The Fireflies of Autumn

by Moreno Giovannoni

  With Villora in the hollow between them, the German artillery at Castello fired at the American outpost on top of the Montanari hill. The Americans fired right back. The shells screamed overhead from one side to the other, backwards and forwards. It was as if the missile that was sent across was being promptly returned by the enemy. There was even a certain monotony about it, so that the occasional misdirected stray, with its unique whistling sound, was a welcome relief.

  Whenever a bomb fell short, it would frighten everyone and they would scramble into the cave under Lilì’s house. Bucchione, still smarting from the embarrassment of his inaccurate prediction about the progress of the war, dragged large branches and rolled massive rocks across the entrance until they all felt safe in the dark in the hole under the hill. It was the least he could do.

  Apart from working in the fields and stables, there wasn’t much for the people in the village to do except tell one another stories, and of course some storytellers were better than others. Bulletta was one of the best.

  (It is well known in San Ginese that Bulletta was given that name when, as a boy, he swallowed a nail. Bulletta is the local word for nail, replacing the standard Italian word, which is chiodo. After he swallowed the nail his mother sat him on a chamber-pot and, from time to time, to encourage him to excrete it, cried out: ‘Caca la bulletta! Caca la bulletta!’ The entire village heard her cries and the little boy from that moment on was known as Bulletta.)

  So, on the day Sirio was blown apart, once the large crowd had settled into the cave, Treccia, who was squatting as usual on his haunches, chewing a cigar and spitting in the dirt between his feet, called out, ‘Ehi, Bullé, tell us the story of the nails!’

  And Bulletta did.

  ‘Mengale, also known as Pasquin Della Pompa, was a funny little man from Centoni. He had two small, fat, pretty daughters and a son called Elio. You remember Mengale, don’t you? He was so short he was unable to ride a bicycle because his feet couldn’t reach the pedals. Anyway, he was tired of having to buy nails from the blacksmith. He thought it was ridiculous to pay someone for such a small thing as a nail when with a little diligence you could grow your own.

  ‘And so he decided to grow his own.

  ‘He dug a patch in a part of his vegetable garden half obscured by a large poplar, so that no-one would see it. He carefully turned his best manure into the soil, and planted the nails with the sharp end facing the sky. That’s how you plant nails, he thought, the pointy end towards Heaven, up where they want to grow, pointing to God, who might look down and smile on them. Then he watered them and waited. He was certain each nail seed would produce a bush laden with bunches of fully formed nails, which he might even sell to the blacksmith in large quantities. He would even become the blacksmith’s supplier and perhaps export them to America, where there was a lot of construction of buildings and railroads, or so he had heard.

  ‘Every day he checked the crop for worms, which, as you know, are a big problem in San Ginese, but the nails were unaffected. Meanwhile, his onion crop, just two metres away, was being destroyed by tiny nematodes that not even the parish priest’s blessing of the onions had been able to get rid of.

  ‘He checked his crop every day, pretending he was visiting his devastated onion field and his carrots, when actually he was glancing out of the corner of his eye at the rows and rows of nails, which seemed to be making slow progress, if they were making any at all. He poured more liquid manure on the crop, and spread more straw and cow shit between the seedlings.

  ‘One day a few weeks after the planting, he walked through the bed of nails to see whether they were ready to harvest and, accidentally standing on a few of them, was shocked to find how hard and sharp they were under the soles of his feet. That’s when the yelps started. The entire village, from Clementina’s down to Bucchione’s, heard him cursing and screaming from the pain. It seemed he would go on forever. When the lightning bolts in his feet stopped, he decided he would keep to himself the discovery that the nails now were well and truly ready to harvest, although not in the form of bunches on bushes as he had expected.

  ‘He quickly brought in his crop, filling an entire basket, which he hid in a corner of his stable. Mengale grew several more crops and soon found that nails would grow at any time of the year, needed very little water or fertiliser, and were unaffected by moulds, worms or insects. They also stored very well, and were not troubled by plagues of mice, which seemed to ignore them.

  ‘However, he was puzzled. No matter how abundantly he watered the crop, no matter how carefully he spread his best manure, the rich golden-brown liquid perugino and the rotten compost from the heap outside his stable, the harvest was always modest. After growing three crops in succession and carefully studying the size of each harvest, he decided that nails, while full of promise as a cash crop, were not profitable.

  ‘Unlike most other harvests, whose yield either exceeded or did not meet expectations, the harvest of nails was always the same.

  ‘You could never reap more than you planted!’

  Out of the dark, from the depths of the makeshift bomb shelter, came cries of ‘Poor Mengale!’ and ‘What an idiot!’

  ‘It’s true! It’s true!’ said someone else.

  ‘I can vouch for it. It’s all true. It really happened!’ replied another.

  ‘I saw him and I heard him suffer the tortures of hell.’

  ‘And he thought none of us knew!’

  ‘Poor short little Mengale!’

  As everyone fell about laughing hysterically at the story of Mengale, plump-buttocked Bruna lit a candle and kept an eye on Beo, with his wandering hands. In the silence that followed the general hilarity, the flickering light caught and held the attention of the Sanginesini. They all looked around at one another’s distorted facial features and wondered whether their friends had become monsters. Then they came to their senses and realised that it was about time they went home, because the bombing had stopped.

  …

  The other thing that happened when the war came was that the population of San Ginese tripled overnight. The retreating German army scattered across the breadth of the Italian peninsula and formed six columns, one of which travelled along the statale road that ran past the bottom of the Speranza hill and through San Leonardo, as Bucchione had predicted. But because they had dispersed to avoid casualties from the aerial bombardments, thousands of Germans abandoned the main roads and wandered around the countryside.

  The Germans had already taken away the men who were healthy and strong to work in their factories, and were now seizing farm produce and livestock. As well as the cows and the pigs, they took horses. The war was clearly not going well if they needed horses to carry their great war machine. Or perhaps they just ate them.

  After two German soldiers were killed by Italian partigiani in nearby Padule di Fucecchio, the Germans had massacred all the people in the town, most of them women and children. News of this evil act quickly circulated through the district and reached San Ginese, where people were so terrified that they bowed their heads and looked at their feet and shuffled about pretending they’d heard nothing.

  Then, when the Americans broke through the enemy line along the Arno River, the German army, including the unit from Padule di Fucecchio, withdrew into the Garfagnana hills, where it formed what came to be known as the Gothic Line. As the Germans ran away, thousands of them passed through San Ginese.

  It was during this retreat that a German Unteroffizier one afternoon strolled through the gap between Vitale’s stable and Edda’s house and into the Mattei Courtyard. He stood in the middle of the yard and called out: ‘Achtung! Achtung! Italiani contadini!’

  First he looked inside the stable and then he kicked open the kitchen door, splintering the jamb and scattering pieces of the latch across the mottled stone floor.

  Irma stepped timidly out into the late afternoon sunlight, squinting behind her thick spectacles and wiping her hands on her apron. She was confronted b
y a man in a field-grey uniform and ankle-high shoes with gaiters (leather was scarce and they had run out of boots).

  The man was shouting at her in broken Italian: ‘Tu portare vacca piazza chiesa domani ore sette! You to take cow church square tomorrow seven o’clock morning!’

  And then he named the town where the massacre had taken place, to concentrate her mind in case she was wondering whether to comply.

  He extracted a pencil from his top pocket, scribbled on a scrap of paper, threw it at Irma’s feet and wrote something in a notebook. ‘Capito, tu porca contadina? Understand, you peasant sow?’

  Irma nodded, blindly, behind her large round lenses, staring sideways at the ground and the piece of paper, avoiding eye contact with the loud, angry man who frightened her.

  Her son Bruno, known as Succhio, also known as the Sucker of the Flat Thumb, was hiding behind the woodpile and ready to leap on the soldier with an axe when Vitale slapped a big calloused hand over his son’s mouth and glared at him with wide eyes and lips drawn tautly over toothless gums, frightening the life out of him. Sucker’s nostrils flared and he glared back but settled down.

  They heard the German’s shoes turn in the gravel and the fading crunch crunch crunch. He was gone. Both men came out.

  ‘That cow is not going to the church tomorrow, ma.’

  ‘If I don’t take it to them, they’ll come for it and then there’ll be trouble for us. He wrote it all down – see, number eighty-seven. That’s the cow and the place, our stable.’

  Sucker was headstrong and volatile. To avoid military service and fighting on the German side under the fascists he had joined the military police. Even then, at the first opportunity he had jumped off the back of a truck carrying new recruits to their training camp and run away to hide in the hills.

  …

  The morning after the German’s visit, Sucker refused to let his mother take the cow to the muster. He had decided on a course of action and he persuaded Vitale, the man who’d been to California and worked with Percheron horses, and his mother, who had introduced the blood of tall men to the family, to help him. Irma sent young Ugo up to the church to fetch the priest for a funeral to be held later that day.

  Sitting at a table in the church square, next to the memorial to the fallen of the Great War, the German drew a line through the items in his inventory as each was delivered: cows, pigs, sacks of corn and flour, wheels of cheese and demijohns of wine, into which the villagers had poured just enough vinegar to make the wine turn after a few days.

  When he’d finished, there remained just one item without a line through it. He remembered number eighty-seven: the brown cow with the spotted udder owned by the big half-blind woman with the broken veins on her red cheeks from drinking too much wine. Unteroffizier Hermann Gebauer pushed his chair back from the table in the gravel of the piazza, adjusted the holster of his Luger and strode off down the hill, followed at a safe distance by Don Mori and Little Ugo. Lida heard someone crashing through the scrub, saw the German walk past and sounded the alarm.

  Sucker, who had been waiting all morning, leaned against the stable door next to the kitchen. He was starting to think the German had forgotten about their cow, and was almost annoyed about missing out on a fight, but when he heard Lida’s voice calling out ‘Pasquale! Pasquale!’ he knew the enemy was on his way. If she had called out ‘Pasquale, Giovanni!’ he would have known there was more than one.

  As Hermann tramped purposefully towards the yard, his killer heard him coming and stepped out from behind the corner of the stable. Sucker had already started swinging, so that as he moved out into the open the weapon was halfway through its trajectory. The shovel he used to pile manure and straw onto the compost heap struck his victim squarely on the forehead, knocking him out. Sucker cried, ‘Pezzo di merda!’ The father leapt out from behind the son, the second wave of the planned attack, and with one thrust of the pitchfork skewered the unconscious German where he lay in the dirt, ruining his uniform and inflicting ugly chest wounds. The tines of the fork, buried deep in the chest and twisted savagely, lacerated Hermann’s heart and tore apart his lungs. A large jet of blood gushed from a severed artery, collected underneath his jacket and seeped into the courtyard.

  The two stripped the uniform from the body while Irma removed the square wooden cover from the cesspit. Don Mori, who had arrived in time to see the soldier felled, read the burial rite as Sucker and Vitale slid the naked body into the slightly acrid, sweet-smelling brown liquid. Sucker poured a sack of lime on the corpse to help it on its way home to the god of dead Nazis and the butchers of civilians.

  Irma cut the uniform – jacket, shirt, breeches, singlet and underpants – into a thousand small pieces and fed them to the blazing fire in the kitchen under the soot-coated soup cauldron. While Vitale removed all signs of blood from the yard, Sucker helped his mother with the shoes, sawing them in two and then four. They worked quietly and contentedly. The fire burnt brighter for an hour or two, and by the time they finished, the black cabbage soup was ready.

  …

  Something else happened the day Sirio lost his legs and his member and then died. The same thing that happened every time the Americans and the Germans threw bombs across the sky at each other.

  As the artillery shells shrieked overhead, in the dark recesses of the cave under Lilì’s place, where half the village hid, you could hear murmuring and occasionally a squeal of delight or a moan, followed by barely audible gasps and rapid, accelerating intakes of breath.

  Some women preferred to squat while others lay flat on their backs, with their legs apart as if they were giving birth. It seemed to everyone quite fitting that women should conceive while adopting the same posture in which they delivered, although there was no conceiving here, except in circumstances where one or both parties lost control of their wits.

  Michelino’s son Alfredo one day went too far and tried to substitute his proper part for the usual middle finger and Bruna slapped him on the side of the head, landing an enormous blow to the temple that temporarily rendered him unconscious. They delivered him to his mother with his member hanging out and still erect. The poor woman cried out to God, begging forgiveness for her reprobate son, and fainted on the floor beside him.

  So, whenever the bombing started and the general alert went out, the lonely war wives in particular made sure they were first into the cave to occupy the space at the back. They took up their positions, naked under their skirts, open to most kinds of propositions in the dark. The aroma of warm water and corn meal wafted about the cave, and when the others noticed it they knew what was going on and became quiet and respectful, as if they were all participating in some kind of sacred rite. While at one end of the cave the members of the audience touched index fingers to closed lips and lifted their eyebrows, at the other end, the darker end, skirts were raised and rustled. Leather soles scraped on loose pebbles as the squatting women tried to keep their balance and give the boys room to manoeuvre. It was only the boys who took part, because the wives kept a close watch on their husbands, usually by holding on tight to their belts so they couldn’t wander away.

  After each bombardment, the floor of the cave was marked with small round patches of moisture and the whole place smelled like a steaming pot of fresh polenta.

  And another thing that happened that day inside the cave, as the boys and the women laboured away, was that an idea started to grow inside Bucchione’s head, a bright little diamond in his brain. He was starting to recover from the humiliation of his failed prediction.

  He wasn’t going to make any pronouncements this time, though. He would just talk to himself until he’d worked out what to do. The villagers could please themselves.

  ‘Sirio has been badly hurt. He’ll soon be dead. His poor mother and father and brother have wrapped his bleeding stumps in bed linen and are pouring wine down his throat to try to replace his blood.’

  Sometimes he said the words out loud, forgetting that he was talking to
himself. This time, Beo, who was always nearby, heard him.

  ‘The war is becoming serious. We’re caught in the crossfire between two fronts, the Germans at Castello and the Americans on the Montanari hill. We need to get behind one of the fronts and stay there, until both armies have moved on. Consider the American front. There’s nowhere to go behind the American front, just the flat plain of Lucca. If I take my family out of here, it’s best if we go behind the German lines, up into the hills of Compito, to the old mill. Listen to me’ – he addressed himself directly now, as if to convince himself – ‘I have pretended to be sick so I could avoid military service for this bastard regime and not be sent to the Russian front. I wanted to look after my family. I am not going to have them die in this shithole from a stray American bomb. Do you hear me?’

  For now that was as far as Bucchione’s thinking went, because the armies had finished shooting at each other for the day and suddenly there was a silence so vast and thick it filled all the world’s empty space. If you sat still and held your breath for a moment, you could hear it. The only earthly sound came from the back of the cave, where Bruna was howling and banging the ground with her fists, raising a cloud of dust that drifted towards the entrance and made the others cough as they sat huddled together. She was always the noisiest, and as usual sounded either ecstatic or upset about something, but nobody had the courage to walk over to see if she was alright. She cried out one last time with all the strength she could muster from her lungs and her vocal chords, let out an enormous groan and either died or immediately fell asleep. You could hear the silence of the absent bombs again.

  Beo crept out through a narrow gap between the rocks covering the entrance and climbed up alongside the house to the Beàno courtyard.

  Soon they heard him calling the all-clear. ‘Venite gente! Qui han finito! Come out! They’ve finished out here!’