The Fireflies of Autumn

by Moreno Giovannoni

  A few nights later they visited an empty house halfway up the Speranza, set back from the road behind high white walls. The Dead Boy had taken one of his father’s diamond-tipped tile cutters and he scratched a circle in the glass of the rear door. When he tried to knock the glass through and it didn’t work, he shattered it with a rock and they crawled in through the hole. There was nothing to take. They had better luck when they forced the canteen door at the trout farm and found thousands of sticks of chewing gum, which lasted for months.

  They did it for the excitement, the warmth and the tingling in the skin, and the accelerated heartbeat.

  They were riding the Dead Boy’s Vespa back from Lucca, where they had seen Brigitte Bardot in And God Created Woman at the local film club, when they decided to break into Gan-Gan, a small pink villa near Villora surrounded by trees and bushes growing wild. The villagers said that the house was a weekend retreat for some Milanese people. The Visitor found a pole, leaned it against the upstairs balcony, and they climbed along it upside down, like action heroes in a Hollywood movie. There were several bedrooms, each with a bed that had been stripped down to a mattress covered with a loose dust cover. The wardrobes were full of clean sheets and blankets.

  In the refrigerator they found a large plaster penis. This seemed to confirm the gossip in the village that women were brought to the house for sex, something you expected men from the city to do. They tried to guess what the penis was for, apart from symbolising what the Milanese did at Gan-Gan with their whores, a bit like the phalluses chiselled into the footpaths in Pompeii pointing in the direction of the nearest brothel. All the two of them could come up with was that it was the cast of the penis of one of the men and it was in the refrigerator to dry out and harden so he could show it off. It looked much too big and coarse to actually be used, but then the two boys had no experience of these things.

  As the sun came up, they sat on the balcony in armchairs, resting their feet on the low wall, drinking the dregs of several bottles of brandy, whisky and vermouth they had found, watching the lights of Montecatini going out in the distance, blinded by the flashing sheets of sunlight reflected off the factory rooftops in Porcari, beyond the drained swamp.

  This was the time when the Dead Boy said to his friend, Listen.

  Though the monologue that follows is not real, it sums up a typical pattern of thought of the Dead Boy and is intended to give an insight into his emotional life.

  Listen, he said, holding up a hand to catch his friend’s attention. Listen.

  Imagine this woman, look at her: brown eyes, blue eyes – doesn’t matter what colour her eyes are – eyelashes, eyebrows, cheekbones, the line of her jaw, lips, luscious lips, earlobes, earrings that say, look at my neck, the line of my neck, see the hollow above my collarbone, the wisps of hair falling down the side of my face, past my temples … what do you think about when you look at her? You look at her and you feel like you’ve just won a billion lire and all your problems are gone. She makes you feel like you could conquer the world. You’re in an American movie, her movie and yours, you’re both in it. You’re driving a white convertible with the top down, a sportscar along the coast road towards Monte Carlo. You have both just had a bath – not a shower, a bath – and are wearing comfortable, loose but elegant casual clothes. You, a white shirt that fits beautifully, with three buttons undone, white slacks and white canvas shoes. Her, a dress to just above the knees, a cotton dress with a subtle floral motif that gently clings to her body sometimes, attaching itself just for a moment to a hip, or a shoulderblade or a breast, revealing the curve each time. You stop for a light lunch, grilled fish and a green salad, accompanied by a glass of white wine. Then you stroll along the beach arm in arm, and here a delicate breeze touches the fine hairs on her arms and on your arms. It’s just a bit warm, and fresh enough too: the temperature is perfect. Strands of her hair float delicately around her mouth and you reach over and gently remove one that is resting on her lips and then you decide to take a room at the hotel where you just had lunch and you lie down on the bed side by side holding her wonderful rich fingers that take your breath away and you both fall asleep, her left arm resting against the entire length of your right arm, her breath on your face so sweet you want to eat it but can only breathe it in, and you both wake perfectly rested that evening, shower, change and sit on the balcony overlooking Avenue Princesse Grace and the water, the temperature again a perfect 20 degrees centigrade and she is there, extraordinary, and she smiles and the soundtrack plays and you don’t ever want her to open her mouth and speak and certainly never to become the mother of your children or anything like that!

  …

  The Dead Boy keeps a large collection of Danish pornography in the attic of his family home and one day he shows his friend, who is surprised that things like that exist – women with dogs and women with penises, as well as the usual girls with large breasts. They sit there on the floor, next to an old wooden box, flipping pages and browsing through magazines with faded covers and pictures of naked women with lurid skin tones.

  One night, the kind of night when wolves go roaming about, the Dead Boy announces they are going to borrow Romano Ragghianti’s motorcycle. He asks the Visitor to stand at the bend in the road at Il Sasso, near the bar, and keep watch in case someone comes out and walks towards them, or in the event that a car arrives and turns into Beàno. The Visitor leans against the wall of Beppino’s house with his hands in his pockets, stares at the sky and counts stars while scanning the road in all directions, and nods that it’s okay. His friend forces open the door of the old stable and together they roll the new Moto Guzzi silently down the hill past Lida’s place, then push-start it.

  With the Visitor riding pillion they enter the freeway at Carraia and ride as far as the outskirts of Pisa in driving rain. The night is a blur of cars and trucks, water splashing, freeway lights, traffic signs, glossy bitumen and white lines. The rain stings their foreheads and eyes and ears, cold air burns their throats and tears at their lungs, and they are frozen and wet but so exhilarated they will never forget. They return the bike early in the morning, turning the motor off down near Sucker’s place and, wheeling it up the slight rise into the village, stopping near Julio’s stable to piss at the stars. No-one ever knows about Romano’s motorbike. Even now there are only two people who do. This is one of those moments that enrich a life immeasurably, even when it becomes a memory, one of those moments that make a life worth being born into.

  The boys play Monopoly in the attic of the old house where Morena was born and where Bucchione stored sacks of corn and his own old motorbike. Every time the Visitor climbs the stairs he sees the light patch on the wall where Gemma spread fresh plaster over the hammer and sickle on the night the blackshirts visited. In an old trunk there are letters that Morena received from Ugo when Ugo went to Australia by himself, before she and her son went too. The two boys have draped a tablecloth over the trunk and placed the Monopoly board on top. It’s good when the Dead Boy wins at Monopoly, but sometimes the Visitor gets carried away, and having obtained a small advantage in his real estate dealings, presses it home, reduces his opponent to nothing and feels disloyal later, and it’s bad for his friend the Dead Boy who again has not won.

  There is another betrayal when the Visitor’s life takes a turn for the better. He leaves San Ginese for a summer holiday in England and France and meets a girl who writes to him every week, and he goes to visit her, makes long overnight train journeys across Europe, while the sad boy with the frizzy hair and the stutter knocks and knocks at his door to ask him out for pizza and beer.

  When the time comes for the Visitor to return to Australia, the Dead Boy drives him to the station in Lucca to catch the train for Rome. It is the last time the Visitor sees him. Over the years there is only an occasional postcard, from Lucca, Milan and South Africa, and once or twice a letter.

  …

  Despite his fear of being alive the Dead Boy has a girlfriend. The Visito
r, who has returned to Australia and hears about it later, is told she isn’t very pretty but, they say, with the Dead Boy’s problems, what could you expect? As oral assessments are the standard form of assessment, and because his tongue is set in concrete, which makes talking to examiners a torture, the Dead Boy doesn’t finish high school. He becomes a migrant, like so many others in San Ginese. He moves to Milan, works as a labourer on building sites and starts a small building-maintenance business.

  …

  Twenty years after they bury him, he’s watching from a corner of the room when the Visitor visits Gimi and his gentle wife, Anna. The three of them sit at the table in the dining room and the Dead Boy senses his mother and father are wondering what on earth the stranger is doing there. They hardly know the man.

  The Visitor sits there and either weeps or is on the verge of weeping in front of the woman who used to ask him to stay to eat and who still wears a headscarf, and the angry leather man who is still tanned but no longer builds houses and is now on a pension. The Dead Boy knows the weeping or imminent weeping confuses his parents. The Visitor tries to explain that their son was another one of those people whom he’d known once, for a short while, and who has died before he had a chance to say goodbye, and that the cemetery is now full of people like that. The old couple say nothing and wait for him to finish and go away.

  …

  For the ceramic photograph on his headstone in the San Ginese cemetery (the New Cemetery, not the Newest), the Dead Boy’s mother and father have chosen a picture of him wearing taupe trousers, a floral shirt and dark glasses while holding a cigarette in a limp-wristed hand. The Dead Boy is looking past the Visitor towards something.

  An Anagraphical Desire

  There are times when ancestral curiosity, which most people experience at least once in their lives, is suddenly of the greatest importance and there is an urgency for you to know where you come from, possibly to discover where you are going. The Visitor recalls that a rush of ancestral passion once overcame Ugo and Ugo’s older brother, Sucker, and transported them into a mental state in which they tasted, through the possibility of belonging to the past, if not immortality, then a beginning without end.

  During one of Ugo’s visits to Italy, the brothers spent an entire week searching through seventeen large registers and piles of loose parchment deep in the bowels of the church at Castello for a date, a name, a birth certificate, a baptismal certificate, a first communion certificate, a confirmation certificate, a marriage certificate, a death certificate – any anagraphical information at all about the ancestors of their great-grandfather Genesius.

  In the course of their investigation they ate a bag of subterranean bibliothecarial dust (a sacca, as Gemma used to say), coughed up a thick brown pulmonary stew, stripped the meninges from their brains, which were clamped in the vice of cerebral trituration caused by the attempted decipherment of faded, written hands, and lost their way in ancient calligraphy and had to be rescued from the stupor into which they slid by their wives, who were called in by the priest when Ugo and Sucker stopped responding to the anxious cries the man of God launched through the open trapdoor, dispatching his oral missives down the twenty-seven flights of stairs once every daylight hour.

  The two men had turned pages day and night by the light of fifteen candles and thirty-three paraffin lamps, not stopping to eat or sleep, but found no-one who preceded Genesius. They came to the conclusion that Genesius was the first and that those who came to San Ginese before Genesius must have been piovuti, people who had fallen like rain from the sky.

  When Ugo and Sucker came to the surface and staggered through the nave and into the courtyard of the church, they discovered half the village had gathered to greet them, fools who had been lost and now were found. As their anxious women hovered over them with urns of water, jugs of cloudy white wine, sheep’s milk cheese, slices of polenta wrapped in pieces of coarse linen and bowls of white beans in tomato, they looked around and marvelled at the breathtaking beauty of the scene before them.

  When the onlookers asked them who had come before Genesius, the two brothers, responding in unison, intoned, as if stunned: ‘Nimmo. No-one.’

  The crowd outside the church slowly dissolved, and everyone reluctantly returned to their fields and stables. Ugo and Sucker walked home, to the house of Genesius, which had become Tista’s house and was now Vitale’s house, accompanied by their wives, who held them by the arms for fear their men would topple over after their ordeal.

  La Storia di San Ginese

  If the Visitor were to be so inclined and if he were at a loose end on the third night, having walked around San Ginese three times the day before and dined in the small pink house where his mother was born, he would read a monograph by Salvatore Andreucci with the title S. Stefano di Villora: the now vanished ancient Pieve of the Compito district.

  The Visitor would learn the following about the history of San Ginese.

  A pieve was a major church, one which had a baptistery. Nearby churches without a baptistery answered to it. In the early Christian Church a separate baptistery building was necessary, as an uninitiated (unbaptised) person could not enter the church proper. So the unbaptised person was first baptised in the baptistery and was then immediately introduced to God, who was waiting in the adjacent building.

  The Pieve di Santo Stefano was where San Ginese is now and existed in its primitive form already in the second half of the fourth century or at the latest since the fifth century. It was named after Santo Stefano, the protomartyr, meaning he was the first Christian martyr in the district.

  The first ancient text in which Santo Stefano is called a pieve dates from Anno Domini 983. The naming occurs in a deed of donation, by which means Bishop Teudigrimo grants to Sisemundo, son of the late Chunerado, from whom are descended the Nobles of Montemagno, the entire estate of Santo Stefano with its major church and baptistery. (Note that in English the above names would be rendered respectively as Theudigrimus, Sigismund and Conrad.)

  For the interested reader, what follows is the full deed of donation in Latin. It is given here in the original in the hope that it will afford an enhanced experience to those fortunate enough to be familiar with the language. It is published by Barsocchi in Memorie e documenti per servire all’Istoria di Lucca, vol. V, 3, doc. MDLXI (3), Lucca, 1841. The uninterested reader may ignore this section.

  In nomine Sancte et individue Trinitatis. Otto grazia Dei imperatore augusto, filio bone memorie itemque Ottoni imperatoris anno imperii eius sextodecimo, septimo idus augusti, inditione undecima. Manifestu sum ego Sisemundo filio bone memorie Chuneradi, qui Chunitio vocabatur, quia tu Teudigrimus gratia Dei et cet. per cartula livellaria nomine et cet. idest omnibus casis et rebus seu terris tam domnicatis quam et massariciis, cum fundamentis, et omnem edificiis vel universis fabricis suis, que sunt pertinentibus Ecclesie plebis vestre Sancti Stephani et S. Johannis Baptiste, quod est plebem sita loco et finibus Villa, quam plebem ipsam esse videtur de subregimine et potestate et cet. Episcopo vestro Sancti Martini. Casis vero ipsis tam domnicatis quam et massariciis cum fundamentis seu curtis ortis ulivis silvis et cet. omnia et ex omnibus rebus tam domnicatis quam et cet. quantas ubique et cet. ad suprascripta Sanctam plebem sunt pertinentibus in integrum mihi eas et cet. livellario nomine dedisti mihi, idest omnem retditum edibitionem illam quantas singulis hominibus qui sunt abitantibus in villis, qui dicitur Paganico, Colugnola, Colline, Vinelia, Cerpeto, Vivaio, Colle, Tillio, Cumpito, Vico qui dicitur ad Sanctum Augustinum, Faeto, Massa Macinaria, singulis quibusque anni ipsius Ecclesie plebis vestre Sancti Stephani et S. Johannis Baptiste consuetudi sunt aut fuerint ad retdendum, tam de vino, quam et de labore simulque de bestiis, aut de qualibet frugibus terre vel qualibet mobilia. Iam dictum retditum seu debitum edibitionem, quantas singulis hominibus qui sunt abitantibus in prefatis villis, aut in antea et cet. singulis quibusque annis ipsius Ecclesie plebis vestre, seu titulis et cappellis cum omni eorum pertinentiis et adiacentiis subiectis ipsius Eccles
ie plebis vestre consuetudi et cet. in integrum mihi eas livellario nomine dedisti. Tali ordinem ut da admodum in mea qui supra Sisemundo vel de meis heredibus sint et cet. suprascriptis casis et rebus seu terris domnicatis et massariciis, quas nobis dedisti, eas abendi et cet. et nobis eas privato nomine usufructuandi; et iam dictum retditum seu debitum quas nobis dedisti, requirendi et recoliendi, et nobis eas privato nomine habendi et usufructuandi, et faciendi exinde quiequid nobis autilitas fuerit. Nisi tantum et cet. exinde tibi vel ad posterisque et cet. ad pars suprascripte Ecclesie plebis per singulos annos per omne mense magio, censum vobis retdere debeamus ad suprascripta Eccl. domum Episcopo vestro S. Martini, per nos et cet. vobis vel et cet. argentum solidos viginti de bonos danarios …

  Petrum notarium domini imperatoris scribere rogavimus. Actum Luca.

  *Ego Sisemundo in unc libello a me facto subscripsi.

  *Ego Johannes notarius domini imperatoris rogatus teste subscripsi.

  *Witternus notarius domini imperatoris rogatus teste subscripsi.

  *Petrus notarius domini imperatoris post traditam rogatus subscripsi.

  …

  Put simply, the Latin document describes the estate that is to be donated by the bishop. The landholding includes, as you are able to see, the parishes dependent on the major church of Santo Stefano, these being Paganico, Colugnola, Colline, Vinelia, Cerpeto, Vivaiuo, Colle, Tillio, Cumpito, Vico qui dicitur ad Sanctum Augustineum, Faeto and Massa Macinaria.

  Several names have persisted until modern times – for example, Colugnola (now Colognora) is where Alfredo makes pizzas. Colline (Collina) is where the Adulteress came from. Colle is where Irmo the Younger lives, whose birth precipitated Ugo’s migration. Cumpito (Compito) is where the Enchanted Glade was. Tillio is no longer a place name but is the name of a major road, via di Tiglio.