“A gunshot to the neck before butchering them,” he spelled out. “It might seem like a quick death, but those awaiting their turn see everything that’s happening and they start struggling, so they beat them with clubs to stun them. That’s where we’re going, Teresa. To a nightmare.”
“And once we get there, what do we do?”
Danco smiled at me in the rearview mirror. “We free the horses, right?”
* * *
—
WE REACHED the slaughterhouse late at night. Tension had kept me awake listening to the jazz music that drifted from the car radio. I was no longer so sure that following them there was a good idea.
We left the jeep in a place sheltered by trees, then continued on foot along the edge of a field. There was a little bit of moonlight, just enough not to stumble.
“What if they spot us?” I asked Bern in a whisper.
“It’s never happened.”
“But what if it happens?”
“It won’t happen.”
The barn stood out in the distance; a floodlight illuminated the yard in front.
“They’re in there.” Danco pointed. Surprisingly, Bern put a hand on my neck. “You’re shivering,” he said.
Forcing the padlock on the gate was easy. We inched forward, hugging the surrounding wall. I could feel the night’s dampness through the thin fabric of the leggings. For a moment I saw myself through the eyes of those who knew me in Turin. What the hell was I doing there? But the hesitation gave way to unbridled glee.
Giuliana and I were ordered to keep an eye on the owners’ house. The windows were all dark.
“So you and Bern were together?” she asked me as soon as we were alone.
“Yes,” I replied, even though I wasn’t sure it was true.
“And how long has it been since you’ve seen him?”
“A long time.”
We could hear the others struggling with the cutters behind us, cursing because the lock was more resistant than the one at the gate.
“Are you and Danco together?”
Giuliana raised her eyebrows. “Sometimes.”
Then a different, sharp clack was heard, followed by the sound of a chain dropping onto the concrete. We turned at the exact moment the door opened and an alarm began to shriek.
Lights immediately went on in the house, one, two, three of them. Bern and the others had disappeared.
“Come on, fuck!” Giuliana yelled, pulling me by the arm.
I found myself inside the barn, in semidarkness. Danco and Bern and Tommaso and Corinne were opening the doors of the stalls and shouting at the horses to get out, slapping their flanks. As if roused, I started doing it too, but the horses wouldn’t move, they just stamped their hoofs, agitated by the sound of the siren.
“They’re coming!” Corinne hollered.
Then Tommaso did something. “I nipped a horse with the cutters,” he would explain to us later, in the car, as we drove back, careening along the highway, charged with adrenaline, everyone talking over one another.
The horse that was nipped started galloping toward the way out and all hell broke loose. The others followed him, hurtling into one another. I stood flattened against a column so I wouldn’t get crushed, until Bern appeared beside me, out of nowhere, emerging from the dynamic throng of manes and hoofs.
We ran out behind the last of the animals. There were men in the yard, but they couldn’t decide whether to stop the horses or us, so we gained an advantage. We fled through the field. I could see Danco ahead of everyone, and Corinne.
There were shots. The horses got even more frantic, but they were running around in circles. They had scattered in front of the barn, because there hadn’t been time to push them outside the wall; only a few of them had gotten the idea.
The men had given up pursuing us, one of them was closing the gate, another was chasing after the runaway animals. We enjoyed that sight of freedom for a few seconds.
“We did it, shit!” Tommaso shouted. I had never seen him like that before.
On the way back, when the enthusiasm had partially subsided, some of us closed our eyes, and sweaty heads slumped onto the shoulder of whoever was beside them; mine on Bern’s shoulder, and he didn’t move a muscle after that so as not to wake me up.
I dreamed that the liberated horses were a whole herd, running through a barren clearing, raising a cloud of dust so thick that they seemed to be floating in air. They were all black. I didn’t merely watch them, and I wasn’t one of them, I was more than that: I was that entire multitude.
* * *
—
IN THE MORNING I was awakened by a hand caressing my face. A residue of the night’s electric charge still lingered in the air. I had a rather confused memory of when we had all been together, drinking wine in the kitchen. Tommaso and Corinne had been the first to go, then Danco and Giuliana, or maybe the other way around. In any case, Bern and I had found ourselves alone, and our dazed state had driven us up the stairs, to his room, into his icy bed.
But I remembered exactly what had happened next, what he’d done to me and I to him, the passion with which he’d taken me and the excitement, so intense that I hurt all over. And then when he’d reached for me a second time, but slowly, almost methodically. We’d repeated every one of the secret gestures from the reed bed; the memory of our bodies was breathtaking.
Now he smoothed the hair from my forehead, parting it in the middle as if trying to re-create the style I’d worn during our last summer together.
“The others are already downstairs,” he said.
I was so sleepy I could barely talk. And the strange taste I had in my mouth embarrassed me, maybe he tasted it too.
“What time is it?”
“Seven o’clock. We get started as soon as it’s light here,” he said, tucking a strand behind my ear and smiling, as if he had finally found what he wanted. “The water to wash up is cold, I’m sorry. I can boil some in a pot.”
I studied him intently. It was heart-wrenching to have him so close.
“I have to leave,” I said.
Bern slipped out of the covers and, naked as he was, stood in front of the window, his back to me. He was still worrisomely thin.
“What are you waiting for, then? Get dressed.”
“You’ll catch cold. Come back under the covers.”
“I hope you enjoyed the diversion.” He grabbed his clothes piled on the floor and left the room carrying them under his arm.
A few minutes later I heard his voice alternating with that of Giuliana. I groped around for the phone on the nightstand. I had turned it off the afternoon before to conserve the battery. The signal was weak, but it was enough to enable the screen to fill with notices, about a dozen messages, all from my father. In the first he simply asked where I was, then he became more and more worried and finally furious.
Panicked, I typed in a response: “Sorry, battery was dead, I’ll stay here until tomorrow, then I’ll come home, promise.” I sent it and a moment later the phone went dead.
Again I was greeted by the others with no surprise, as if I now lived there. The house was even colder than it was the night before, though the fireplace was lit. Corinne handed me a cup of coffee. I recognized Floriana’s dishware.
“Well, Teresa has finally appeared, maybe she can serve as arbiter,” Danco said.
“I doubt it,” Tommaso said through clenched teeth.
“Tommi claims that today is not a good day to plant the chicory because, he says, we’re in a waxing moon. I tried to explain to him that there isn’t a single scientific reason why the moon should have anything to do with agriculture.”
“For millennia farmers have waited for the waning moon to sow chicory,” Tommaso broke in, “millennia. And you think you know better?”
“There it is! I knew it! I
was sure it would come out sooner or later. Tradition.” Danco stood up, all excited. “Until a few decades ago, people around here poured oil over their heads in the name of tradition, to ward off the evil eye. In the name of tradition, men have done nothing but slaughter one another.”
He looked at Tommaso and me in turn.
“I’m glad you think it’s funny,” he said to me. “I’d laugh too, if it weren’t the tenth time at least that we’re having this discussion.”
“Call it ‘practice,’ if you like that better than ‘tradition,’” Tommaso shot back.
“Listen to me. First of all, none of the well-intentioned farmers you mention has a degree in physics like myself.”
“You don’t have a degree!” Corinne put in.
“All I’m lacking is the thesis.”
“I know quite a few people who only lack the thesis.”
“Secondly,” Danco went on, raising his voice, “I’m still waiting for you to bring me a shred of scientific grounds. But fortunately, we now have Teresa, right? Maybe in the natural sciences they taught her something about the moon that they forgot to explain to me.”
I shrugged. I didn’t think he really expected an answer; it seemed like just a game they wanted to include me in. I held the coffee’s steaming vapor under my chin.
“Well?” he pressed me.
Tommaso was staring at me, as if he were remembering something.
“If I’m not mistaken, they say that moonlight’s power to penetrate the soil is greater than that of the sun,” I said. “And that helps germination. But I’m not sure.”
“Aha!” Tommaso leaped to his feet, pointing a finger at his opponent.
Danco started writhing in his chair, as though having a convulsion.
“A greater power to penetrate? And what the hell would that power of penetration be? I feel like I’ve landed in a coven of witch doctors, fuck! If we go on like this, we’ll start doing a rain dance. Teresa, I had faith in your coming here. Finally an ally, I told myself. And now you’re defending the phases of the moon. Power of penetration!”
“That seems to be just what interests her,” Giuliana commented, causing a sudden silence.
I thought I’d die of embarrassment; I didn’t dare look at Bern or anyone else. Then she herself said: “What? Can’t we even joke?”
After breakfast we helped Tommaso plant the chicory seeds in the greenhouse. The technique seemed strange and ineffective to me: we formed little balls of clay with our fingers, then dropped them somewhat randomly into the pots.
“To imitate the wind,” Bern explained gravely.
He no longer seemed angry, only sad.
Finally Tommaso slapped his hands on his pants and said: “It won’t grow. Next time you’ll listen to me.”
* * *
—
HE WAS WRONG. The chicory grew and I was still at the masseria when it was ready to be transplanted to the food forest; and I was still there when it exploded in big, plump heads in early summer. At our last phone call, my father had sworn not to speak to me again until I returned home.
Except for him, I didn’t miss anything from my life in Turin, but I didn’t try to explain it to my mother or to anyone else who called to ask the reason for my disappearance: they wouldn’t have understood. All that mattered was going to bed with Bern in the evening, finding him beside me in the morning, watching his eyelids still heavy with sleep, in a room that was only his and mine, from which all you could see were trees and sky. And the sex, especially the sex, blind, dizzying: in the first few months it gripped us like a fever.
But there was also the euphoria of finally having some real friends—no, more than that, brothers and sisters. It must have taken me some time, of course, to get used to the no-flush outdoor toilet, to the lack of privacy that it involved, as well as to the rationed electrical power, the rotten-tasting water, and the assigned work shifts: for cleaning, cooking, burning the garbage. But I can’t remember those troublesome aspects. What I remember instead are the long interludes when we sat under the pergola, drinking beer and playing cards.
In any case, ours was “do nothing” farming: not doing what nature could do for itself. We wanted to understand nature’s intelligence and take full advantage of it. And we wanted to regenerate—to regenerate everything that had been brutally consumed on that land.
Danco guided us and in the meantime he studied us one by one. Once he made a very complicated analysis of Tommaso’s personality, starting from the habit he had of always opening a new jar of jam before the old one was finished. I understood little or nothing of it, but I saw that Tommaso was upset. Corinne interceded to defend him: “Now you’re even watching what we do with the jars? You’re really twisted.”
Putting together the fragments of the story, I reconstructed how Danco had come to the masseria along with Giuliana.
Bern had lived there by himself for about a year, the period when he had occasionally worked for my grandmother in exchange for her private lessons. Then Tommaso had decided to join him, and Corinne was already with him.
“It was hard,” they said of those months. “Fortunately, Danco and Giuli arrived.”
Bern and the others had met them at the market center in Brindisi, where they went to do the shopping because things cost less in the discount stores. There were several different versions of that afternoon, each of them had one, and during the first months at the masseria I heard all of them. The meeting in the parking lot of the supermarket had become legendary, and to some degree it became so for me as well.
“Love at first sight” was how Giuliana described it.
She, Danco, and some other people they named in passing were picketing at the entrance to the supermarket. They had stopped Bern at the exit. “Can I see what you’ve got there?” Danco had asked him.
Tommaso and Corinne were ready to leave, but Bern had already let him come over and obediently opened his bag. Rummaging through it, Danco had asked him, “Why do you buy this stuff? You seem like a decent guy. May I ask what you do?”
“I work on myself,” Bern replied.
“And besides that?”
“Myself, period.”
That answer had astonished Danco. He’d started explaining to Bern why the cheese he had in his plastic bag was poison, why the bag itself was an abomination, and how those tomatoes grown in Morocco, thousands of miles away, would bring the whole planet to ruin.
“They were just some fucking tomatoes!” Corinne always intruded at that point, a little worked up.
“I have a proposal,” Danco had said to Bern. “If I’ve piqued your curiosity, come by here tomorrow, even if it’s just to tell me that I’m talking bullshit and that you’d rather go on working only on yourself. If you come, I’ll bring you something.”
That evening, at the masseria, Bern hadn’t touched any of the food. When he returned to Brindisi, Danco was waiting for him alone in the parking lot. He had brought him a copy of The One-Straw Revolution; not his own copy, one he’d purposely bought that morning.
Later they’d met again and Bern had invited Danco to the masseria. Danco still didn’t have a specific project in mind, but he was looking for one. He was in touch with people who’d devoted themselves to new forms of agriculture, mostly other university dropouts like himself. When he’d seen Tommaso’s little vegetable garden, he’d had a vision. That’s how it began.
Much later, I too arrived.
And now, almost every evening, Danco still read that same book to us: “This straw appears small and light, and . . . could become powerful enough to move the country and the world.”
When the book ended, we implored him to start over again. We especially liked the first few chapters, where Fukuoka discovers his mission after a night of sudden illumination, but we wanted Danco to skip the boring part about cultivating rice, because who would ever
cultivate rice in Puglia? But not Danco, he insisted on reading everything, claiming we’d miss some important insights otherwise. Actually, he just wanted to test how faithful we were to the cause.
When we got to the part about the Four Principles, we recited them in chorus, joking about our dedication, yet believing in it with all our hearts: “No cultivation! No chemical fertilizer! No weedkilling! No dependence on artificial substances!”
We felt as if we were the start of something, the start of change. Every moment had the lucidity of an awakening.
We carried out two other “actions.” For the first we stationed ourselves at one of the many illegal dumps, at night, cloaked in dark sheets, scaring to death anyone who approached with their garbage. But what aroused our outrage the most were the lawns: those well-groomed lawns in front of vacation rental homes, so perfect, so incongruous. At the masseria we saved every drop of water; even in the torrid days of June our vegetables had to grow with only the soil’s moisture. We let them wither and sometimes die of thirst because that was the right thing to do, whereas that ornamental grass was abundantly irrigated with groundwater.
We’d kept an eye on a time-share in Carovigno for days and we knew that there were no longer any renters, only a farmer who came by a couple times a week to make sure everything was in order. The utility room wasn’t even locked. Destroying the irrigation system’s control unit seemed too violent, even though Giuliana insisted, so Danco started meticulously taking it apart with a screwdriver. We removed the motherboard and only smashed that, then we put the lid back on. In the end the unit looked identical to the way it had when we’d arrived.
Two days later we returned to check. The lawn had yellowed; in another forty-eight hours it would have withered completely. But the farmer must have noticed the problem and fixed it promptly, because the next time we went by the sprinklers were going full blast. The grass had already regained its color.
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