by Jo Riccioni
He spotted his mother on the grass bank, sitting with Fabrizia. She was watching them. Otto began to raise his hand to her, but she turned away from them to talk to her friend. As she moved, her hair fanned across her back. It was tied loosely at the nape of her neck in a single black ribbon. She had taken to wearing it this way recently. Lucio had heard women in the washhouse complain it was too girlish, disrespectful to her husband, but this didn’t seem to concern his mother. He liked the way it looked. Under the light of the lanterns, the curls falling down her back reminded him of ink dropped in water.
He saw Otto’s hand retreat, yet there was a satisfaction playing about his friend’s mouth, as if he’d lost fifty centesimi but found a lira. ‘I can show you the best place to sit, if you want,’ Lucio told him. He led Otto away from the crowd, past the washhouse, and up the track in the direction of Collelungo. When they were well above the campo, they cut through the meadow and onto a ridge, finding a spot that offered a clear view of the action in the ring and the audience below.
‘All-seeing and yet unseen?’ Otto said, smiling at him.
Lucio saw his mother glance towards the hill that rose behind her. She would not be able to see them, camouflaged as they were in the dusk, but she knew him too well, knew all the places to which he removed himself. She shifted back around, ready for the entertainment, running her hand over the hair at her neck, her fingertips lingering on the knot of ribbon, as though she knew she was being watched. And she was: he noticed Otto’s gaze focusing there too.
‘I nearly forgot,’ his friend said suddenly, coming back to himself. He reached into the folds of his jacket and pulled out a book: a rolled journal encased in leather. He gave it to Lucio. ‘I made this for you.’
Lucio held the book in his lap uncertainly, his fingers brushing the supple nap of the leather.
‘Yes, it’s for you,’ Otto said. ‘To keep all your sketches together.’
He untied the leather string around the journal. The cover fell back, soft as cloth, but the paper inside was thick and blank and clean. The pages reminded him somehow of the past: freshly drawn milk; a tablecloth of pale linen handed down to his mother, cut up long ago for shirts; the whitewashed walls of his grandfather’s murals.
‘Thank you,’ he began, but Otto shook his head to stop him.
‘Oh, and this,’ his friend said. He dropped something from his pocket into Lucio’s palm. It resembled a coin, but on closer inspection he saw it was a metal disc on a ring. He ran his thumb over it and felt the engraving. He couldn’t read it in the dark but he could guess what was written there: Viviana.
‘Where is she tonight anyway?’ Otto asked.
‘I had to tie her up in the stable. She gets too excited about the piglet.’
Otto scoffed a little. ‘What do they do with this piglet that everyone’s making such a fuss about?’
‘It’s a game. They play it every year. Two men at a time get blindfolded. They have to chase the piglet round the arena with brooms. The one who hits it most in five minutes goes to the next round, until they get a winner.’
‘And what’s the prize?’
Lucio shrugged. He thought it was obvious. ‘The piglet, of course.’
‘A rather bruised one, then.’
‘The beaters seem to hit each other mostly,’ Lucio said. ‘Some people find it funny.’
His friend’s grey eyes were steady under their pale lids. ‘But not you?’
He didn’t answer. He didn’t want to say that he’d never been able to laugh at the game.
In the amphitheatre, the competitors were lining up — a motley collection of boys and weathered old men, their shirtsleeves rolled about their arms. Vittorio stood among them, balancing barefoot on the low arena wall, brown and lean. He seemed to have grown over the summer, inhabiting his adult body with a nonchalant confidence that made Lucio feel like the younger brother. Many of the Avanguardisti had joined up over the spring, and he was one of the oldest left in the village now. But Lucio knew he didn’t count, not the way Primo did. He was not a crowd-pleaser, a favourite to win.
‘My brother,’ Lucio said, indicating Vittorio to Otto. ‘He’s competing for our family.’
‘For your family?’
Lucio heard the question that he knew his friend was too tactful to ask: And why not you? He tried to explain. ‘My brother’s better at things like this — better in a crowd. He’ll have the audience behind him. It makes a difference. You’ll see.’
Otto seemed unconvinced.
‘It’s become more than a game now,’ Lucio said. ‘Alive, that piglet could grow to see a family through next winter and spring. Even dead, it’s the best meat anyone’s likely to get all year. Vittorio has the greatest chance of winning.’
In the ring, Polvere was handing brooms to the first two competitors. Professore Centini stepped into the arena between them, the piglet under his arm. Spooked by the cheers of the crowd, the animal began to struggle and squeal, forcing the mayor to drop it and abandon his attempt at a speech. The pig skittered to the centre of the ring, sniffing the air and twitching the bell around its tail. The onlookers called out its whereabouts and jeered at the seekers for clinging to the safety of the walls. Shamed, they ventured inwards, blindly swinging their brooms, until one managed to land a sturdy smack on the backside of the other. The crowd bellowed, terrifying the animal, which did a circuit of the wall and promptly defecated.
Lucio could see the Germans exchanging coins and cigarettes, placing hurried bets. The captain was finding the game immensely entertaining, shouting in German at the top of his voice, his cheeks ablaze. His collar was unbuttoned, and he had discarded his glass, which Padre Ruggiero had given him, in favour of swigging straight from a bottle of Raimondi Gold, set on the wall before them. Every time one of the seekers hit the other, he clapped the priest on the shoulder with such force that the tuft of his biretta quivered.
From the sidelines, Polvere called time, and it was Vittorio’s turn to replace the loser in the ring. The baker swung a leg down into the arena and gave the piglet a stiff kick. It screamed ridiculously, and Vittorio managed to land a few hits on its rump before it squeezed between his legs, leaving him swiping his opponent about the ankles. Someone summoned an imaginative curse that invoked both pigs and mothers-in-law, sending ribald laughter through the crowd, even among the Germans who hadn’t understood a word.
At the fifth changeover, Vittorio was still undefeated in the ring, and the captain had become so excited that he could no longer stay in his seat. Stripping to his shirtsleeves, he jumped ahead of the queue of contestants, instructing the baker to tie the blindfold about him. His men seemed to think this a splendid development in the festivities, but their enthusiastic toasts fell suddenly loud in the villagers’ silence.
To the side of the arena, Vittorio and Fagiolo were exchanging hushed, urgent words. His brother, still blindfolded, set back his shoulders and raised his broom tentatively. He seemed to have become a boy again, a David next to the German’s towering Goliath. He sidestepped about the ring, keeping the head of his broom low to the ground and cocking his head to listen. He made a strike, short and quick, catching the calf of the captain, who lashed out in response. Vittorio took a cuff to the ear and another to the arm, which sent him sprawling across the dirt. But within seconds he was up again, this time swiping the German about the chin and drawing blood. There was a cheer from the villagers. Padre Ruggiero shifted in his seat. The captain spat and laughed, undeterred, continuing to command the space as he tried to locate his target. When the pig squealed, he jabbed his broom, striking its head with the handle and stunning it. Vittorio caught the second thrust in the stomach and doubled over. As he reached for the ground, his hand touched the pig, dazed at his feet. He scrambled to grab it, but the captain kicked his hands away and snatched up the animal by a hind leg.
A roar went up from the Germans, drowning out the pig’s screams. The captain held his arms wide in victory. Still wearing his blindfold and dangling the piglet before him, he began to club it vigorously with his broom handle. The clamour of the audience gradually faded until all that could be heard were the dull thuds of the wood on limp flesh, the captain’s rasping grunts.
When he became conscious of the silence, he threw the scarf from his eyes. He shook the beast towards his men for approval, like it was a hunting trophy. The soldiers stood and removed their cigarettes from their mouths, hesitating before starting up a solemn and dutiful applause. Vittorio had also pulled off his blindfold, panting. The captain offered him a broad grin, a bruised hand, but his brother only wiped his face on his sleeve and pinned the German in his sights for a long moment. Captain Schlosser, perhaps coming to his senses, lifted the piglet between them and offered it up to Vittorio. Everything seemed suspended. A dog barked; a child began to cry. Vittorio cracked his neck and snorted through his nose, making a bloody expectoration in the chalk at his feet. He walked to the wall and jumped over it, leaving the captain standing in the arena, the mauled piglet dangling from his fist.
Lucio became aware that Otto had gone. He caught sight of him striding towards the ring. But instead of joining the men thronging about the captain, he cut across the ridge, walking briskly away from the slope of spectators on the campo below. Searching ahead of him to see what Otto had seen, Lucio could make out a figure bound for the mule track up Collelungo. It was his mother. The shape and the sway of her was unmistakeable to him. He knew she was hurrying away from the festival, away from all that ugliness, just as he wanted to, losing herself between the moonlit brambles without looking back.
He bent to pick up the journal Otto had given him, intending to set off after them, but he paused. Where Otto had sat, something lay across the flattened grass, thin and black as charcoal. He prodded at it with his toe, thinking it might be a lizard or a young grass snake, but the thing was inanimate under his foot. When he picked it up, he felt its softness between his fingertips, the lush texture of velvet. The ribbon was no longer than his hand, too short to have come unthreaded from a collar or a cuff, to have been tied about a woman’s hair. It was no more than a remnant, an offcut — a memento. He ran the velvet over his lips and recalled his mother’s curls.
When he straightened he saw Otto on the mule track, his pale hair attracting the moonlight like something metallic under water. Lucio slipped the ribbon inside his journal and turned his back to the mountain, making his way down over the ridge and towards the village.
They knew the war was changing. But only after the festival did they actually see it for themselves. One November morning, there was a foreign stillness to the air: it reminded Lucio of the partial eclipse he had once witnessed, hearing it long before he had seen it. The birds had started up their frenetic evening song, even though it was barely midday, and there seemed a heightened flurry of insect activity in the grass. Fagiolo’s mules had skittered and whinnied in their paddock, and dogs barked at the breeze that sounded like a distant train. Then everything became mute, holding its breath, as the shadow inched across the meadow, and he had imagined a stony chill like the Angel of Death passing overhead. Even when the summer day returned — the mules bowing their heads to the grass once more, the ants busy circling his boot, as though it had all been in his head — everything seemed changed to him. He recalled he had shifted his foot fractionally and let it hover over the black line of the moving ant trail. He could hear his blood in his ears, the thin, shallow breath in his throat, the very smallness of life all about him, clinging to its tenuous thread.
He remembered all this as they walked under the canopy of chestnuts lining the road to Cori. No birds sang, and the verges dripped with quiet. Even Viviana seemed spooked. The donkey, with its load of olives to be pressed, stopped dead and shook at its bridle.
‘Cammina, su!’ Vittorio grumbled. ‘Useless beast’s as lazy as Padre Ruggiero himself.’ He put up a hand to slap it on the rump, but Lucio caught his wrist. ‘What?’
They heard a rope creaking, the flies fizzing among the branches, paper fluttering in a scuff of breeze. The body had been there some days, they guessed, the face pecked at by birds, the stench as stunning as heat from an opened oven door. Viviana let out a hesitant growl.
‘Jesus Christ and all the saints.’ Vittorio swallowed hard. ‘Fuck.’ The feet of the hanging man were bare and blue as stone: someone had already stripped him of his boots and socks. Lucio noticed his gnarled toes — the feet of an old man, bunioned like Nonno Raimondi’s had been. He ran to the ferns on the other side of the road and retched.
‘Bastards,’ Vittorio said. They squatted together with their backs to the corpse, staring vacantly into the undergrowth. It seemed to glimmer in the weak sun through the trees, with tiny points of light like early stars in winter. His brother reached out and picked up several bullets from the leaf litter, shuffling them in his palm and blowing on the casings until their unspent charges were revealed. He pocketed them, glancing at Lucio. Then, without speaking, he scoured the bushes with the toe of his boot, perhaps hoping he might find the gun that went with them.
‘See what your German friends are doing now?’ His brother motioned to the swinging body and looked at him as if he could barely contain the contents of his own stomach. ‘You see, Gufo? You think no one sees you — Mamma and you at Collelungo, meeting that blonde one. The translator.’
Lucio turned away, but his brother caught him by the arm.
‘Things have changed. Weren’t you listening at the fountain? They’re rounding up boys as young as sixteen. They say it’s for the new Fascist army, but the talk is they’re being sent to Germany, to work in factories.’ He was staring at Lucio but his focus seemed elsewhere, on some other image. ‘How long do you think it’ll be before they get to us?’
Last winter, Vittorio had been cursing the years between himself and the older Avanguardisti, imagining the envelope from Rome, stamped with the axe and rods, bearing his own name. But now Lucio could sense other longings in him, other ambitions coming to the surface, crossing his brother’s face like clouds changing the colour of the lake at Montemezzo.
Behind him the rope creaked softly. Lucio saw the paper pinned to the old man’s chest. Harbouring Deserters, Possessing Firearms, Anti-German Activity. It read as bluntly as a market-day list.
His brother glanced over his shoulder at the noise. ‘Let’s do the business in Cori and get out of here.’
The next morning they were silent as they followed the road home, the only sounds the donkey’s lazy shuffle on the chalk path, the bullets jangling in Vittorio’s pocket as he ran his fingers through them.
He thought of Otto. He knew his brother was right. Everything about his friendship with the German should have felt wrong. But it didn’t. Walking through the woods of Montemezzo with Otto and Viviana felt more real to him, more precious than any memory he could conjure of his father. And seeing his mother watching them from the rocks as they dived and resurfaced in the lake at the close of a summer day, her mouth open, her laugh skimming across the water between the two of them, brought him more happiness than it ought to. As for his mother’s lantern, which he would track from the battlement wall as it swung up the mule track to Collelungo, and the torch that winked its impatient answer along the ridge, he would only lower his head and squint, until they became no more than fireflies, flickering to each other as nature dictated they must, on the last balmy nights before autumn.
They turned in at Padre Ruggiero’s to deliver his share of the olive oil. The priest was expecting them and came to the gate.
‘Is it true?’ he called before they had finished the climb towards his villa. ‘Did they hang Giacomo Luigi?’ He saw the answer in their faces and he crossed himself, mouthing a prayer before sizing up the two casks of oil. He pursed his lips, evidentl
y disappointed with the yield, but continued on the subject of the hanged man. ‘Still, Giacomo was a known Communist. They even said he encouraged the formation of resistance groups. At his age, I ask you? I wonder he had the energy.’
He rested a hand on each of their shoulders. ‘They’ll be the death of us, these partisans — you understand that, don’t you? The Germans will retaliate. You must see the danger that poses for normal, honest men and women like the Montelupinese?’ They nodded dutifully, but Lucio saw Vittorio’s shoulder inch away from Padre Ruggiero’s hand. ‘That’s why I want you to promise that if you hear anything of partisan groups or the GAP in these parts, you come and tell me. Even if it’s someone you know, even if it’s a friend. Is that understood?’
They gave their word and Padre Ruggiero climbed the steps of his verandah once again. Eager to be gone, they headed below to store the oil, but as they re-emerged from under the house, Lucio saw the priest’s jowly face still at the balcony railing, his pale eyes following them from above, scanning the shape of their jackets, their trouser pockets as they left his cellar.
‘And Primo, don’t forget,’ he called, ‘I’m expecting you at the head of the litter during Santa Lucia’s procession this year. Your father would want it.’
Without turning, Vittorio held up one hand in acknowledgement, as Lucio had seen him do so many times to boys in the schoolyard. But with the other, his brother made the cornuto behind his chest and spat as he led the donkey down the hill. ‘Go fuck yourself,’ he mumbled.
They stopped at Rocca Re from habit. Lucio suspected it had become a superstition of Vittorio’s: to stand on the rock and make his mark before passing. The donkey wandered into the meadow to graze.