Difficult Loves (3 page)

Clouds darkened the sun. Very quietly Giovannino and Serenella crept away. They went back along the same paths they had come, stepping fast but never at a run. And they went through the hedge again on all fours. Between the aloes they found a path leading down to the small, stony beach, with banks of seaweed along the shore. Then they invented a wonderful new game: a seaweed fight. They threw great handfuls of it in each other's faces till late in the afternoon. And Serenella never once cried.

A GOATHERD AT LUNCHEON

It was, as usual, a mistake of my father's. He had had a boy sent down from a village in the mountains to look after our goats. And the day the boy arrived, my father insisted on asking him to eat with us.

My father does not understand the things that divide people, the difference between a dining room like ours, with its inlaid furniture, dark-patterned carpets, and majolica plates, and those homes of theirs, with smoky stone walls, beaten-earth floors, and newspapers black with flies draped over the mantelpieces. My father always goes about among them with that jolly, ceremonious air of his, and if they invite him to eat when he is out shooting, as they all do, he insists on eating off the same dirty dish; then in the evening they all come to him to settle their disputes. We, his own sons, don't take much part, though. Perhaps my brother, with that air of silent complicity he has, may occasionally be given some rough confidence; but I'm too well aware of the difficulties of communication between human beings, and sense at every minute the gulfs that separate the classes, the abysses that politeness opens up under me.

When the boy came in, I was reading the paper. My father began fussing over him. What was the point? He'd only get all the more confused. But he didn't. I raised my eyes and there he was in the middle of the room, with his heavy hands and his chin on his chest, though looking straight ahead of him, stubbornly. He was a goatherd boy of about my own age, with compact, wooden-looking hair and high features—forehead, nose, cheeks. He wore a dark military shirt with its top button straining over his Adam's apple, and a crumpled old suit out of which his big knobbly hands and great boots, lifting slowly on the gleaming floor, seemed to overflow.

"This is my son Quinto," said my father. "He's at high school."

I got up and put on a smile; my outstretched hand met his and we immediately moved apart without looking each other in the face. My father had already begun saying things about me that no one could want to hear—how long I still had at school, how I'd once killed a squirrel when we were out shooting in the area the goatherd came from; and I kept on shrugging my shoulders as if to say, "Me? No, really!" The goatherd stood there mute and still, showing no sign of following; every now and again he gave a quick glance toward one of the walls or curtains, like an animal looking for an opening in a cage.

Then my father changed the subject and began walking around the room talking about certain varieties of vegetables grown up in those valleys. He kept asking the boy questions, while the goatherd, with his chin on his chest and his mouth half shut, kept on saying he did not know. Hidden behind the newspaper, I waited for the food to be served. But my father, having made his guest sit down, brought him a cu-

cumber from the kitchen and began cutting it up in small pieces in his soup plate, for him to eat as an hors d'oeuvre, my father told him.

Now my mother came in, tall, dressed in black with lace trimmings, her smooth white hair rigidly parted. "Ah, here's our little goatherd boy," she said. "Have you had a good trip?" The boy did not get up or reply, but just raised his eyes to my mother in a look full of uncomprehending distrust. I felt wholeheartedly on his side; disapproving of the tone of affectionate superiority my mother was using, I even found myself preferring my father's manner, his rather servile affability, to her aristocratic condescension. And then I hated that possessive
tu
by which my mother addressed the boy; if she'd been using dialect like my father it might have been all right, but she was talking Italian to the poor goatherd, an Italian cold as a marble wall.

To protect him I tried to turn the conversation away from him, so I read aloud an item of news from the paper, something that could only interest my parents, about a vein of mineral ore discovered in a part of Africa where certain friends of ours lived. I had deliberately chosen an item that could have no conceivable connection with our guest and was full of names unknown to him; I did this not to make his isolation weigh on him more, but so as to dig a moat around him, as it were, give him a breathing space, and distract my parents' besieging attentions for a moment. Perhaps he, too, misinterpreted my move. Anyway, it had the opposite effect. My father went rambling on with a story about Africa, confusing the boy with a tangle of strange names of places, peoples, and animals.

Just as the soup was being served, my grandmother ap-

peared in her wheel chair, pushed by my poor sister, Cristina. They had to shout loudly in her ear to tell her what was happening. My mother, indeed, made a formal introduction: "This is Giovannino, who is going to look after our goats. My mother. My daughter, Cristina."

I blushed with shame at hearing him called Giovannino, little Giovannino; how different that name must have sounded in the rough dialect of the mountains; certainly it was the first time he heard himself called it in that way.

My grandmother nodded with matriarchal calm: "Fine, Giovannino, let's hope you don't let any goats escape, eh!" My sister, Cristina, who treats all our rare visitors as people of great distinction, now muttered "Delighted" in a terrified way, half hidden behind the back of the wheel chair, and she held her hand out to the youth, who shook it heavily.

The goatherd was sitting on the edge of his chair, but with his shoulders back and his hands spread on the tablecloth, looking at my grandmother as if fascinated. The old woman was sunk in her big armchair, with mittens half covering bloodless fingers that made vague movements in the air, a tiny face under its network of wrinkles, spectacles turned toward him as she tried to make out some shape in the confused mass of shadows and colors transmitted by her eyes, and spoke an Italian that sounded as if she were reading out of a book. It must all have seemed so different to him from the other old women he had met that perhaps he thought he was face to face with a new species of human being.

My poor sister, Cristina, had not moved from her corner. As usual when she saw a new face, she now advanced into the middle of the room, her hands joined under the little shawl drawn over her deformed shoulders, her head streaked with

premature gray, her face marked with the boredom of her reclusive life. Raising her clear eyes toward the windows, she said, "There's a little boat on the sea, I saw it. And two sailors who kept rowing and rowing. And then it passed behind the roof of a house and no one saw it any more."

I wanted our guest to realize my sister's unfortunate state at once, so that he would take no more notice of her. I jumped up and, with a forced animation that was quite out of place, exclaimed, "But how can you have seen men in a boat from our windows? We're too far away."

My sister went on looking out of the window—not at the sea, but at the sky. "Two men in a boat. Rowing and rowing. And there was a flag, too, the tricolor flag."

Then I realized that as the goatherd listened to my sister he did not seem so uneasy and out of place as he seemed to be with the rest of us. Perhaps he had finally found something that came into his experience, a point of contact between our world and his. And I remembered the idiots who are often to be met in mountain villages, who spend their hours sitting on thresholds amid clouds of flies, and sadden the village nights with their wails. Perhaps this family misfortune of ours, which he understood because it was well known to his own people, brought him closer to us than my father's eccentric jollity, the women's maternal and protective airs, and my own awkward detachment.

My brother arrived late as usual, when we already had spoons in our hands. The instant he came in he took in everything at a glance; before my father had explained and introduced him as "My son Marco, who's studying to be a notary," he had already sat down to eat, without blinking an eyelid, without looking at anyone. His cold spectacles were so im-

penetrable they seemed black, his depressing little beard stood out spruce and stiff. He gave the impression of having greeted everyone and excused himself for being late, and even perhaps of having smiled at the guest, instead of which he had not opened his mouth or wrinkled his smooth forehead with a single line. Now I knew that the goatherd had a powerful ally on his side, an ally who would protect him and make every retreat possible for him in the atmosphere heavy with awkwardness which only he, Marco, knew how to create.

The goatherd was eating, bent over his bowl of soup, slurping it noisily about in his mouth. Now we three males were with him in leaving obvious manners to the women: my father from natural expansive noisiness, my brother from imperious determination, I from ill grace. I was pleased with this new alliance, this rebellion of us four against the women. Certainly the women disapproved of us all at that moment, and avoided saying so only in order not to humiliate the family in front of the guest, and vice versa. But did the goatherd realize this? Definitely not.

My mother now went into the attack, with a very sweet, "And how old are you, Giovannino?"

The number the boy gave rang out like a shout. He repeated it slowly. "What's that?" said our grandmother and repeated it wrongly. "No, this," and everyone began shouting it in her ear. Only my brother was silent. "A year older than Quinto," my mother now discovered; and this had to be repeated all over again to my grandmother. These were the things I could not bear, which shamed me to the bottom of my heart, for my sake and his; this comparing of him and me, he who had to look after goats to make a living and stank of ram and was strong enough to fell an oak, and I who spent

my life on a sofa by the radio reading opera librettos, who would soon be going to the university and disliked flannel next to my skin because it made my back prickle. This injustice, these things lacking in me to be him and lacking in him to be me, gave me a sharp feeling of our being, he and I, two incomplete creatures hiding, diffident and ashamed, behind that soup bowl.

It was then that our grandmother asked, "And have you already done your military service?" This question was ridiculous; his class had not yet been called, he had scarcely passed his first check-up. "A soldier of the pope," said my father, one of those jokes of his that no one understood and which he had to repeat twice. "They've made me 'returnable,' " said the goatherd. "Oh," said our grandmother, "refused"; and her voice expressed disapproval and regret. Even if he is, I thought, why make so much of it? "No. 'Returnable.' " "And what does that mean, 'returnable'?" This had to be explained. "Soldier of the pope, ha ha! Soldier of the pope," my father laughed. "Oh, I hope you aren't ill," said my mother. "Ill on the day of the medical," said the goatherd, and luckily my grandmother did not hear.

My brother raised his head from his plate then and through his spectacles gave the guest almost a direct glance, a glance of complicity, while his little beard moved slightly at the corners of his lips in a hint of a smile, as if to say, "Let the others be; I understand you and know all about these things." It was with these unexpected signals of complicity that Marco attracted sympathy; from now on the goatherd would always turn to him and answer every question with a glance in his direction. And yet I guessed that at the root of this apparent shy humanity of my brother, Marco, there lay both the ser-

vility of our father and the aristocratic superiority of our mother. And I thought that by allying himself with him the goatherd would not be any less alone.

At this point I thought of something to say that might perhaps interest him, and I explained that I had had my military service deferred until the end of my studies. But now I had brought out the tremendous difference between us two: the impossibility of a common link even about things that seemed everyone's fate, like military service.

Just then my sister came out with one of her remarks : "And will you go into the cavalry, sir, excuse me?" This would have passed unobserved if my grandmother had not taken up the subject. "Ah, the cavalry nowadays ..." The goatherd muttered something about
"alpini."
We realized, my brother and I, that we had at that moment an ally in our mother, who certainly found this subject silly. But why did she not intervene, then, to change the conversation? Luckily my father had stopped repeating, "Ah, a soldier of the pope," and now asked if mushrooms were growing in the woods.

We went on thus for the whole length of the meal, with us three poor boys fighting our war against a cruel, torturing world without being able to recognize one another as allies, full of mutual fears. My brother ended by making a grand gesture, after the fruit: he took out a pack of cigarettes and offered one to our guest. They lit up without asking if they were disturbing anyone; and this was the fullest moment of solidarity created during that meal. I was excluded because my parents had forbidden me to smoke till I left school. My brother was satisfied now; he got up, inhaled once or twice, looking down at us, then turned around and went out as silently as he had come.

My father lit his pipe and turned on the radio for the news. The goatherd was looking at the instrument, his hands open on his knees and his eyes staring and reddening with tears. Certainly those eyes were still seeing his village high above the fields, the lines of mountains, and the thick chestnut woods. My father did not let us listen to the radio—he was criticizing the United Nations—and I took advantage of this to leave the dining room.

That whole afternoon and evening we were persecuted by the memory of the goatherd. We had supper in silence by the dim light of the chandelier and could not free ourselves of the thought of him alone in the hut on our land. Now he must have finished the soup in the can in which he had heated it up, and was lying on the straw almost in the dark, while down below the goats could be heard moving about and bumping one another and munching grass. The goatherd would go outside and there would be a slight mist over toward the sea and damp air and a little spring gurgling gently in the silence. The goatherd would head for it along paths covered with wild ivy, and drink, though he was not thirsty. Fireflies could be seen appearing and vanishing in what seemed like a great compact swarm. But he would move his arm in the air without touching them.