The Fireflies of Autumn

by Moreno Giovannoni

  Gemma had a favourite saying that she repeated at every opportunity to anyone who complained about the state of their life: Bisogna mangiare tre sacca di polvere prima di morire (by the time you die you will have eaten three sacks of dust). It was clear this meant that life is long and hard, and if you think you have problems now, be prepared to put up with a lot more.

  Gemma died of pneumonia in the new hospital in Lucca, the first of the family not to die at home, in her own bed. The vision of those who saw her last is of a thin, haggard woman with tubes protruding from her nose and mouth far away on the other side of a window in a sterile isolation ward. She had suffered all her life from ipertiroidismo, which kept her extremely thin, even skeletal. In fact, this was probably why men did not look at her. This, and the fact that she had a strong personality.

  Buona Fortuna!

  Ugo’s father and grandfather and half the village had been to America. They hated San Ginese for the poverty and the mud and the cow shit and the pig shit. The Sanginesini took to going to America with such fervour that it was as though they had been waiting for her to rise up on the other side of the ocean ever since God had made His promise to the chosen.

  It was as if the Lord had said, ‘I have seen the misery of my people in San Ginese. I have heard them crying out and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come to rescue them and show them the road to a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey. So now, go. Go to America. Bring yourselves out of misery.’

  …

  When he’s a little boy he listens to them talking about America, those who have been and come back, and he starts to dream. He hears the words from the Bible about the milk and the honey and the streets paved with gold.

  The shipping agents visit the villages and give away postcards depicting giant chickens, monstrous carrots, colossal cattle and silver coins growing on trees, and he sees these images in the tavern as the men pass them around. This is what he will have in America. Everything there is abundant.

  He’s a dreamer and reads books by the light emanating from his lumino, a beautiful word for a round tin lid filled with olive oil, in which rests a strip of linen for a wick, burning its small flickering flame on a saucer on the chair beside his bed in his nook under the stairs.

  …

  Eight men sit around a table in the tavern, sucking their cigars and drinking their sweet coffee and rum with a sliver of lemon peel. While four of them watch, another four play, slamming their cards down with a shout, shooting gobs of phlegm into a strategically placed spittoon and telling stories about their time in America.

  One of the old men curses the ship that brought him back to the pile of mud and shit that is the village in Tuscany called San Ginese. Oh, that it had sunk, that curséd vessel that brought me back to this pile of mud and shit!

  The old man speaks of the horrible storms they brave as they sail from Genoa, out of the Mediterranean Sea, through the Pillars of Hercules at Gibraltar, and across what is really just a short distance to New York. The waves are so high and the troughs so deep and the ship leans so hard that you can wash your hands in the ocean as it rises before you like a sudden mountain.

  There is work in America, as much as you want, thick wads of green banknotes at the end of the working week, freedom to move on, if you don’t like the boss, and always another job to go to.

  …

  And they would go to America and become lost over there, and when they returned to San Ginese they would still be lost, as if they could not find the place they had left but kept looking for it, anywhere, somewhere, but it was always elsewhere – on top of a hill, along the walking paths between the villages, in a field, inside a stable or a pig-sty, inside a woman, a wife, a neighbour’s wife. You could see the men wandering about in the courtyards and between the houses, aimlessly at first, and then slowly they would give the appearance of settling into their lives again, but remained as sad as trees that have had half their roots hacked off. Such trees can barely feed and water themselves and are in danger of toppling over in the gentlest breeze.

  At night, after their card game, they shuffled stiffly out into the mud and went home. As they slumbered restlessly in their beds, dreaming of the America they had lost, their laments could be heard above the snoring of the cows and rabbits, the heavy breathing of the chickens and the snorting of the pigs (who never slept, for fear of the butcher’s skewer). The wives of the returned men hardly slept at all.

  With their hearts set on regret, the men tossed and turned and woke their wives, who by morning were tired and sad and pitied by the women whose husbands had never left and slept the deep sleep of the innocent.

  The road to America is hard.

  Yes, they went to America and yes, they made money, if they were lucky, but their hearts broke. They caught a disease, a deep sadness that afflicted soldiers fighting away from home, soldiers who were otherwise fit, a homesickness that killed them, whether they stayed or returned home.

  …

  Ugo married and his first son was born and he, the wife and the child all lived in his father’s house with his father, mother, two brothers, one sister-in-law and one nephew. His young wife wasn’t happy, and threw a broomstick at her mother-in-law and walked out with the baby to her own parents’ house, one hundred metres away.

  Ugo’s older brother had taken the spare cow and the fields that their father had bought with American money. There were not enough cows and fields left to support Ugo’s family.

  So there he was, restless and empty and bored, living days without routine, his life frittered away, almost gone. The lumino burned and spluttered and flickered gently in a tin lid filled with olive oil.

  Then, because the Americans had closed their doors, he wrote to the Canadians and the Australians. The Australians wrote back immediately. There was scarcity in Australia, there was a famine; the country hungered for people and demanded to be fed.

  So he packed a few things into one famous suitcase.

  …

  On the day Ugo left San Ginese it snowed, and the road up near Clementina’s house had iced over. It hardly ever snowed in San Ginese, so this was a day he never forgot. During the night the snow had covered the whole world, including the roof of the pink house at Gan-Gan, on the flank of the hill on the right, which had been bombed during the war. The snow had formed small heaps on the steps in front of Clementina’s, where Bucchione started his run down into Beàno in the little wooden cart that his father Paolino then chopped up with an axe.

  He paid Giuseppe Dal Porto to drive him to the train in Lucca, and Bucchione and Sucker went with him.

  The road out of San Ginese up to the crossroads winds twice, sharply, and is very steep. Albo the milkman had been doing the milk-collection round with his donkey, which had five large churns strapped to its sides and was now climbing towards the top of the Speranza hill.

  Giuseppe Dal Porto blew the horn as the car approached. The donkey was struggling to maintain its footing on the frozen bitumen and kept falling onto its backside, performing a kind of frenetic four-hoofed dance.

  ‘Ugo, buona fortuna,’ Albo called out, waving, as the car crawled past.

  ‘Buona fortuna!’

  THE ENCHANTED GLADE AND THE BABBLING BROOK

  The Fireflies of Autumn

  When the war came to San Ginese, the people had been expecting it for many years, although it still took everyone by surprise.

  It started like this.

  In the days when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Unione delle Repubbliche Socialiste Sovietiche, or URSS, was the hope of the oppressed peoples of the world, and Benito Mussolini’s fascist government signed the Lateran treaties with the Catholic Church (this was in 1929), Bucchione had not yet married Iose the Flour-Eater, and he lived in casa vecchia with Paolino and Teresa (his mother and father), and his sisters, Gemma and Orsolina. Alongside the staircase leading from the hallway to the bedrooms on the first floor, there was a lighter patch of
plaster that didn’t match the rest of the wall.

  In San Ginese a squad of fascists wearing black shirts was doing the rounds of the villages looking for evidence of hostility to the regime. Bucchione, who was an unashamed communist, hated the fascists and hated the church, and the fact that they had now signed an agreement recognising and supporting each other in Rome doubled the hatred he felt.

  Being no patriot, he saw the coming war as a class struggle. Later he was unimpressed with jokes about the cowardice of Italian soldiers, given that for him so-called cowardice was a means of self-preservation for the good of your family. Italy had been ravaged by many invaders over the centuries, and to him Mussolini was just another invader.

  He had drawn a hammer and sickle on the wall alongside the staircase at the back of the front room, an act of defiance and a manifestation of his political allegiance, but now the camicie nere, the black shirts, were going around banging on doors and they were bound to see it and there would be trouble.

  Four of them came one night, calling at every house in Villora. When you opened the door they strode in as if they owned the place, sounding friendly in a bold and jovial kind of way, until they detected something they didn’t like, either in the tone of your voice or the attitude of your body. Once they had decided you were hostile to the government, they punished you by pouring castor oil through a funnel down your throat, and, if you were unlucky, gave you a few blows around the ribs with a stick. Muffled cries, the scraping of chairs dragged along stone floors and thumping, banging, knocking noises travelled through the walls of all the houses in the village and down into the foundations made of human bones, because, as you know, Villora was built on top of the cemetery of a medieval monastery.

  When she heard from Nedo at the bar that they were coming, Gemma ran to get the lime they used to dust the vines and mixed it with water to make a paste, which she spread with her hands over the communist symbol on the wall, to cover it up before the bastards knocked on the door. That part of the wall would forever be discoloured, but that night in the dark little house the fascists would not notice. While she was seeing to this, Gemma grumbled about men and how they needlessly complicated everybody’s lives with politics and war and other fancy ideas. Sometimes she thought the women and children of San Ginese would be better off without them.

  Bucchione opened the door and invited them in. One of them was Michelino, the son of the butcher and an old family friend, and Bucchione greeted him with a hug and a slap on the back. Creusa’s father was there too, who had been a foundling, and Venanzio, Drea’s father. Bucchione didn’t know the other man.

  He offered them all a glass of wine, and pulled a fresh ham off the hook and started slicing while Gemma fetched bread. He said nice things about il Duce, including how good it was that the swamp had been drained and the malaria eliminated, and pretty soon the visitors’ bellies were full and they were all in a jovial mood, feeling welcome after receiving cool receptions in every other house.

  As Gemma hurried back into the front room carrying the bread basket, head bowed inside her headscarf, she glanced sideways at her brother, who, unseen by the uninvited guests, winked.

  This was the story that, as an old man, Bucchione told his young Australian grandson. Bucchione was no fool. He knew it wasn’t important to win small victories when there was a greater battle to be fought and won, the battle for your life and for the wellbeing of your family. The thugs would go away and leave you alone if you filled their bellies and made the right noises. The time would come when the people would take care of the men in black shirts. But first there would have to be a war.

  …

  When the war came to San Ginese, it was autumn and the days were shorter, and in the mornings the mist rose out of the dry swamp and floated away into the sky. In the evenings it rolled down from the hills and crawled into the empty spaces between the trees, lay gently on the fields, rolled over onto its back, turning to one side and then the other, holding the entire plain in its ghostly embrace until the world to the east, this side of Porcari, was a dirty grey translucent smudge and the only sign of hope was the sickly pale-yellow halo of the electric light at the Baracca tavern, where the villagers from nearby Picchio, who were renowned layabouts, ate fried eels, played briscola, drank wine all night and slept all day while their crops rotted in abandoned fields and their animals starved in the stables.

  In Villora the smoke from the poplar logs burning in the fireplaces refused to rise above the rooftops. It drifted around the houses, settling somewhere between your nose and your eyes so that it blinded you; it smarted inside your nostrils and made you weep and sneeze. The tall men of the village looked down along the blanket of smoke hovering below their chins and saw furry rodents gliding past in a ghostly silver sea, illuminated by the single streetlight on the corner in front of Gino’s house. Sometimes a hat or a woman’s thick locks sailed into view; other times it was a procession of lustrous pates and wisps of hair slicked wetly onto balding craniums.

  With the cooling of the season the women prepared thick vegetable soups, throwing in the few remaining pieces of salted pork from last year’s pig that were stored in large terracotta jars. In December the new pig would be killed, but for now they made do with the remnants of the old one. The tang of black cabbage, onions, beans and pork filled Beàno, the Winds, Canaponi, the Houses Above, the Mattei Courtyard and Il Sasso.

  …

  When the war came to San Ginese, all one hundred and twenty inhabitants of Villora were shocked, including Bucchione. For weeks he had swaggered about, proclaiming that the armies would not come close to the village, which, according to him, was just a pile of manure near the bottom of the San Ginese hill.

  ‘Everyone knows that!’ he roared. ‘Although we’re fortunate to be the first village to receive the morning sun, all this means is that by evening we stink more than the others. In summer the sun brings our cesspits to boiling point and bakes our compost heaps of cow manure and straw. Even now, in autumn, we can still smell every stone in the village impregnated with the shit of a thousand summers. The Germans and the Americans know this and will go out of their way to avoid us. The reek of excrement will be Villora’s salvation!’

  The shit of a thousand summers! The reek of excrement! People looked at one another wide-eyed, shook their heads and marvelled at his poetic gift.

  Bucchione made this announcement one afternoon, standing on the low wall in front of Lilì’s place, where a small group had gathered to enjoy the breeze blowing up from Porcari. As he spoke he raised his right arm, like Vladimir Lenin in the famous statue.

  ‘Which army would bother coming through here?’ he continued. ‘They will go right past us, down the main road on the San Leonardo side.’

  Toothless Beo – whose nickname meant ‘worm’, whose real name was Vincenzo Giovannoni, and who had a malfunctioning thyroid gland that made him look like a skinny white maggot – took advantage of the spell that Bucchione was casting over his small audience to plant his hand between Bruna’s cold buttocks and give the left one a good squeeze. Bruna, pretending to adjust the scarf on her head, let Beo feel the back of her hand across his face, and Bucchione, noticing a small commotion at the back of the group, hesitated a moment but ploughed on.

  ‘We only need to look out for stray mortars and artillery shells. The Wehrmacht, that great German war machine, will not come anywhere near us, and as for the American Fifth, well, why would they bother with this pile of shit?’

  He flung open his arms as if to embrace the mountain of manure that was the courtyard and its houses, inviting the villagers to see for themselves what a pile of shit everything was. Lilì felt reassured. Bucchione made sense. The best way out of trouble was not to get into it in the first place, and if the armies avoided San Ginese, well, the villagers had nothing to fear. She nodded and emitted a supportive sound, which the others heard and took up, nodding and grunting at one another until in the end even Bucchione thought they were overdoing
it, although he didn’t know how to make them stop.

  …

  Within a week of Bucchione’s speech, two stray bombs hit the village. The armies had installed themselves in the surrounding hills and started shooting at one another.

  One night Nello the idiot, who had a vivid imagination, ran around knocking on doors announcing that the fireflies were back. ‘Come, come, come and look! Fireflies, fireflies – the fireflies have returned! Fireflies, fireflies!’

  Fireflies belonged to the summer, when they were born, lived a short life and died. It was rare to find fireflies flitting about in autumn. Yet there they were, the pretty little bugs, on the Montanari hill where the Americans had set up their battery. Tiny lights dancing in the distance accompanied by the pop pop pop of exploding shells and the occasional burst of machine-gun fire.

  One shell blew away two-thirds of the pretty pink villa at Gan-Gan, where thirty years later the Milanese would bring their weekend whores, and the Dead Boy and his Australian friend would drink whisky and brandy dregs and watch the sun rise over Porcari. The second bomb flattened the house built by Gimi, who would become the father of the Dead Boy. Sirio, Norato’s brother, who was just eighteen years old, was sauntering past and lost both his legs and his private parts and died shortly after, which everyone said was a blessing.

  The explosion that killed Sirio sent half the village running to the bomb shelter. The rest hid in wine cellars and haystacks, where the only danger was a direct hit, and no-one in Villora was ever that unlucky (except Sirio, of course).