A Winter's Night (25 page)

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.

“Good night,” Checco told him. “Welcome home.”

They entered the house together and Floti went up to his room. From the window he saw Fonso saying goodbye to Maria in front of the stable door; the storyteller threw his
tabarro
around her and drew her close. Floti felt the blood rush to his head and he felt like running downstairs, but Fonso was already walking off.

Floti was convinced that, now that he was home, things would go back to the way they were before, but he was wrong. In his absence, the family situation, which had already begun to show its cracks, had further deteriorated. The inclusion of so many women had multiplied the occasions for tension and disagreement. Each of them thought she saw her sisters-in-law enjoying privileges and advantages that she didn't have, or felt that her own husband wasn't receiving the right amount of respect, or that some of the brothers were expected to do too much while others did too little. As for the husbands, they wanted to appear attentive and worthy in their wives' eyes, and thus tended to attach importance to imagined snubs or perceived acts of discourtesy that they never would have even noticed in the past. On top of everything else, Clerice was becoming worn down by all of the knocks life had given her, and no longer had the spunk she once had, nor the energy to manage such a numerous tribe.

Floti took the reins in hand again, but the family's bad habits had already become entrenched and it wasn't easy to go back. He needed a stroke of luck to help him regain his undermined prestige. The opportunity unexpectedly presented itself towards the end of that spring. Barzini, the notary who owned their land, had gone to meet his maker, and since none of his heirs was interested in agriculture, they had decided to sell the plot and to split up the proceeds equally among themselves. The Brunis were given the chance to buy the land that the family had been farming as tenants for over one hundred years, and what was more, at deferred payment conditions.

The family council was immediately convened: Clerice and her six sons. All of them participated, including Armando, who in the meantime must have convinced his wife to grant him her favors, since she was pregnant. The meeting took place in the kitchen, around the table where they had their meals, and Floti immediately took the floor: “You all know the reason we're here together today. The last time we met, it was to decide whether to pay for mother's trip to Genova so she could claim her inheritance. You all remember how that turned out: the inheritance was handed over to the government. Now we've been given another opportunity and I don't think we should this one slip: the landowner's heirs are willing to sell us this property.

“We've been farming this land for more than one hundred years, but the fruit of our labors has always gone to Barzini. At first, he barely left us enough to live on until, thanks to the cooperative league, we managed to get him to agree to more humane conditions. But whatever we had to turn over to him was still too much, considering that all the labor was ours and he never came to help us a single day, for a single hour.”

Dante was afraid that his brother would start up on politics, and said: “Get to the point.”

“I will,” replied Floti, without hiding his irritation, “what I want to say is that we should buy our farm. The heirs have proposed that we pay for the property a little at a time over the next ten years. This is a positive gesture on their part: it means that they recognize that we've always worked the land and that we deserve to own it. We have a bit of money set aside in the bank . . . ”

“We have money in the bank?” asked Fredo.

“That's right,” replied Floti, “everything I managed to save was put into an account in mother's name, and we've even earned interest on it.”

“I didn't know we had money in the bank either,” broke in Dante.

“How much?” asked Armando.

“Enough to pay the first two installments of the debt we're going to incur, while allowing us to get along comfortably.”

Floti realized that each one of his brothers was mentally calculating how much he would get if the money were to be divided up equally, and he thought it best to interrupt the process: “I know what you're thinking, but you're wrong. If we use that sum of money together, we'll all stand to gain. If we split it up, each one of us will have some money in our pockets but it won't get us anywhere. Strength lies in unity, you know that. They want thirty thousand liras, payable over ten years' time, which means that they're giving us the land for a song, even though the figure may seem high to you now. If we stick together we can do this, I promise you. Once we've bought the land, we'll be our own bosses, no one can tell us what we can do and what we can't do, no one can send us packing from one day to the next. And the forty percent that we've been turning over to Barzini will be ours to split up every year. Or we'll use it to buy more land and build a future for our children.”

Floti concluded his plea without realizing that all of the enthusiasm and energy that he'd put into his speech, rather than convincing the others, had made them suspicious. When he noticed their reaction, he could have bit his tongue. He understood what they were thinking: if Floti is getting so excited about this, he's hoping to get something out of it himself. The atmosphere around the table felt heavy, and the silence that greeted his speech promised no good. If they wanted to buy the land, they would have said so right away.

But Clerice supported him this time: “Floti's right. Land never betrays you. If you have land, you're sure you'll never suffer hunger, no matter what happens. If you need to, you can always sell it again, and make a profit. Think about it, boys, Floti's never been wrong about things like this. I can barely believe it myself: the Brunis, who have been working someone else's land for a hundred years, becoming property owners!”

No one responded. Armando cracked a joke that made no one laugh.

“What's wrong?” asked Floti. “Don't you trust me? Are you afraid we'll sink into debt? That won't happen. If you borrow money without any capital, you've got a problem waiting to happen, but if we have capital, that is, our own land, we can always sell it and make our money back, if we need to. We can do this, together: we can set up a company, so that each one of us is protected and no one is running a risk. Think about it, please.”

The brothers said they would think about it, that it wasn't something you could decide on the spur of the moment, that thirty thousand liras was no small sum and, finally, that they'd give him an answer in a couple of days' time.

Two days later, when Floti went to market with the cart to sell a sow, his brothers took advantage of his absence to meet and discuss the matter amongst themselves. After they'd hashed it out for more than an hour, each of them went to talk to their own wives, which further worsened the situation. Clerice realized what was happening and it saddened her greatly because it meant that the family had split apart and would perhaps never be like it once was.