Malafrena

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  In midmorning the coach stopped in a tiny village. Itale handed Stasio over to his mother with relief and, rubbing his numbed arm, climbed out of the coach with Sangiusto.

  “Bara already?”

  “Aye,” said the rusty coachman, not uncivilly, for his passenger had said the name of the village with the broad Montayna accent.

  “We’re on the border,” Itale said, coming over to the roadside where his friend stood stretching and yawning. “Walk over to where that pig’s rooting and you’ll be in the Montayna.”

  They walked in the bright sunlight down the rutted streets of Bara, and patted a dog that came up hungry and fawning. Neither had anything to say. They turned back to take some breakfast at the hovel that called itself, in faded letters and obscure picture on a signboard, the Traveller’s Rest. While the peasant girl left in charge of the place was fetching bread and cheese, Itale looked about the room, at its dirt floor, dirty walls, benches, table, and out the door onto the bright, desolate street where the mangy dog sunned himself and nothing else stirred. The child who brought them sour wine—she had only gaped when they asked for coffee—had a neck thickened by incipient goitre and a dull way of staring. He had forgotten that dull look, that country look.

  He sat down at the table to drink his wine, and picked up a couple of printed sheets lying on it, left by travellers; one was the broadsheet of a song such as mountain peddlers sold or gave with their wares, the other a handbill which he started to read without recognition. “REVOLUTION,” it was headed. “On the twenty-seventh of July the citizens of Paris rose in the name of the French People to protest…” He read no further, though his eyes found the line at the foot of the sheet, “August 13, 1830. From the office of Novesma Verba.” Sangiusto had wandered over, chewing on a hunk of bread. Itale left the handbill lying, got up and went out. He stood there in the sunlight and looked at the hut opposite, with its clumsy door and oilpaper window, at the pig rooting in the street by a pump where the dust had turned to mud, at the white dog cringing, at the poor, short length of the village where the coach loomed on its high wheels taller than the huts beside it. Behind the huts and before them the street became again the highroad, the road he must follow, that had brought him, so far, here.

  “The horses are in, I suppose we leave soon,” said Sangiusto, coming out beside him.

  Itale turned away and set his hands against the wall of the Traveller’s Rest, hard, as if to push the sorry little house down. He felt the hot dry clay under his palms, the heat of the sun on his shoulders. Here I come to ground, he thought. I thought I must succeed, because my hopes were so high, and I have failed. I thought I must win, because my cause was just, and I have been defeated. It was all air, words, talk, lies: and the steel chain that brings you up short two steps from the wall.

  For five years he had been sick for home, and now, forced to it as a fugitive, he must come to it knowing that he had no home.

  Slowly and steadily the little horses pulled, the coach jolted on towards the mountains that now dominated all the lower sky. After the midday stop at Vermare they still had to climb two thousand feet up and some twelve miles on, winding now more south than west. The air grew yet more clear and dry, the mountains darker blue, the cricket-chant on the slopes deeper and more long drawn out; and the boy riding the wheel horse pulled his cap down over his eyes and sang half-dozing the song that seemed as monotonous and timeless as the cricket song,

  Grey will fall the autumn rain,

  Sleep, my love, and sleep thee well,

  My heart has broken and will break again,

  Sleep till thou wilt waken…

  “Don’t pester the gentleman, Stasio!”

  “That’s all right.”

  “It’s too good of you, sir. You come here now, Stasio.”

  “He’s all right here.” Itale let the baby investigate his waistcoat, grateful for the distraction, seeing always the mountains rise around him in reproach.

  The road wound in and out; the young mother looked down the plunge of a ravine to the right and shut her eyes.

  “We’ll be out of this in a couple of miles. Then there’s a straight pull to the pass.”

  They were going at less than a footpace now, the tough little horses straining, the wheelboy wide awake, the driver’s whip crackling lightly over the horses’ necks.

  “What mountains are those, if you don’t mind, sir?”

  “The mountains above Lake Malafrena.”

  “Hoy there! get on, get on!”

  “Now we tip over?” Sangiusto inquired placidly of Fate.

  The coach righted itself and settled back into the ruts, the little horses pulled sturdily. Declining, the sun shone to their right, and the long shadow of Sinviya Mountain stretched up the forested slope of San Givan like a barrier before them dividing the mountain valley from the open, golden weather of the hills.

  “This is like my own country,” Sangiusto said. His voice was soft. “Yet there is no one thing the same.” After a while he said, “So I come here with you after all.”

  Itale nodded, dodging the memory of Easter in Aisnar; but it would not be dodged, and he said at last, “I wish I’d thrown it over then. Gone home. Before I went too far to be able to come back.”

  Sangiusto glanced at him calmly and keenly. After a time he said, “Five or six months is not long enough. One comes back, Itale.”

  “But what does one…bring…?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I was a fool before I—before that. Now I’m wise, now I know what a fool I was, right? But what use is wisdom, what good is it, when the price of it is hope?”

  “I don’t know,” Sangiusto replied again, very quietly, and with humility.

  Itale caught himself, was ashamed, and was silent. He would not talk again. The habit of protest was strong, well-nourished; but it was time to go back to the older habit, silence.

  Stasio had wakened whimpering among his bundles again, and Itale picked him up, set him on his knee, let him play with the endlessly wondrous waistcoat buttons, while sunlit and shadowed slopes closed in on the road and the horses quickened their pace. The road levelled out, Portacheyka lay before them in the pass, greeted by the wheelboy’s long whistle, Portacheyka, peaked roofs, streets of slate stairs twining between crowded houses, the monastery of Sinviya frowning over it white on the dark mountain shoulder, the Golden Lion where as a child Itale had watched the high coaches roll in, dusty, come from remote and unimaginable lands.

  “Where to now?” asked Sangiusto when they were standing on the cobbled street, since Itale, looking bewildered, made no more.

  “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought—”

  The innkeeper’s wife was coming out, peering curiously at them.

  “Come on, this way,” Itale said, and set off abruptly, leading Sangiusto down a long slate stair, across a little street, through a back alley, and up another set of stairs to a garden gate. There he stopped.

  “Itale,” said Sangiusto, who had also been making decisions, “this is your family, and you are unexpected. I shall put up at the inn, and meet you when it’s convenient.”

  Itale looked at him with the same angry bewilderment; then he laughed. “You can’t,” he said, “we haven’t got a krune left. Come on.” He pushed open the gate, and Sangiusto reluctantly followed him up the path between phlox and pansies to the door; to the little servant girl who went rigid with dismay at the sight of strangers, the stiff, neat, high-windowed parlor, the grey-haired woman who came in looking puzzled, and then looked frightened, and putting her hands to her throat whispered, “Itale—Oh mercy of heaven, Itale!”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Itale said as she embraced him. “There was no way to let you know. I’m sorry—”

  “You’re so thin,” she whispered, and then releasing him, “It’s all right, my dear, I was startled but I don’t faint, you know,” and already she was turning to Sangiusto to welcome him with the fine courtesy and profound distru
stfulness of the Montayna; taking his hand and repeating his name as Itale introduced them; inviting them both to sit down; ascertaining that they were tired, hungry, dirty, and looking after their needs. Not a word came from her that could distress Itale, after the first cry. Only she asked in her blunt way, when he had given a sketchy explanation of why he had arrived so suddenly, “Then how long will you stay?”

  “I don’t know.” His tone cut her off and she asked nothing more about his plans; nor did Emanuel, at first, when he came home to find the little maid in a flurry, his wife preternaturally calm and ironical, and his bedroom, bath, razors and clean shirts sacrificed to the unknown foreigner and unexpected nephew. “When did you leave Krasnoy?” was his first question.

  “Tuesday.”

  “What’s going on? The Post didn’t come last week, still no papers on the Diligence—”

  “They weren’t printed.”

  “Why not?” Emanuel exploded, and a summary of the days of the insurrection only enraged him—“You mean that never a word of all this reached us until you came here? Good God! We might have been a kingdom for a week and never known it!”

  “But we’re only a grand-duchy,” Itale said, “so it doesn’t matter. Look here, uncle, I want to ask you—I want to go on to the house, to see mother. But I can’t—I don’t know what my status is, I’ve been proscribed from Krasnoy but it may go farther—I don’t want—”

  Emanuel interrupted him. “What difference will that make to them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about my father.”

  “Yes—you’re right, he ought to be prepared a bit for this.”

  “I came here because I had nowhere else to go,” Itale said, going dead white, “but if there are going to be any conditions, any accusations, I’ll go on, now, across the border.”

  Sangiusto, coming in from the other room, stopped in the doorway, a towel around his bare neck. “Oimè!” he said to himself, and withdrew. The uncle and nephew stood face to face. “You damned, arrogant fool,” Emanuel said, “who said anything about conditions and accusations? What I’m talking about is that Guide is ill and needs a bit of protection from shocks.”

  “Ill?”

  “Since November. Why did you think it was I that came to the Sovena, not he or Eleonora?”

  “But you said, then—”

  “He told me to say as little as possible about it to you. I obeyed him. I’ve always done what Guide says. Maybe I was wrong, I don’t know. He was ill again about a month ago. I wanted to write you. They both said not to.”

  “I could have come—”

  “What good would that do?”

  Itale sat down on the bed. He was still very white, and there was a forced rigidity in the way he held his shoulders and arms that made Emanuel realise at last that he was very near breakingpoint. “None,” he said.

  “He’s all right, Itale. No worse than he was, now. It’s the same heart trouble, it can go along for years like this, you know. I didn’t mean to alarm you. But you cannot walk in on him in anger—”

  Itale shook his head.

  “Emanuel,” said Perneta outside the bedroom door, “if you’ll ride on out to the lake and tell Guide and Eleonora we’re coming, I’ll give Itale and his friend a little supper and put Allegra in the gig and we’ll come along in an hour or so.”

  “Right,” Emanuel said. He turned back to Itale, wanting to say something more, to reassure him; but he did not know what to say. The relation between Guide and Itale, the bond of absolute loyalty strained impossibly by competitive pride, the understanding and hostility, the vulnerability of each to the other, all that was beyond Emanuel now as always. Whenever he came close to that passionate and essential relationship in either the son or the father he burned his fingers in the fire of it, fumbled, lost his temper, guessed wrong. And yet it was always he who had to bring the news to Guide, he thought as he saddled his horse and set off through lengthening shadows towards the lake; always he who was the intermediary. Thirty months ago he had been driven down here to tell Guide that the boy had been arrested and jailed, and had gone about it all wrong, jabbed his clumsy fingers into the wound. This time he had as badly misunderstood Itale, when all the young man was doing was clinging desperately to the last fragments of pride. It was always pride with these two; their strength and patience, their violence and vulnerability, all came down to pride, to the resistance of the will to the insults and indifference of time. Resistance, never acceptance. They gave with open hands, but they had never learned to receive. Guide’s somber temper had turned ardent in the son, but the root of it still was pride and pain. The world is a hard place for the strong, Emanuel thought; it gives no quarter; no man ever defied evil and got off lightly.

  He hoped to find Guide alone, but saw him with Laura in the garden behind the house. To judge by their gestures they were discussing replantings, and they did not see him coming down the road till he was at the fence. Then Laura looked round and came alive. “There’s uncle! Was there a letter?”

  “Oh aye,” he said, smiling. It would have been so easy to tell Laura his news, why was it so hard to tell Guide? “Perneta’s coming along behind me. Will you give us dinner?”

  “Of course, but where’s the letter?”

  “I haven’t got it, niece.”

  Laura looked at him, alert and silent.

  “It’s a message rather than a letter. Itale wants to know if he can come here, Guide.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In Portacheyka. At the house. Came in on the Diligence this afternoon. With another man.”

  Guide stood still. Laura did not speak.

  “What brought him here?”

  “He has nowhere else to go. He came with the clothes on his back. There was a revolution in Krasnoy, the Assembly’s been dissolved, there was fighting for two days, he’s under ban and doesn’t know how far it extends—You must let him come without questioning him, without conditions, Guide, he’s lost everything he was working for—”

  “Conditions?” Guide said. “Tell your mother,” he said to Laura. “I’ll go to Portacheyka.” He was out of the gate and coming round past Emanuel to the stables as he spoke.

  “They’re probably on the way already,” Emanuel said, and seeing there was no stopping Guide, “Here, then, take the horse, he’s fresh.” He dismounted, Guide swung up and was off. Laura, looking after her father, trembled all over and laughed.

  “How strange it is. You riding up there while we were standing here talking about the hollies. And the house, and the road. As if it had happened before. I was standing here and you rode up to tell us he was coming. As if there was only one moment, and this was it.”

  “Where’s your mother, lass?”

  “Indoors.” They walked, she on this side of the picket fence and he on that, back to the gate. Laura went lightly, hurrying, but before going in she looked back once at the garden in the clear light, the roses, the empty paths.

  When they came, she was confused. She had forgotten Emanuel had said there was a stranger with Itale. She could not tell which was her brother as the gig came out from under the oaks in the late dusk. She went forward with her mother and uncle; she felt herself moving over the short grass, in the warm twilight air. A tall man jumped down from the gig and came to them, that was his blue coat, it was Itale, when she held him in her arms he was as thin as a child, but his face was a man’s face now; was this her brother? Who was the other man, with his hand tied up in a bandage, holding back from them? “Welcome home,” she said to him, and after a moment he smiled, someone else laughed. All at once she was happy, caught the moment passing never to return, was herself and the waiting was over, they were home. “Come in, come into the house,” she urged them, the father, brother, stranger.

  II

  Late in a September afternoon, coming past the orchards of Valtorsa, where the golden light shone broken by transpar
ent walls of shadow that stretched eastward from each row of trees, Itale saw his sister come towards him on the road. “Letter,” she called, “Uncle brought it,” and then, when they met, “Are the grapes ready to pick?”

  “We’ll pick the Oriya vines tomorrow.” As they walked side by side he opened the letter and read it, frowning against the level sunlight. It was dated from Solariy.