The Fireflies of Autumn

by Moreno Giovannoni

  Nevertheless, the people of San Ginese have never had much respect for their priests.

  Bucchione and the Angel of Sadness

  On the day he turned ten, Bucchia, as he was called then, finished building himself a small wooden cart that he rode down the hill from Clementina’s place and along the main street, the only street, of Villora. He rumbled past the house on the right where Nedo, who was Nedo’s father, would one day open the village bar next to Gino’s place and charge twenty lire to watch television in a special room at the back. The boy sped past the plot of land on the left that would later become Neva’s garden (built halfway down into the ditch where Derì’s motorcycle landed after the Dinner of the Pig), bounced through the dip in the road at the bend and headed straight into Beàno. Planting the heels of his shoes firmly in the dirt, he ground to a chaotic jumble of a stop in a cloud of dust and a scatter of gravel outside Lilì’s house. Then he dragged his cart back up to the top and started again. He did this over and over all day, and no-one took any notice because he was just a little boy playing with his little wooden cart.

  The late springtime sun setting behind the Montanari hill left Villora in shadow as Bucchia’s father, Paolino, his arm outstretched over the handle of the scythe resting on his shoulder, walked home from the Preselle field. He proceeded at that infinitely patient pace that peasants invented and still observe all over the world and that city people wish they could imitate. It’s the kind of pace that says, I am alive and have worked hard today and the earth has been good to me. I am enjoying the walk that will see me home where I can rest my bones.

  Rounding the bend behind the house, Paolino heard the crunch of gravel and the boy shrieking at the top of his voice. He waited for him in front of Lilì’s house, and the next time Bucchia arrived from his run he grabbed him by the shoulder, spun him around and told him to stop because he was tiring himself out and getting hot and sweaty and everybody knew this was not good for children. Bucchia hung his head, dropped his chin onto his chest and stuck out his bottom lip. Paolino went down to the stable to milk and feed the cows.

  As soon as his father was out of sight, the little boy wiped the disappointment from his face so that it looked as if the sun had just come up in his eyes. He decided he would do the run a few more times, to see if he could go faster. Paolino heard the boy still at it. He finished his work and waited for him.

  While little Bucchia pleaded with him, using the formal form of address with parents, which was common then, ‘Non me lo rompete! Non me lo rompete!’, Paolino chopped the cart up with an axe. No-one would have believed him capable of doing something like that.

  …

  Because of the presence of the nearby swamp and the damp, fetid air, Bucchia, like every other child in the village, had weak lungs and often caught bronchitis, so every year in summer Paolino and Teresa took him to the seaside at Viareggio to breathe the fresh salt air. When he was old, he remembered those visits and spoke of seeing fishermen’s huts made of cane and straw on the viale Margherita. This is the now glamorous Liberty-era beachfront avenue, where smartly dressed men and women stroll arm in arm as music from café orchestras drifts out through the wide open French doors onto the crowded footpaths.

  The Mediterranean breeze had the desired medicinal effect, and Bucchia grew tall and robust and was renamed Bucchione by the villagers.

  …

  God had made Bucchione so strong that whenever he was confronted by a difficulty he either smashed it, lifted it up, carried it away or dug a hole and buried it. For example, if the obstacle was his sadness, first he transferred the sadness into a pile of manure, or a field of hay or corn. Then he worked his way through it, shovelling the manure, loading the hay onto a cart with a pitchfork, or harvesting the corn, filling fifty sacks and carrying them home five at a time.

  He did the same thing if he was concerned about some matter. When he was troubled at the thought of leaving his family alone and defenceless while he went to the war, he decided to plant a new vineyard behind the house. By the time the vines had sprouted small green shoots (and by the time he had fooled the authorities into classifying him as unfit for military service) the fear was gone and his life was normal again.

  In those days, as always, there were a number of sightings of the Angel of Sadness in San Ginese, and the villagers tried all kinds of strategies to avoid it. Some men ran away to America, scores of them scurrying aboard ships in Genoa, hoping to leave the Angel behind, but when they came back they found it waiting for them at their front doors. A very few, like Paolino, ran away a second time, but even that didn’t help. Paolino had been to America twice, and both times had come back poorer than when he left, a feat unequalled in the district and a profound lesson for Bucchione, who never travelled further than Corsica in search of work.

  The villagers who remained behind sought ways of keeping the Angel at bay. They spent longer hours in the fields and stables and at the bar, drank more ponce (the name given to a small glass of strong coffee, with a splash of rum, a dash of sugar and a slice of lemon peel), played more card games or smoked more cigars, looking for consolation in the perfume and pull of the tobacco.

  Whenever he heard the satin whisper of angel wings behind him and felt the air move where there should have been no movement, Bucchione worked harder, developing a capacity for sustained labour that became legendary.

  Given his father Paolino’s spectacular failures in America, Bucchione was never inspired to cross the Atlantic in search of his fortune, but from the age of sixteen, every autumn for twenty years the big man would catch the ferry across to Corsica to work, returning in the spring.

  The story goes that when he was in Corsica, armed with just a shovel and an axe, he excavated a kilometre-long trench, drained a swamp, dug up an entire plain and chopped down a forest. One day, on a farm near Bastia, he was digging in a field when the owner of the farm asked him to stop because there was other work to do. Bucchione, whom God, we know already, had made strong, was born to use a shovel, and the soil was so soft and easy to work that he forgot the instruction and kept digging, turning the clods over and moving down the field. The owner reminded him again, telling him to finish the furrow and then get on with the other job, but Bucchione wanted to see how long it would take him to finish the whole field. Finally the boss pulled out a large pistol and pointed it at him and said, ‘Stop now, monsieur, or I will spread you all over that chestnut tree.’

  In Corsica he also worked in a quarry and on road construction gangs. Large rocks from the quarry were placed at regular intervals by the side of the road and workers like Bucchione made their way along, slowly smashing them into smaller and smaller pieces, ultimately pulverising them, chipping away with hammers of various sizes, including the small rock hammer he later gave to Ugo when Ugo worked on the construction of the tunnel through the mountain between Lucca and Pisa before he left for Australia. This is the mountain that, according to Dante, in Canto XXXIII of the Inferno, prevents the Pisans from seeing Lucca.

  Bucchione was by far the hardest worker in the district and spread more stone chips and pulverised more rock over a road surface than anyone else. He often worked bare-chested, even when it snowed. One year it was so cold that the moisture on his top lip started to freeze and only the warm air he breathed out through his nostrils prevented the formation of light crumbs of ice. He had to keep breathing out to stop his lips solidifying. Bucchione sat half-naked on a rock, on a mountainside in Corsica, chipping away, building the road, stubborn and strong, while the snowflakes glided down from the sky and settled on him.

  In San Ginese, he became a mythical character as the years passed. It was said that once, in a single day, he carried two motherless calves to their wet-nurse in a neighbouring village and then ran home and loaded twenty 54-litre demijohns of wine onto a merchant’s carts as if they were feather-filled pillows. For those who do not know, a demijohn is a large, round-bodied, wicker-covered blown-glass container originating in Damghan
in Persia, called a damigiana in San Ginese and throughout Italy. Then he rescued the team of working cows that his now elderly father Paolino had allowed to slide off the edge of a field into an irrigation ditch, where the poor beasts were stuck in mud up to their shoulders, and when they refused to go any further he hitched himself up to the hay cart and pulled it home himself with the cows meekly trailing behind, looking quite ashamed. At such times he became lost in a rapture that did not leave him until the work was done.

  Bucchione was also renowned for the strength of his convictions, his righteous anger and his hot temper. With one punch he flattened the nose of a trespasser from Centoni whose cow, a large, white, small-horned Tuscan Chianina, was eating his lush green pasture in the Preselle field. He scolded the beast, which was immediately penitent, and made it lead the miserable human offender home. Bucchione later sent Gino to make peace with the man and his family and the cow. The rage in his eyes made men afraid, but after it passed he was like a lamb. He was sympathetic to murderers and other criminals when he believed they were applying their own rough justice in a corrupt society where the privileged and the higher class ruled.

  As a young man he worked as a day labourer on the Maggiorello hill, which in those days was covered with vineyards and olive groves. He later bought a vineyard there and produced some of the best wine in the district. The hillside was positioned so that the morning sun rose behind it from Porcari and received the rays of the afternoon sun, which set on the San Leonardo side. His Australian grandson helped him tie vines. For lunch there was bread and cheese, perhaps a pear each, a bottle of water and a flask of wine.

  By the time they were old, both he and his sister Gemma were toothless. His gums became very bony and hard, and he could chew almost anything. He was still strong and had great stamina when loading a hay cart or moving demijohns of wine about in the cellar. On the way home from cutting hay, with Bucchione in charge of the cow, Gemma, with her pointed nose and sunken mouth, would perch on top of the hay cart wearing her perennial headscarf, looking like a rapacious bird.

  His Tuscan cigar was planted permanently in the corner of his mouth. Occasionally he would light it. About him wafted the acrid smell of stale cow manure, made sweet with the perfume of straw.

  At the small kitchen table that seated the entire family of eight (when the Australians were visiting), Bucchione kept a wine flask and a leg of prosciutto in a basket on the floor beside him, filling glasses and slicing and presenting the salted, preserved pork to others on the end of a pointy knife, all on request. His wine was light red or cloudy white and sweet, friendly to drink, with tiny, light, natural bubbles.

  After the midday meal, which always started at one o’clock and was over by two, he would shuffle off to the village bar wearing a white singlet, a collarless flannel shirt with all its buttons undone, a worn blue jacket draped over his shoulders, blue canvas trousers held up by a piece of string for a belt and an old brown trilby with a greasy sweat stain running around it, his slippers scraping on the gravel path. He never became a bent old man but maintained his upright bearing and its emotional counterpart, a positive disposition, until the very end.

  His Australian grandson helped him shovel corn into sacks, filling them with dusty grains that had been spread over a broken concrete yard to air and dry in the sun. If you are visiting and listen carefully, you can still hear the shovel scraping on the ground.

  The Flour-Eater and the Girl Without a Reflection

  Bucchione married Iose Dal Porto, Derì’s sister, who was from Centoni and had unusual eating habits. By the time she had completed her eighteenth year she had been courted by two young men but had quickly grown tired of both of them. Bucchione was impressed by her reputation for hard work in the fields, a reputation she had developed from an early age. She was smitten with his size and looks, although, as it turned out, this applied only as long as she wasn’t required to make physical contact with him.

  Delicate and ladylike in her youth, despite her large, square, masculine fingers, Iose was accustomed to a comfortable life with indulgent parents. She had her own pretty carriage, which she hitched to a nervous little pony to tour the villages on Sundays after Mass while showing off a new dress. Skittish like her horse, which bolted once and at breakneck speed carried her two kilometres along the ridge of the San Ginese hill, she ran away and went back home three days into her marriage to the large and boisterous Bucchione, who frightened her with his size and strength. Within a week she was back, reluctantly, but never really felt at home in Villora, and always pined for Centoni and the gentleness of her father’s house, for white satin lace and frilly dresses, for her doting mother, for her two sisters and her sweet, melancholy brother.

  Nevertheless, she helped train the young heifers as working cows, and grew beans, onions, carrots and cardoons, which she sold at the market in Lucca. The vegetables were grown in the family’s fields at la Botra, also known as il Bozzo, a pond on a spring near Pierini that had eels in it.

  Early in the morning, when it was still dark, she and her son, little Paolo, would load the bicycle with baskets and bags full of the current season’s crop and head off to the Piazza dell’Anfiteatro. On arriving she would claim a good position near one of the archways leading into the big open space that had once been a Roman amphitheatre. Over hundreds of years, houses had been built up against the amphitheatre’s outer walls, and as it had fallen into decay and eventually been demolished, the houses around its perimeter remained, leaving empty the oval shape it had once occupied, and forming a communal area perfectly suited for a market. Iose would spread out a large canvas sheet and arrange the produce in small, neat piles, with the most attractive samples on top. She was an expert haggler, a skill she inherited from her father, the farm broker.

  Later, as the agricultural economy began to die, she took in knitting like her sister Alfonsina, and they became outworkers for one of those new factories they were building, as did many other women in the village. She too kept the sadness at bay by working hard. No other woman made as many pieces of knitwear – jumper sleeves, fronts and backs – in a day as she did.

  The Flour-Eater had two major defects.

  The first flaw was that she never ate a plate of spaghetti or polenta, or a vegetable or a piece of meat in her life, and never touched sweets. She lived on a diet of cheese and a mixture made of milk and wheat flour, to which she would add a few olives, which also found their way into her coffee. While the rest of the family was at the table feasting on Gemma’s renowned rabbit stew, she would be at the stove, a few feet away, stirring the milk and adding bread and flour to thicken it. Because she did not enjoy food, she was unable to cook. The thought of preparing a meal that she could not bear to eat brought her to despair, and if you put her in the kitchen she would panic.

  The second imperfection was brought by the Angel of Sadness. It had visited her in Centoni one night soon after she was born. It followed her around for the rest of her life, and she struggled to prevent it from overwhelming her. By throwing herself into her work she barely managed to keep it at bay. Although she did not inherit any of her father’s estate, Giuseppe dei Centoni did bequeath to her his powerful variations of humour. At times of powerful emotion – for example, after giving birth to her first child, Morena, who later emigrated to Australia – she became a sad rag, lost all desire to live and remained in bed for weeks. She gradually resumed her knitting work to help support the family, but remained forever sadder than she was previously. The birth of her second child, Paolo, brought on a recurrence of the earlier condition. Her life was a prolonged sadness for her and for all those around her.

  …

  Just as Giuseppe Giovannoni was known as Bucchione, so was his sister Gemma Giovannoni known as Galgani.

  The real Saint Gemma Galgani was from Lucca, which was just down the road from San Ginese, and because Gemma Giovannoni was a hard-working, patient and selfless creature, everyone associated her with the saint and called her Galgan
i. All her life she never travelled further than the few kilometres to Lucca, and was the happiest person anyone who knew her had ever met. She was not an overly devout woman, simply observing the major religious services. Gemma understood there was an Australia because she knew there was an America that half the village had been to. She wondered if Australians had chickens and electricity.

  Gemma appeared to be perfectly content with her life, and if you asked her the secret to her happiness, she would say it was that she did not have a reflection. At this, most people would smile inside their hearts and look at her with sympathy and condescension.

  When she first looked in the mirror as a young girl her reflection appeared to her very faint, although to her mother and anyone else standing beside her the reflection was perfectly normal. As she grew older, her reflection became even fainter until, on her sixteenth birthday, it disappeared. She had not seen herself since then, although everyone else could see her, quite clearly. As time passed, however, the rest of the village also started to believe she had no reflection, and after a time hardly anyone would test the belief by standing beside her in front of the mirror. The word spread and soon those who did see a reflection were suspected of being sinners and of having blackened souls. And so her sainthood grew.

  Gemma washed the family’s clothes and linen at the communal laundry in the stream that flowed past Vitale’s spring. She cooked meals, gathered edible weeds from the fields and paths, raised and slaughtered chickens and rabbits, sowed and planted and picked corn and other vegetables, loaded hay carts, milked and fed the cows. She ran the household, taking charge of all the domestic chores, teaching Morena to cook, raising her and Paolo as if they were her own children.

  She had had one half-hearted suitor in her youth, but decided men were too much trouble and quickly lost what little interest she had. When it turned out that Iose, the woman her brother had married, was an ineffective wife and mother, Gemma assumed the relevant responsibilities. She became the wise spinster sister, who cared for the elderly parents and the young children and was generally in command of the domestic aspects of the household. She discussed important family matters with Bucchione, who always consulted her.