Then we both enter the house, hands in pockets, silent, a little ill at ease, and suddenly my brother starts talking as if the conversation had just been interrupted.
“Last night,” he says, “Giacinta’s son almost came to a bad end.”
“Shot him, you should have,” I say, though I don’t know what it’s about. Also, we’d like to ask each other where we’re coming from, what job we’re doing, if we’re making money, if we have a wife, children, but there’s time to ask later; now it would be contrary to our habits.
“You know that Friday night it’s our turn for the water from the Long Well,” he says.
“Friday night it is,” I assure him, though I don’t remember and maybe never knew.
“You think we get the water every Friday night?” he says. “They’ll send it all in their direction if you’re not around to keep watch. Last night I go past, it must have been eleven, and I see someone running with a hoe: the flow had been turned toward Giacinta’s.”
“Shot him, you should have!” I say, and already I’m full of rage: for months and months I’d forgotten that the problem of the water from the Long Well existed. In a week I’ll be gone again and I’ll forget about it again, although now I’m bursting with rage because of the water they’ve stolen from us in the past months and will steal in those to come.
Meanwhile I wander up and down the stairs and through the rooms, with my brother behind me puffing on his pipe, up and down the stairs and through the rooms, where guns old and new are hanging along with powder flasks and hunting horns and chamois heads. The stairs and the rooms smell stale and worm-eaten and have Masonic symbols on the walls instead of crucifixes. My brother tells me about everything the tenant farmers steal, about the harvests that go bad, about other people’s goats that feed in our fields, about our woods where the whole valley goes to gather wood. And I go pulling out of closets jackets, leggings, vests with long pockets for holding cartridges, and I take off my wrinkled city clothes and look at myself in the mirrors all rigged out in leather and homespun.
Soon afterward we go down along the mule track with the double-barreled guns over our shoulders, to try some shooting, on the wing or stationary. We haven’t gone a hundred paces when a hail of gravel hits our necks, hurled hard, likely from a slingshot. Instead of instantly turning around, we pretend not to notice and continue, keeping an eye on the vineyard wall above the track. Amid the leaves, gray with sulfur, the face of a boy peeks out, a round red face with a crowd of freckles under the eyes, like a peach eaten by aphids.
“Good God, they even set the children against us!” I say, and start cursing them.
The boy looks out again, makes a rude noise with his tongue, and runs away. My brother takes off through the gate of the vineyard and starts chasing him between the rows of vines, trampling the seedlings, with me behind, until we catch him between us. My brother grabs him by the hair, I by the ears. I realize I’m hurting him, but I keep pulling, and the more I hurt him the angrier I get, and we shout, “This is for you, and the rest will be for your father, who sent you.”
The boy is crying; he bites my finger and runs away. A woman in black appears at the end of the rows; he hides his head in the folds of her apron and she starts shouting at us, waving her fist: “Cowards! Picking on a child! The same bullies as always. Someone’ll pay you back, you can be sure!”
But we’ve already gone on our way, shrugging our shoulders—you don’t respond to women.
Then we meet two men coming toward us loaded with bundles of sticks, bent double by the weight.
“Hey, you two”—we stop them—“where did you get that wood?”
“Wherever we wanted,” they say, and would like to keep going.
“Because if you took it from our woods we’ll make you take it back, and hang you from the trees besides.”
They’ve put their bundles down on the wall and are looking at us, sweating in the sackcloth hoods that protect their heads and shoulders.
“We don’t know what’s yours or not yours. We don’t know you.”
In fact they look like new people, maybe unemployed folk who’ve started collecting wood. One more reason to introduce ourselves.
“We’re the Bagnasco brothers. Never heard of us?”
“We don’t know anything about anyone. We got the wood in the town’s woods.”
“It’s prohibited in the town’s. We’ll call a guard and have you put inside.”
“Oh, now we know who you are,” one of them bursts out. “You don’t want us to know who you are, always ready to cause trouble for poor people. But someday it’ll stop!”
I begin, “What will stop?” Then we decide to let it go, and we set off, swearing at each other.
Now, when my brother and I are in some other place, we talk with the tram drivers, with newspaper sellers, give a smoke to whoever asks for it, ask for a smoke from someone passing by. Here it’s different, here we’ve always been like this, we go around with the double-barreled guns and make trouble everywhere.
The tavern at the pass is where the Communists meet; outside is a board where newspaper clippings and other notices are tacked up. Going by, we see a poem posted there saying that the rich people are always the same, and the ones who were bullies in the past are the brothers of the ones who are now. “The brothers” is underlined because it all has a double meaning against us. We write on the page “Cowards and liars.” Then we sign: “Giacomo Bagnasco and Michele Bagnasco.”
And yet when we’re away we eat at the cold oilcloth-covered tables where other men who work far from home eat, and with our nails we dig out the soft part of the sludgy gray bread, and then our neighbor at the table talks about what’s in the newspaper, and we, too, say, “There are still bullies in the world! But one day things will be better.” Now, here, we couldn’t say that; here is the land that doesn’t produce, the tenant farmers who steal, the laborers who sleep on the job, the people who spit at us when we pass because we won’t work our land, and—they say—all we’re good for is exploiting others.
We reach a place where the wood pigeons should be passing, and we look for two spots to wait in. But right away we get tired of keeping still, and my brother points out a house where some sisters live, and whistles to one who’s his lover. She comes down: she has a big bosom and hairy legs.
“Say, see if your sister Adelina will come, too, because here’s my brother, Michele,” he says to her.
The girl goes back inside and I ask my brother, “Is she pretty? Is she pretty?”
My brother doesn’t give his opinion. “She’s fat. She’s easy.”
The two come out, and mine really is big and fat, and for an afternoon like this she’ll do fine. First they want to make a fuss and say they can’t be seen with us or they’ll make enemies of the whole valley, but we tell them don’t be stupid, and we take them to that field, to the place where we were waiting for the wood pigeons. In fact every so often my brother finds a way to fire a shot; he’s used to taking the girl hunting.
After I’ve been there a while with Adelina I feel another hail of gravel land between head and neck. I see the boy with freckles running away, but I don’t feel like chasing him and I swear at him.
In the end the girls say they have to go to the blessing.
“Go ahead, and don’t get in our way again,” we say.
Then my brother explains that they’re the two biggest whores in the valley and they’re afraid that if other young men see them with us they won’t go with them anymore, out of spite. I shout at the wind, “Whores!” But really I’m sorry that only the two biggest whores in the valley will go with us.
All the people waiting for the blessing are standing in the church square, in front of Saints Cosimo and Damian. They make way for us, and glower at us, even the priest, because we Bagnascos haven’t been to Mass for three generations.
As we pass we hear something drop nearby. “The boy!” we cry, and are about to start chasing him.
But it’s a rotten medlar that has fallen from a branch. We go on walking, kicking the stones.
The House of the Beehives
It’s difficult to see from far away, and even if someone has already been here once he won’t remember the way back; there was a path here at one time, but I made brambles grow over it and wiped out every trace. It’s well chosen, this home of mine, lost in this bank of broom, with a single story that can’t be seen from the valley, and covered in a chalky whitewash with windows picked out in red.
There’s some land around I could have worked and haven’t; a patch for vegetables where snails munch the lettuce is enough for me, and a bit of terraced earth to dig up with a pitchfork and grow potatoes, all purple and budding. I only need to work to feed myself, for I’ve got nothing to share with anyone.
And I don’t cut back the brambles, either the ones now clambering over the roof of the house or those already creeping like a slow avalanche over the cultivated ground; I’d like them to bury everything, myself included. Lizards have made their nests in the cracks of the walls, ants have scooped out porous cities under the bricks of the floor; I look forward every day to seeing if a new crack has opened, and think of the cities of the human race being smothered and swallowed up by weeds.
Above my home are a few strips of rough meadow where I let my goats roam. At dawn, dogs sometimes pass by, on the scent of hares; I chase them off with stones. I hate dogs, with their servile fidelity to man; I hate all domestic animals, their pretense of having sympathy with human beings just so they can lick the remains off greasy plates. Goats are the only animals I can stand, for they don’t expect intimacy or give any.
I don’t need chained dogs to guard me. Or even hedges or padlocks, those horrible contraptions of humans. My field is studded with beehives, and a flight of bees is like a thorny hedge that only I can cross. At night the bees sleep in the bean husks, but no man ever comes near my house; people are afraid of me and they are right, not because certain tales they tell about me are true—lies, I say, just the sort of thing they would tell—but they are right to be afraid of me, I want them to be.
When I go over the crest in the morning, I can see the valley dropping away beneath and the sea high all around me and the world. And I see the houses of the human race perched on the edge of the sea, shipwrecked in their false neighborliness; I see the tawny, chalky city, the glittering of its windows and the smoke of its fires. One day brambles and grass will cover its squares, and the sea will come up and mold the ruins into rocks.
Only the bees are with me now; they buzz around my hands without stinging me when I take the honey from the hives, and settle on me like a living beard; friendly bees, ancient race without a history. For years I’ve been living on this bank of broom with goats and bees; once I used to make a mark on the wall at the passing of each year; now the brambles choke everything. Why should I live with men and work for them? I loathe their sweaty hands, their savage rites, their dances and churches, their women’s acid saliva. But those stories aren’t true, believe me; they’ve always told stories about me, the lying swine.
I don’t give anything and I don’t owe anything; if it rains at night I cook and eat the big snails slithering down the banks in the morning; the earth in the woods is scattered with soft, damp toadstools. The woods give me everything else I need: sticks and pinecones to burn, and chestnuts; and I snare hares and thrushes, too, for don’t think I love wild animals or have an idyllic adoration of nature—one of man’s absurd hypocrisies. I know that in this world we must devour one another and that the survival of the fittest holds; I kill only the animals I want to eat, with traps, not with guns, so as not to need dogs or other men to fetch them.
Sometimes I meet men in the woods, if I’m not warned in time by the dull thuds of their axes cutting down trees one by one. I pretend not to see them. On Sundays the poor come to gather fuel in the woods, which they strip like the speckled heads of aloes; the trunks are hauled away on ropes and form rough tracks, which gather the rain during storms and provoke landslides. May everything go to similar ruin in the cities of the human race; may I, as I walk along one day, see chimney tops emerging from the earth, meet parts of streets falling off into ravines, and stumble on strips of railroad track in the middle of the forest.
But you must wonder if I don’t ever feel this solitude of mine weighing on me, if some evening, one of those long twilights, I haven’t gone down, without any definite idea in my head, toward the houses of the human race. I did go, one warm twilight, toward those walls surrounding the gardens below, and climbed down over the medlar trees; but when I heard women laughing and a distant child calling, back I came up here. That was the last time; now I’m up here alone. Well, I get frightened of making a mistake every now and again, as you do. And so, like you, I go on as I was before.
You’re afraid of me, of course, and you’re right. Not because of that affair, though. That, whether it ever happened or not, was so many years ago it doesn’t matter now anyway.
That woman, that dark woman who came up here to scythe—I had only been up here a short time then and was still full of human emotions—well, I saw her working high on the slope and she hailed me and I didn’t reply and passed by. Yes, I was still full of human emotions then, and of an old resentment, too; and because of that old resentment—not against her, I don’t even remember her face—I went up behind her without her hearing me.
Now, the tale as people tell it is obviously false, for it was late and there wasn’t a soul in the valley and when I put my hands around her throat no one heard her. But I would have to tell you my story from the beginning for you to understand.
Ah, well, let’s not mention that evening anymore. Here I live, sharing my lettuce with snails that perforate the leaves, and I know all the places where toadstools grow and can tell the good ones from the poisonous; about women and their poisons I don’t think anymore. Being chaste is nothing but a habit, after all.
She was the last one, that dark woman with the scythe. The sky was full of clouds, I remember, dark clouds scudding along. It must have been under a hurrying sky like that, on slopes cropped by goats, that the first human marriage took place. In contact between human beings there can only, I know, be mutual terror and shame. That’s what I wanted, to see the terror and shame, just the terror and shame, in her eyes; that’s the only reason I did it to her, believe me.
No one has said a word about it to me, ever; there isn’t a word they can say, since the valley was deserted that evening. But every night, when the hills are lost in the dark and I can’t follow the meaning of an old book by the light of the lantern, and I sense the town with its human beings and its lights and music down below, I feel the voices of you all accusing me.
But there was no one to see me there in the valley; they say those things because the woman never returned home.
And if dogs passing by always stop to sniff at a certain spot, and bay and scratch the ground with their paws, it’s because there’s an old moles’ lair there—I swear it, just an old moles’ lair.
The Same Thing as Blood
The night the SS arrested their mother the boys went to have dinner at the Communist’s house. The Communist lived in a cottage halfway up the hill; you climbed a path between olive trees and walls. The night became thick, gray, as if in a hurry, as if it wished to cancel out everything. On the way, the brothers were attentive to the dogs barking on the valley floor; it could mean the SS, who were coming to look for them, or their mother, who was returning, already free, or their father, or someone else who was coming to say something, something that would explain. But the dogs were barking at the soup; the children in the cottages in the valley were shouting, banging their spoons on their bowls.
The rhythm of things had changed, the senses too slow, the thoughts too swift. Had changed suddenly. The older brother and the Communist were coming down from the woods. With the younger brother, they’d been in Rovere del Fariseo, transp
orting medicines for Giglio’s unit. Waiting for them under the oak were Giglio and Magro, with a pistol hidden under his jacket. Giglio was based in Rocche del Corvo; he carried out raids on his own with a few men, allied with one group and then another, but always doing as he pleased. Sitting under the oak, they had talked, about how to treat the rashes you get on your legs from sleeping on straw, and about how the disbanded partisans in the area needed to join the units and stop wandering through the woods like thieves. Then they had been shown a good hiding place, a den, where five men could sleep. Coming back through the woods they had met a girl who was herding goats and the younger brother had lingered with her. Throughout the woods they continued to hear him singing with her, jumping down the banks of pines with the goats.
Then, at the Bicocca, all the inhabitants of the seven houses were outside their doors. Walter was there, too.
He said, agitated, “You don’t know what happened down there?”
“What happened down there?”
“It’s bad. The SS arrested your mother. Your father went to see if they’ll free her.”
Then the air had become tense and charged, as when the Black Brigade came up and you could hear machine-gun volleys amid the olive trees. A crowd of questions in the eardrums, in the throat. The green faces of spies appeared and disappeared in memory like bursting bubbles. The brother who was returning happily, singing the shepherd girl’s song, suddenly heard the story and stopped.
Now there was this new fact, and all the things of before had changed, this new fact was mixed up inside them, their mother carried off by the Germans. And the brothers became like children again, though they were grown boys, with books, with girls, with bombs, and yet they were children again, hit in the child part of them, hit in their mother. Now they would be taken by the hand, they would walk, lost, children without their mama. But there were many things to do: hide the bombs, the guns, the magazines, the rifles, the medicines, the leaflets, hide them in the hollows of the olive trees and behind the stones of the walls, so that the Germans wouldn’t come up there to search, looking for them. And wonder how and when and why, wonder aloud and in thought, without ever resolving anything.
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