Samson grew a little fatter, and dominated the other pigs, two sows and their piglets. The food was slightly different and more abundant than at the other farm. Then came the day—an ordinary working day, it seemed to Samson from the look of the farm—when he was taken on a lead to go to the woods for truffles. Samson trotted along in good spirits. He intended to eat a few truffles today, besides finding them for the man. Somewhere in his brain, Samson was already thinking that he must from the start show this man that he was not to be bossed.
The Bravest
Rat in Venice
The household at the Palazzo Cecchini on the Rio San Polo was a happy, lively one: husband and wife and six children ranging from two to ten years of age, four boys and two girls. This was the Mangoni family, and they were the caretakers. The owners of the Palazzo Cecchini, an English-American couple named Whitman, were away for three months, and probably longer, in London, staying at their townhouse there.
“It’s a fine day! We’ll open the windows and sing! And we’ll clean up this place!” yelled Signora Mangoni from the kitchen as she untied her apron. She was eight months’ pregnant. She had washed up the breakfast dishes, swept away the breadcrumbs, and was facing the crisp, sunny day with the joy of a proprietress. And why not? She and her family had the run of every room, could sleep in whatever beds they wished, and furthermore had plenty of money from the Whitmans to run things in a fine style.
“Can we play downstairs, mama?” asked Luigi, aged ten, in a perfunctory way. Mama would say “No!” he supposed, and he and a couple of brothers and maybe his sister Roberta would go anyway. Wading, slipping, falling in the shallow water down there was great fun. So was startling the passing gondoliers and their passengers just outside the canal door by suddenly opening the door and heaving a bucket of water—maybe on to a tourist’s lap.
“No!” said mama. “Just because today is a holiday—”
Luigi, Roberta and their two brothers Carlo and Arturo went to school officially. But they had missed a lot of days in the last month since the Mangoni family had full possession of the Palazzo Cecchini. It was more fun than school to explore the house, to pretend to own everything, to be able to open any door without knocking. Luigi was about to give a hail to Carlo to join him, when his mother said:
“Luigi, you promised to take Rupert for a walk this morning!”
Had he? The promise, if made, did not weigh much on Luigi’s conscience. “This afternoon.”
“No, this morning. Untie the dog!”
Luigi sighed and went in a waddling, irritated way to the kitchen corner where the Dalmatian was tied to the foot of a tile stove.
The dog was growing plump, and that was why his mother wanted him or Carlo to walk him a couple of times a day. The dog was plump because he was given risotto and pasta instead of the meat diet recommended by Signor Whitman, Luigi knew. Luigi had heard his parents discussing it, and the discussion had been brief: with the price of meat what it was, why feed a dog bistecca? It was an absurdity, even if they had been given the money for it. The dog could just as well eat stale bread and milk, and there was some fish and clam bits after all in the risotto leftovers. A dog was a dog, not a human being. The Mangoni family were now eating meat.
Luigi compromised by letting Rupert lift his leg in the narrow street outside the front door of the palazzo, summoned Carlo who was strolling homeward with a half-finished soda pop in hand, and together they went, with the dog, down the steps behind a door of the front hall.
The water looked half a meter deep. Luigi laughed in anticipation, pushed off his sandals and removed his socks on the steps.
Schluck-slosh! The dark water moved, blindly lapped into stone corners, rebounded. The big, empty square room was semi-dark. Two slits of sunlight showed on either side of the loose door. Beyond the door were more stone steps which went right down into the water of the rather wide canal called the Rio San Polo. Here for several hundred years, before the palazzo had sunk so much, gondolas had used to arrive, discharging well dressed ladies and gentlemen with dry feet into the marble-floored salon where Luigi and Carlo now splashed and slipped in water nearly up to their knees.
The dog Rupert shivered on one of the steps the boys had come down. He was not so much chilly as nervous and bored. He did not know what to do with himself. His routine of happy walks three times a day, milk and biscuits in the morning, a big meal of meat around 6 p.m.—all that was gone. His life now was a miserable chaos, and his days had lost their shape.
It was November, but not cold, not too cold for Luigi’s and Carlo’s informal game of push-the-other. First man down lost, but was rewarded by applause and laughter from the others—usually Roberta and little sister Benita were wading too, or watching from the steps.
“A rat!” Luigi cried, pointing, lying, and at that instant gave Carlo a good push behind his knees, causing Carlo to collapse on his back in the water with a great hollow-sounding splash that hit the walls and peppered Luigi with drops.
Carlo scrambled to his feet, soaked, laughing, making for the steps where the trembling dog stood.
“Look! There’s a real one!” Luigi said, pointing.
“Ha-ha!” said Carlo, not believing.
“There it is!” Luigi slashed the surface of the water with his hand, trying to aim the water at the ugly thing swimming between him and the steps.
“Sissi!” Carlo shrieked with glee and waded towards a floating stick.
Luigi snatched the stick from him and came down with it on the rat’s body—an unsatisfactory blow, rather sliding off the rat’s back. Luigi struck again.
“Grab him by the tail!” giggled Carlo.
“Get a knife, we’ll kill it!” Luigi spoke with bared teeth, excited by the fact the rat might dive and nip one of his feet with a fatal bite.
Carlo was already splashing up the stairs. His mother was not in the kitchen, and he at once seized a meat knife with a triangular blade, and ran back with it to Luigi.
Luigi had battered the rat twice more, and now with the knife in his right hand, he was bold enough to grab the rat’s tail and whirl him up on to a marble ledge as high as Luigi’s hips.
“Ah-i-i! Kill ’im!” Carlo said.
Rupert whined, lifting his head, thought of going up the steps, since his lead dangled, and could not come to any decision, because he had no purpose in going up.
Luigi made a clumsy stab at the rat’s neck, while still holding its tail, missed the neck and struck an eye. The rat writhed and squealed, showing long front teeth, and Luigi was on the brink of releasing its tail out of fear, but came down once more with a blow he intended to be decapitating, but he cut off a front foot instead.
“Ha-ha-ha!” Carlo clapped his hands, and wildly splashed water, more on Luigi than the rat.
“Bastard rat!” cried Luigi.
For a few seconds the rat was motionless, with open mouth. Blood flowed from its right eye, and Luigi came down with the blade on the rat’s right hind foot which was extended with splayed toes, vulnerable against the stone. The rat bit, caught Luigi in the wrist.
Luigi screamed and shook his arm. The rat fell off into the water, and began to swim wildly away.
“Oooh!” said Carlo.
“Ow!” Luigi swished his arm back and forth in the water and examined his wrist. It was merely a pink dot, like a pinprick. He’d been wanting to exaggerate his prowess to his mother, have her nurse his wound, but he’d have to make do with this. “It hurts!” he assured Carlo, and made his way through the water towards the steps. Tears had already come to his eyes, though he felt no pain at all. “Mama!”
The rat scrabbled with one stump of a forepaw and his other good paw against a mossy stone wall, keeping his nose above water as best he could. Around him the water was pinkening with blood. He was a young rat, five months old and not fully grown. He
had never been in this house before, and had come in at the street side via a dry alley or slit along one side of the wall. He had smelled food, or thought he had, rotting meat or some such. A hole had led through the wall, and he had tumbled into water before he knew it, water so deep he had had to swim. Now his problem was to find an exit. His left foreleg and right hind leg smarted, but his eye hurt worse. He explored a bit, but found no hole or slit of escape, and at last he clung to slimy threads of moss by the claws of his right forefoot and was still, rather in a daze.
Some time later, chill and numb, the rat moved again. The water had gone down a little, but the rat was not aware of this, because he still had to swim. Now a narrow beam of light showed in a wall. The rat made for this, squeezed through, and escaped from the watery dungeon. He was in a kind of sewer in semi-darkness. He found an exit from this: a crack in a pavement. His next hours were a series of short journeys to an ashcan’s shelter, to a doorway, to a shadow behind a tub of flowers. He was, in a circuitous way, heading for home. The rat had no family as yet, but was indifferently accepted in the house or headquarters of several rat families where he had been born. It was dark when he got there—the cellar of an abandoned grocery store, long ago plundered of anything edible. The cellar’s wooden door was falling apart, which made entry easy for the rats, and they were in such number no cat would have ventured to attack them in their lair, which had no escape route for a cat but the way the cat would have come.
Here the rat nursed his wounds for two days, unassisted by parents who did not even recognize him as offspring, or by relatives either. At least he could nibble on old veal bones, moldy bits of potato, things that rats had brought in to chew in peace. He could see out of only one eye, but already this was making him more alert, quicker in darting after a crumb of food, quicker in retreating in case he was challenged. This period of semi-repose and recuperation was broken by a torrent of hose water early one morning.
The wooden door was kicked open and the blast of water sent baby rats flying up in the air, smashed a few against the wall, killing them by the impact or drowning them, while adult rats scrambled up the steps past the hose-holder to be met by clubs crashing on their heads and backs, huge rubber-booted feet stamping the life out of them.
The crippled rat remained below, swimming a bit finally. Men came down the steps with big nets on sticks, scooping up corpses. They dumped poison into the water which now covered the stone floor. The poison stank and hurt the rat’s lungs. There was a back exit, a hole in a corner just big enough for him to get through, and he used it. A couple of other rats had used it also, but the rat did not see them.
It was time to move on. The cellar would never be the same again. The rat was feeling better, more self-assured and more mature. He walked and crept, sparing his two sore stumps. Before noon, he discovered an alley at the back of a restaurant. Not all the garbage had fallen into the bins. Pieces of bread, a long steakbone with meat on it lay on the cobblestones. It was a banquet! Maybe the best meal of his life. After eating, he slept in a dry drainpipe, too small for a cat to enter. Best to keep out of sight in daylight. Life was safer at night.
The days passed. The rat’s stumps grew less painful. Even his eye had ceased to hurt. He regained strength and even put on a little weight. His gray, slightly brownish coat became thick and sleek. His ruined eye was a half-closed, grayish splotch, a bit jagged because of the knife’s thrust, but it was no longer running either with blood or lymph. He discovered that by charging a cat, he could make the cat retreat a bit, and the rat sensed that it was because he presented an unusual appearance, limping on two short legs, one eye gone. The cats too had their tricks, puffing their fur up to make themselves look bigger, making throaty noises. But only once had an old ginger tomcat, mangy and with one ear gone, tried to close his teeth on the back of the rat’s neck. The rat had at once attacked a front leg of the cat, bitten as hard as he could, and the cat had never got a grip. When the rat had turned loose, the cat had been glad enough to run away and leap to a windowsill. That had been in a dark garden somewhere.
The days came and went and grew ever colder and wetter, days of sleep in a patch of sun if possible, more often not, because a hole somewhere was safer, nights of prowling and feeding. And day and night the dodging of cats and the upraised stick in the hands of a human being. Once a man had attacked him with a dustbin, slammed it down on the stones, catching the rat’s tail but not cutting any of it off, only giving him pain such as he had not known since the stab in his eye.
The rat knew when a gondola was approaching. “Ho! Aye!” the gondoliers would shout, or variations of this, usually when they were about to turn a corner. Gondolas were no threat. Sometimes the gondolier jabbed at him with an oar, more out of playfulness than to kill him. Not a chance had the gondolier! Just one stab that always missed, and the gondolier had glided past in his boat.
One night, smelling sausage from a tied-up gondola in a narrow canal, the rat ventured on board. The gondolier was sleeping under a blanket. The sausage smell came from a paper beside him. The rat found the remains of a sandwich, ate his fill, and curled up in a coarse, dirty rag. The gondola bobbed gently. The rat was an expert swimmer now. Many a time he had dived underwater to escape a cat that had been bold enough to pursue him into a canal. But cats didn’t care to go below the surface.
The rat was awakened by a bumping sound. The man was standing up, untying a rope. The gondola moved away from the pavement. The rat was not alarmed. If the man saw him and came at him, he would simply jump overboard and swim to the nearest wall of stones.
The gondola crossed the Canale Grande and entered a widish canal between huge palaces which were now hotels. The rat could smell the aromas of fresh roasting pork, baking bread, orange peel and the sharper scent of ham. Some time later, the man maneuvered the gondola to the steps of a house, got out and banged on a door with a round ring of a knocker. From the gunwale, the rat saw a decaying portion of the embankment that would offer foothold, jumped into the water and made for it. The gondolier heard the splash and stomped towards him, yelling “Aye-yeh!” So the rat didn’t climb up at that spot, but swam on, found another accessible place and got to dry pavement. The gondolier was back at the door, knocking again.
That day the rat met a female, a pleasant encounter in a rather damp alley behind a dress shop. It had just rained. Pushing on, the rat found a trail, almost, of sandwich ends, dropped peanuts, and hard corn kernels which he didn’t bother with. Then he found himself in a large open area. It was the Piazza San Marco, where the rat had never been. He could not see all its vastness, but he sensed it. Pigeons in greater number than he had ever seen walked about on the pavement among people who were tossing grain to them. Pigeons sailed down, spread their wings and tails and landed on the backs of others. The smell of popcorn made the rat hungry. But it was broad daylight, and the rat knew he must be careful. He kept to the angle made by the pavement and the walls of the buildings, ready to duck into a passageway. He seized a peanut and nibbled it as he hobbled along, letting the shell fall, keeping the peanut in his mouth, retrieving the other half of the peanut which held a second morsel.
Tables and chairs. And music. Not many people sat in the chairs, and those who did wore overcoats. Here were all manner of croissant crumbs, bread crusts, even bits of ham on the stone pavement among the chairs.
A man laughed and pointed to the rat. “Look, Helen!” he said to his wife. “Look at that rat! At this time of day!”
“Oh! What a creature!” The woman’s shock was genuine. She was nearly sixty, and from Massachusetts. Then she laughed, a laugh of relief, amusement, and with a little bit of fear.
“Good God, somebody’s cut his feet off!” the man said in almost a whisper. “And one eye’s gone! Look at him!”
“Now that’s something to tell the folks back home!” said the woman. “Hand me the camera, Alden!”
The h
usband did so. “Don’t do it now, the waiter’s coming.”
“Altro, signor?” asked the waiter politely.
“No, grazie. Ah, si! Un caffe latte, per piacere.”
“Alden—”
He wasn’t supposed to have more than two coffees a day, one morning, one evening. Alden knew. He had only a few months to live. But the rat had given him a curious zest, a sudden joy. He watched the rat nosing nervously in the forest of chair legs just three feet away, peering with his good eye, darting for the crumbs, eschewing the small, the inferior, the already crushed. “Do it now before he goes,” said Alden.
Helen lifted the camera.
The rat sensed the movement, one of potential hostility and glanced up.
Click!
“I think that’ll be good!” Helen whispered, laughing with a gentle happiness as if she’d just taken the sunset at Sounion or Acapulco.
“In this rat,” Alden began, also speaking softly, and interrupted himself to pick with slightly trembling fingers the end of a dainty frankfurter from the buttery little bun in front of him. He tossed it towards the rat, which drew back a little, then darted for the sausage and got it, chewed it with one foot—the stump—planted on it. Suddenly the sausage vanished from view, and the plump jowls worked. “Now that rat has fortitude!” Alden said finally. “Imagine what he’s been through. Like Venice itself. And he’s not giving up. Is he?”
Helen returned her husband’s smile. Alden looked happier, better than he had in weeks. She was pleased. She felt grateful to the rat. Imagine being grateful to a rat, she thought. When she looked again, the rat had vanished. But Alden was smiling at her.