Difficult Loves (13 page)

Giuà began trembling more than ever before because of the great responsibility weighing on him. But he pulled himself together and pressed the trigger.

The German heard the shot and saw the chicken wriggling in his hands lose its tail. Another shot, and the chicken lost a wing. Was it bewitched, this chicken, that it exploded every now and again and was falling to pieces in his hands? There was another explosion and the chicken was completely feather-less, ready for roasting, and yet it still went on flapping its one wing. Seized with terror, the German was holding the chicken away from himself by the neck. Giuà's fourth cartridge cut the neck off right under his hand and left him holding the head, which was still moving. He flung it aside and ran away. But he could not find any more paths. Near him was that rocky precipice. The last tree before the precipice was a carob, and in its branches the German saw a big cat crouching.

By now he was beyond feeling any surprise at seeing domestic animals scattered in the woods, and he put out a hand to stroke the cat. Then he took it by the nape of the neck, hoping to please it and hear it purr.

For some time now the woods had been plagued by a savage

wild cat that killed birds and sometimes even got into the henhouses in the village. The German, who was expecting to hear it purr, suddenly saw the cat fling itself at him with its fur on end, and felt its claws slashing into him. In the struggle that followed both man and beast rolled over the edge of the precipice.

So it was that Giuà, a hopeless shot, was feted as the greatest partisan and huntsman in the village. And poor Girumina was bought a brood of newly hatched chicks at the expense of the community.

MINE FIELD

"Mined" was what the old man had said, waving an opened hand before his eyes, as if he were wiping a clouded pane. "All along there, didn't know exactly where. They came and mined it. We were in hiding."

The man in the baggy trousers had glanced for a moment at the slope of the mountain, then at the old man standing erect in the doorway.

"But since the end of the war," he had said then, "there's been time to do something about it. There must be some kind of path. Somebody must know."

You know it well, old man, the younger man had thought, too; because the old man was surely a smuggler and knew the frontier terrain like the bowl of his pipe.

The old man had looked at the patched, baggy trousers, the other man's limp, torn knapsack, the layer of dust covering him from hair to shoes, bearing witness to the miles he must have covered on foot. "Nobody knows just where," the old man had repeated. "The pass. It's a mine field." Then he had made that gesture, as if there were a clouded glass between himself and everything else.

"Hey, I can't be all that unlucky, can I? To go and step right on a mine?" the younger man had asked, with a smile that seemed to set the old man's teeth on edge as an unripe persimmon would.

"Huh," the old man had said then. Only that: Huh.

Now the younger man was trying to remember the tone of that
huh.
Because it could have been a
huh, 1 should think not,
or a
huh, you never can tell,
or a
huh, nothing more likely.
But the old man had uttered only a
huh
without any special intonation, as blank as his gaze, bleak as this mountain terrain, where even the grass was short and tough as an ill-shaven human beard.

The trees along the slopes could never grow taller than the brush; every now and then there was a twisted, rubbery pine, situated so as to cast as little shade as possible. The man was now walking along the remnants of climbing trails, gnawed away year after year by the encroaching bushes and trodden only by smugglers' footsteps, an animal tread that leaves little imprint.

"Damn this land," the man said. "I can't wait to be on the other side." Luckily he had already taken this route once, before the war, and he could do without a guide. He also knew that the pass was a broad, high gap, and they couldn't mine the whole thing.

So he had only to be careful where he set his feet: a spot with a mine underneath must surely look different somehow from all other spots. Somehow: loose dirt, stones artfully arranged, fresher grass. Over there, for example: you knew immediately there could be no mines. No mines? What about that slab of slate lying askew? That bare patch in the midst of the field? And that tree across the path? But the pass was

still far ahead. There couldn't be any mines, not yet. He walked on.

Perhaps he would have preferred to cross the mined zone at night, crawling in the darkness, not to elude the border guards—these places were safe from them—but to elude the fear of the mines, as if the mines were great dozing beasts that could waken at his passing. Marmots, enormous marmots curled up in underground lairs, with one acting as sentry on top of a rock, the way marmots do, to give the alarm with a hiss on seeing him.

At that hiss, the man thought, the mine field blows up, the enormous marmots fall on me and tear me to pieces with their teeth.

But never had a man been chewed by marmots, and never would he be blown up by mines. It was hunger that prompted these thoughts; he knew it. The man knew hunger, the tricks the imagination plays in times of hunger, when everything seen or heard assumes a meaning associated with food and chewing.

The marmots did exist, however. You could hear the hissing —"gheee ... gheeeee ..."—from up in the spills of rock. If I could succeed in killing a marmot with a stone, the man thought, and roast it on a stake ...

He thought of the greasy smell of marmot, but without nausea; hunger gave him an appetite even for marmot fat, anything that could be eaten. For a week he had been lurking around farms, approaching shepherds to beg a loaf of brown bread, a cup of clotted milk.

"If only we had some for ourselves. We don't have anything," they would say, pointing to the bare, smoke-darkened walls, decorated only with a string or two of garlic.

He came within sight of the gap before he was expecting it and felt a twinge of amazement, almost of fear, at once: he wasn't expecting the rhododendrons to be in bloom. He had thought he would find the gap bare, so he could study every stone, every bush before taking a step forward. Instead, he was plunged up to his knees in a sea of rhododendrons, a uniform, impenetrable sea from which only the humps of the gray stones surfaced.

And under it, the mines. "Don't know exactly where," the old man had said. "All along there." And then he had passed those opened hands through the air. The younger man now thought he could see the shadow of those hands fall on the expanse of rhododendrons, spreading out until it covered them.

He had chosen a route along a winding crevasse flanking the broad gap, uncomfortable for walking but also uncomfortable to mine. Farther up, the rhododendrons thinned out, and among the rocks you could hear the "gheee ... ghee ..." of the marmots, as unrelenting as the sun on the back of his neck.

Where there are marmots, he thought, heading in that direction, it's a sign there are no mines.

But this reasoning was erroneous : there were anti-personnel mines, devised to kill men; and the weight of a marmot would not be enough to trip them. He had recalled the name of the mines at this moment, "anti-personnel"; and it frightened him.

Personnel, he repeated, human beings.

That name was suddenly enough to frighten him. Certainly, if they mine a pass it was in order to make it completely useless. He had better turn back, question the men of the area more closely, try some other way.

He turned to retrace his steps. But where had he set his

foot before? The rhododendrons stretched out behind him, a vegetable sea, impenetrable, with no trace of his passage. Perhaps he was already in the heart of the mine field, and a misstep could destroy him: he might as well go forward.

This damned land, he thought. Damned right to the end.

If only he had a dog, a big dog, heavy as a man, to send ahead. Instinctively, he clicked his tongue, as if urging a dog to run. I have to be my own dog, he thought.

Maybe a stone would do. There was one near him: big, but he could lift it. It was just right. He grabbed it with both hands and flung it ahead of himself as far as he could throw, uphill. The stone fell not far away and rolled back toward him. He could only try his luck, as he was doing.

He was already in the higher part of the gap, among the treacherous dry, rocky stream beds. The colonies of marmots had heard the man and were in a state of alarm. Their screams pierced the air like cactus spines.

But the man no longer thought of hunting the animals. He had realized that the gap, broad at its mouth, had gradually narrowed and now was only a passage between cliffs and brush. Then the man understood: the mine field could only be here. This was the only spot where a certain number of mines, placed at the correct interval, could block all passing. Instead of terrifying him, this discovery gave him a strange serenity. Very well: he now found himself in the middle of the mine field, that was sure. Now there was nothing to do but continue climbing, at random, and let what would happen, happen. If it was his fate to die that day, he would die; if not, he would walk between one mine and the next and would be saved.

He formulated this thought about fate without any con-

viction: he did not believe in fate. If he took a step it was because he could not do otherwise; it was because the movement of his muscles, the course of his thoughts led him to take that step. But there was a moment when he could take this step or that one, when his thoughts were in doubt, his muscles taut but without direction. He decided not to think, to let his legs move like a robot's, to set his feet on the stones without looking; but he had the nagging suspicion that it was his volition that decided whether he would turn right or left, place his foot on this stone or that.

He stopped. He felt a strange inner craving, compounded of hunger and fear, which he could not allay. He searched his pockets: he was carrying a little mirror, the memento of a woman. Maybe this was what he wanted: to look at himself in a mirror. In the little piece of murky glass an eye appeared, red and swollen, then a cheek, the beard caked with dust, then his parched, chapped lips, his gums redder than the lips, then the teeth. ... Still, the man would have liked to see himself in a big mirror, see himself whole. To run that little piece of mirror over his face and see an eye, an ear did not satisfy him.

He went on. I haven't encountered the mine field so far, he thought. By now it must be another fifty paces, forty. ...

Every time he set his foot down, feeling the ground beneath him hard and steady, he heaved a sigh. One step is taken, another, and another. This slab of marl seemed a trap, but, no, it's firm; this clump of heather isn't concealing anything; this stone ... the stone sank two inches beneath his weight. "Gheee ... gheee ..." went the marmots. Go ahead: the other foot.

The earth became sun, the air became earth, the "gheee" of

the marmots became thunder. The man felt an iron hand grasp him by the hair, at the nape. Not one hand, a hundred hands seized him, each by the hair, and tore him head to foot, the way you tear up a sheet of paper, into hundreds of little pieces.

POSTWAR STORIES

THEFT IN A PASTRY SHOP

When Dritto got to the place where they were to meet, the others had already been waiting some time. There were two of them, Baby and Uora-Uora. The street was so silent that the ticking of the clocks in the houses could be heard. With two jobs to do, they'd have to hurry to get through them by dawn.

"Come on," said Dritto.

"Where to?" they asked.

But Dritto was never one to explain about any job he was going to do.

"Come on now," he replied. And he walked along in silence, through streets empty as dry rivers, with the moon following them along the tramlines, Dritto ahead, gazing around with those restless yellow eyes of his, his nostrils moving as if they were smelling something peculiar.

Baby was called that because he had a big head like a newborn baby and a stumpy body; also perhaps because of his short hair and pretty little face with its small black mustache. All muscle, he moved so softly he might have been a cat; there

was no one like him at climbing up walls and squeezing through openings, and Dritto always had good reason to take him along.

"Will it be a good job, Dritto?" asked Baby.

"If we bring it off," answered Dritto—a reply that didn't mean much.

Meanwhile, by a devious route that only he knew, he had led them around a corner into a yard. The other two soon realized that they were going to work on the back of a shop, and Uora-Uora pushed ahead in case he was left as lookout. It always fell to Uora-Uora to be lookout man; he longed to break into houses, search around, and fill his pockets like the others, but he always found himself standing guard on cold streets, in danger from police patrols, his teeth chattering in the cold, and chain-smoking to calm his nerves. Uora-Uora was an emaciated Sicilian, with a sad mulatto face and wrists jutting out of his sleeves. When on a job he always dressed up in his best, God knows why, complete with hat, tie, and raincoat, and if forced to run for it, he'd snatch up the ends of his raincoat as if spreading wings.

"You're lookout, Uora-Uora," said Dritto, dilating his nostrils. Uora-Uora took off quietly; he knew Dritto and the danger signal of those dilating nostrils, which would move quicker and quicker until they suddenly stopped and he whipped out a revolver.

"There," Dritto said to Baby. He pointed to a little window high off the ground, a piece of cardboard in place of a broken pane.

"You climb up, get in, and open for me," he said. "Be sure not to put on the lights: they'll be seen from outside."

Baby pulled himself up on the smooth wall like a monkey,

pushed in the cardboard without a sound, and stuck his head through. It was then that he became aware of the smell; he took a deep breath and up through his nostrils wafted an aroma of freshly baked cakes. It gave him a feeling of shy excitement, of remote tenderness, rather than of actual greed.