Otherwise, just about no one in town continued to keep company with the Brunis. Iofa, the carter, would show up now and then for a question of work or to get some information. Despite his failing health, his hobbling walk and his bizarre looks, he wasn’t afraid of anybody, nor was anybody afraid of him.
The summer that year was even hotter and more suffocating than usual, making work in the fields tougher and more tiring. The water in the steeping ponds rotted and let off a nauseating stench which spread on the thin mist that hovered above the surface when it got dark and the air cooled down. The only things that could survive in that turbid sewer water were the catfish who hunkered down on the muddy bottom without ever moving.
When, towards the end of the autumn, the heat finally let up, they started the harvest. Golden, ultra sweet grapes that produced an extraordinary wine. The Brunis still sang as they picked, in part to forget their worries, in part because the colors, the fragrance and the light still seemed a blessing from God.
The swallows left the third week of October. By Saint Martin’s day the wine was already in the barrels and the wind scattered the red and yellow leaves among the grapevines, making them swirl like butterflies. Now Armando too had decided to marry and Clerice was quite surprised indeed. What woman would agree to marry this peculiar son of hers?
“Lucia, mamma, Lucia Monti,” explained Armando. “Do you know her?”
Clerice regarded him with a perplexed expression: “Lucia Monti? Where’s she from? Not those Montis who live at the Botteghetto?”
“That’s her!” exclaimed Armando, satisfied.
Clerice scowled.
“She’s beautiful, mother.”
“She is beautiful, but you do know, don’t you, why no one else has chosen her yet?”
Armando dropped his head and said only: “I like her. I don’t care about anything else.”
‘The Montis are a tainted breed, my son. That woman may be beautiful but she’ll bring you trouble. Leave her be, let someone else have her.’
“Mamma, I know her very well. It’s true, she’s a bit strange at times, but nothing more. As long as you don’t get her angry.”
“You’re a grown man, son, and you don’t need someone to tell you what to do or what not to do. Remember, though, that I’m warning you: forget about her now, while you’re still in time. She’s not the only one with a nice bum and bosom! And anyway, you’ll see, in five or six year’s time the spell will be broken and you’ll have a creature on your hands that you won’t know what to do with.”
Armando would not listen to reason and he married Lucia Monti at the end of November, on a cold, gray day. He was afraid that she would change her mind and he didn’t want to risk losing her by waiting for the spring, the season in which just about everyone got married. He knew that he’d never again find another girl so beautiful.
He was given the bedroom that had been Gaetano and Silvana’s, because no one else had wanted to sleep there even though space in the house had been running out and they’d had to convert part of the hayloft into a bedroom. The wedding lunch was plain and unpretentious because with Floti gone, there wasn’t much hope for anything finer. Floti’s absence weighed heavily on the festivities, but there was occasion for merriment nonetheless. To make sure of this, Armando took it upon himself to tell a number of spicy stories having married life as their common theme.
“Have you heard the one about Lazzari, the hunchback?” he began. He was talking about a blacksmith who lived in town. “Well, old Lazzari gets into a fight with his neighbor, who did something to annoy him, and now he’s bent on giving him tit for tat. He knows that every morning, when this neighbor gets up to go to work, it is still dark out. So Lazzari waits until he leaves, sneaks into the house behind him and, quiet as a mouse, slips into the wife’s bed, with her still sleeping! While it is still dark, he does what a wife could expect from a husband in bed and then, with her all relaxed and just about to fall back asleep, Lazzari the hunchback sticks her backside with a fork and runs off in the dark before she can see who he is.
“When her husband gets back that night, dead tired, she’s waiting for him behind the door with her rolling pin and she clobbers him so hard he can’t go to work for three days!”
Roaring laughter and the guests, tipsy by now, added their own stories until the cake and coffee were ready to be served. The bride laughed as well, but in a coarse, unbecoming way that embarrassed the others and put a frown on her mother-in-law’s face. By dusk the party was breaking up.
Clerice served some of the leftovers for dinner and then everyone retired, the men first of all, while she and Maria and a couple of the daughters-in-law cleared the table and began to wash the dishes. No sooner had they begun than they heard a scream of terror coming from the floor above them, as if someone were being murdered.
“Mercy!” exclaimed Clerice, dropping the soap into the sink. “What’s happening up there?” She took off her apron and rushed up the stairs, stopping in front of the door to the newlyweds’ room.
“Armando, what’s happening?”
Armando came to open the door dressed in his nightshirt and looking all disheveled. Clerice could see the bride standing in a corner on the other side of the room, half-undressed, eyes wide, shivering with cold and fear.
“Out,” she said to Armando, “but what on earth did you do to her?”
“Nothing, mamma, I swear it, I just got close to her, to . . . ”
“I understand, I understand. Just go now, this one here is out of her mind.” She entered the room, muttering, “What did I tell him?”
Armando went into his mother’s room because he was cold and he lay there under the covers waiting wide awake to be able to go back to his rightful place, but time passed and not a thing was heard. Finally Clerice appeared with a candle in hand: “Where are you?” she asked, raising the candle and looking around the room for him.
“I’m here, mamma. I just got into bed because I was cold.”
“Listen to me, are you sure you didn’t do anything strange to her?”
“No, are you serious? I just got close and well, you know, I was ready . . . ” Armando tried to explain, embarrassed.
“I understand, I understand. You can go back to your bed now. I’ve told her that you won’t do anything to her and you’ll both sleep and that’s all. Then you’ll have to see, a little at a time . . . you have to treat her like a child, understand? Not jump on her like a goat.”
“Mamma, I didn’t do that, I . . . ” Armando tried to justify himself, but Clerice stopped him.
“I’m afraid the problems are starting even sooner than I expected.” She refrained from adding ‘I told you so,’ because it seemed completely useless.
The next day it snowed.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
That winter, Fonso was invited to tell his stories at a number of different farms, some of them quite far from the town, but none so far that he couldn’t get there on foot. He was happy to go: first of all, because he liked having an audience who were enchanted by listening to his tales, and then because they always gave him something, especially food, wine and wood for the fire, and in those times that was a lot. Some gave him a salame, others a plucked rooster, and others a big oak or elm log to burn in the fireplace. The most generous offered him his choice; they’d say: “Fonso, any trunk that you can manage to hoist to your shoulders and carry home is yours.” This was said with a sly smile, as if to say let’s see if your shoulders are as good as your tongue. And when Fonso had finished telling his story and everyone said goodnight and went to bed, he went out into the courtyard in the moonlight and picked up the biggest trunk he could carry on his back and away he would go, trudging through the snow for as far as a kilometer. Every so often he’d lean one end on the ground, so he could rest a bit, then he’d ease himself under the trunk again until he had it solidly on his shoulders
, straighten up and go on.
But he’d go to the Bruni house for nothing, because there was another, greater reward waiting there. He was crazy in love with Maria. And that year, more people had shown up seeking lodging than ever before. There was one fellow who claimed that he’d been part of the band of Adani and Caprari, the two famous bandits who, in the saddles of their Frera motorcycles like knights errant, robbed the rich to give to the poor. He’d worked with them as a highway robber for four years before his two bosses were brought down in a gunfight with sergeant Capponi’s carabinieri in the plains north of Modena. When he’d had a couple of glasses too many, the Brunis could hear him screeching in the middle of the night:
“When the moon sets sail over the hill
That’s when we’re ready to kill, kill, kill!”
Maria was terrified of him; when she brought him food he would look at her and roll his eyes and say, just like some ogre in a fairy tale: “I’m starving for a bit of the nice, tender meat of a Christian!” He would burst into hysterical, burbling laughter while she swiftly put his plate of soup down on the ground and took to her heels.
No one else, obviously, gave him a second thought. Except Armando, lying still in his bed with his eyes wide open next to his cold, numb wife. When he heard the shrill voice of that braggart piercing the night, he would shiver:
“The first attack was all mine:
We saw a lady dressed very fine
My knife went into her neck so white
We got her money without a fight!”
It was bitter cold that winter. Icicles hung from the gutters like crystal daggers for weeks and the hoar frost dressed the trees in white lace that the pale foggy sun couldn’t manage to melt. It was winters like this that Hotel Bruni offered shelter to a full house. The cowherd would open two or three bales of hay and spread it out in a corner of the stable where wayfarers could stretch out comfortably and warmly. At meal time, Clerice sent each of them a steaming bowl of soup and a small flask of wine, convinced that Our Lord himself might be hiding in any of those poor creatures, roaming through the night to test whose heart was hard and who instead had compassion for their fellow men.
Some of the guests even did something to deserve all of that benevolence. They helped to care for the animals or took out the manure or fixed the chairs or put a new handle on a shovel or hoe. In that case, they had dinner with the family because it was only right that someone who pitched in to help should be able to put their feet under a table.
It sometimes happened, in seasons like that one, that a woman came knocking at their door. It was very rare, but sometimes it happened. In that case, Clerice opened the little room where the vinegar was kept, because she didn’t want trouble of any sort. There was one woman in particular, not all there in her head, who had come several times; that year she had shown up at the beginning of December and gave no signs of wanting to leave, although January was almost over. When they asked her who she was and where she came from, she would always answer with the same sing-song phrase: “Poor Desolina, her mind is unsound, poor thing . . . ” She seemed to be mechanically repeating a diagnosis that she had been given lord knows where. One of those rare times that she seemed to be clear-headed she told them that, before she discovered Hotel Bruni, she had knocked and knocked at the door of the presbytery, back in Don Massimino’s day, but that no one opened the door for her.
“I believe you!” replied Clerice. “Priests can’t be having women in their house at night!”
Some claimed to know her story: she was a widow who had lived up in the hills with her only daughter, working an unproductive plot of land, all weeds and stones, from morning till night. One day her daughter seemed to fall ill: she was pale, subject to sudden fainting, nausea and vomiting.
“You’re not pregnant, are you?” she’d asked the girl. “Look, if you’re pregnant, I’ll kill you. I told you that the owner of this land will drive us off if he hears of such a thing. We’ll end up begging on the streets. We’ll die of starvation!”
The girl was terrified by those threats and could find no rest. She felt she was to blame for of all of the misfortune that would befall them and finally, no longer able to bear the sense of guilt that was crushing her, she drank some mercury salts and died a horrible death. Her mother went crazy and the village doctor had her shut up in the insane asylum in Reggio Emilia. Whether she escaped or had been released, no one knew. That’s where she must have learned the phrase: “Poor Desolina, her mind is unsound . . . unsound insane . . . ”
Nobody knew whether such a cruel story was true or had been made up, but the perennially bewildered look in the woman’s eyes made you imagine she was fighting a perpetual battle against herself. As if she were forever trying to forget or to repress intolerable memories. In any case, despite it all, Fonso’s stories seemed somehow to quiet her, acting like a balm to soothe her frantic thoughts. She listened raptly without batting an eyelid. If she could, she would sit there for hours and hours. You could see that she was escaping the reality of a past that would not let her be; the voice of the narrator transported her to another time and another place.
When the stories were over and she had to reach her room by crossing the courtyard, she pulled her raggedy shawl tight around her shoulders and her body seemed to shrink until it nearly disappeared, prey once again to memory.
One night late in January, as Fonso was weaving his tales and had paused for dramatic effect, a hard knock at the stable door interrupted the deep silence.
“Who’s there?” asked Checco.
“It’s me,” replied a voice hoarse from the cold. Checco went to open the door and there was Floti. Pale, his face gaunt and unshaven, his eyes shining, perhaps with fever. Maria leapt into his arms and Clerice dried her eyes on the corner of her apron. The others, both family and strangers, were struck dumb by the sudden apparition. His brothers, especially, did not know what to say. It was Fonso who had the presence of mind to break that stony silence. He jumped up with the flask to pour Floti a glass of wine.
“How’s it going, Floti?”
“Much better, now that I’m home,” he replied. He drained the glass and held it out again. “Give me another,” he said, “and you go on, I didn’t want to interrupt your story. It was your favorite, wasn’t it, Fonso?” and he started reciting:
“From beyond the sea I have come
to collect the waters of the river Ossillo
that heal any kind of malady.”
There was a moment of embarrassment. The circumstances would have called for everyone to leave, returning to their own homes or their own straw beds to allow the Brunis to speak with their brother who’d been released—or had escaped?—from prison. But no one made a move and Fonso understood that they truly expected him to continue. And continue he did.
“Go on, Fonso, you’re just getting to the good part, if I remember well,” repeated Floti, beckoning to Checco to follow him outside. His brother wrapped himself up in his tabarro and followed Floti out.
They faced each other in the icy courtyard while the sky sputtered fine snow at them.
“How are things going, Checco?”
“Badly. It’s every man for himself, mother can’t keep the family together any more. Savino wants to go. He has a girlfriend, and a job at the Ferretti farm. They’re going to get married.”
“We’ve all gotten married. That’s normal.”
“Yes,” answered Checco, “that’s normal.”
“What else?”
“We bought a new bull for mounting the cows.”
“I noticed, last stall on the left. Beautiful animal.”
“Right, I paid a good price for him. Name’s Nero.”
“I want to know whether you spoke badly of me while I was inside.”
“Why, Floti, what does it matter?”
“I want to know who organized the trap
that sent me to prison.”
“Prison has turned you bitter, I can understand that, but you have to try and forget. Revenge won’t get you anywhere: the way things are going, it would only make them worse.”
“I’ll find out anyway. What about the storyteller? He’s more here than at his own house, it seems.”
“Maria in is love with him, and he with her. What’s wrong with that, Floti? He’s a good man, a hard worker, he’s always come to help when we’ve needed a hand.”
“He does that so you’ll accept him. But that’s something I’ll deal with later. Do you know who betrayed me?”
“Floti, it’s damn cold out here. Can’t we talk about this tomorrow? What’s the hurry? Is there some reason you want to talk now? How did you get out?”
“I was acquitted of the charge. The idiot who accused me wasn’t even smart enough to get rid of the jacket that his pistol put a hole through. The judge sequestered it and the experts established that the shot came from inside his own pocket. This guy accidently shot himself and they decided to put my name on it.”
“It’s turned out all right for you this time, but this may not be the last you hear from them. If they’ve tried once, they’ll try again. Go to sleep now, your bedroom is waiting for you. Mother has always kept it clean and neat. She was sure you’d be back.”
Floti nodded gravely.