Instead of retorting angrily, Baron Neill smiled and said, “Which one, girl? Who do you pick in my place?”
The woman glanced around her. Disconcerted, she squirmed backward, out of the focus into which she had thrown herself.
“He’s treated us right,” murmured another woman, half-hidden in the shadow of the post which held the candle. “Hit’s best we git on with the business.”
“All right, ol’ man,” said Len, stepping forward to hold out the strop. “What er ye waitin’ on?”
“Mebbe fer my kin t’ come t’ their senses,” retorted the patriarch with a smile of triumph.
Instead of snatching the bullhide at once, Baron Neill slid his cold pipe into the breast pocket of his coat, then folded the receipt he had taken from Bowsmith and set it carefully on the endpost of the stall.
Len pursed his lips in anger, demoted from central figure in the clan’s resistance to the Baron back to the boy who had been ordered to hold the bullhide. The horns, hanging from the section of the bull’s coarse poll which had been lifted, rattled together as the young man’s hands began to tremble with emotion.
Baron Neill took off his frock coat and hung it from the other post supporting the bar on which he had waited. Working deliberately, the Baron shrugged the straps of his galluses off his shoulders and lowered his trousers until he could step out of them. His boots already stood toes-out beside the stall partition. None of the others of the clan were wearing footgear.
“Should we…?” asked one of the men, pinching a pleat of his shirt to finish the question.
“No need,” the Baron said, unbuttoning the front of his own store-bought shirt. “Mebbe not fer me, even. But best t’ be sure.”
One of the children started to whine a question. His mother hushed him almost instantly by clasping one hand over his mouth and the other behind the child’s head to hold him firmly.
The shirt was the last of Baron Neill’s clothing. When he had draped it over his trousers and coat, he looked even more like the white-furred rodent he resembled clothed. His body was pasty, its surface colored more by grime and the yellow candlelight than by blood vessels beneath it. The epaulettes on the Baron’s coat had camouflaged the extreme narrowness of his shoulders and chest, and the only place his skin was taut was where the pot belly sagged against it.
His eyes had a terrible power. They seemed to glint even before he took the candle to set it before him on the floor compacted of earth, dung, and ancient straw.
The Baron removed the receipt from the post on which it waited, opened it and smoothed the folds, and placed it beside the candle. Only then did he say to Len, “Now I’ll take the strop, boy.”
His grandson nodded sharply and passed the bundle over. The mood of the room was taut, like that of a stormy sky in the moments before the release of lightning. The anger and embarrassment which had twisted Len’s face into a grimace earlier was now replaced by blank fear. Baron Neill smiled at him grimly.
The bull’s tail was stiff with the bones still in it, so the length of hide had been wound around the base of that tail like thread on a spindle. Baron Neill held the strop by the head end, one hand on the hairless muzzle and the other on the poll between the horns, each the length of a man’s arm along the curve. He shook out the roll with a quick jerk that left the brush of the tail scratching on the boards at the head of the stall.
The Baron cautiously held the strop against his back with the clattering horns dangling down to his knees. The old man gave a little shudder as the leather touched his bare skin, but he knelt and leaned forward, tugging the strop upward until the muzzle flopped loosely in front of his face.
The Baron muttered something that started as a curse and blurred into nondescript syllables when he recalled the task he was about. He rested the palm of one hand on the floor, holding the receipt flat and in the light of the candle. With his free hand, he folded the muzzle and forehead of the bull back over the poll so that he could see.
“Make a circle around me,” ordered the patriarch in a voice husky with its preparations for declaiming the spell.
He should have been ridiculous, a naked old man on all fours like a dog, his head and back crossed by a strip of bullhide several times longer than the human torso. The tension in the barn kept even the children of the clan from seeing humor in the situation, and the muzzled plowhorse froze to silence in her curtained stall.
The Neills shuffled into motion, none of them speaking. The man who held the infant’s lips pinched shut handed the child back to its mother. It whimpered only minutely and showed no interest in the breast which she quickly offered it to suck.
Two of the grandsons joined hands. The notion caught like gunpowder burning, hands leaping into hands. In the physical union, the psychic pressure that weighted the barn seemed more bearable though also more intense.
“Remember,” said the Baron as he felt his offspring merge behind him, two of them linking hands over the trailing strop, “Ye’ll not hev another chance. En ye’ll git no pity from me effen ye cain’t foller my deaconin’ en you’re no better off thin ye are now.”
“Go on, ol’ man,” Mary Beth demanded in a savage whisper as she looked down on Baron Neill and the candle on the floor between her and the patriarch.
Baron Neill cocked his head up to look at the woman. She met his eyes with a glare as fierce as his own. Turning back to the paper on the ground, the old man read, “Ek neckroo say Üxwmettapempomie.”
The candle guttered at his words. The whole clan responded together, “Ek neckroo say mettapempomie,” their merged voices hesitant but gaining strength and unity toward the last of the Greek syllables like the wind in advance of a rainstorm.
“Soy sowma moo didomie,” read the Baron. His normal voice was high-pitched and unsteady, always on the verge of cracking. Now it had dropped an octave and had power enough to drive straw into motion on the floor a yard away.
“Soy sowma moo didomie,” thundered the Neill clan. Sparrows, nested on the roof trusses, fluttered and peeped as they tried furiously to escape from the barn. In the darkness, they could not see the vents under the roof peaks by which they flew in and out during daylight.
Baron Neill read the remainder of the formula, line by line. The process was becoming easier, because the smoky candle had begun to burn with a flame as white as the noonday sun. The syllables which had been written on age-yellowed paper and a background of earlier words now stood out and shaped themselves to the patriarch’s tongue.
At another time, the Baron would have recognized the power which his tongue released but could not control. This night the situation had already been driven over a precipice. Caution was lost in exhilaration at the approaching climax, and the last impulse to stop was stilled by the fear that stopping might already be impossible.
The shingles above shuddered as the clan repeated the lines, and the candleflame climbed with the icy purpose of a stalagmite reaching for completion with a cave roof. Jen kicked at her stall in blind panic, cracking through the old crossbar, but none of the humans heard the sound.
“Hellon moy,” shouted Baron Neill in triumph. “Hellon moy! Hellon moy!”
Mary Beth suddenly broke the circle and twisted. “Hit’s hot!” she cried as she tore the front of her dress from neckline to waist in a single hysterical effort.
The woman’s breasts swung free, their nipples erect and longer than they would have seemed a moment before. She tried to scream, but the sound fluted off into silence as her body ran like wax in obedience to the formula she and her kin had intoned.
The circle of the Neill clan flowed toward its center, flesh and bone alike taking on the consistency of magma. Clothing dropped and quivered as the bodies it had covered runneled out of sleeves and through the weave of the fabrics.
The bullhide strop sagged also as Baron Neill’s body melted beneath it. As the pink,
roiling plasm surged toward the center of the circle, the horns lifted and bristles that had lain over the bull’s spine in life sprang erect.
The human voices were stilled, but the sparrows piped a mad chorus and Jen’s hooves crashed again onto the splintering crossbar.
There was a slurping, gurgling sound. The bull’s tail stood upright, its brush waving like a flag, and from the seething mass that had been the Neill clan rose the mighty, massive form of a black bull.
Eldon Bowsmith lurched awake on the porch of the Neill house. He had dreamed of a bull’s bellow so loud that it shook the world.
Fuddled but with eyes adapted to the light of the crescent moon, he looked around him. The house was still and dark.
Then, as he tried to stand with the help of the porch rail, the barn door flew apart with a shower of splinters. Spanish King, bellowing again with the fury of which only a bull is capable, burst from the enclosure and galloped off into the night.
Behind him whinnied a horse which, in the brief glance vouchsafed by motion and the light, looked a lot like Jen.
* * *
—
When Eldon Bowsmith reached the cabin, Old Nathan was currying his bull by the light of a burning pine knot thrust into the ground beside the porch. A horse was tethered to the rail with a makeshift neck halter of twine.
“Sir, is thet you?” the boy asked cautiously.
“Who en blazes d’ye think hit ’ud be?” the cunning man snapped.
“Don’t know thet ’un,” snorted Spanish King. His big head swung toward the visitor, and one horn dipped menacingly.
“Ye’d not be here, blast ye,” said Old Nathan, slapping the bull along the jaw, “ ’ceptin’ fer him.”
“Yessir,” said Bowsmith. “I’m right sorry. Only, a lot uv what I seed t’night, I figgered must be thet I wuz drinkin’.”
“Took long enough t’ fetch me,” rumbled the bull as he snuffled the night air. He made no comment about the blow, but the way he studiously ignored Bowsmith suggested that the reproof had sunk home. “Summer’s nigh over.”
He paused and turned his head again so that one brown eye focused squarely on the cunning man. “Where wuz I, anyhow? D’ye know?”
“Not yet,” said Old Nathan, stroking the bull’s sweat-matted shoulders fiercely with the currycomb.
“Pardon, sir?” said the boy who had walked into the circle of torchlight, showing a well-justified care to keep Old Nathan between him and Spanish King. Then he blinked and rose up on his bare toes to peer over the bull’s shoulder at the horse. “Why,” he blurted, “thet’s the spit en image uv my horse Jen, only thet this mare’s too boney!”
“Thet’s yer Jen, all right,” said the cunning man. “There’s sacked barley in the lean-to out back, effen ye want t’ feed her some afore ye take her t’ home. Been runnin’ the woods, I reckon.”
“We’re goin’ back home?” asked the horse, speaking for almost the first time since she had followed Spanish King rather than be alone in the night.
“Oh, my God, Jen!” said the boy, striding past Spanish King with never a thought for the horns. “I’m so glad t’ see ye!” He threw his arm around the horse’s neck while she whickered, nuzzling the boy in hopes of finding some of the barley Old Nathan had mentioned.
“Durn fool,” muttered Spanish King; but then he stretched himself deliberately, extending one leg at a time until his deep chest was rubbing the sod. “Good t’ be back, though,” he said. “Won’t say it ain’t.”
Eldon Bowsmith straightened abruptly and stepped away from his mare, though he kept his hand on her mane. “Sir,” he said, “ye found my Jen, en ye brung her back. What do I owe ye?”
Old Nathan ran the fingers of his free hand along the bristly spine of his bull. “Other folk hev took care uv thet,” the cunning man said as Spanish King rumbled in pleasure at his touch. “Cleared yer account, so t’ speak.”
The pine torch was burning fitfully, close to the ground, so that Bowsmith’s grimace of puzzlement turned shadows into a devil’s mask. “Somebody paid for me?” he asked. “Well, I niver. Friends, hit must hev been?”
Spanish King lifted himself and began to walk regally around the cabin to his pasture and the two cows who were his property.
“Reckon ye could say thet,” replied Old Nathan. “They wuz ez nigh t’ bein’ yer friends ez anybody’s but their own.”
The cunning man paused and grinned like very Satan. “In the end,” he said, “they warn’t sich good friends t’ themselves.”
A gust of wind rattled the shingles, as if the night sky were remembering what it had heard at the Neill place. Then it was silent again.
Antonio Tabucchi (1943–2012) was an Italian writer, translator, and academic who split his time between Italy and Portugal, and wrote some of his works in Portuguese. In Italy, he was a professor of Portuguese literature at the University of Siena, while he was also director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Lisbon. Tabucchi was a prominent critic of former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and an outspoken anti-fascist. His work tended toward the fantastical and surreal, and he was frequently compared to Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Fernando Pessoa, from whom Tabucchi learned the Portuguese idea of saudade, which Tabucchi said “describes the melancholic nostalgia one feels for people, things, pleasures, and times now lost.” Saudade would become a prominent feature of much of Tabucchi’s writing. “The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico” is the title story of I volatili del Beato Angelico, a collection of stories published in 1987 and published in English by Archipelago Books in 2012. The story is included in Message from the Shadows: Selected Stories (2019).
THE FLYING CREATURES OF FRA ANGELICO
Antonio Tabucchi
Translated by Tim Parks
THE FIRST CREATURE arrived on a Thursday toward the end of June, at vespers, when all the monks were in the chapel for service. Privately, Fra Giovanni of Fiesole still thought of himself as Guidolino, the name he had left behind in the world when he came to the cloister. He was in the vegetable garden gathering onions, which was his job, since in abandoning the world he hadn’t wanted to abandon the vocation of his father, Pietro, who was a vegetable gardener, and in the garden at San Marco he grew tomatoes, zucchini, and onions. The onions were the red kind, with big heads, very sweet after you’d soaked them for an hour, though they made you cry a fair bit when you handled them. He was putting them in his frock gathered to form an apron, when he heard a voice calling: Guidolino. He raised his eyes and saw the bird. He saw it through onion tears filling his eyes and so stood gazing at it for a few moments, for the shape was magnified and distorted by his tears as though through a bizarre lens; he blinked his eyes to dry the lashes, then looked again.
It was a pinkish creature, soft-looking, with small yellowish arms like a plucked chicken’s, bony, and two feet that again were very lean with bulbous joints and calloused toes, like a turkey’s. The face was that of an aged baby, but smooth, with two big black eyes and a hoary down instead of hair; and he watched as its arms floundered wearily, as if unable to stop itself making this repetitive movement, miming a flight that was no longer possible. It had got caught up in the branches of the pear tree, which were spiky and warty and at this time of year laden with pears, so that at every one of the creature’s movements, a few ripe pears would fall and land splat on the clods beneath. There it hung, in a very uncomfortable position, feet straddled over two branches which must be hurting its groin, torso sideways and neck twisted, since otherwise it would have been forced to look up in the air. From the creature’s shoulder blades, like incredible triangular sails, rose two enormous wings that covered the entire foliage of the tree and that moved in the breeze together with the leaves. They were made of different colored feathers, ocher, yellow, deep blue, and an emerald green the color of a kingfisher, and every now and then they opened like a fan, al
most touching the ground, then closed again, in a flash, disappearing behind each other.
Fra Giovanni dried his eyes with the back of his hand and said: “Was it you called me?”
The bird shook his head and, pointing a claw like an index finger toward him, wagged it.
“Me?” asked Fra Giovanni, amazed.
The bird nodded.
“It was me calling me?” repeated Fra Giovanni.
This time the creature closed his eyes and then opened them again, to indicate yes once again; or perhaps out of tiredness, it was hard to say: because he was tired, you could see it in his face, in the heavy dark hollows around his eyes, and Fra Giovanni noticed that his forehead was beaded with sweat, a lattice of droplets, though they weren’t dripping down; they evaporated in the evening breeze and then formed again.
Fra Giovanni looked at him and felt sorry for him and muttered: “You’re overtired.” The creature looked back with his big moist eyes, then closed his eyelids and wriggled a few feathers in his wings: a yellow feather, a green one, and two blue ones, the latter three times in rapid succession. Fra Giovanni understood and said, spelling it out as one learning a code: “You’ve made a trip, it was too long.” And then he asked: “Why do I understand what you say?” The creature opened his arms as far as his position allowed, as if to say, I haven’t the faintest idea. So that Fra Giovanni concluded: “Obviously I understand you because I understand you.” Then he said: “Now I’ll help you get down.”
Standing against a cherry tree at the bottom of the garden was a ladder. Fra Giovanni went and picked it up, and, holding it horizontally on his shoulders with his head between two rungs, carried it over to the pear tree, where he leaned it in such a way that the top of the ladder was near the creature’s feet. Before climbing up, he slipped off his frock because the skirts cramped his movements, and draped it over a sage bush near the well. As he climbed up the rungs he looked down at his legs, which were lean and white with hardly any hairs, and it occurred to him they looked like the bird creature’s. And he smiled, since likenesses do make one smile. Then, as he climbed, he realized his private part had slipped out of the slit in his drawers and that the creature was staring at it with astonished eyes, shocked and frightened. Fra Giovanni did himself up, straightened his drawers, and said: “I’m sorry, it’s something we humans have,” and for a moment he thought of Nerina, of a farmhouse near Siena many years before, a blond girl and a straw rick. Then he said: “Sometimes we manage to forget it, but it takes a lot of effort and a sense of the clouds above, because the flesh is heavy and forever pulling us earthward.”
The Big Book of Modern Fantasy Page 93