A Winter's Night (33 page)

“But my place is with the child who needs me the most, without me being a burden for him. I think it's best I go and live with Dante. He's found work as a tenant farmer on a property near Cavazzona that's one hundred and fifty furlongs. He already has three children and his wife is pregnant. I can still be useful to them; I can cook, feed the chickens, heat the water for the pigs, take care of the little ones while their parents are in the fields . . . They need me, Checco.

“You're talking to me about a life that I've never lived, and at my age it's not easy to change. I wouldn't know what to do with myself all day; I've always been accustomed to working. Please don't take it badly. I'll come to visit and we'll have a cup of coffee together on Sundays after mass. And you can come to visit me whenever you like.”

Checco dropped his head without managing to say a word, and Clerice understood that he had taken it badly. He must have been hoping she would accept and her refusal had hurt his feelings. All he said, finally, was, “Whatever you wish, mother.”

Fonso wanted to get married right away, at that point, because the new public housing development was almost ready. The windows weren't in yet, but that wasn't a problem. The problem was Maria, who felt responsible for her niece and nephew. One day at the end of October, Floti finally sent word: he had found a place to live and a job and he wanted his children to join him. He asked Maria to bring them to the station of Bologna, since he still couldn't set foot in town. One foggy morning, Maria dressed them in the nicest clothes they had, tidied them up, put a pretty ribbon in Ines's hair, had the farmhand hitch up the horse to the cart, and headed to Bologna. She had begun to feel like they were her own, and she wept during the whole journey, at the thought of separating from them. Corrado, the elder of the two, kept asking her: “What's wrong,
zia
?”

By the time she got to the station, Maria was almost hoping her brother wouldn't be there. Instead, she soon saw him emerge from the fog and steam of the locomotive and come towards them. Floti embraced the three of them tightly, then brought them to a café where they could have something hot to drink. They spent a couple of hours together before it was time to go. The children kept looking at the ground because they were a bit afraid of their father, who they hadn't seen in so long and didn't really feel at ease with. Maria kept her eye on the big clock hanging in the station. The hands clicked forward, marking, minute after minute, the approaching moment of separation. It was even worse, sadder, than when she had left Fonso to go to Florence.

When the moment came, Maria burst into endless, inconsolable tears, and stood watching while they got onto the train and rode off. The fog swallowed them up instantly and she went back to the cart, pulling her shawl tight over her shoulders. She couldn't say a word the whole way back and the farmhand, who'd always been in love with her, said now and then: “Cheer up, Maria.” But he had a lump in his throat as well: he knew that no more obstacles lay in the way of Maria getting married. He was right.

The wedding was soon celebrated. This time it was Maria asking her fiancé to hurry things up, because she didn't want to be there when the time came for all of her brothers to leave their ancestral home. She and Fonso didn't have a penny more than what they needed to live, and they had to take out a loan to pay for the bedsprings and mattresses. They did, however, have a brand new house: a little apartment in the public housing project that had just been built, which to them seemed like a royal palace. There was even a little sty in back, so they could raise their own pig. Their first few days there turned out to be nice and cool, because the carpenter hadn't fitted the windows and shutters yet. With that excuse, they spent all their time in bed, and thus Maria made up for all of her many heartaches.

When the windows were ready, Fonso's mother and unmarried sister came to live with them.

On Saint Martin's Day, the Brunis took their leave, each one of them going their own way because there was already more that divided them than what united them. It was said that it was the wives who had broken up the family. None of them had ever been fond of the farmer's life, and renting a place in town already seemed like a step up on the social scale. The men, on the contrary, left with heavy hearts because, if the truth be told, they'd been happy living all together for so many years. Some of them had tears in their eyes as they left Hotel Bruni, more than one hundred years after the family had entered for the first time.

Checco was the last to leave the courtyard and, although a more comfortable life awaited him, he was full of melancholy. He looked at the blackened skeleton of the stable and thought of those long winter nights when the snow would fall in big flakes and the oxen would peacefully chew on the fragrant hay. He thought of the big cellar, spacious as a parade ground, where the good red wine fermented in the big vats. He thought of the joyous, bloody ritual of butchering the pig, of those crisp days in January when they seasoned the pork to make salami, sausages and prosciutto. He wasn't sure whether he was mourning the happiness that a stroke of ill fortune had swept away, or the end of his youth.

He moved to the new house with his wife, his young son Vasco and all of their household goods. The Bruni house had emptied out.

From then on, Checco and Dante stopped speaking to each other. No one ever knew why; the fact that Clerice had chosen one of them over the other didn't seem sufficient reason to generate such discord. Perhaps Checco blamed his brother for not having any qualms about allowing their mother to continue working, old as she was, while he could have offered her an easy, comfortable life. He could have taken her to the market in Spilamberto and to eat at the
osteria
, to Bologna to see the Sanctuary of the Madonna di San Luca, who she was so devoted to, instead of watching her slave away until the day she dropped. Someone even said that Checco and Dante had met up one day, just the two of them, and they'd had a terrible fight after which they had never spoken another word to each other again.

A long time after that, two or three years before dying, Checco was said to have written his version of the truth in a letter to his sister Maria. But the letter, in moving from one house to another, was lost and never found again and Maria, who was the only one ever to have read it, never revealed what it said.

Floti had arrived at Camporgiano at the end of June, after a full day's journey. Although it was evening, he went immediately to introduce himself to the person who his friends had told him about and who had helped in finding work for him. He was a old master builder and Floti caught him in the middle of his supper.

“You must be Bruni,” he said, sizing him up. Floti had a suitcase with him and a bag slung over his shoulder with a few personal belongings.

“Come in,” said the builder. “Have you eaten?”

“Yes, a little.”

“Sit down, there's a bowl of soup left and some bread. You must be tired.”

Floti thanked him and sat down. The soup made him feel better, as did being welcomed into his home, the smell of cooking and the scent of chestnut blossoms which he wasn't familiar with but that reminded him of apple blossoms.

“You're safe here. No one will come looking for you. Have you ever laid bricks?”

“No, but I'm willing to do anything to earn a living.”

“I've been told you were wounded in the war and so you can't work as a hodman. You'll have to start as a master bricklayer. You can learn with me; you'll help me build the henhouse and the boundary wall. For the time being you can stay here with us, and when you start working you can pay me back for the board and lodging a little at a time. I expect you'll find people here to be a bit mistrustful at first; you know how mountain folk are with strangers. But if you earn their respect, they'll become your friends and you'll always be able to count on them.

“No one knows who you are or why you've come to live here. But I can see that you speak Italian well and that will be to your advantage. I've found you a place to live as well, a little abandoned house on the outskirts of town. It belonged to an old woman who died without leaving heirs. It was damaged by the earthquake. You can move in as soon as I've taught you the trade. That way you can fix it up as you like.”

“I can pay you board and lodging. I have my savings with me. Anyway, I don't know how to thank you,” said Floti, “you don't even know me.”

“Of course I know you,” replied the master builder, “you're a person who earns his living by hard work, you are being persecuted because you acted like a free man, you were wounded in a war you didn't ask for, but you did your duty, with courage. Your name is Raffaele. I don't need to know anything else about you.”

Four months after his departure, before All Saints and All Souls, Floti wrote Maria a letter in which he told her that he had settled in, had a regular salary and had managed to transform a temporary shelter into a comfortable home. It was then that he announced that he would come to collect his children at the station of Bologna.

After their initial bewilderment, the children got used to the place and were happy there. Corrado went to school and little Ines to the nursery where she was cared for by gentle nuns who didn't mind letting her stay after hours when her father came home late at night. They ate dinner together and it was Floti who cooked the meal, something he'd never done in his whole life. Sometimes he even made fritters from chestnut flour, which was so abundant there, and the children loved them.

In that tiny town, lost in the middle of the mountains, with chestnut forests thousands of years old all around them, with the moss laying carpets of velvet at their feet, with the river crashing down from one crag to the next, seething its way down the mountain only to finish up in quiet, crystalline pools, Floti had started to breathe again and to form a bond to a land so wild and barren yet capable of engendering true, strong emotion.

One evening in February, near dusk, he had gone to fill a bucket with water at the fountain for the washing up, and he'd felt embarrassed at being the only man in the middle of so many women carrying out that task. It wasn't the first time he'd gone, but it had always been at different times of day. In the end, just he and a thirty-year-old woman were left in line. She wasn't pretty, but she had very light, clear blue eyes and a graceful figure. He insisted that she go first and she accepted with a smile. While she was filling her pail, she spoke to him: “You're the stranger who has moved into the abandoned house outside the village, aren't you?”

“Yes, miss, you're right.”

“And I see you have to do a woman's work as well.”

“I'm a widower, unfortunately, and I do what I can.”

“Do you have anyone helping you?”

“No, of course not! I couldn't afford it.”

“I understand. If you won't take offense, I'd be happy to give you a hand. I do most of my work in the afternoons. If you bring me the children in the morning, I can get them ready and take them to school and then collect them again in the evening. They can stay with me until you can come for them. I live in that brick house down there, the one with the trellis. It's not too far from your place.”

At first Floti didn't know what to say, but then he realized that this was a true act of generosity on her part, and he accepted. “You are really too kind. I don't know how I can repay you.”

“Don't worry,” she replied. “A person's always in time to die, and to pay his debts!” she said, with such an open smile that Floti was enchanted.

“Thank you very much, then. And . . . let me introduce myself: I'm Raffaele.”

“I'm Maria, but everything calls me Mariuccia.”

“Thank you, Mariuccia, from the bottom of my heart.”

He offered to carry her bucket and walked her to her doorstep.

Early that next spring, Floti wrote his sister to say he'd met a nice girl called Maria just like she was, but whom everyone called Mariuccia because she was such a tiny thing. They were planning to be married. She was willing to care for Corrado and Ines as if they were her own. He wrote that the children were forgetting the town dialect and had started to speak with a Tuscan accent, just like that. He reminded her to tell Checco, Fonso, Savino and even Dante to be sure to give Armando a hand, since he was the one who needed it most.

At first, Maria had missed her niece and nephew terribly, but then she had a little girl of her own and she was happier. The letters she exchanged with Floti became less frequent as time passed but never stopped; for Christmas, her Tuscan sister-in-law always sent her a sack of chestnut flour and a card. The other brothers had settled into their new lives and seemed to be doing all right, except for Armando, who was finding it difficult to get work, although he was so amusing and lively that sometimes people took him on for the day mostly because he made them laugh and kept their spirits up.

Armando would pile up debts the whole winter, hoping to pay them off in the summer, but he didn't always succeed. He'd ended up living in an attic where it rained more inside than out; when the weather was bad, he covered the floor with pots and buckets that collected the dripping water. In the summertime the roof got red-hot and the heat underneath was unbearable. They had put the bed in the only corner where it didn't rain, and they all slept there: he, his wife and all the children. Three of them would come into the world, all girls, born one after another because, as they say, no one is ready to give
that
up, no matter how poor they are.

“At least,” he would say, “there are no more mice, because they've figured that if there's nothing here for us, they'd better go someplace else!”

When it was time for the harvest, Fonso, who was the foreman at the estate where he worked, tried to include him among the workers who went “with the machine,” that is, behind the thresher. Armando was happy to go, even if the work was hellish: days and days in the middle of the dust and chaff, with the awns of the wheat that pricked you everywhere. He liked it anyway, because it reminded him of when the family was still together, when they had threshed their own wheat. Those had been days of jubilation, with the children romping around in the hay and watching open-mouthed as the huge red machine, all full of pulleys and belts, swallowed up sheaf after sheaf at the top and spit out the chaff at the front and the shiny blond wheat at the side. And then, to their delight, pooped straw out the back, which was promptly gathered into bales by the “mule.”