And as if the impossible thought of vacation had suddenly opened the gates of a dream to him, he seemed to hear a distant clank of bells, and a dog's bark, and also a brief lowing. But his eyes were open, he wasn't dreaming: and, pricking up his ears, he sought to regain a grip on those vague impressions, or a denial of them; and he actually did hear a sound as of hundreds and hundreds of steps, slow, scattered, hollow, which came closer and drowned out all other sounds, except, indeed, that rusty clanking.
Marcovaldo got up, slipped on his shirt and trousers.
"Where are you going?" asked his wife, who slept with one eye open.
"There's a herd of cattle passing in the street. I'm going to see it."
"Me, too! Me, too!" cried the children, who knew how to wake up at the right moment.
It was the sort of herd that used to cross the city at night, in early summer, going towards the mountains for the alpine pasture. Climbing into the street with their eyes still half-closed in sleep, the children saw the stream of dun or piebald withers which invaded the sidewalk, brushed against the walls covered with bills, the lowered shutters, the stakes of no-parking signs, the gasoline pumps. Cautiously extending their hoofs from the step at the intersections, their muzzles never betraying a jolt of curiosity, pressed against the loins of those ahead of them, the cows brought with them the odor of dung, wild flowers, milk and the languid sound of their bells, and the city seemed not to touch them, already absorbed as they were into their world of damp meadows, mountain mists and the fords of streams.
Impatient, on the contrary, as if made nervous by the looming city, the cowherds wore themselves out in brief, futile dashes along the side of the line, raising their sticks and bursting out in broken, guttural cries. The dogs, to whom nothing human is alien, made a display of nonchalance, proceeding with noses erect, little bells tinkling, intent on their job; but clearly they too were uneasy and restless, otherwise they would have allowed themselves to be distracted and would have begun sniffing corners, lamp posts, stains on the pavement, as is every city dog's first thought.
"Papà," the children said. "Are cows like trams? Do they have stops? Where's the beginning of the cows' line?"
"There's no connection between them and trams," Marcovaldo explained. "They're going to the mountains."
"Can they wear skis?" Pietruccio asked.
"They're going to pasture, to eat grass."
"Don't they get fined if they trample the lawns?"
The only one not asking questions was Michelino, who, older than the others, already had his own ideas about cows, and was now intent simply on checking them, observing the mild horns, the withers, and variegated coats. And so he followed the herd, trotting along at its side like the sheep dogs.
When the last group had passed, Marcovaldo took the children's hands to go back to sleep, but he couldn't see Michelino. He went down into the room and asked his wife: "Has Michelino already come home?"
"Michelino? Wasn't he with you?"
"He started following the herd, and God only knows where he's got to," Marcovaldo thought, and ran back to the street. The herd had already crossed the square, and Marcovaldo had to look for the street it had turned into. But that night, it seemed, various herds were crossing the city, each along a different street, each heading for its own valley. Marcovaldo tracked down and overtook one herd, then realized it wasn't his; at an intersection he saw, four streets farther on, another herd proceeding along a parallel, and he ran that way; there, the cowherds told him they had met another heading in the opposite direction. And so, until the last sound of a cow-bell had died away in the dawn light, Marcovaldo went on combing the city in vain.
The captain to whom he went to report his son's disappearance said: "Followed a herd of cows? He's probably gone off to the mountains, for a summer holiday, lucky kid. Don't worry: he'll come back all tanned and fattened up."
The captain's opinion was confirmed a few days later by a clerk in the place where Marcovaldo worked who had returned from his first-shift holiday. At a mountain pass he had encountered the boy: he was with the herd, he sent greetings to his father, and he was fine.
In the dusty city heat Marcovaldo kept thinking of his lucky son, who now was surely spending his hours in a fir tree's shade, whistling with a wisp of grass in his mouth, looking down at the cows moving slowly over the meadow, and listening to a murmur of waters in the shadows of the valley.
His Mamma, on the contrary, couldn't wait for him to return: "Will he come back by train? By bus? It's been a week ... It's been a month... The weather must be bad..." And she could find no peace, even though having one fewer at table every day was in itself a relief.
"Lucky kid, up in the cool, stuffing himself with butter and cheese," Marcovaldo said, and every time, at the end of the street, there appeared, in a light haze, the jagged white and gray of the mountains, he felt as if he had sunk into a well, in whose light, up at the top, he seemed to see maple and chestnut fronds glinting, and to hear wild bees buzzing, and Michelino up there, lazy and happy, amid milk and honey and blackberry thickets.
But he too was expecting his son's return evening after evening, though, unlike the boy's mother, he wasn't thinking of the schedules of trains and buses: he was listening at night to the footsteps on the street as if the little window of the room were the mouth of a seashell, re-echoing, when you put your ear to it, the sounds of the mountain.
One night he sat abruptly up in bed: it wasn't an illusion; he heard approaching on the cobbles that unmistakable trample of cloven hoofs, mixed with the tinkling of bells.
They ran to the street, he and the whole family. The herd was returning, slow and grave. And in the midst of the herd, astride a cow's back, his hands clutching its collar, his head bobbing at every step, was Michelino, half asleep.
They lifted him down, a dead weight; they hugged and kissed him. He was dazed.
"How are you? Was it beautiful?"
"Oh... yes..."
"Were you homesick?"
"Yes..."
"Is it beautiful in the mountains?"
He was standing, facing them, his brows knit, his gaze hard.
"I worked like a mule," he said, and spat on the ground. He now had a man's face. "Carrying the buckets to the milkers every evening, from one cow to the next, and then emptying them into the cans, in a hurry, always in a worse hurry, until late. And then early in the morning, rolling the cans down to the trucks that take them to the city. And counting... always counting: the cows, the cans, and if you made a mistake there was trouble..."
"But weren't you in the meadows? When the cows were grazing?"
"There was never enough time. Always something to be done. The milk, the bedding, the dung. And all for what? With the excuse that I didn't have a work-contract, what did they pay me? Practically nothing. But if you think I'm going to hand it over to you now, you're wrong. Come on, let's go to sleep; I'm dead tired."
He shrugged, blew his nose, and went into the house. The herd was still moving away along the street, carrying with it the lying, languid odor of hay and the sound of bells.
AUTUMN
11. The poisonous rabbit
When the day comes to leave the hospital, you already know it in the morning and if you're in good shape you move around the wards, practicing the way you're going to walk when you're outside; you whistle, act like a well man with those still sick, not to arouse envy but for the pleasure of adopting a tone of encouragement. You see the sun beyond the big panes, or the fog if there's fog; you hear the sounds of the city; and everything is different from before, when every morning you felt them enter—the light and sound of an unattainable world—as you woke behind the bars of that bed. Now, outside, there is your world again. The healed man recognizes it as natural and usual; and suddenly he notices once more the smell of the hospital.
Marcovaldo, one morning, was sniffing around like that, cured, waiting for them to write certain things in his health insurance book so that he could
leave. The doctor took his papers, said to him, "Wait here", and left him alone in the office. Marcovaldo looked at the white-enameled furniture he had so hated, the test-tubes full of grim substances, and tried to cheer himself with the thought that he was about to leave it all. But he couldn't manage to feel the joy he would have expected. Perhaps it was the idea of going back to the warehouse to shift packing cases, or of the mischief his children had surely been up to in his absence, and especially of the fog outside that made him think of having to step out into the void, to dissolve in a damp nothingness. And so he looked around, with a vague need to feel affection towards something in here; but everything he saw reminded him of torture or discomfort.
Then he saw a rabbit in a cage. It was a white rabbit, with a long, fluffy coat, a pink triangle of a nose, amazed red eyes, ears almost furless flattened against its back. It wasn't all that big, but in the narrow cage its crouching oval body made the wire screen bulge and clumps of fur stuck out, ruffled by a slight trembling. Outside the cage, on the table, there was some grass and the remains of a carrot. Marcovaldo thought of how unhappy the animal must be, shut up in there, seeing that carrot but not being able to eat it. And he opened the door of the cage. The rabbit didn't come out: it stayed there, still, with only a slight twitch of its face, as if it were pretending to chew in order to seem nonchalant. Marcovaldo took the carrot and held it closer, then slowly drew it back, to urge the rabbit to come out. The rabbit followed him, cautiously bit the carrot and began gnawing it diligently, in Marcovaldo's hand. The man stroked it on the back and, meanwhile, squeezed it, to see if it was fat. He felt it was somewhat bony, under its coat. From this fact, and from the way it pulled on the carrot, it was obvious that they kept it on short rations. If it belonged to me, Marcovaldo thought, I would stuff it until it became a ball. And he looked at it with the loving eye of the breeder who manages to allow kindness towards the animal to coexist with anticipation of the roast, all in one emotion. There, after days and days of sordid stay in the hospital, at the moment of leaving, he discovered a friendly presence, which would have sufficed to fill his hours and his thoughts. And he had to leave it, go back into the foggy city, where you don't encounter rabbits.
The carrot was almost finished. Marcovaldo took the animal into his arms while he looked around for something else to feed him. He held its nose to a potted geranium on the doctor's desk, but the animal indicated it didn't like the plant. At that same moment Marcovaldo heard the doctor's step, coming back: how could he explain why he was holding the rabbit in his arms? He was wearing his heavy work coat, tight at the waist. In a hurry, he stuck the rabbit inside, buttoned his coat all the way up, and to keep the doctor from seeing that wriggling bulge at his stomach, he shifted it around to his back. The rabbit, frightened, behaved itself. Marcovaldo collected his papers and moved the rabbit to his chest, because he had to turn and leave. And so, with the rabbit hidden under his coat, he left the hospital and went to work.
"Ah, you're cured at last?" the foreman, Signor Viligelmo, said, seeing him arrive. "And what's that growth there?" and he pointed to the bulging chest.
"I'm wearing a hot poultice to prevent cramps," Marcovaldo said.
At that, the rabbit twitched, and Marcovaldo jumped up like an epileptic.
"Now what's come over you?" Viligelmo said.
"Nothing. Hiccups," he answered, and with one hand he shoved the rabbit behind his back.
"You're still a bit seedy, I notice," the boss said.
The rabbit was trying to crawl up his back, and Marcovaldo shrugged hard to send it down again.
"You're shivering. Go home for another day. And make sure you're well tomorrow."
Marcovaldo came home, carrying the rabbit by its ears, like a lucky hunter.
"Papà! Papà!" the children hailed him, running to meet him. "Where did you catch it? Can we have it? Is it a present for us?" And they tried to grab it at once.
"You're back?" his wife said, and from the look she gave him, Marcovaldo realized that his period of hospitalization had served only to enable her to accumulate new grievances against him. "A live animal? What are you going to do with it? It'll make messes all over the place."
Marcovaldo cleared the table and set the rabbit down in the middle, where it huddled flat, as if trying to vanish. "Don't anybody dare touch it!" he said. "This is our rabbit, and it's going to fatten up peacefully till Christmas."
"Is it a male or a female?" Michelino asked.
Marcovaldo had given no thought to the possibility of its being a female. A new plan immediately occurred to him: if it was a female, he could mate her and start raising rabbits. And already in his imagination the damp walls disappeared and the room was a green farm among the fields.
But it was a male, all right. Still Marcovaldo had now got this idea of raising rabbits into his head. It was a male, but a very handsome male, for whom a bride should be found and the means to raise a family.
"What are we going to feed it, when we don't have enough for ourselves?" his wife asked, sharply.
"Let me give it some thought," Marcovaldo said.
The next day, at work, from some green potted plants in the Management Office, which he was supposed to take out every morning, water, then put back, he removed one leaf each-broad leaves, shiny on one side and opaque on the other-and stuck them into his overalls. Then, when one of the girls came in with a bunch of flowers, he asked her, "Did your boy-friend give them to you? Aren't you going to give me one?" and he pocketed that, too. To a boy peeling a pear, he said, "Leave me the peel." And so, a leaf here, a peeling there, a petal somewhere else, he hoped to feed the animal.
At a certain point, Signor Viligelmo sent for him. Can they have noticed the plants are missing leaves? Marcovaldo wondered, accustomed always to feeling guilty.
In the foreman's office there was the doctor from the hospital, two Red Cross men, and a city policeman. "Listen," the doctor said, "a rabbit has disappeared from my laboratory. If you know anything about it, you'd better not try to act smart. Because we've injected it with the germs of a terrible disease and it can spread it through the whole city. I needn't ask if you've eaten it; if you had, you'd be dead and gone by now."
An ambulance was waiting outside; they rushed and got in it, and with the siren screaming constantly, they went through streets and avenues to Marcovaldo's house, and along the way there remained a wake of leaves and peelings and flowers that Marcovaldo sadly threw out of the window.
Marcovaldo's wife that morning simply didn't know what to put in the pot. She looked at the rabbit her husband had brought home the day before, now in a makeshift cage, filled with shavings. "It arrived just at the right moment," she said to herself. "There's no money; his wages have already gone for the extra medicines the Public Health doesn't cover; the shops won't give us anymore credit. Raise rabbits, indeed! Or wait till Christmas to roast it! We're skipping meals, and we're supposed to fatten a rabbit!"
"Isolina," she said to her daughter, "you're a big girl now, you have to learn how to cook a rabbit. You begin by killing it and skinning it, and then I'll tell you what to do next."
Isolina was reading a magazine of sentimental romances. "No," she whined, "you begin by killing it and skinning it, and then I'll watch how you cook it."
"What a help!" her mother said. "I don't have the heart to kill it. But I know it's a very easy matter; you just have to hold it by the ears and hit it hard on the back of the head. As for skinning, we'll see."
"We won't see anything," the daughter said, without raising her nose from the magazine. "I'm not hitting a live rabbit on the head. And I haven't the slightest notion of skinning it, either."
The three little ones had listened to this dialog with wide eyes.
Their mother pondered for a moment, looked at them, then said, "Children..."
The children, as if by agreement, turned their backs on their mother and left the room.
"Wait, children!" their mother said. "I wanted to ask you
if you'd like to take the rabbit outside. We'll tie a pretty ribbon around his neck and you can go for a walk with him."
The children stopped and exchanged looks. "A walk where?" Michelino asked.
"Oh, a little stroll. Then go call on Signora Diomira, show her the rabbit, and ask her if she'll please kill it and skin it for us. She's so good at that."
The mother had found the right method: children, as everyone knows, are caught up by the thing they like most, and they prefer not to think of the rest. And so they found a long, lilac-colored ribbon, tied it around the animal's neck, and used it as a leash, fighting over it, and pulling after them the reluctant, half-strangled rabbit.
"Tell Signora Diomira," the mother insisted, "that she can keep a leg for herself! No, better the head. Oh, she can take her pick."
The children had barely gone out when Marcovaldo's room was surrounded and invaded by orderlies, doctors, guards, and policemen. Marcovaldo was in their midst, more dead than alive. "Where is the rabbit that was taken from the hospital? Hurry: show us where it is, but don't touch it; it's infected with the germs of a terrible disease!" Marcovaldo led them to the cage, but it was empty. "Already eaten?"
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