Difficult Loves (12 page)

The cave came out into a torrent. Once again the naked man was on the crust of the earth, under the sky. Was he safe now? He must take care not to make any mistakes. The torrent

was running silently over white and black stones. Around it was a wood full of twisted trees; all that grew in the undergrowth was thorns and brambles. He was naked in wild and deserted parts, and the nearest human beings were enemies who would pursue him with pitchforks and guns as soon as they saw him.

The naked man climbed a willow tree. The valley was all woods and shrub-covered slopes, under a gray hump of mountain. But at the end of it, where the torrent turned, there was a slate roof with white smoke coming up. Life, thought the naked man, was a hell, with rare moments recalling some ancient paradise.

ANIMAL WOODS

On days of Fascist round-ups the woods might have been a fairground. Off the paths, among the bushes and trees, there was a constant passage of families urging along a cow or a calf, and old women leading a goat on a rope, and girls with a goose under one arm. Some of them were even escaping with their rabbits.

Wherever one went, the thicker the chestnut woods, the more one ran into heavy-bellied bulls and tinkling cows, which were finding it difficult to move on those rocky slopes. Best off were the goats, but perhaps the happiest were the mules, which just this once could move without carrying a burden and go cropping leaves along the alleys. The pigs went rooting about in the ground, pricking their snouts all over with chestnut husks; the chickens roosted in the trees and frightened the squirrels; the rabbits, which after centuries of cages had forgotten how to dig themselves lairs, took refuge in hollow tree trunks, where they were sometimes bitten by squirrels.

That morning a peasant named Giuà Dei Fichi was gathering fuel in a remote corner of the woods. He knew nothing about what was happening in the village, for he had left the

evening before, intending to gather mushrooms in the morning, and had slept in the middle of the woods in a hut used, in autumn, for drying chestnuts.

So as he was chopping a dead tree trunk with a hatchet he was surprised to hear a vague tinkling of bells far and near through the woods. He stopped chopping and heard voices getting closer. "Oo-u," he shouted.

Giuà Dei Fichi was a short, tubby little man, with a face like a full moon, dark of skin and flushed with wine; he wore a green conical hat with a pheasant's feather stuck in it, a shirt with big yellow spots under a homespun jerkin, and a red scarf around his tubby stomach to hold up trousers covered with purple blotches.

"Coo-u!" came the reply, and between the green lichenous rocks appeared a close friend, a peasant with a mustache and a straw hat, dragging behind him a big, white-bearded goat.

"What're you doing here, Giuà?" asked his friend. "The Germans've reached the village and are going around to all the animal stalls!"

"Oh!" shouted Giuà Dei Fichi. "They'll find my cow, Cochineal, and take her off!"

"Hurry up and you may still be in time to hide her," advised his friend. "We saw the column as it was coming up through the valley and we took off at once. But they may not have reached your place yet."

Giuà left his hatchet and basket of mushrooms and rushed off. As he ran through the woods he met rows of ducks that scattered quacking between his feet, and flocks of sheep marching compactly side by side without moving to let him through, and children and old women who shouted, "They've reached the Madonnetta! They're searching the houses above the

bridge! I've seen them turning the last corner before the village!" Giuà Dei Fichi speeded up his short legs, and went rolling down the slopes like a ball, and panting up the hills with his heart in his mouth.

On and on he ran till he reached a top of a hill from which opened a view of the village. A great expanse of tender early-morning air, a misty ring of hills, and in the middle the village, knobbly houses all stone and slate, heaped on top of one another. And through the thin air came the sounds of shouts in German and of fists banging against doors.

"Oh dear! The Germans are already in the houses!"

Giuà Dei Fichi was trembling all through his arms and legs; a bit of a tremor he already had from drinking, and more now came over him at the thought of his cow, Cochineal, the one possession he had in the world, about to be taken away from him.

Very quietly, cutting through fields, keeping under cover of vines, Giuà Dei Fichi drew near the village. His little house was one of the last, on the outskirts, in the middle of a green mass of pumpkins, where the village merged into vegetable patches; possibly the Germans might not have reached it yet.

Peeping around each corner, Giuà made his way into the village. He saw an empty street with the usual smells of hay and stalls; those new noises were coming from the middle of the village—inhuman voices and the stamping of iron-clad feet. There his house was—still shut up. The door of the stall on the ground floor was closed, and so was the one to the rooms at the top of the worn outside staircase, with its clumps of basil planted in cooking pots filled with earth. A voice from inside the stall said, "Mooooo." It was Cochineal recognizing the approach of her owner. Giuà blushed with pleasure.

But now from under an arcade resounded a tramp of feet; Giuà hid in a doorway, sucking in his round paunch. It was a German, with the look of a peasant, wrists and neck jutting out of his short tunic, and long, long legs and a big gun as long as himself. He had left the others to try to find something on his own; besides, the look and smells of the village reminded him of things he knew well. So he was walking along sniffing the air and looking around with a yellow, porkish face under the peak of his squashed cap. At that moment Cochineal lowed: "Mooo." She could not understand why her master had not arrived yet. The German quivered in his shrunken clothes and at once made for the stall; Giuà Dei Fichi held his breath.

He saw the German beginning to kick violently at the door; he'd break it in soon, for sure. Then Giuà slipped around the corner behind the house, went to the haystack, and began groping about under the hay. There he'd hidden his old double-barreled shotgun, with a full belt of cartridges. Giuà loaded the gun with a couple of shots, strapped the belt around his tummy, then very quietly, with the gun at the ready, went and hid behind the door of the stall.

The German was coming out, pulling Cochineal along behind him on a rope. She was a fine red cow with black markings (that was why she was called Cochineal), a young, affectionate, punctilious cow; she did not want to be taken away by this man she did not know, and was balking; the German had to pull her along by the halter.

Giuà Dei Fichi looked on, hidden behind a wall. Now, it should be said that Giuà was the worst shot in the village. Never had he succeeded in hitting, even by mistake, a squirrel, let alone a hare. When he shot at sitting thrushes, they didn't

even bother to move from the branch. No one wanted to go shooting with him, for he was apt to hit other men's behinds. He couldn't aim: his hands always trembled.

Now he pointed the gun, but his hands were trembling and the barrel of the shotgun waved about in the air. He tried to aim at the German's heart, but what he saw through the sights was the cow's rump. "Oh dear!" thought Giuà. "Suppose I fire at the German and kill Cochineal?" So he didn't dare fire.

The German was moving along very slowly with this cow; she could sense the nearness of her master and was refusing to be dragged. Suddenly he realized that his fellow soldiers had already evacuated the village and were disappearing down the road. The German tried to catch up with them, pulling that stubborn cow after him; and Giuà followed him at a distance, jumping behind bushes and walls and pointing his shotgun every now and again. But he could not manage to keep the weapon steady, and the German and the cow were always too near each other for him to dare fire a shot. Must he let the German take her away?

To reach the column in the distance, the German took a short cut through the woods. Now it was easier for Giuà to trail him by hiding among the tree trunks. And perhaps now the German would begin walking farther away from the cow so that it would be possible to shoot at him.

Once in the woods, Cochineal seemed to lose her reluctance to move, and since the German was apt to get lost among the paths which he could scarcely make out, she even began guiding him and deciding whenever two paths crossed. Before long the German realized he was not on the short cut to the main road but in the middle of a thick woods; both he and the cow were lost, in fact.

Giuà Dei Fichi, his nose scratched by branches, his feet soaked by rivulets he'd stumbled into, was still following along behind, among flapping birds taking to flight and frogs croaking in the mud. It was even more difficult to aim among the trees, with all those obstacles around and that wine-red-and-black rump, which seemed always to be there under his eyes.

The German was already looking in alarm at the thickness of the woods and wondering how he could get out of it, when he heard a rustling in an arbutus bush and out came a fine red pig. At home he'd never seen pigs wandering about in the woods. He loosened the rope on the cow and began following the pig. As soon as Cochineal felt herself free she trotted off into the woods, which was, she sensed, full of friendly creatures.

Now was the moment for Giuà to shoot. The German was fussing around the pig, clutching at it to keep it still, but it slipped away.

Giuà was about to press the trigger when nearby appeared two small children, a little boy and a little girl, wearing woolen caps with pom-poms and long stockings. Big tears were dropping from their eyes. "Aim carefully, Giuà, please," they said. "If you kill the pig we'll have nothing left!" Giuà Dei Fichi felt the gun dancing about in his hands again; he had such a soft heart and was too easily moved, not by having to kill that German but by having to risk the pig that belonged to those two poor little children.

The German was swaying about among the rocks and bushes, gripping the pig, which was wriggling about and grunting, "Ghee ... ghee ... ghee. ..." Suddenly the pig's grunts were answered by a "baaa" and out from a cave trotted a little lamb. The German let the pig go and ran after the lamb. "What strange woods," he thought, "with pigs in bushes

and lambs in caves." And he caught the lamb, which was bleating at the top of its voice, by a leg, hitched it up on his shoulder like the Good Shepherd, and started off. Very quietly Giuà Dei Fichi followed. "This time he won't escape. This time he's had it," he said to himself, and was just about to fire when a hand raised the barrel of his gun. It was an old shepherd with a white beard, who was now holding out his clasped hands toward him and saying, "Giuà, don't kill my little lamb; kill the German but don't kill my little lamb. Aim well, just this once, aim well!" But Giuà was completely confused by now, and couldn't even find the trigger.

The German on his way through the woods was making discoveries that left him open-mouthed: chickens perched on trees, guinea pigs peering from hollow trunks. It was a complete Noah's ark. He saw a turkey spreading its tail on the branch of a pine. At once he put up his hand to catch it, but the turkey gave a little skip and went to perch on a branch higher up, still spreading its tail. The German left the lamb and began climbing up the pine. But for every layer of branches he reached, the turkey went up another layer, without looking in the least put out, still preening itself, its hanging watdes aflame.

Giuà moved under the tree; there was a leafy branch on his head, two others on his shoulders, and one tied to the barrel of his gun. But then a plump young woman with a red handkerchief tied around her head came up to him. "Giuà," she said, "listen to me. If you kill the German I'll marry you; if you kill the turkey I'll bump you off." Giuà, still a bachelor though no longer young, and very modest, blushed scarlet; his gun began waving around like a spit.

The German was still climbing and had reached the small-

est branches; suddenly one of them broke under him and down he fell. He very nearly fell right on top of Giuà Dei Fichi, who did this once see straight and get away in time. But on the ground Giuà left all the branches that had been hiding him, so the German fell on them and did not hurt himself.

As he fell he saw a hare on the path. But no, it wasn't a hare; it was round and paunchy and did not run away when it heard a noise, but settled down on the ground. It was a rabbit; the German took it by the ears. He walked on, with the rabbit struggling and twisting about in all directions, so that in order not to let it escape he had to keep jumping about with his arm raised. The woods were full of lowing, bleating, and screeching. At every step were new things to be seen: a parrot on a holly branch, three goldfish wriggling in a spring.

Giuà, from astride the high branch of an ancient oak, was following the German's dance with the rabbit. But it was difficult to aim at him because the rabbit was constantly changing position and getting in between. Giuà felt a pull at a corner of his jerkin; it was a little girl with plaits and a freckly face. "Don't kill the rabbit, Giuà, please; I don't mind if you shoot the German, though."

Meanwhile, the German had reached a place covered with gray stones spotted with blue and green lichen. There were only a few bare pines growing there, and nearby opened a precipice. A hen was scratching about in the carpet of pine needles covering the ground. When the German began running after the hen, the rabbit escaped.

It was the thinnest, oldest, and scraggiest hen he had ever seen. It belonged to Girumina, the poorest old woman in the village. Now the German had it in his hands.

Giuà was lying on top of the rocks and had constructed a

pedestal of stones for his shotgun. He had even put up a sort of little fortress, with only a narrow slit for the barrel. Now he could fire without having any scruples: even if he killed that scraggy hen, little harm was done.

But now old Girumina came up to him, wrapped in her ragged black shawls, and began saying persuasively, "Giuà, it's bad enough that a German should take away my hen, the last thing I possess in all the world. But it's much worse that you should be the one to kill it."