17
Oblong shades worried the walk of Pietro. The naked branches of the trees were bony hands of ready witches to grab him/it: Maria's Point Oru claws. Announced by a shiver, a feeling of uneasiness forced him/it to mind its threatening thoughts. Geneva was still betraying Daniel Minghetti, Pietro knew him/it. A look was enough for him to understand the thoughts of his/her daughter. It had to intervene in first person to put elegant to everything this, there were no other alternatives. It had only to contrive as.
Shaded by the trees of the park, in front of the building of the direction, the motocarrozzetta of Antioco Perra was surrounded by about ten people that you/they attended with the knives in hand. Nobody had intention to make him the party, they had the knives because Antioco was a knife sharpener. Pietro drew near and saw him/it rhythmically press the pedaliera of the car to sharpen the blades. The wheel of stone twirled clockwise emitting sparks to the contact with the steel. The practical hands of Antioco quickly rubbed on the wheel both the faces of the blade, producing an annoying screeching to listen. «You come, men, women and children, get thin here knives, cutlasses and coltellini» it sing-songed without dissuading the look from the rotations of the circular stone. Antioco had been one of the carters: workers that using some wagons hauled by oxen transported up to Cagliari the mineral extracts in the mines, for then to reenter loads of explosive. That trip massacrante of going and return it had the duration of six days and it exclusively foresaw two standstills. The animals finished the run exhausted, as Antioco and his/her companions, forced to crowd by hand the load in the holds of the next ships to ferry him/it in the peninsula. In 1932, with the birth of the foundry of St. Gavino and private the railway line of the mines, the carters had been forced to preoperating pension. Luckily, or for misfortune, according to the points of view. Antioco rather than to cry I am set you/he/she had spent all the savings of a life to purchase a motocarrozzetta and a car to sharpen the second-hand knives and you/he/she had put on in really to be a knife sharpener.
«Antioco I have to sharpen four knives!» a young mother exclaimed delivering him that small arsenal.
«It is all right, Giannina, makes you four knives for three liras. I discount quantity and greet me Gigio» Antioco responded.
The woman smiled and picked up the regards for his/her husband. Ginisceddu, the greatest child of Antioco, fumbled in the large case of the motocarrozzetta. It systematized in beautiful sight of the bottles of glass filled with the milk. Antioco instigated him/it to talk to a light push with the elbow. «Today for you fresh milk of sheep» it made to know in encumbered way the young one.
«You are sure that I/you/he/she am fresh?» he/she asked tzia Elvira Maccioni, one of those petulant vecchines that rummaged six of it or seven cassettes to the search of that good before purchasing a mandarin. Elvira had the face completely covered with brown stains.
Ginisceddu confirmed. «Certain, lady! This is milk of the pastures of Luiso Perra, dad's brother.» It raised the cork cork from one of the bottles to make to feel to the woman the perfume of the fresh milk. «Feels that they perfume and it will tell me!»
Elvira sniffed. «It seems good, I trust me. Give me of it a liter, I am tired of the usual milk of goat. There is not other here!»
Antioco inserted him. «Some that would be some difficulty to pasture in the steep costonis of this mountain for the sheep. Antioco is here for this and brings you genuine milk from the pastures of Guspini.»
Tinedda, a silfide of girl around twenty-five years of age, did him before. «You would not have any foremilk? My child is down of rope in this period, you/he/she seems a ranocchia with the eyes of out.»
«Today it is fortunate Mrs Tinedda. Antioco has thought about all.» It abandoned for an instant the knife that handled on the base of the car grinder and it pointed out a box of cardboard systematized to a side of the large case to Ginisceddu. The boy the takings and it threw out other bottles containing foremilk. They distinguished from those of milk for a cross engraved in the cork cork.
«Here to her, lady! Milked foremilk few minutes after the birth of the little lamb» it said Ginisceddu smiling.
The woman took the bottle and paid satisfied. September and October were fortunate months for his/her/their children. They ate the boiled of that strange minute duck with the thin bones and the roast one of a kidskin that had the sharp teeth as those of a wolf. But you/they could also feed with liters of foremilk: a tonic, to said of the elderly ones. In September and October the most greater number of the births of lambs was verified. The first milk milked after the birth it was so fat that once boiled it clotted him as the ricotta, and you/he/she could also be eaten with a fork. The foremilk boiled with sugar and lemon gave he/she knows casada. His/her children him strafogavano with that delicacy of which you/they were greedy, dealt after all with tonic.
Antioco was massaged the whirlbones. «Tomorrow it will rain. I feel the knees that he is numbing. My rheumatisms mark the time.»
Ginisceddu looked at him/it worried. «If it rains as we do, dad? They again touch tomorrow us Guspini and Marceddì!»
Antioco shook the shoulders. «And as you want that we do, my child, will do as they do to Bosa!»
«And as they do to Bosa?»
«They leave that it rains!»
Seeing him/it amazement of the boy the customers they tried to turn the laughters into a sudden attack of cough. His/her father had bewitched him with one of the so many Sardinian proverbs from the ambiguous meaning.
«But also in the other places they allow to rain when it rains» it protested Ginisceddu in abrupt way, feeling himself/herself/itself taken around.
«Note, therefore we will allow to also rain us!» it confirmed Antioco making him the occhiolino.
Shook Ginisceddu the head. His/her father was incorrigible in as for imbecilities. The turn of Pietro came.
«Good morning, marshal. What can I do for you?»
Pietro leaned a butcher rapier on the base of the car grinder. «Mrs Loi owes to badly have used him/it and the blade is hollowed out in some points.»
Took Antioco the rapier. «We see what I can do!» It inspected the blade as him same taking the aim with the reed of a rifle and it sent forth a toward of disappointment. «The blade is very damaged but I believes to succeed in putting again her/it in sixth. However you have to leave him/it to me for a few days. To house I have some special utensils to cut out her/it. It will return as it was, only slightly thinner.»
Pietro nodded. «Perfect! Of these times there is not then so so much meat to be butchered but it is better always to prevent a possible rain of heads of livestock.»
Laughed Antioco, without doing him/it for convenience of his/her business. «You are right marshal. It goes worse and worse. Yesterday the fishermen of Marceddì were in revolt against the Castoldis. It seems that half is not enough theirs fished for power usufruire of the lagoon anymore.»
With his/her motocarrozzetta Antioco made the spool among Montevecchio, Guspini, Ingurtosu and Marceddì, and he/she saw of it of all the colors.
«Poor thing!» Pietro exclaimed. If his father-in-law Bernardino had still been alive you/he/she would have tried to kill the Castoldis, the family owner of the lagoon.
"That Alberto is worse a leech of his/her father-in-law! Marceddì has paid her novantamila liras and he/she takes to draw it so many money how many the fishes that splash about you are. There that is one whom he/she knew well how much it was worth to get married among the thighs open of Zely Sanna, the daughter of the master of Montevecchio. When the old Giovanni has bursted, Alberto is not made to pray for jousting his/her fortunes" you/he/she said Bernardino of Alberto Castoldi son-in-law of the ex magnate of the mines.
Shook Antioco the head. «By now it is tried to impoverish only who doesn't even have the least necessary to be defined poor.»
Pietro made a face schifata. «It will change all this!»
Antioco scrutinized the sky as him same sif
ting the answer of the Lord to the forecast of the marshal. Then he/she still spoke. «Instead I was this morning to Ingurtosu. An American airplane has been dejected from the Germans and you/he/she is fallen on the beach of Piscinas. They say that there is inside still the dead body of the pilot and in country it doesn't speak of other. Here to thing it brings the war!»
Pietro started. You/he/she had not seen nearby never a military airplane destroyed from and its choice to be with Geneva had made him lose the possibility to make himself/herself/themselves be worth in battle. The clamor of the heroic enterprises completed by its colleagues policemen had also reached Montevecchio. In the battle of Culquaber, in Abyssinia, the first group mobilized of the Policemen, without ammunition and restocking from months, you/he/she was immolated fighting to the white weapon against the English. In the battle of Eluet el Asel instead, four hundred parachutists of the policemen, appiedati, had stopped the advance English giving the time to the italo-German army to retire himself/herself/themselves. When these news had reached him/it, Pietro had been proud to belong to the policemen and at the same time you/he/she had tried some you/he/she is ashamed. He was calm home with Geneva while his/her colleagues, to defend the country, battled without the fear to be killed.
Some pigeons raised him in flight from the trees making to fall one of the last rains of foliage, colored corianders that circled in the air.
Pietro left the rapier in the hands of Antioco and reentered to house.
The desire to see that dejected airplane became in a few hours uncontrollable. In the flash in which Pietro crossed again in motion to big speeds in front of the park, the bottles of milk had disappeared from the motocarrozzetta and the wheel of stone you/he/she still turned for the last knives.
The road that brought to Ingurtosu was a mulattiera disseminated by ditches that the fruit of exploded mines they seemed. The thin branches of heathers and filliree sbordavano on the road, making even more her hold. They noticed some brooks with the water from the garish colors. The drainages of the mines were tied up to the pestilences of fishes that increased of year in year. The fishermen that complained him were beaten out of the lagoon and you/they would not have fished anymore for how much you/they had lived. Also this would have made to burst the liver to Bernardino. The drainages of the laveries in some place also had to end. The little rivers color rust that, flowing among the stones, they ended up plunging himself/herself/themselves in the waters adjacent to the lagoon they confirmed the fears of the fishermen. On the banks of that orange rivulets they didn't even grow the thorns.
Montevecchio reigned the countries from the tall one, Ingurtosu contrarily it expanded him at the end of a steep descent. Villas, public buildings and structures of extraction could be individualized with some kilometer of advance. The motorbike Guzzi he left to the left the village and it continued right-hand for the sea of Piscinas. From the last tornante of the mountain the immense dunes were seen, that decreased up to disappear in the extended chilometrica of sand from the beaches of Pistis and Tower of the Pirates that from Gutturu and frumini it arrived until after Scivu. In distance people and jeeps were noticed close to the presumed heap of wrecks of the airplane. In front of the sea there was another sea, constituted by million of grains of sugar of reed that returned reflexes ambrati. It was the beach: a boundless arabesque created by the depths furrows left by wagons and a halves of curious. The sea was blue and calm as a cup of oil. You melted with the clear sky cancelling to the horizon the line that divided them.
Metallic rails crossed the beach. They mailed in the gallery of a well of extraction that defaced the uncontaminated loneliness of that place.
Pietro parked the motorbike just before the beach. It was better to proceed afoot. Holes surrounded by heaps of sand testified that someone had already run aground.
The pointed bushes of rush and sparto sprouted in the sand here and there. Tower of the Pirates was an open coffer that exhibited gold dust for beach and casting of fused silver for sea. The flowers of the ravastrello were small pink sapphires as grains of pomegranate and the white santolina it was like ivory and mother pearl.
The green jeeps belonged to the German army and colonel Basthuberr's greyish outline it was graven in the background of silvered reflexes.
The point of the airplane was planted in the sand and a shovel of the helix it sprouted from earth as the lopsided stem of a birch tree. The tail, without more rudder and fuselage, were broken and you/he/she had invaded the box of the pilot. A folded up wing was still hooked for three quarters to the aircraft: as a plow you/he/she had left behind of itself, for about ten meters, a furrow in the beach. The other wing floated in the waterline as a float. A green olive with darker stains reigned on the back of the I air. The visible parts of the abdomen approached more to a grey celestial.
Pietro scrutinized the carcass of the airplane with the hands leaned on the sides. Its shade was projected on the sand drawing an ancient pitcher. The German soldiers and some curious were immovable to few meters from the wrecks. It seemed that someone had implored the silence and you/he/she had been satisfied.
Basthuberr acknowledged Pietro but it kept on fixing the airplane. It had the joined hands. It seemed to pray in that desolate laying.
Pietro still advanced toward the airplane, you/he/she put on a hand in front of the mouth and you/he/she understood: Basthuberr was not fixing the wrecks of the airplane but the dead body that that steel coffin contained. A blackened arm, of certain burnt, it dangled along the side of the aircraft. The broken tail had invaded the box crushing the pilot up to the sternum. The overall of the dead body, a blood's soup by now clotted, was torn and it showed it lavishes wounds on the skin. You/they had been produced by the splinters of the aircraft or simply from the bomb that you/he/she had demolished him/it.
Pietro made small, small, as a little one to which is revealed that dad native and the Epiphany don't exist. "Then it was this the show that the policemen had seen in Africa"?, he/she thought. "A cemetery of wrecks and one of dead bodies!"
«Then the war is so: a place where the soldiers feel to sing and to dance the music of the death» it whispered. And pronouncing that zeugma it realized as the man was scanty. Of as he/she lived with the fixation that the only episteme was the search of the perfection: to eliminate the dregs to reach the perfect race the Aryan race.
Was its head a stray dog stung by a poisonous question as an invasion of thirsty mints: because the man ever had to go to the spasmodic search of his/her perfection? Possession of the defects was so beautiful and to show them. They made every unique person, they remembered every day the weakness of the men and they made to feel more alive. His/her wife for example had a big mole as soon as above the navel. After having made the love Pietro he/she was extended to observe that imperfection that only he knew and you/he/she could appreciate. Every defect cancelled the possibility to see one day for road the clone of him same. What horrendous world would have been if everybody had been beautiful, intelligent and healthy. There would not have been even the taste to choose him a companion. You/he/she would have been enough to close the eyes and to point out at random one of them.
Only the strongest had to survive, as in the savanna. But as the shoulders you/he/she could turn to the elderly ones that for a life you/they had thrown you on, or to kill a sick child as his/her daughter Geneva?
The scientists were trying to give to the man of the characteristics that you/they didn't belong him. Pietro had read from some part of a discovery folgorante, that had underlined a decrease of weight of twenty-one grams in the exact instant of the death of every examined individual. You told that that twenty-one grams that suddenly they escaped to the bodily weight they were not anything else other than the weight of the soul.
Pietro tightened the teeth that almost squirted from the gums. Those ideas could not sediment in its mind. You/he/she would have spit in front of whoever it sustained that his/her wife's souls, or of an innocent baby as Giuseppi
nos Masala, had the same weight of those of Hitler or Stalin. No! They didn't even have to try to thrust him in head certain minchiates. Hitler and Stalin had everything, less that a soul. And it didn't concern at all a political matter. You was exasperating some ideas. You tried to convince with the strength other men to favor those ideas without sharing her. Pietro was not a clairvoyant but he knew well that those same ideas could withstand until when you/he/she would have lasted the violence that sustained her. It is few that point would have cared you/he/she if the oppressors had been communist or fascist, republican or monarchic. The theater of their horrors would always have reserved an only end: elegiaco and predictable.
It had a shiver and been surprised of as all that discourses of liberty and tolerance they circled in his/her mind; really him that you/he/she had thought about killing a" different."
"And if Lucio deserved my daughter"?, he/she wondered, arburesa turning himself/herself/itself in the bloody wound.
You rubbed the hand some times on the chin, scraping off the fingernails against the prickly beard of one day. «Lucio, Lucio» it was said. «Thing I have to do with you?»
So many years before, when it lent service with the mobile battalions, to give a demonstration of their rebellion the communists you/they had seized a young fascist. The black shirts of the voluntary militia, for revenge, you/they had beaten up four boys of the near binges to the communists. Three of them were made two months of hospital, one had not been so fortunate and it were dead because of the lesions. That death had been the death sentence for the abducted youth. You/he/she had been found again after a few days, thrown in a channel of drainage. Pietro had seen the dead body of the boy with the face pulped by one shot. The father of that youth had gone then in barracks to sign a deposition. Before andar by you/he/she had looked at Pietro in the eyes and you/he/she had told him: «The man is the beast more beast that exists. It attacks and he/she kills his similar, without eating them for pure folly. At least the animals they kill for instinct to survive. And unlike the beasts that you/they quickly kill their prey and almost without bringing sufferings, the man is crueller, sadistic. It grants the hope, the deceptive hope to be able to survive between difficulties and atrocity, a hope that in reality there has not been never, since the principle. Does tell me her, that hope has my child now?»
Pietro to the epoch had the same age of the killed boy. You/he/she had not answered, some because he/she didn't know whether to answer and some because it didn't fully share that consideration. But today, in front of the schifezzes that were making the life a dump of frustration, you/he/she could say to have the well clear ideas on the nature of that twenty-one grams of soul. That physiological decrease had a less noble cause of that that was wanted to make to believe; it was something organic. That twenty-one grams were the weight of the last stupid given birth by the hole of the culo; of the last urination that squirted from the private bladder of every control. The man, and he didn't make exception, it had the same origins of the animals: of the dogs that crushed for road by the automobiles, in unison with the death, him cacavano and they pissed I set; of the rabbits, that drilled by the little balls of a cartridge, they forced the hunters to hold I hung them for the ears to lasciar to drain the merda and the piss for a few minutes.
The man was so, an animal, not a God. And the merda and the piss also had to have a weight. If a man was left naked to die only in a room, you/he/she would give the impression to be dead drowned in the puddle of his/her same physiological necessities. A last combination among piss and merda that it had a well precise weight: twenty-one grams.
«Marshal, has she come to also make himself/herself/themselves an idea of the war?» It was colonel Basthuberr's voice and it dragged Pietro away from thoughts that became more and more suffocating.
«Any communication of this demolition had not come me. I have known him from the knife sharpener!»
«Marshal, has told already her that the army treats the military matters with the maximum reserve.»
Pietro wrinkled the forehead. «I understand, but it is fallen in Italian territory and in my zone of competence!»
Basthuberr made spallucce. «It doesn't depend on me. The official communications depart from the field of Villacidro and I are competence of the captain.»
Pietro nodded with a grimace. «I know him/it, colonel, we am only the pedestrians of the chess.»
Basthuberr still looked at the body of the pilot. «You look as it is ended in this damned war!»
Pietro uttered a sigh. «Colonel, has novelty on Pertzogiu?»
The colonel stared at him/it severe. «What I have to say a novelty is not her: holds the illness of his/her daughter to the wide one from indiscreet ears. You remembers that the physicians of the Nazi army love to serve experiments on particular cases as the twins or people affette as rare and incomprehensible illnesses. The epilepsy reenters of certain among these.»
Pietro imagined his/her daughter's image vivisected by a scalpel tightened by hands put on of gloves, under the cold light of lamps from clinic, and you/he/she shivered.