, I think it imperative that you establish at once who is master. Perhaps,” he questioned, “perhaps you wish to go in alone?”

  Giorgio looked at the forbidding, heavy door. He drew a deep breath, hesitated, then lifted the latch and pushed. The creaking of the hinges sent Farfalla rearing to the rafters. Quietly Giorgio stepped inside and closed the door. He stood transfixed at the change in her—the ribs showing, the mantle harsh. Her stall was big enough, but lit by only one window, too high for looking out. It smelled of cold earth and hay and dung. All this he sensed in some faraway place in his mind. He had never before been alone with the mare, and he stood motionless, making no sound.

  She too was electric with curiosity, pulling in the scent of him, blowing it out with a rattling snort.

  “I am here,” the boy said in a quiet tone. “It’s only me.”

  The mare’s head jerked high, her nostrils flared red, her ears flattened. “Stay back!” she warned. Fear was strong in her, but spirit, too. When Giorgio did not retreat, she wheeled about, took aim, and like a cat ready to spring, she gathered herself for a mighty kick. In the split second before her heels lashed out, he leaped against her rump, pressing his body hard against her. She was trapped as if her hind legs had been hobbled! Through his clothes he could feel her break out in lather. He too was drenched in sweat. Relief and happiness flooded into him as her muscles relaxed. He had won the first skirmish.

  He went around now to her head and gently took hold of her halter. “You, so soft-eyed,” he said. “You could not hurt me. Not ever. I am not afraid. Why are you afraid? Come,” he coaxed, trying the new name softly. “Come, Gau-den-zia.” And he led her out into the morning.

  Doctor Celli could not hide his surprise. “Colombo!” he shouted to his farmer, who was throwing a pan of soaked acorns to the sow. “Look here! Already she knows who is master.”

  The farmer and Doctor Celli stood back in amazement while Giorgio lifted her hurt foot and held it between his knees. Carefully he pressed his hand from her hock down her cannon bone and along the tendon to a point just above the fetlock. To his great relief he could tell that the tendon was not bowed.

  “The leg,” Giorgio said, “should be rested if . . .”

  Doctor Celli nodded. “So I told you! A month, maybe.”

  “No! No!” the boy spoke quickly. “If the tendon bowed out, then she would need rest. But now we got to keep her leg moving. The gristle otherwise will harden.”

  The men exchanged glances, eyeing each other with doubtful, questioning looks.

  Giorgio pretended not to notice. He spoke with a bold sureness that surprised even himself. “If you please,” he said, “I now make a poultice of flour and alum for the bruised place, and if you don’t mind, we leave at once. It is sixty kilometers to Monticello and I must stop often to rest her.”

  The farmer disappeared to fetch the flour and alum, and Doctor Celli himself produced the bridle.

  “She does not willingly take the bit,” he said. “I will help you.”

  Giorgio smiled and shook his head. He led the mare inside her stable and cross-tied her to iron rings fastened to opposite walls. Then he saw that underneath her chin was a raw, red place. He thought a moment, and took from his pocket the rabbit’s foot. Much as he prized it for a good luck charm, he skinned it and wrapped the soft fur about the chinstrap of the bridle.

  “Now, Gaudenzia,” he said as if he were talking to a small child, “with rabbit’s fur the strap will not chafe the sore spot.”

  It took only a little firmness to slip the bit between her teeth and to adjust the throat latch. And she actually pushed her leg against Giorgio’s hand while he bound the poultice in place.

  • • •

  For as long as he lived, Giorgio knew he would never forget this day. Of all the masters Gaudenzia had known, she had singled him out as the one to trust! Why else did she let him leap aboard without bolting? Why else did she travel the mountainous country with scarce any favoring of her hurt leg? Why else did she swivel her ears to pull in his talk, or a snatch of his song?

  The trip took all day, with Giorgio walking up the hills and riding down. Whenever they came to a stream, he let her wade into it, let her paw and plash to her heart’s content. It was a remedy Babbo had handed down. “One thing you must know about horses,” he had said time and again. “Soak hurt feet and legs in mountain streams, and you leave behind the fever and the pain.”

  Giorgio wished he could make the day last forever. In riding, he and Gaudenzia fitted together as if some sculptor had molded them all of one piece. In walking, they were a team, enjoying the cool wind in their faces and the warm sun on their backs.

  It was good to see the country again! The little checkerboard farms with rows of grapevines holding hands, and hills swelling away to the horizon, and cypress trees marching bold and black against the sky.

  They met farmers with guns on their shoulders, and lean dogs nosing for game. And they saw oxen slow-footing as they turned over the clods of earth.

  They saw strawstacks, layered golden and brown, like mocha tortes. At thought of the tortes Giorgio was suddenly hungry. Standing at the side of the road, one arm through the reins, he ate his bread and salami and watched Gaudenzia graze. He wondered how far into the distance she could see. He studied her purple-brown eyes, but all he saw in them was his own reflection.

  The sun was slipping into the folds of the mountains when they reached the wild loveliness of the Maremma. Never had it seemed so boundless. To Giorgio it was not lonely looking at all. He bristled at the thought. To him the tangle of brush and brake was beautiful, and the wild birds more plentiful than anywhere, and the autumn weeds winking bright and yellow in the roughed-up land. He stopped at a small wayside shrine decorated with a bouquet of dahlias, and asked a blessing for his new responsibility.

  As they took off again, he noticed that the mare had lifted one of the flowers from the shrine. He laughed to the wind and the echo rolled back to him.

  At last, in the thickening twilight, they wound up the hill to the huddled houses of Monticello. He clucked to Gaudenzia, asking her to trot the last few meters home in triumph. Her hoofbeats alerted the whole village.

  Shutters flew open. Heads popped out. Voices shouted.

  “Look! Look what Giorgio brings home! A white scarecrow!” And the children made a sing-song of it. “A white scarecrow! A white scarecrow!”

  “Hey, Giorgio! She’s got ribs like a washboard!”

  “If you sell her for nothing, I wouldn’t buy.”

  The jokes were all good natured, and in high spirits Giorgio leaped from Gaudenzia’s back and led her to Pippa’s stable. But Pippa was not there. In her place stood a red motor scooter with Babbo’s old cap on the handlebars.

  For a moment Giorgio felt grief. Then he wiped it away as if it were a cobweb. He had to think ahead now. “It is better Pippa
is not here,” he said to the mare. “Nobody now can be jealous.” He showed Gaudenzia around, showed her the old donkey cart and the trunk with the oats in it and the big wide windows. “You have only a little alley for view,” he explained, “but nicer than Doctor Celli’s stable with windows too high for seeing out. No?”

  As he took off her bridle, she rubbed her head against him where the leathers had been. He sighed happily, feeling singled out and special again. “At last you have come to me!” he said. Then he went to the trunk and scooped up a measure of grain. Before pouring it into the manger he sifted it between his fingers, removing the dried grasshoppers and beetles.

  It was late evening when his family returned home from the farm where they had been gathering grapes. But they all had to see the mare, and admire her points, even though she was not in a welcoming mood.

  That night when Giorgio went to bed in the family bedroom he did not mind that Emilio, with arms and legs flung wide, slept crosswise, taking up most of the bed. As the wind blew cool, he pulled up the cover, making it snug about Emilio’s back. It was good to feel cozy and warm and welcome; good to belong to a family again.

  Before he dozed off, he saw through the open window a fingernail moon far away above the mountain. A new moon, a new mare, a new beginning . . .

  Chapter XIX

  NO MORNING GLORY

  When Giorgio awoke the next morning he felt whole and strong and full of purpose. He hurried at once to the barn and set to work. He grained Gaudenzia and gave her fresh water. Then he nailed hardwood boards over the lower half of the two windows. “In case of kicking,” he explained to an early visitor, “splinters of wood are better than splinters of glass.”

  Word quickly flew from house to house that “the little runt of Monticello” was back home with a race mare. Neighbors, relatives, friends came from far and near just to look. A few recognized that she was Farfalla, the cart horse, but they seemed puzzled by her fineness, awed by the Arabian head. In her shabby harness they had never really noticed her before. They were not speechless, however. The advice Giorgio got was enough to fill a book.

  “Worm her! It is the worms that make her thin.”

  “Mix tiny pinches of snuff with her grain.”

  “Pull her shoes at once, before she kicks you over the moon.”

  Giorgio listened with only half his mind. He wondered how he was going to handle the curious visitors and get his work done, too. But the novelty soon wore off. For everyone, that is, except Giorgio.

  Each time he opened the door to her stable he felt the same inward excitement as on the first day he had seen her. And each time he held the water bucket for her to drink, or felt her head scratching against his shoulder, the joy was so deep the whole world seemed different. It wasn’t exactly a fatherly feeling he had; it was stronger, more fantastic, as though he lived in ancient times and some oracle had said: “Fate has given her to you. You, Giorgio Terni, are all to her—master, teacher, god. Now prepare her for the great battle of the Palio.”

  Never before had Giorgio paid much attention to calendars; he had enjoyed the pictures on them and noticed the holidays. But now, suddenly, the pages of the months flashed and signaled importantly.

  Hanging on a nail in Gaudenzia’s barn, beside the bunches of drying anise-seed, were several dusty old calendars. The top two were 1948 and 1949, but they would do. He tore off the first eight months of 1948 and wrote on the bottom of the page marked Settembre, “Rest her.”

  On Ottobre he wrote, “Walk her four kilometers.”

  On Novembre, “Walk three, jog one.”

  On Dicembre, “Walk two, jog two.”

  On the 1949 calendar, for Gennaio he wrote, “Walk one, jog three, gallop one.”

  On Febbraio, “Two-two-two.”

  On Marzo, “Walk one, trot two, gallop three.”

  Then he put ditto marks on Aprile and Maggio, and for Giugno wrote, “Walk one, jog three, gallop three and one-half.”

  As he lifted the page for Luglio he solemnly circled the second, the Festival of the Visitation of the Madonna, the day of the Palio. He turned then to face Gaudenzia and found her blinking at him, yawning in contentment.

  “Our life-threads squinch closer and closer together. No?” he asked of her. He wanted to say more, to show her he grasped the total wonder of their fate, but there were things he could not put into words.

  With the training program laid out on paper, Giorgio went to work with a frenzy. He felt that no force on earth could stop him. Each day he glanced at the calendar on the wall as if it were a generalissimo barking out orders.

  One morning when Gaudenzia stood bridled and ready for exercise, Babbo burst into the stable with startling news.

  “The government!” he announced proudly. “It has jobs—for you and for me!”

  “Jobs?”

  “Si, si. Down the slope of Mount Amiata we must plant trees.”

  “But already there are many!”

  “More they need, to hold the soil. You see,” he explained, “the rain washes away the earth, causing great damages. The pay is not much,” he added, “but it helps. We both go.”

  Giorgio’s stomach rose and fell. I will have to tell Babbo “no,” he thought. On the calendar I have already fixed the plans for Gaudenzia. She is in training for battle; we cannot stop now.

  “Babbo,” he said, “every morning I take Gaudenzia to the road that winds round the hills. We walk, and we jog, and then we begin the gallops and . . .” He broke off as a sudden thought struck him. Instead of working Gaudenzia in the morning, he would plant the trees, and take her out at night. Was not the Palio held at sundown? Why not accustom her to the late hour?

  He smiled. “But from now on I train her by night. Yes, Babbo, I will go with you. We will plant the trees together.”

  Later that day the father proudly told the townfolk, “That Giorgio of mine, he makes of Gaudenzia no morning glory! Horses has time clocks in their heads. The morning bloomers wilt by noon. Oh, that boy, he thinks like the four-footed!”

  As the days grew shorter, the workouts grew longer, more intense. Long walks with little jogs gave way to long jogs with little walks. By starlight, by moonlight, the white mare rounded the curves of Mount Amiata like some floating phantom of the night. She was never extended, never pushed. Without anyone’s telling him how or why, Giorgio knew he had to build up her confidence in herself. Always he stopped short of what she could do. There was plenty of time to reach the peak. The real mountain, he knew, was not Amiata.

  October, November, and December were torn off the calendar. In January there were many days of mist and drizzle when Giorgio still had to work, planting trees. Then no one passed the stable for hours at a time, and Gaudenzia’s nervous twitching came on again and she took to crib-biting. One dismal evening when he came to bridle her, she stood grunting as she clamped her teeth on her manger, sucking air into her stomach. Giorgio tried fastening his belt around her neck, loose enough so that she could munch grain, but tight enough to prevent her opening her jaws for swallowing air. It worked! After this, on rainy days, he made her wear the belt, and all went well. And so, regardless of weather, they left the stable each evening at the same hour, clattering down the stony lanes of Monticello, and out upon the lonely road cleft in the hill.

  Nothing was too good for Gaudenzia. He gave her rubdowns, first with straw, then with burlap bags. He borrowed the flour sifter from home, and each measure of grain he sifted free of bugs and dust, saving the dead beetles for the kittens. He begged old sheeting from his mother and spent precious lire buying cotton and alcohol with which to bandage her forelegs. “You cannot even imagine,” he told Gaudenzia, “how firm we make your legs.” Sometimes she threatened to bite him as he worked, but she never did. More often she lipped the back of his sweater, in the way a dam gently nibbles along the neck of her colt.

  Giorgio lived all day—digging and planting—for the night. He might have been sticking faggots in the earth for all
he knew. His mind was everywhere else: on the calendar in the stable, taking the curves of the mountain, putting on his helmet for the race. Trumpets and drums beat like blood in his ears. Unconsciously he began whistling the “March of the Palio.” It made Babbo and all the other men work better, happier.

  The months of winter passed, not in days and weeks, but in developing Gaudenzia’s wind and stamina. When Giorgio came home each night, mud-spattered and hungry, his mother reheated the soup and stood by as he drank it. One night when his hair was wet with snow, and his jacket sagging and sopping, she cried, “Giorgio, Giorgio, Giorgio, why can’t you let up?”

  The boy stopped eating. “Mamma, I can’t!” he said firmly. “Have you forgot the Palio? Three times around Il Campo is four and a half kilometers. She must go the whole way and still be strong at the finish!”

  By March she was galloping three kilometers.

  On the fifteenth of May, Giorgio walked her to nearby Casole d’Elsa and entered her in a race on a straightaway course. She flew ahead at the start, and with no sign of difficulty, led all the way. It was a stunning triumph for the mare and her young trainer.

  The whole family took a long time deciding where to hang the little red-and-white flag she won. Teria chose the spot. “Here,” she said, “beside the cupboard. On this wall the sun comes just before setting.”

  Often, when no one was looking, Giorgio ran his fingertips over the painting of the white mare on the red silk. Was this the work of a soothsayer? He read the artist’s name in the turf beneath her flying hoofs. How did the man know that a white mare would win, and so picture her instead of a black, or a bay? And under the date of the race was painted a golden crown bright with jewels. Had the oracle spoken to the artist, too? Or had he seen a boy flying in the night on a white phantom?

  Once when Babbo caught Giorgio fingering the little humps of oil paint that made the jewels of the crown, he pulled the boy aside. “Jesters,” he said, not wanting him to be hurt, “sometimes wear the crown like king and queen. Maybe that artist fellow, he dangles the carrot before Gaudenzia only to tease.”