They rested by the fire and ate everything they had managed to steal from the charcoal burner’s cabin, including bacon rinds, rye bread and Lamon beans.
Augusto had a voracious appetite, whereas Jole felt as if her stomach were blocked. She would put the food in her mouth and chew it for a long time without swallowing.
A few paces away, Samson and the black horse were hobbled to an oak but had sufficient rope to graze on the last yellowed grass of autumn and to drink from the little stream that flowed past them.
“Don’t think about it. You did what you had to do, Jole… although I should have been the one to do it.”
Jole stared into space, holding in her hand the wilted, poor-looking dandelion flower that Maddalena had given her.
You’re in as bad a shape as I am, she thought, observing it with compassion as she turned it in her fingers.
Her blue, green and grey eyes were like an Alpine glacier weary of the endless cold and anxious to become a summer lake.
Augusto chewed bacon rind and beans and looked around suspiciously, like a stag in the middle of a meadow.
He had changed. He was even thinner than he had been before, he was lame in one leg and his moustache had become one with his long grey beard.
“Why were you there?” he asked her.
She returned to reality and looked at him. “I was on my way home.”
“You should never have left.”
“Someone had to. We all thought you were dead, Papà. What happened to you?”
He was silent for a moment, and for the first time Jole saw a tear run down his cheek.
“I’ve been wandering about. I had to hide.”
Jole’s eyes opened wide. “So you did kill that girl?”
“Is that what they told you? The bastards.” Augusto lowered his eyes and sighed. “Everyone down in the inn knew that half-mad Kraut, Näckler, killed the girl. But to save him, De Menech told the customs men to look for an Italian. He claimed he’d seen me kill her, but it was a complete lie. We’d had an argument the day before: I’d found someone who was offering me much more silver and copper than that shark. I’d gone to him and told him this would be the last load I brought him, and he started insulting me, he was even on the point of grabbing his rifle. And so within a few hours I found myself running away from Imer, forced to escape from the emperor’s officers not just as a smuggler, but as a rapist and murderer.”
She had never heard him speak so quickly. He seemed like a different man. There are some things that change men for ever.
“So you didn’t kill her!” Jole said, relieved.
Augusto grunted a “No” as sharp as his face and looked her straight in the eyes. “The very idea of killing a girl like you or Antonia makes me sick. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy!”
Then he told her about his escape from the customs men and the long climb back through the Noana Valley and up Mount Pavione, where the Zollwache had caught up with him and shot him in the leg.
“With a bloody knee, I managed to cross the border on Mount Pavione and come down the other side.”
“And then?”
“I bandaged my wound and treated it as best I could with plants, then dragged myself across the south side of the Vette Feltrine until I met some woodcutters, may God protect them always, who tended me and took me to their cabin… I thought of all of you… all the time…”
Augusto was silent for a moment and looked at his daughter with watery eyes. Then he threw another log onto the crackling fire and dozens of incandescent sparks rose into the air.
“Papà…” she said, going to him and embracing him. They remained in this embrace for a long time, then he continued, “After tending to me, one of them, Tomaso, carried me on his back to his house in Laredo, a hamlet of three houses hidden in the woods above Lasen. There, his wife and sister-in-law immediately took care of me, even though I didn’t have much expectation of being saved, with a crushed knee and tibia and the wound already infected.”
“Why did they trust a fugitive?”
“I don’t know if they believed what I told them. But I know what compassion and mercy are. Especially among those at the bottom of the heap.”
She ran a hand through her greasy, darkened hair and gestured to him to continue.
“I was close to death, but they didn’t abandon me. I had a high fever for two weeks, then gradually recovered, but didn’t get out of bed for the first time until I’d been there for four months. Tomaso had made me a crutch to walk on. I’d lost more than ten kilos and wasn’t eating anything. A year later I began walking again, with a limp, and it was only after a year and a half that I started to get my weight and strength back. From then on, I prepared myself for going home. Every day I went for walks in the woods, longer ones each day, to exercise my breathing and my leg. I had only one thought in my head: going home. Going back to my family.”
“And we thought you were dead…”
Augusto’s eyes again grew moist. “That was my biggest sorrow. I couldn’t inform you, couldn’t let you know how I was. And so, when a week ago I realized I was ready to leave Tomaso’s family and go home, I felt like the happiest man in the world.”
“What about the mule, Hector?”
“Killed on Mount Pavione by the Zollwache’s bullets, poor beast.”
“Poor thing… And how did you find me?”
“After two days of walking, it was getting to be really hard. I’d got it into my head to do one thing before going home, but I realized I didn’t have the strength to carry it out. Luckily, on the slopes of Mount Pavione, which is where I was, I met a young shepherdess.”
“A shepherdess? Was she by any chance wearing a hat with a fox’s tail?”
“Yes.”
“She tended to me, too.”
“I know. She told me she’d met a beautiful young blonde girl from the Brenta Valley who was running away. She gave me your name. I told her I was your father. I summoned up all the strength I could find in me and set off to look for you.”
“I should have found you, and instead you found me. But how did you know where I was?”
Augusto put a hand in his pocket and moved it about as if trying to clutch hold of something. “I got to the charcoal pile almost by chance, because I’d seen the smoke from a distance above the trees. Reaching the clearing where the two horses were tied, I found these on the ground!”
And he held out to her the little wooden horse and the sacred image of St Martin that she had left on the ground before drinking the juice that had knocked her out.
“Then I recognized St Paul propped against a tree. I took it, checked it was loaded, and just then I saw him dragging you across the clearing—”
“Enough!”
Almost without realizing it, Jole had screamed. Every word or image that reminded her of the recent past was hateful to her.
Father and daughter lapsed into silence. Above them, the waning moon looked melancholy, while the stars shone so brightly they seemed alive and alert to their words, as if trying to understand their secrets and seal them for ever in the crystalline autumn sky.
“How big you’ve grown, Jole!” Augusto said at last, unable to take his eyes off his daughter.
She lowered her eyes and clung to him.
She had been telling herself for a long time that he was dead, but in her heart of hearts she had never stopped dreaming of this moment. She had not seen him, had not heard his voice for three years, and now she burst into tears from the emotion.
It was as if her father had died and then been reborn, come back miraculously to life. But it was as if she, too, had come back to life. It was a strange sensation: to be born again with her own father, together at the same moment.
Augusto, in the meantime, was fantasizing about his return home, silently talking to his family. How I miss you, Sergio, with your little wooden horses, your curious eyes, your frail little hands, he was thinking. I miss when you come to me and sit on my knees becaus
e someone has shouted at you, or else because nobody can spare the time to be with you. I love you. Hold on, Sergio, soon I’ll be with you and Antonia and your mother. Soon I’ll be with all of you. It was only now that he realized he had not asked Jole any questions about his family. Thinking about them so much had made them seem close.
“How is your mother?” he asked. “And Antonia? And Sergio?”
Sobbing, Jole wiped her tears. “When we get home they’ll be fine. They’ll be fine.”
“Why did you do it? Why did you set off for the Primiero Valley on your own?”
“I told you. At home we suffer hunger, as you know. And since you left, it’s been even worse, much worse…”
“I know.”
They ate more bacon grilled on the fire and rye bread.
“I’ve earned four kilos of silver and eight of copper,” Jole said after a while, in an outburst of pride.
Astonished at this news, Augusto abruptly spat out something he had in his mouth. “Are you joking?”
“No, it’s true,” she said, unfazed.
“May God bless you, daughter!”
But sad she was and sad she remained.
And when she recounted her whole adventure, he was astounded. “So that black horse belongs to the man who was hunting me, too?”
“Yes.”
Luckily for them, it was a docile, submissive nag.
“What about the other one?”
She told him the story of her Haflinger, and this time they both fell silent for a long time.
Augusto was lost in thought. He was thinking about his family, about those long years, the people who had helped him. And after a while he could not tell if he had said what he was thinking out loud or only to himself.
16
“LET’S GO HOME, PAPÀ!”
Augusto looked at the moon, embraced his daughter, who was sitting beside him, and then moved his lips imperceptibly, as if trying to recite a prayer without being heard.
“Let’s go home!” Jole repeated.
“Yes. But first there are two things we have to do. The last two.”
At this point she abruptly pulled away from him and looked at him as one looks at a madman.
“And to do them we have to go back to Mount Pavione,” he went on, still looking at the moon.
Jole leapt to her feet. “I’m not going back to Mount Pavione!” she said.
17
AT DAWN THE FOLLOWING MORNING, they quickly rode back up through the conifer forest on the two horses and in less than three hours reached the south side of Mount Pavione.
Jole had wept for much of the previous evening before collapsing into sleep. This morning, though, she had woken different.
Opening her eyes, she had felt better. She had listened to the song of the blackbirds and thrushes and had interpreted it as a calm invitation to leave, to follow her father.
After all that had happened, the idea of retracing her steps, going back over her open wounds, did not appeal to her at all and required a great sacrifice, but the fact that it was her father who was asking it of her, this man she had mourned for two years and had now finally found again, persuaded her. Augusto had also told her that she would soon understand the importance of this decision.
She realized she would do anything not to lose him again before they got home.
And so she put her hat on her head and mounted Samson with her rifle, the weapon that had saved her from death, even though it had changed her life.
They were both exhausted and conscious that this variation in their return journey would represent a great risk, both because of their physical condition, and because they might encounter customs officers on the way.
Sitting on their horses, they looked up at the summit of the great mountain. The peak had turned white since they had last seen it and an impressive wind was blowing the first dusting of snow through the air.
“Follow me!” he said.
For a while, they climbed up through the prairies that crowned the massif and then, when the slope grew hard and tiring, followed unlikely paths and directions improvised by Augusto, who constantly looked around to intercept possible dangers.
After more than half an hour of steep climbing, the wind started up, that wind that Jole had by now got to know and respect, submitting almost humbly to its powerful voice.
That soul of the border to which her father himself had introduced her, teaching her to recognize its deep voice.
“Everything all right?” he asked.
“Yes!”
They looked at one another and understood. Augusto pointed at a group of Swiss pines and moved in that direction.
She followed, remaining always close to him.
Before long, having passed the last pines in that part of the scree, pines bent by the constant wind, Augusto dismounted, tied his horse to one of the trees and proceeded on foot, motioning to his daughter to do the same.
With difficulty, they crossed an area of large grey stones and at last came within sight of an old landslide. Jole shuddered: the smallest rock was as big as a cow. Augusto looked around to get his bearings, then limped ten paces further down and pointed to a large boulder.
Jole joined her father and looked at the boulder. On it, the letters ADB had been carved with a white stone.
From the way Augusto’s beard and moustache moved, she knew that he was laughing. She definitely saw his eyes light up with joy.
Without wasting any time, he bent down—it was not easy, thanks to the leg he could not move—and began to remove all the smallest stones from the base of the rock.
“Give me a hand!” he said, looking up at her.
Jole, too, bent and began lifting all the stones she could find, until she saw a piece of jute sticking out.
“This is it!” Augusto cried with excitement. “We’ve done it.”
After a few minutes, the piece of jute proved to be an actual sack. A large, full sack.
Augusto took his knife, made a cut in the sack and slipped a hand inside.
A moment later, the hand came back out clutching the barrel of a rifle, which could gradually be seen in its entirety.
“Have you ever seen St Paul without St Peter?” he said, passing her the Werndl-Holub that was the twin of her own.
She laughed.
Augusto stuck his arm into the ground and continued looking for something else until his face changed expression again. A moment or two later, he pulled out, one at a time, five kilos of silver and seven of copper and passed them to Jole who could not believe her eyes.
When at last he took out the eighth bar of copper, he said, “I told you it was worth it. They’re all here, five plus eight. Added to yours, that makes nine kilos of silver and sixteen of copper.”
“But when did you hide them?” Jole asked, struggling to put them all in the rucksack.
“When they shot Hector, I gathered them all up and took them with me.”
“With a wounded leg?”
“With a wounded leg. I crossed the mountain and deposited them here. Then I went down into the woods over towards Lasen.”
“Papà,” she said, looking around, stunned by the ruggedness of this place, “how did you manage to—”
“The soul of the border, daughter. The soul of the border helped me!”
She helped him to his feet and they slowly went back to the horses.
“Does this mean we’re finished with smuggling, Papà?” she asked before mounting her horse.
“Yes, but this is not all ours.”
“Why?”
“God would never forgive me if I didn’t repay the man who saved me.” And taking the reins of his horse, he added in a peremptory tone, “To Laredo. Follow me!”
And he began to descend towards the valley, in a northeasterly direction, while the soul of the border blew loudly, howling bitter words of anger, vengeance and justice.
18
THEY DESCENDED A SLOPE that only Augusto knew, on the lookout as alw
ays for the presence of patrols, given their continued proximity to the border. They went forward as if charged with a mission whose origins lay in the remote past, as if bound by a blood pact to an implacable ancient order.
They rode through conifer woods and then, further down, stretches of oaks and broad beeches.
After riding for three hours, remaining always at altitude, amid constant rises and falls, perilous descents and steep ascents, the De Boers came to a cabin built from larch trunks. In the front yard, just under a large wild mulberry tree, was a tall, sturdy man in his fifties, busy chopping firewood into large logs ready to be stockpiled for burning in the stove during the winter. He moved at a steady rhythm, repeating the same movements, as if destined to perform these gestures all his life.
Augusto and Jole rode across the meadow, and when they were some twenty metres from the cabin, the man saw them, stopped chopping, leant on the handle of the axe and watched them as if trying to work out who they were.
“Tomaso!” Augusto cried, raising his arm.
The man gave a smile that changed the colour of his face and immediately came walking towards the two of them.
“Have you changed your mind? On a horse? And who’s she?” he asked, casting a curious look at the girl by Augusto’s side.
“She’s my daughter,” Augusto said, dismounting.
Tomaso went and called his wife, his mother-in-law and the children, two irrepressible boys of eight and six. They all embraced, put the horses in the barn and entered the cabin.
Tomaso’s family were poor, like the De Boers, and poverty was the language that united them, that led them to say and hear the same things, to feel the very same sufferings and torments of life.
Soul of the Border Page 13