The Fireflies of Autumn

by Moreno Giovannoni

  The villagers couldn’t wait to see the Americans. Even though the British were part of the invasion force, the people loved the Americans. Almost all of San Ginese loved the Americans: many of their countrymen had emigrated to America, and the Sanginesini had never understood why they should fight the Americans in a war. As American convoys drove through the villages of Italy, trucks and jeeps carrying happy soldiers who gave sweets and chocolate to children, the people shouted: ‘Gli americani! Gli americani!’

  …

  The eighth consequence of the war was that the young people of the village organised chicken feasts, to which whoever could spare one would bring a roast chicken. They would gather a small orchestra, with Zena on accordion or mandolin, Giorgione, Pittone and Padreterno on accordion, and Baby (pronounced bebi), a name brought back from California, on clarinet. Sometimes there was a guitarist. It was in Vitale’s large front room that they all drank and danced and then ate the chickens. Afterwards there were almond cakes that had been baked especially for the occasion.

  In the last year of the war, well after the Germans had run away and settled down along a defensive front in the Garfagnana hills, American soldiers on leave from the base at Livorno, on the coast, would come to the chicken feasts to enjoy the company and the other benefits of the young women, who pleaded to be kidnapped and taken to America. When they got to know them, the young women found the Americans were not always happy, friendly and generous. For these later chicken feasts, a fee would be charged.

  …

  The ninth consequence of the war was that everyone became afraid of everything, whether it was when the Americans were bombing Livorno and their squadrons flew over the village, or after the armistice, when the Germans were the enemy and the Luftwaffe took its turn. They became afraid and hid.

  The men who had avoided military service or who had come home when the Italian forces collapsed, men like Gino and Danny, hid from the Germans in the long grass, with the cows. They were reluctant to go out onto the roads and into their fields with their carts and working animals. They had heard stories that in nearby towns the German war planes fired machine-guns at slow-moving carts laden with hay, while small patrols wandering about the countryside used flamethrowers to set fire to clumps of reeds and tangled agagi bushes where men might be hiding. The Sanginesini heard rumours they also burned carts with the cows still attached. The sound of the aeroplanes overhead made you run to the cesspit.

  At night a few people gathered around the radio in Nedo’s bar to hear reports on the progress of the war, and they feared the worst. Meanwhile, the word spread quickly if a brother or father away at the war had stopped writing, or his letters were no longer arriving, or he had disappeared into the fog on a distant battlefield. Everyone feared the sudden absence of news.

  Enzo, who was Vitale’s nephew, and Ugo rode their bicycles to the station in Lucca, where Enzo caught the train to Bolzano, near the Austrian border, to report for duty at the barracks there. Ugo brought his riderless bike back to the village. On the day Enzo arrived in Bolzano, the armistice had just been signed and the Germans were now the enemy, so they took him as he got off the train and he was sent to a labour camp, where he later died. A lieutenant-ranked chaplain at the labour camp wrote to give Enzo’s mother the news. Her fear was replaced by the kind of grief that filled every room in her house. After the war the same chaplain, who had made Enzo a solemn promise before he died, delivered his personal effects to his mother. Enzo had never worn his uniform.

  Because of the fear, villagers made plans. In Vitale’s vegetable garden below the ancient fig tree was a large hole in the ground where men hid, if there was time to hide, when a German patrol was going through the village looking for slave labour to send to the fatherland.

  In the vegetable garden Vitale had also buried a large jar full of money, which would be useful if members of the family were taken or separated.

  ‘Those of us who survive can come back here and get the money,’ he told his children. ‘If something happens and we can get away, your mother and I will walk to Compito through Padule and then turn right to reach Centoni before continuing on our way into the hills. We should all walk separately so that if we are ambushed, not all of us will die.’

  Fear meant you lied to save your life so you could help your family. In the year Ugo came of age, at the medical examination for his military service, which required a battery of tests, he was fortunately diagnosed with a heart murmur by the doctor who was Vitale’s friend. The military doctor classified him as unfit for military service. In his long life Ugo only mentioned this cardiac defect once or twice, as he was embarrassed by the lie the doctor had told and at his father’s complicity in it, although generally speaking there was no dishonour in wishing to avoid being killed in a war.

  Fear meant that Danny, who was Gino’s and Ugo’s cousin, hid in the cave underneath Lilì’s house. When he was discovered by two German soldiers, they dragged him out and into the courtyard by the scruff of the neck and at the point of their guns. In desperation, Danny escaped. His plan was a simple one: to break free and run. And run. Between houses and stables and through woodsheds, down stone steps jutting out from retaining walls. They immediately opened fire with their Maschinengewehr 42 automatic weapons and missed.

  Danny fled to the hole in the side of the terraced hillside behind Lida’s house. Gino was already there, perfectly hidden in the cavity dug into the embankment, behind long grass and bushes, and he reproached Danny for possibly leading the Germans to him. Gino was afraid that the Germans would use flamethrowers to flush them out. But no-one came.

  Morena, who was eight years old, never forgot how the sound of flying bombs made her intestines gurgle so that she ran to the chamberpot every time. Her friend Erica, well into the next century – when Erica had become the second-oldest person in the village, when all the migrants had sailed away and a few had returned, and most had become lost around the world and their children and grandchildren had barely even heard of San Ginese – Erica, standing in front of her green-washed house on a sunny spring day, as she waited for an Albanian to come to weed her small garden, would look you in the face and say, ‘Ohimè! Che paura! How afraid we all were!’ Ohimè! is the word that you use when you wish to convey physical or spiritual dejection, dismay or pain.

  More than seventy years later, what Erica remembered most of all was the fear. The great fear experienced by the people is a fact that many who are not directly affected forget when talking about a war.

  …

  The tenth consequence of the war was that it displaced entire populations of innocents.

  Individuals and small groups wandered in, stumbled in, to San Ginese from the large towns and cities as the armies bombed each other. Stables, wine cellars and huts were slowly occupied by frightened, hungry people, until they overflowed. What else could the villagers do but shelter and feed them? Many of the displaced fleeing the war were from Livorno, which is also the place where the large white homonymous chicken, the livornese, comes from. Just like the chickens, people from Livorno are called livornesi.

  Vitale sheltered in his stable in the Mattei Courtyard, a fugitive from the fighting in Livorno. One morning a German soldier came, pushing a wheelbarrow in which he was carrying his standard-issue rifle. In the middle of the courtyard were two sacks of wheat that had been threshed the night before. He ordered the guest to lift both sacks into his wheelbarrow. The man obeyed, but as the German was leaving with his heavy load, straining up the slight incline and back onto the street, the Livornese suggested with enthusiasm to Vitale that they kill him.

  Vitale rejected this proposal, saying, ‘No. It is possible that he is one of those innocent Germans and that he just wants to eat.’

  …

  The eleventh consequence of the war was that the work of the peasant was never the same.

  The sacks of grain in Vitale’s courtyard taken by the German were a sign of the slowing of agricultural work in the ye
ars of the war. The communal mechanical thresher had not visited San Ginese for a long time, so the work had to be done as it was in the olden days. Bundles of wheat were spread out in the courtyards and beaten with the correggiato, a flail made of two large sticks attached to each other at the extremities with a small chain or piece of leather. You held one of the sticks in one or both hands and swung the implement over your shoulder, then brought it down with force to strike the pile of wheat, each blow separating the chaff from the grain.

  The mechanical thresher later returned and then was used almost all the time by everyone, even those who before the war had grumbled about modern contraptions. In addition, instead of cutting wheat and grass by hand with a long-handled scythe, called a frullana (from the original friulana), you now attached a moa to the cow (moa being a distortion of the English word mower, another word brought back from California) and did the harvesting that way.

  After the war, villagers also acquired water pumps, most of which were manufactured in Mantua by the Officina Colorni engineering workshop. Bucchione bought a pump from the American army, which was disposing of equipment it no longer needed.

  Of course, pumps were also used to irrigate crops at the appropriate time. Once, they had used donkeys to drive irrigation wheels. Now these new pumps were so effective and saved so much work and made so much money that they were like donkeys shitting Napoleon gold coins. Bucchione called his pump just that: ‘un miccio che caca marenghi.’

  …

  The twelfth consequence of the war was not felt for many years, so did not form part of the discussion in front of Nedo’s bar on the day of Nello’s accident.

  If you tried to argue that the twelfth was not a true consequence of the war but that it was simply a matter of a correlation without causation, it would be up to you to provide an alternative explanation for the events that followed. In any case, who is to say why some things happen and some things don’t?

  The twelfth consequence consisted of two parts, having one Primary Cause.

  The first part concerned Remo Sportelli, who did not have a wife. He lived with a woman who, people said, did the housework and looked after him. This was the same thing people would say about the parish priest, that he had a housekeeper who did the housework and looked after him. It was normal for a man to be looked after. A man needed looking after, and usually a wife did that. A man who for one reason or the other, and usually it was the other, did not have a wife made alternative arrangements. About Remo Sportelli they would say, ‘He has a woman who does the housework and looks after him,’ and their left nostril, or their right nostril, would twitch, producing what looked like a wink of their left eye, or their right (the side was optional), as if to say well, you know what is going on there.

  Remo was almost married once, but in the end the woman could not countenance the touch of his three-fingered left hand on her breast or the brush of his two-toed right foot against her leg in the marital bed she imagined. Her mother scolded her, praising Remo’s character and military service and reminding her of a long, easy passage through life lubricated by government pay for easy work and a government pension, but the mother’s efforts were in vain.

  When Remo Sportelli the soldier returned from the Russian front, after the Russian snow had bitten off two of the fingers on his left hand and three of the toes on his right foot, the authorities had given him preferential employment as the teacher of artistic education at the junior secondary school in San Leonardo.

  He taught the children to draw what was in front of their eyes, not what they saw in their fantasy. This was the fundamental principle of artistic education. The children always began by drawing trees with a round green ball, which was the crown, resting on a brown pedestal, which was the trunk. Remo knew that people, in this case the schoolchildren, saw what they wanted to see, not what was there.

  From the age of twenty-two years Remo’s teacher’s pay, and the special war emolument issued as compensation for the loss of the digits of his hand and foot, ensured a good enough income that, by the time Ugo returned to Italy the first time, Remo was almost wealthy. His income was much greater than the usual pay for a person of his origins and he was able to save much of it to buy land. He had no wife and no children to support, just a frugal housekeeper.

  With the fruit of his absent digits Remo bought land on a hillside, behind which grew a large pine forest, in a place called Palaiola, on the periphery of San Ginese. He built a magnificent stone house at the front of the forest and sold the land below his house on the left to Ugo, who wanted to build a house with Australian money, like Sucker had done.

  Remo Sportelli also sold land below his property on the right to Il Bacchi, who would build a house for his daughter. Il Bacchi’s daughter’s house would be a grand house on a hillside in Tuscany, with a beautiful view.

  Il Bacchi’s daughter and son-in-law had emigrated to England, and the old man’s grandchildren, two girls and a boy, were born there. Il Bacchi and his wife were very lonely, although the daughter brought her family to visit her elderly parents twice a year, staying with them each time for two weeks in San Ginese, where she was born. Everyone knows the loneliness of the old is an aching, desolate bleakness. With age all hope leaks out from the soul and physical ailments bedevil the body. The illumination and warmth of the sunshine that children bring to the lives of old people is immeasurable. It soothes the bones and the muscles and the ligaments and restores the soul.

  When the daughter decided to return to Italy permanently, her father was overjoyed. She asked him to build her a house and he started immediately, doing all the work himself, although he was no longer young, only calling in workers when it became too much for him. He worked every day for two years. The neighbours watched him laying bricks, pouring concrete and struggling to push his wheelbarrow through the mud in winter.

  He was still building it when Ugo left to return to Australia, and many years later Ugo heard that he had died, but this was only after his daughter had changed her mind and decided to remain in England forever with her husband and the old man’s grandchildren. Forever.

  As a teacher of artistic education, Remo knew that Il Bacchi saw what he wanted to see in his daughter’s request. Il Bacchi saw family closeness and unity and happiness. When he sold the land Remo knew that the daughter might break her father’s heart, but there was no obligation on Remo to warn the old man.

  And so it was that because of the war, because of frostbite on the Russian front (the Primary Cause), Remo Sportelli, who did not have a wife and was unencumbered and could live frugally, was able to save his veteran’s pay and impairment pension supplement to buy land and sell it to Il Bacchi, who built a house for a daughter who broke his heart.

  …

  The second part of the twelfth consequence was that Ugo built a house on Remo Sportelli’s land too, using Australian money, just as Sucker did in Monkey’s Field.

  When Ugo bought the land, Remo knew what Ugo saw in that land. Ugo saw happiness for himself and his family. Ugo also saw Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff returning to the place that had been a misery when he was a young man. Having made his fortune he would show everyone in San Ginese how well he had done, that he could buy land and build a grand house with a forest behind it on a hillside in Tuscany.

  Remo knew, just as he knew the impulses of the children in the classroom, that Ugo was seeing what he wanted to see, not the tree as it truly was in the field.

  And so it was that because of the war, because of frostbite on the Russian front (the Primary Cause), Remo Sportelli, who did not have a wife and was unencumbered and could live frugally, sold the land to Ugo, and Ugo built the house, and then Ugo and his wife Morena were unhappy and returned to Australia, and as a result of all this Morena ran away, which is what women did in those days, because they were prisoners and they were always trying to escape, like birds in a cage, like a tordo (which is a thrush) or a fringuello (which is a chaffinch).

  You could say that s
uch were the consequences of frostbite, but it would be absurd if you did because the matter was more complicated than that.

  THE VISITOR

  A Modest Tour of San Ginese

  If a man who was born in San Ginese were to return after being away in Australia for many years, he would be like a visitor from abroad, a tourist.

  People would think it was unusual for a grown man to walk along the road for the purpose of recreation on a sunny morning, wearing a hat for shade, or on an overcast afternoon, in the rain, carrying an umbrella. They would think it was very unusual if he walked that route three times in one day with only minor deviations, walking for two hours each time. They would not know that inside the Visitor there burned a strong desire to know the name of every person in the three cemeteries, where he would spend much of his time. They would not know that inside the Visitor there burned a strong desire to know everything there was to know about San Ginese and that this desire extended to knowing the names of the plants that grew there.

  As he walked he might study the plants growing along the verge, take photographs and ask his cousin for their names later, writing everything down in a small black notebook. If they knew that he was doing this too, they would think he was in actuality mad, a mad foreigner, of which there have been many in Tuscany since the English started their Grand Tours of Europe in the seventeenth century.

  These are the plants he would discover:

  graminacea graminaceous plants, grass

  tarasacco (piscialetto) dandelion (piss-a-bed), a diuretic plant

  vitalba an edible climbing plant, good for use in a frittata

  cardo selvatico spinoso wild thistle, an ancient plant present in Greek and Germanic myth

  gigaro arum; toxic

  papaveri poppies; the subject of a popular song, ‘Papaveri e papere’