The Fireflies of Autumn

by Moreno Giovannoni

  ‘Vigliacco! Coward!’ Folaino called out. ‘Go to hell, you and those sluts of your sisters!’

  Most people were satisfied. It had been quite a good altercation, although some in the crowd wanted more. People mumbled about Tommaso being all talk and no action, promising much and not delivering. Tommaso went home and everyone else returned to their work.

  For a while the village waited for something else to happen, but nothing did. Like many other men who had been to America, Folaino had bought new fields and more cows, and deposited what was left in the bank in Lucca. He was able to dress all eight of his children elegantly, educate them at the Jesuit school and the convent, make large donations to the church and generally saunter about San Ginese as if he owned the place.

  Meanwhile Tommaso continued to work his fields, leading a miserable existence, just him and his little aluminium saucepan.

  …

  Ten years after Folaino returned from America, his only daughter, Mariuccia, married Nedo del Carlaccio and came to live in Villora. Folaino bought a horse and carriage for two, with a driver’s seat as well, and on the wedding day paraded his virgin daughter through all the hamlets of San Ginese, taking the long way round up to the church so that everybody could get a good look at her and her virginity. The rest of the family followed in three motorcars, which were rarely seen in these parts, driven by groomsmen in fancy dress, as if this were an American film.

  After the ceremony the couple repeated the tour in their bright new trap, all polished wood and brass, this time as the bells of San Ginese tolled on the hilltop. Folaino made a generous donation to the church that day and the bells rang for one whole hour, the time it took for Mariuccia and Nedo to visit the villages and arrive at the Baracca tavern for the wedding feast.

  People wondered how Tommaso might have felt about this public display of wealth and fertile abundance from Folaino, but on the day of the wedding Tommaso was nowhere to be seen. Of course, no-one expected to see him, then or at any other time. He kept to himself and went out of his way not to be seen.

  He had slipped once when walking home with a full saucepan, and the milk made a white arc in the air and landed on his head. He was left sitting on his backside in the street, embarrassed but unhurt. Folaino, who had just turned the corner in his car, slowed and stopped to watch, with the engine running.

  For a few years the story of Tommaso’s two walks would be mentioned in conversation in local bars and courtyards, when the heat of summer had exhausted everyone and the only energy most had left was reserved for sitting in the shade on low, grey stone walls, listening to the stories told by the more energetic. The speaker always made sure Tommaso was not present before starting.

  The story often included reflections on the different forms of luck that accompanied you if you left for America in search of your fortune. Some people noted how those who returned hardly ever had children, as if on their return God punished them for having left the place where they were born. Of course this wasn’t true of Folaino, who had produced all his children before he left.

  Then Tommaso’s story died and was buried and nobody could be bothered digging it up to tell anymore, until the thing happened that would make it a tale to be told for as long as people lived in San Ginese.

  …

  Twenty years passed from the day Tommaso returned from America, and he and Folaino both grew old. Old in those days was different to old now, of course. Nevertheless, they were old.

  Tommaso, who was physically very strong, still worked his miserable fields and seemed a man driven by some secret purpose, while Folaino, just as hardy and certainly not poor, rented many of his fields to others and passed the time driving his wife to visit his children and grandchildren. On Sundays the entire family (there were thirty-five of them in total) would appear at Mass in all their opulence. There was a feeling that through their elegant dress and motorcars, and sheer weight of numbers, they were demonstrating their moral superiority to everyone else. Many of us found this irritating and our thoughts would turn sympathetically to Tommaso. This was probably the beginning of his future popularity. Meanwhile, he worked like a dog to scratch a meagre existence from the land and sometimes went just a little hungry.

  For twenty years he and Folaino had, generally speaking, managed to avoid each other. On Sundays at Mass, Folaino and his family occupied three pews at the front, while Tommaso sat near the door at the back. Although you could say he was in the ascendancy, Folaino seemed wary of crossing paths with Tommaso after so many years. He always waited for Tommaso to leave before leading his family out.

  In the evening Tommaso still came down for his milk, although Irma stopped charging him for it.

  …

  One day in the middle of summer Tommaso’s door creaked open and the old man tottered out, mumbling something to himself and gently shaking his head as if earnestly engaged in conversation with someone. He looked ancient and very tired and was scruffy and grey. He was wearing his clogs. Clacaclac. He turned right.

  …

  After it was all over, the men would sit outside Nedo’s bar marvelling at what Tommaso had done. Many did not blame him. They would raise an arm, take their hat off, throw it to the ground and turn away in disgust, making noises such as pah! And mah! Others would open their right hand to make a dismissive gesture and turn their back on their interlocutors as if sickened by Tommaso’s actions. As the years passed, however, there were fewer and fewer who disapproved of him. They remembered Folaino’s arrogant display of wealth and his condescension towards those he considered inferior, until finally Tommaso became a hero to all the people of San Ginese. In the end they were prepared to defend him to the death against critical outsiders. He became a kind of patron saint of unlucky migrants, his conduct an example to be followed by anyone who had been badly treated in America.

  Some said it must have hurt him terribly to be betrayed by a friend, that he had gone on living as if nothing had happened and suppressed the anger and the resentment and brooded all that time. They imagined Tommaso silently wishing that the person who had hurt him would be hurt. They imagined Tommaso’s resentment when he saw that the person who had hurt him was not going to be hurt and the gradually dawning understanding that he would have to be the one to inflict the hurt on Folaino.

  Or maybe he had it in for God over the way his life had turned out. He was unmarried, childless, lived with his old maid sisters, and, as Gino said, he was unmoneyed. Folaino was everything he was not. If only he had the money that Folaino had stolen. In the end his patience ran out.

  …

  Nobody noticed Tommaso as he made his way alone under the canopy of trees alongside the Metato to Folaino’s house, where the usually padlocked gate was open, and pounded his fist on the heavy wooden door. When Folaino opened it, Tommaso shot him four times in the chest. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Then he turned around and walked home. Clacaclac. He was home eating, with renewed appetite, his sad midday meal of cheese and bread with a glass of watered-down wine well before the police arrived and just as the news started spreading.

  It was one o’clock on a hot day, and the silent village was at lunch when the troop of police in their smart black uniforms arrived at a jogging pace. There was the clatter and shuffle of swords and running feet. They looked as if they were attending a ceremony on a public holiday, with their white shoulder strings, red-banded trousers, small V-shaped capes and two-cornered hats. Five carabinieri knelt in a row behind the low stone wall in front of le case di sopra and pointed their guns at the door. When their commanding officer, the maresciallo, called out to Tommaso to surrender, there was a long wait, and then the old man calmly walked out. He wasn’t muttering to himself now. He was clear-eyed, his skin looked fresher and he seemed to glow.

  They handcuffed him and marched him to the lock-up at La Pieve. Those who saw him said that as the procession moved along the top of the San Ginese hill, Tommaso seemed to be at peace with the world, like a man on his deathbed who had m
ade his confession to the priest in plenty of time and was now just waiting for whatever happened next. When they passed the church, the commanding officer told his men to remove the handcuffs, and Tommaso accompanied them freely the rest of the way.

  …

  Tommaso refused a lawyer throughout the trial and refused to speak in his own defence until the sentence was pronounced. When the judge, in his black cloak, silver and gold cord, shoulder braid and frilly white blouse, asked if he had anything to say, Tommaso rose in the dock and pronounced the words that became legendary in San Ginese. ‘Your Honour, I did my duty, nothing more, nothing less.’

  And he sat down. The courtroom exploded in applause and cheering.

  Tommaso the Killer was given a life sentence but served just five years because he was old and the crime had been committed in a moment of folly. The suggestion that it was premeditated, that he had planned it for twenty years, was incredible, so no-one believed it. Because of his good behaviour and the royal amnesties that were still available at the time, he was released and returned to San Ginese, where he lived a few more good years and died peacefully in his sleep.

  Ugo, son of Vitale and Irma, who later emigrated to Australia, lived across the road from Tommaso. He was a boy when all this happened and remembers it very clearly. When his wife, Morena, the daughter of Bucchione, was a little girl, she would visit Tommaso with a crowd of her little friends and knock on his door to hear the famous words.

  In fact, in his final years, wherever he went, children and villagers gathered round and someone always called out: ‘Tommà, Tommà, what did you to say to the judge, Tommà?’

  And Tommà, who by then was ninety years old, would snap to attention and for the thousandth time repeat: ‘Your Honour, I did my duty, nothing more, nothing less!’

  And everyone would cheer and clap and double over with laughter.

  Il Chioccino

  The priests of San Ginese were rascals, whoremongers and layabouts. They were men, after all, with the same human desires and weaknesses as everyone else. One parish priest was Don Palagi. Another, who was only a kind of priest, was Il Chioccino, named for a chioccia, which is a brood hen, round and plump. Life in San Ginese was not always wretched.

  In San Ginese, not too long ago, Tista lay dying in his bed. It was the day Ugo went to stand at the foot of the old man’s bed, not knowing what to expect. What do you expect to see when they tell you your grandfather is dying and you must go to see him and you are standing at the foot of his bed?

  Ugo’s sister Lida, the holiest and most religiously observant of the grandchildren, had run up to the church to call the priest.

  Tista looked at Ugo and said, ‘Ugo, muoio.’ Just like that.

  Ugo looked back at him.

  Don Palagi came up the stairs and administered the sacrament of extreme unction.

  Tista was at that moment of impending death when the moribund might say, more or less quoting the sixteenth-century poet Pietro Aretino:

  Son arrivato all’estremo punto

  Salvatemi dai topi ora che son unto.

  I have come to the end time that’s appointed

  Save me from the mice now that I’m anointed.

  When the priest had finished he left the room rather suddenly, abandoning the family and a few neighbours who were standing around the dying man, and went back downstairs to the kitchen. Ugo’s father Vitale told him many years later that he followed the priest and saw him passionately embracing and kissing Rosaria, Drea’s wife, who had been distributing food and wine to the visitors.

  This was the same priest who refused to bless the houses of families whose relatives had emigrated to Australia. Migrants betrayed their motherland, he said from the pulpit, before announcing that Gianni Di Lilloro, who had been crushed to death in the belt of his wheat thresher the week before, had been punished by God for working on a Sunday.

  The priests also carried on as if the feudal entitlement of jus primae noctis was still in force throughout the land. It was commonly known that when asked by their distraught and furious husbands on their wedding night who had taken their virginity, local women occasionally replied: ‘Go and ask the priest!’

  Because we knew about these things, we joked about the men of God. On one occasion Ugo was turning over the soil in the priest’s olive grove (this was one of the good works the parishioners did for the priest, a kind of religious obligation everyone shared). He was working alongside Il Tegghio, who was from Marchetti, and who was called that because he looked like a large, round copper pot. At midday they stopped working and the priest’s housekeeper, La Chiocca, brought them their food.

  Copper Pot asked her, ‘Oh, Chiocca, quante ne hai fatto l’altra notte?’ (How many times did you do it last night?)

  When the fat old woman blushed (which was a sign of the truth of the accusation), of course the two fell about laughing. She quickly deposited on the ground the two bowls of bean soup she was carrying and waddled off, cursing the men under her breath.

  …

  Then there was Il Chioccino. Il Chioccino wasn’t really a priest. After becoming a man, and working his father’s fields for a few years, he became a kind of chaplain and moved to the top of the hill where he shared a house and the housekeeper with the real parish priest. Not that he troubled the housekeeper much, preferring gluttony to lust. He was just a simple peasant at heart and counted his blessings that he had stumbled into this position, which meant he didn’t have to do any work while eating well, sleeping as much as he wanted and, at least in his own mind, enjoying the respect of the people in the village.

  Many years ago, when Tista was still alive, Irma sent Little Ugo up to the church at Castello to ask the chaplain if he would come to bless the onions in the field, which were being eaten by worms. Ugo knocked on the door of the presbytery and the chaplain opened it. He listened to Ugo, all the while wiping breadcrumbs from his chin and emitting a gassy concoction of onions and wine, either from a bodily orifice or from the pores of his skin, or maybe from both. Il Chioccino agreed to perform the sacred ritual the next day.

  With his little terrier in tow, he arrived just before one o’clock, as Irma was setting the table. Vitale, who was in the vineyard, dropped his shovel and joined them in the patch of land below the house, removing his hat as he took his place beside Ugo and Irma, who had come running from the kitchen, draping a scarf over her head. They stood there on the edge of the onion row with their heads bowed and hands piously joined as Il Chioccino read out the church-sanctioned official Blessing of the Onions. As the dog raised its leg on a clod of earth, Ugo wondered whether, as the blessing took effect, the worms would feel any pain and if they would actually die, or whether they would just retreat and wriggle over to eat Julio the Orphan’s carrots five metres away.

  Having completed his work for the day, Il Chioccino folded his arms inside the long sleeves of his cassock and stood there nodding, looking at the other three, smiling, a little round man who resembled the small wine barrels people had in their cellars. The church bell tolled one o’clock. Irma looked at Vitale and Vitale looked back at her, and Irma looked at the assistant priest, who looked at her. She invited him to stay for the midday meal. Il Chioccino’s face exploded with happiness. His meal for the day was assured! What a heavenly profession God had chosen for him!

  And so he stayed and ate and drank and was still there late in the afternoon, showing no sign of leaving, when the sun started to set behind the hill on the side of the house. Vitale had excused himself to return to the vineyard, and it was left to Irma and Tista to entertain the chaplain with conversation and one glass of wine after another, accompanied by pecorino cheese and bread. It was so late that it was getting cold, so Tista lit a fire with twigs and kindling kept in a large, heavy wicker basket beside the fireplace.

  In order to warm himself in front of what was soon a crackling, spitting inferno, Il Chioccino wobbled to his feet and, taking a few steps towards the basket, went to sit down on its
edge. The basket was too low, not heavy or stable enough, and he was too fat, too round and unsteady after three flasks of Vitale’s wine, so as he lowered his body and allowed himself to drop the last few centimetres, instead of coming to rest on the edge he fell into the middle of the container, where his backside found a perfectly snug fit. And there he stuck, firmly planted, doubled up, his face buried in his crotch, his legs wriggling, arms waving.

  Tista took him by an arm and tried to haul him out but only ended up dragging him and the basket in a circle around the kitchen table. The little black-and-white-spotted dog Il Chioccino had brought with him became very excited and began yapping at his master while keeping a safe distance until, who knows what came over him, he charged in and bit his master’s fat thigh and retreated under the table, where he continued barking.

  By rolling him onto his side, one of them pulling him by the head while the other held the basket, Irma and Tista finally freed him. Of course, after that they had to give him another glass of wine to calm his nerves, and some prosciutto and bread to settle his stomach, which had become agitated in all the excitement. Irma was worried he was going to stay for dinner, but he had already eaten and drunk so much that in the end he seemed glad to leave. She asked Ugo to accompany him up the hill to his home near the church and so the little boy took Il Chioccino home, walking a little in front of him and trying hard to ignore the sounds that came whenever the assistant priest made a special effort on the steeper parts. Ugo watched him collapse onto his little bed and go straight to sleep as he wished the boy goodnight, emitting one final, prolonged trumpet blast.

  In the end the onions were saved, but Ugo always wondered if it was really Almighty God’s intervention in the sad little field below the house or just the weather and other circumstances.

  The only good thing you could say about a priest was that he visited all the dying, as if to say it didn’t matter whether you were rich or poor, famous or unknown. In the end God treated you all in the same way.