a mark of near perfection that was only evident on Sunday afternoons or early weekday mornings when the children were still asleep and Almerinda had preoccupied herself with setting the farina to boil.
Pietro’s grandfather, Fiorentino Cavalieri, had also been an artisan. Young Pietro would watch him carefully as he bent hot iron into grillwork for the town’s balconies, gates, and shop signs. Fiorentino had a long white beard, unkempt white hair, and narrow shining eyes. “You learn some trade, Pete. Be sure to, or next thing you know they’ll be sending you to school. There’s already such talk in the North. And whatever happens first in Piemonte will eventually make its way down to the Abruzzi. Listen! Pietro! Find out what your skill is, and use it. Practice it. Make them see it before they take you and turn you into a modern imbecile.” After such a little lecture the old Fiorentino would turn his lively eyes back onto his work, leaving Pietro free to hover like an angel about his shop, for Pietro did indeed feel like an angel in his grandfather’s presence: gifted, fated, noted but unnoticed.
In 1880 Pietro turned fifteen. It was to be the most magical year of his life, the year a well ran dry inside him and he felt a lake filling up in its place; the year his childhood left but he was not yet sure of a thing called manhood; the year every sense of his was unlocked, and the world recreated itself daily before him. When he was well past his prime, and fraught with the problems that only the new country could bring, he sometimes looked back on that year, wanting to both relive and forget it, and able to do neither. For it was during that year that he arose at five o’clock to join two friends on an expedition to climb Mount Arazecca. Wearing his grandfather’s hunting boots to protect his legs from the poisonous, ubiquitous vipere that populated his town, and carrying a knapsack filled with sausages, cheese, bread, and wine, he went to meet Pierluigi and Elio on the bridge at the edge of town: the clear water of the Sangro River broke like crystal over its rocks, as trout rose to the surface and flipped their tails into the cool air. When Pietro turned around to face the town he was leaving he saw it in an unfamiliar light, a pale silver that covered every cobblestone, window, chicken, roof tile, and tree. Only one lamp burned far up the old town hill, and he recognized the window it shone through. It belonged to his grandfather’s house.
“Come on, Pete. Hurry! Hurry!”
He turned back and saw that the others had come, already anxious to find the path that led through the brown grass to the foot of Mount Arazecca. They thrashed through the lifting darkness as if being chased, and addressed one another sporadically and succinctly, as if learning a new way of speaking. Together they felt like reinventing everything that morning: the day was about to dawn for them, and they would direct its course, alone, on their manly expedition.
They saw no vipers, and only one wolfdog nursing her pups just beside the path after the sun had broken. She looked up at them, but didn’t bark, and they passed by hurriedly, disregarding any consideration of pacing themselves during the five-hour climb.
The day’s heat came gently as they began to cross the lower fields of sheep. A watchful shepherd or two waved at them from a distance, then they too grew small below, magically blending in with the still-life of a town whose activity they had known intimately from birth, though never all at once, until now. Young Pietro, his chestnut hair lifting from short gusts of wind, paused more than once to watch the shadows of clouds larger than Castel di Sangro approach, engulf, and then abandon the town.
In those days the railway to Castello had not yet been built, though markers had been laid halfway up the mountainside, past the sheep folds and viper line, where the first black locomotive would steam in from Roccaraso and Cinquemiglia, several years hence. Fiorentino had greeted the news of the impending railroad with caution. Soon, he’d said, they’d be sending in such nonsense as newspapers and city clothes to poison the character of Castello’s young. Pietro and the others took pride in knowing that Mount Arazecca still belonged to them; and to the wild bears, rabbits, wolves, and deer of Abruzzi.
They reached the summit before noon, exhausted and hungry. In one direction lay Castel di Sangro, the first town in a line of towns that dotted the long valley. In every other direction lay the Apennine Mountains, and the dark green hills that made up part of the National Park of Abruzzi. A stone pit there at the top contained the blackened ashes of many previous expiditions: the boys made their fire in it and held their sausages into it on long sticks. They ate them between thick slices of hard-crusted bread, and washed them down with a communal bottle of Fiorentino’s wine.
Pietro would have been content to take a siesta afterward, lying on the last shreds of green grass and watching hawks circle overhead; but Elio, as thin and agile as an Abruzzese deer, decided to climb the iron skeleton of a cross that townsmen had planted on the peak sometime before he or the others had been born. He reached its highest bar before Pietro had turned around, and there he sat, yelling “Screw you, Signor Toschi! Take your mangy old goat and give it to her up the ass…” Pierluigi, having finished the wine, fell back in raucous laughter, his generous stomach heaving. When he finished, the shimmering silence returned, but only for a moment. Pietro, who was only just beginning to close his eyes, straightened and sat up when he heard the thud. Elio had fallen from the cross.
At first they could not see him, and thought he had rolled down the hill. But soon his disheveled black hair rose up, and stayed surprisingly still. Now Pietro knew all was not well; he tripped over rocks on his way to the foot of the cross. Elio looked up at him, serious but still light-headed from the wine, and said:
“I broke my goddam leg.”
Pierluigi, having inherited a robust waistline from his mother’s family, tired easily, and was of little use in helping Elio back down the summit. Pietro, on the other hand, was lean and sinewy: his muscles responded to any task at hand, and his family was known for their endurance during times of physical hardship. He carried Elio on his back three-quarters of the way down, until they met a farmer with his mule, which he lent to them on the condition that they return it in good condition, watered and fed.
When Pietro recounted this adventure to the old Fiorentino later, Fiorentino stopped briefly from his work, looked up, and said:
“That jackass. Surely it was Giuseppe Andelucci. May his ancestors stay nailed in their coffins on Judgement Day.”
These were the condemnations, the self-security and effortless wit, that made the adolescent Pietro ache to love his grandfather. If he could, he’d often thought, he would grow himself a long white beard too, and the more his grandmother would curse it and try to attack it with her shears, the longer he would let it grow. Why? “Just-so, that’s all,” as Fiorentino would have responded to those annoying little questions people ask one another about why they do what they do, live where they live, eat what they eat, or screw who they screw.
Fiorentino died the following year, when Pietro was sixteen. And Pietro didn’t dare ask anyone why he had died, because he already knew the answer, in words that were painfully familiar to him: Just-so, that’s all. It was a phrase his children, and their children, would hear often, though they would never know from where it came.
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