Three Horses

by Erri De Luca

  The woman listens to me carefully. To her they must be fairy tales. Even Mimmo doesn’t mind being quiet.

  So I continue. “Nonno teaches me to take apart a pig. He works salt into it on an old willow plank, puts in garlic, pepper, and wine when needed. And as soon as the animal’s throat has been cut, he collects the hot blood and fries it until it’s spongy, and eats it for strength in his work, which has to be completed in a day.”

  She is repelled. I don’t tell her, but not even I can swallow the stuff. No one can. But if you want a place among the elders you have to repeat one of their customs, from their youth, even a simple dance step on a feast day if you really can’t stand to dip your bread in their soup.

  I don’t tell this to the woman and I fall silent. She stares at my forehead and says: “Again.”

  I remember Nonno talking about Indian women and how when the storm winds blow they go out bare-breasted to stop them.

  I remember Nonno rubbing into his eyelids the first violet that came up after the winter. Then I say no more.

  Mimmo tells me about himself.

  He’s coming back from a long trip along one of the borderlines of the war between Croatians and Serbians. Two Italians, who knows how, brought a bread oven, a nice piece of machinery, to a tiny little town on the front.

  Some of our guys can manage to slip themselves in anywhere, he says. “I met an old Croatian who for a long time was a factory worker in Austria. He’s one of our guys from the old days, the kind that knows how to fix a car, making the spare parts himself, and then how to make cheese and wine.”

  The woman is standing there, magnificent. In silence she leans her chin against her fists. This already makes her alluring. She offers her ear, desire and time.

  For a while I look at her as Mimmo says, “Eight children, the youngest shot in the head in the front yard, a shot that singed his hair, fired at close range.”

  The old man tells Mimmo how attractive war can be at the beginning. Debts, robberies, loans, contracts: war burns up every piece of paper. For some it’s like an amnesty, for others a chance at revenge.

  Then houses start to burn with the children inside and everyone loses.

  Four years of war in that little town. The vineyard he planted is still filled with mines and the grapes of summer explode like the nipples of unmilked cows. The flies get drunk on them.

  In winter he prays to the snow to bury the earth and then prays to the frost to make the ground hard enough so he can walk on top and do the pruning.

  The surrounding fields are still, the land mines waiting for footsteps.

  “How can children grow up surrounded by so much forbidden land?” the woman asks, wanting no answer.

  Mimmo leaves a little empty space after the woman’s voice, to take it in.

  He answers that the women tie their children up when they go out and have to leave them alone.

  The woman knows about me, about Argentina, from something Mimmo said. She’s young but not a girl and asks for an answer: whether I think I was useful.

  A practical adjective. I like her saying it, but it has nothing to do with me. “You stay in the war because it would be shameful to stay out of it. And then grief seizes you and holds its grip till anger has turned you into a soldier.”

  “I wish I knew more,” she says.

  “I can only talk about it bluntly, without giving any explanation as to the why. My feeling is that it’s not up to me but to someone who comes later, if he feels like it, and goes looking out of curiosity and pity. I don’t feel like it.”

  “I can’t understand why you don’t give the ‘why’ of your story. To me already having a story seems so great that forgoing the why is a waste.”

  “I forgo it because so many lost lives sound like a justification of the why, an excuse. I don’t know how to make excuses.”

  “It’s a shame. I know other guys like you who fought and don’t talk anymore, don’t answer. You keep your reasons in your body.”

  “That’s how it is,” I say, she won’t be alone, while Mimmo regrets the edge of rebuke in her voice. “That’s how it is, we don’t know how to behave in front of a question. We’re the leftovers of a reply.” We, I say, and I don’t know who else I’m putting inside this jar of “we.”

  I swallow saliva and drown my voice in my throat.

  Mimmo steps in to help me, says that a bit of explanation did come out of me.

  “No, Mimmo, it’s not good enough for her, only for me. And to you I say I am in your debt.” And I bring my glass up to sip, slowly empty it, dry my mouth, and this means that for me the conversation is over.

  We stand up, shake hands.

  In the afternoon I have to brush the tree trunks with lime milk. This way I can tell Mimmo that tonight the moon is out and if he comes by, he can see a forest of ghosts.

  Days go by working in another garden. I have to dig up a pavement of bulky, rough stone, bring the soil back to light and work it into planting soil. It’s only a hundred square yards, but it’s set solid. The stones are stuck to a cement slab and wire grid.

  Blow by blow I have to break it with an iron sledgehammer. I sweat, smash my knuckles and fingers. Salt streams from my body.

  I console myself with honey and strong cheese.

  Under the crust of pavement the soil is spent, exhausted by darkness, scorched by lime. It needs oxygen and light. The salt absorbed has to be corrected with acidic loam.

  For days I keep heaving the sledgehammer and the ash handle shakes with every blow. When I pick up a regular rhythm, I’m able to get a good look at myself from outside my body. From inside I feel the blows and labored breathing: inhale when I raise the iron, exhale when I bring it down on the stone.

  The body’s small bellows divides the movement into five beats: two to raise the sledgehammer, one suspended in the air, two to crash it down to earth.

  From outside my body, I see a fifty-year-old man knocking at the gates of the earth to break it down, to smash gravel into its padlocked womb.

  In a corner, I pile scrap metal twisted with cement chunks, then I load it onto a truck that carries it away.

  In the end, I’m on uncovered land.

  It’s gray, I turn it over by the shovelful, enrich it with horse manure and chestnut mulch. I spread it out in combed columns in a late winter sun that embraces the whole and ferments it.

  Days alone, working. Evenings at home, crushing raw tomato and oregano over a colander and peeling garlic cloves in front of a Russian book. It takes the weight off my body.

  This is what books should do: Carry a person and not be carried by him; take the day off his back, not add its own ounces of paper to his vertebrae.

  Late at night, Laila is a puff of my garlicky breath on the edge of sleep.

  I also think about Selim who prays at every farewell to the day. There are acts of humility that make a man great.

  I go back to working in Mimmo’s garden. I find a note from him: A woman came looking for me and he had to make a point of not giving her my address.

  It’s Laila. I think that I’ll call her tonight. Instead she bursts into the tavern at noon, half angry, half glad, a shaken mass of freshly washed hair, maybe still wet.

  She breathes words into my face, a tickling at the corner of my eyes. “You think it’s funny?” She protests and then smiles.

  She doesn’t want to sit, so I stand. Two days she’s been looking for me. She’s furious and happy. She should kick me and kiss me, she says. She tears off hunks of bread to eat. “It’s not my hand,” I say.

  “You’ll see what I’ll do to your hand and to the rest when no witnesses are around.” And she insults me, swallows, turns around to leave, and orders me to come to her place after work without going home first and then she’s off. So I sit and feel cramps in my stomach. I know my body loves this woman. It tells me by calling and gnawing at me.

  I have to obey its braying, even if it means plodding after its tail.

  I brush
the palm of my hand, a rasp, over my face, I address my mind: We’re not equal, you’re an ancient skeleton, I’m the last of your tenants and I’m slow.

  You balk like Balaam’s ass when it sees the first angel. Unlike Balaam, I’m not your master and I don’t raise the stick to force you to keep going. I owe it to you because of the burden placed and the risk and even because of your unswerving patience.

  I take my hand from my face and place it on my esophagus to reach an understanding. If the body loves Laila, then so do I. This calms the nerve that had snapped at her arrival, after her voice and sudden, perfumed disappearance.

  Sometimes to take two steps in a row, one after the other, I need to write a contract with myself.

  At Laila’s place there’s happiness. She even has flowers on.

  “What fertilizer do you use to make them so beautiful?” I ask, and touch one of the painted flowers on her dress.

  “You’re the gardener, guess.”

  I have to move things around below and sniff. I place my finger between her skin and the fabric of her neckline. “What’s the idea of wearing a flowered dress, to attract bees and gardeners?”

  I withdraw my finger and breathe on top of it, pretending it’s burnt. And we start off with jokes before plunging into hugs.

  Young people make absorbed, concentrated faces in love, older people are more playful and warm their blood with laughter. Laughter impels.

  The water is boiling but we don’t put in the pasta.

  When we go back to the kitchen, an inch of very salty water is still resisting on the open flame. “Like the waters of the Dead Sea,” she says.

  We’re hungry, so we fry six eggs and sop them up with bread straight from the pan, face to face, she with the soft part, me with the crust.

  She eats more than me. I don’t know how to swallow quickly.

  I pour one of her wines, French, the kind that makes the palate genuflect. I have no mouth for such delicacies. She does, and she swishes it in her mouth and cradles it. I toss back half a glass in a second.

  “With those passages through the mouth, you’ll end up spitting it out.” She rocks with laughter while swallowing and some goes down the wrong way so she really does end up spitting it out. She punches me in the arm and then hacks up a wild red.

  Fried eggs were my survival plate once I’d left home, the discovery that I could cook. Nothing but fried eggs, for the first few months.

  We put the pan away without washing it because it’s been deep cleaned by the bread slices.

  “You do the talking, Laila, don’t make me tell stories.”

  “I was a dentist, I have steady hands. I can read a root’s humor even without X-rays. I grip it with the forceps and know which way to twist to extract it right.”

  I look at the joints in her hand, understanding its agility and grip, a force that comes more from the back of the hand than the palm. I know hands better than faces.

  She’s no longer a dentist. One day by mistake she makes an incision beneath a canine into an artery in the palate. The man’s mouth fills with blood in two seconds. She is able to stop it, to close it, but decides to quit the profession. It’s just an accident, ended well, but she quits anyway.

  I ask if my mouth is healthy.

  “Yes,” she says, “yours is full of air, a dark cellar, a cave in the sandstone filled with silence.”

  On my tongue I taste the cork and my teeth are bits of gravel consumed by chewing, by bread.

  “There are many kinds of mouths,” she says, “gutter mouths that spew saliva and empty words, marsupial mouths that always hold a sleeping puppy, mouths of sealed envelopes never mailed.”

  She speaks without hands, just lips.

  She asks if I work with my shirt on even in the summer, because the sun’s marks stop at my neckline.

  “Yes,” I say, “a working man wears darkened skin on his face, neck, and hands. The rest is on vacation.”

  She laughs, I don’t know why.

  She has an egg smear that I brush away with my thumb. She presses her mouth against it to start. Our naked feet rub beneath the table. We’re lovers who hold each other’s feet rather than hands. We put our arms around each other. I’m a little tense, she’s relaxed, no murky shadows in her tenderness like a scirocco that hurls the laundry into the air.

  Working girls have a repertory. When they love, they avoid it and circle it through familiar gestures without falling in, sidestepping it automatically. They invent love in the midst of sacrifices, of bans on acting “as if.”

  In Laila’s hands, love is the most virginal flesh. She seeks it by calling its name on her breath. She calls to me from outside of her openness.

  Finally her embrace gathers my blood and she is fulfilled by the reserves still left in me.

  She says it’s nicer for her when I’m tired.

  And I know from the start that I love this woman and that this love has the right to be my last.

  It’s night and our feet intertwine again. The rest of the body has broken away.

  I think of an island where you go barefoot, an island after Laila, when the time has come to leave terra firma. I need an island after her, after my feet are untied from hers.

  “What are you thinking?” she asks, just to hear me say it.

  “Of an island, of waves breaking against cliffs, of a wind that lets the trees grow, of well water and a gutter that carries the rainwater to it. I’m thinking of a pulley sighing over the well and the water humming at the bottom and of the peace that comes from having some water in reserve.”

  Then I make up things that I can say after “I’m thinking of.”

  “You’ve got a good imagination,” she says.

  “Yes, like a man who shaves without a mirror.”

  Laila listens to me and is so close to my ear that she breathes inside the island.

  Except that I don’t tell her it’s a place for the time after her. Love is a one-way ticket and afterward there’s no taking shelter in the earlier room.

  “I like the silly accuracy in the things you say. I ask you what you’re thinking and you give yourself an island, a well and even a rainpipe. I get emotional seeing you discombobulated. I think this is izvestie of love, news of love.” She corrects herself like her Russian grandmother, who could mix different languages in the same sentence.

  I notice news of love as well. My body holds on to Laila’s words about the pleasure gleaned from my tiredness, and rejoices with gratitude. This is news of love.

  “Tomorrow I have something to tell you,” she says.

  “Why not now?”

  “No, tomorrow, now it’s late but tomorrow night yes, no hugging, just some serious talk for a little while.”

  “Yes, a little while,” I say, “because if you don’t laugh afterward I’ll be sick.” Our feet rub against each other to say good night.

  IN THE GARDEN I burn the laurel trimmings, a scent that invites your eyes to shut.

  From behind the gate Selim’s coalman face returns. I invite him into the shed. “You’re the spirit of coffee,” I tell him, “you appear when I’m about to put it on the flame.”

  “I can smell it for miles, before you’ve even thought about it,” he says, seriously.

  We sit down, I ask him about the harvest. Good work but half of his earnings were robbed at knifepoint, only half was sent home. Four guys with knives, for a small amount that, divvied up, didn’t give them enough for a Saturday night on the town.

  “Who would rob a laborer?” I ask.

  “Boys without need,” he says.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “The shame comes from your feelings, not from an injury,” he says.

  Then Selim drinks his coffee sitting next to me in front of the burning twigs.

  With a remaining branch he pokes at a corner. “The ashes say that you have to leave.”

  He says it so softly that I can only hear it thanks to the dry, smoking silence.

  I look at the s
hifted embers that hum with a whispering of oak, like Laila’s voice, but rather than make me speak they want me to listen.

  I’m initially annoyed by this earthen horoscope from downcast black eyes. I swallow, saying only that I have no place I’m trying to reach. “Here no one is following me and no one is waiting for me elsewhere.”

  “You have to leave.”

  “I don’t leave anymore. Now my verb is to stay. There’s also a woman to love.”

  “The ashes see blood, including yours shed beside it. The ashes don’t say love.”

  “The ashes don’t know my business.”

  Selim pokes at another spot, flips, strews, looks me in the eyes and says with a vein that fills his forehead: “Me too.”

  I don’t know what part of my life he’s meddling in, but I believe him. I think maybe one of his ancient hours equals one of mine. If so, then all the more reason to be friends.

  “This is not the only thing. We also have an hour that matches up in the future,” and his voice dies down with the last flames of the kindling.

  “Don’t tell, Selim, let’s stick to some future coffee instead and let ashes be ashes. If they’re mad at me it’s because not long ago they were still green fiber and alive.”

  “You care for the trees and they love you back. These are their words to you, their last.”

  “Do you know anyone who departs on the advice of trees, Selim?”

  “You do,” he says, “I do. I left because of the ashes from a vultures’ nest.”

  “But I’m the last to leave, the one that clears the table and closes the door.”

  “There are many signs,” he says, “they arrive with leaves, birds, raindrops. Ashes are the last advice.”

  I keep silent, finish drinking from the cup.

  Selim’s voice is quiet, it already comes from afterward, from a time that follows the present. He sniffs at the wind and smoke and says: “We are friends, làzima kuwa rafiki, we have to be friends.” He shifts the ashes, erases.