Set This House on Fire (35 page)

The main street of Sambuco up which we hastened was hardly a street at all, but a series of cobblestone steps too narrow and too steep for vehicles of any kind, damp with the steady seepage of water, slippery from this damp and from the smoothing wear of the centuries. As we toiled upward, panting, barely speaking, silent slumbering houses lined our route, illuminated by dim street lights for perhaps a mile or so, and then by nothing as the town itself dropped behind and we found ourselves walled around by darkness. It suddenly smelled like country. Cass turned a flashlight on. “The path begins around here somewhere,” he said, playing the light over a weedy patch of ground. “That’s it,” he murmured suddenly. “Come on. It’s a good half-hour’s hike, but it’s along the rim of the valley, and pretty level all the way, so we won’t get too pooped.” His light caught a lizard in its beam—a ghost-eyed, anxious-looking little creature which fled our approach and scuttled away over a wall. “A million years old, the poor bastard,” Cass said. “Come on.” We set out down the trail. A smell of lemon trees blossomed in my nostrils. I don’t know what it was—perhaps only escaping at last that palace-hemmed chicanery—but the night seemed suddenly touched with rapture. An odor of clean earth, of lemon blossoms, of pine-scented air from the mountains came over us. Out from the edge of a roving cloud the pale full moon appeared, outlining the woods and slopes below, and a stream way down in the bottom of the valley, bright as quicksilver, madly babbling and gurgling. I heard sheep baa-ing far off. The valley seemed enchanted. As we walked along Cass turned out his light; we could see by the moon: its light engulfed the entire valley, showering silver upon the pine groves and rocks and the peasants’ huts scattered here and there upon the slopes, looking lonely and marooned and asleep. Far up on the heights a waterfall noisily splashed: around it a rainbow quivered, then vanished. Again I heard the distant bleating of sheep, a somnolent, gentle noise. Finally Cass spoke up: “It’s like some crazy Arcadia, isn’t it? You should see it in the daytime, or at dawn.” There was a pause. “What’s your dodge, Leverett?”

“What do you mean, what’s my
dodge?”

“Don’t get me wrong. I mean, what do you do? To make the world go round, and the gardens grow and all that.”

When I told him—or when I told him what I
had
been doing, in Rome—there was another long pause. “I remember now,” he said. “Mason told me.” He paused. “Seems like you boys could have spread some of that aid or assistance or whatever you call it down here.” He stumbled against a stone, clutched at my arm for support, righted himself. “ ’scuse me,” he said, “still a little wobbly around the ankle bones.”

“I wasn’t the boss up there,” I began mildly to protest, trudging along beside him. “I was just an expediter, a what you call—”

“Aha!”
he broke out in a hoarse, unhappy laugh. He pulled a beret out of his hip pocket, yanking it down rakishly over his brow; it was an odd, brisk gesture, full of scorn and anger. “Ha! Yes, Jesus Christ, I know you weren’t the boss, God bless you. I see the boss’ picture every time I pick up the newspaper. A great shark-faced elder of the Presbyterian church. What does
he
know about the world, I ask you! What do any of them know, the sleek stuffed bastards! Why don’t they come back
here
and take a look?” He paused, breathing hard. The valley around us swam in tender, silvery loveliness beneath the moon. “Look at it!” he said, stretching forth his arm. “It breaks your heart, doesn’t it? And I’ll swear before God, Leverett, it’s the saddest place I know on earth.”

Without altering his stride, Cass lit a cigar. Smoke billowed back around us in reeking gusts. Then, after another brief spell of hacking and coughing, he spoke to me over his shoulder. “Tell you a funny story about this valley. Very, very funny story. Around Sambuco it breaks everybody up when they hear it. Especially the fat Christian-Democrats who run the town. It
really
breaks
them
up. Now you know, no one makes any money back here. They try to farm but the land’s been so poor for so many years that they’re lucky to turn up a few dry peas in the spring. You should see the chickens! They got a whole little fable about that. About how the valley of Tramonti’s the only place in Italy without foxes, the foxes got so disgusted years ago about the chickens that they just packed up and left. Anyway, that’s not the funny story. The story is about milk. You should see the cows, Leverett. They don’t get any fodder, of course; they graze on the hillsides and they’re about the size of goats. Well, about five years ago, so the story goes, the government sent a bunch of agriculture inspectors around the province, testing samples of milk. Big deal, you know. They had a fancy sort of portable laboratory and all that, in a big truck and so on, and anyway, they came to Sambuco. Well, all the farmers from all the valleys around came to the square with buckets of milk to be tested, for tuberculosis and fat content and mineral content and all that sort of thing. They tested this milk all day there in the square, and finally the farmers from this here valley—hell, there couldn’t be more than a dozen or so of them—these Tramonti farmers came up with their samples to be tested. Well, they took this Tramonti milk into their big portable laboratory and tested it and sampled it, and finally after a long time the head technician stepped out with the results. I can just visualize the whole scene: this big fat slob of a government man from Salerno with his test tubes and his charts and so on, and these poor sad hopeful yokels gawking up at him from the piazza. Well, the man drew a big breath finally and said,
‘Questo qui non è latte.È un’altra cosa.’
Can’t you see it, the whole ridiculous scene: these poor draggledy-assed bastards gazing up at this pompous fat chemist fellow, while he very gravely told them that what they had given him, whatever it was, was certainly not milk. This is not milk,’ he said again, I guess in that pompous voice government officials have, ‘it is something else.’ And then, very pompously, while all the Sambuco citizens gawked and snickered, he proceeded to give a chemical analysis of the Tramonti whatever-it-was: water, rat turds, hair, and a certain blue coloration which could only be made out as something really negative and horrible—a total absence of fat or minerals or any bleeding food value whatsoever. And then he said: ‘Take it home, this stuff. It is not milk.’ “ After a pause, Cass said: “Very funny story. Every time I hear it, it breaks me up.” His voice was spiritless. “Very funny,” he repeated. Sending out clouds of smoke from a corner of his grim, clamped lips, he fell into an impenetrable silence.

We had walked for nearly half an hour when, trudging up over a rise, we beheld in a hollow below the moon-silvered shape of a peasant’s hut. We took a side path toward it, passing through a meadow busy with the scratching of insects, across a brook, beneath a shadow-haunted cypress grove, over a rickety stile. Descending onto a patch of soggy, spongy ground, we found ourselves in a farmyard. There was a smell of manure in the air, and the rustle and stir, somewhere in the shadows, of chickens in clumsy slumber. A broken-down dog approached snarling and snapping, quieted down at Cass’ murmured tones, gave a whimper of delight and scrambled about us, his ribs stark and scurvy in the moonlight. We approached the hut across a stretch of parched earth. Inside the hut, what seemed to be a single dim lamp was glowing. And as we moved closer to the place, I was aware for the first time of a sound which broke in upon the serene moonlit quiet of the valley like fingernails against a pane of glass or the scream of braking wheels—not a loud sound, nor a low sound either, but one long, long protracted steady wail of anguish and despair which, emanating from the darkness of the hut, was like a laceration upon my eardrum.

“My God,” I said. “What’s that?”

Cass said nothing. The wail in the hut ceased abruptly, as if strangled, and after a few seconds there came in its stead a low series of groans, almost inaudible now, but touched with the same insupportable and desolating anguish. Nearer, we could hear a scuffling of feet within; a child cried, a pot or pan fell, then all was silent as before.

“Chi è la?”
came a voice from the shadows. It was a woman’s voice, oddly heavy and masculine, and slow and torpid, suffused throughout with the deepest weariness.

“Sono io, Ghita,”
said Cass softly. “It’s just me, Ghita—Cass. With a friend.’’

The woman stood in the doorway, her arm upthrust against the frame, supporting herself, her face harshly illuminated in the flooding moonlight. It was an awesome face—fearsome, I should say, in the attitude graven upon it of suffering. Her lips were contorted downward, her eyes had become as dull and as sightless as two black stones; like wild grass her hair flew out around her head in unkempt strands. And she stood there motionless except for her breathing, which heaved up the sagging breasts beneath her tattered bag of a dress, and seemed to shake her all over. She looked like one whose grief had borne her miles beyond the realm of simple tears.
“Buonase’,”
she said in a dull voice. “We were waiting for you.”

“How is Michele? How is he tonight?”

“He fails,” she said. “He asks for you. It’s his pain now. It’s as if his pain were my pain, so that when he cries out I can feel it in my own bones. I think he will die soon. I can’t get it out of my bones.”

“The morphine? Shut up about dying.”

“It’s of no use now. He no longer feels it. Besides, the glass instrument one uses fell and broke.
La siringa.
Alessandro took it in his hands—”

“I
told
you to keep—” Cass began with a note of anger. Then he said quietly: “Ah well, we’ll arrange to get another.”

Her voice was parched and dry. “I feel it in my bones,” she said, “in my flesh. Here. Everywhere. Maddalena came tonight. She says that the disease possesses me now. The children. That it will devour us all. She gave me a philter—”

“Keep that witch out of here,” Cass interrupted. The groans commenced again from the recesses of the hut. The woman stiffened and her eyes grew wide. “Keep that witch away from here, Ghita. How many times have I told you to have done with these idiotic charms? She’ll do nothing but make things worse. Keep her out of here. Poison! Hasn’t Francesca told you, too? Where is Francesca?”

The woman made no response, turning toward the sounds like an automaton and melting into the shadows of the hut. The groans faded, and suddenly died. “What it is,” Cass said to me as he removed the knapsack from his shoulder, “is a case of miliary tuberculosis. Galloping consumption. This man’s riddled with the stuff from head to toe, bones and kidneys, liver, lungs, and lights. Broke his leg a while back, which don’t help any. It hurts him, and it’s like a bleeding sponge. There’s not a hope in the world. I wouldn’t go inside if I were you.” He weaved a bit, as if still half-drunk, but steadied himself. He took the bottle of capsules from the sack, peering at it closely in the moonlight. “As for me, if I’m going to get it, I’ve got it already. Mother of God! A bleeding amateur sawbones! Now what the hell did the book say? What’s the dose? Oh yes, three grams four times a day. Well, we’ll see. It sure won’t hurt this poor bugger. Nothing in this world.” He turned and made a move toward the door. “There’s no point in your taking a chance. I won’t be very long.”

“I guess I’ll go on in with you,” I said.

“Suit yourself,” he replied.

The stench of the place met me at the door, clamping itself down over my face like a foul green hand. It was an odor of many things —of manure again, of sourness, of dirt and offal—but mainly it was the odor of disease, a sweet tainted odor as of meat gone bad which blossomed in the air as vividly as a color. It was the odor of the morgue. Fumbling my way in the smirchy light, I blinked and gazed around me. Flies generated a steady buzzing in the stillness: they were everywhere—in the air, on the earthen floor, and upon each inch of the windowless walls. In sticky nocturnal fidget they crawled across the wan faces of three feverish, sick-looking children who, oblivious to the stir around them, and to the racking wails, slept soundly in one corner on a tick of straw. Nothing adorned the walls, not even a Madonna, while for furniture there was a table and three chairs and that was all. A huge shadow stirred clumsily in a nether corner of the room, startling me, until I saw that it was a cow, separated from the room by a low wooden partition, who gazed up at me from her repose with a sweet funereal expression, all the while sedately masticating. Then another groan roused me, and I saw the sick man on his straw pallet, only his face exposed beneath a thin and tattered U. S. Army blanket, the face itself taut, immobile, as pale as wax, and such a wondrous portrait of emaciation, of sunken and ravaged flesh, that I thought for an instant that he must be dead. Cass and the woman had knelt down beside him. I heard Cass’ voice, soft and gentle:
“Come va, mio carol Soffri molto?
It’s me, Cass, Michele.”

Michele opened his eyes, and slowly looked around him. It was as if he had been in some rapt communion with his agony, a meditation upon his pain as profound and consuming as the deepest sleep, so that now, encroached upon by the outer world, he was indeed like a man who wakes to marvel at his surroundings. Slowly his eyes roved about, searching the ceiling and the walls. Then, as his gaze finally lit upon Cass’ face, he gave a stir beneath the blanket and his sunken mouth with its lack of teeth suddenly parted wide in an unexpected, beaming smile. He spoke: his voice was almost unintelligible, stricken like the rest of him with the mutilating canker flowering within, cracked, hoarse, and sepulchral. “Cass,” he said, “I’ve been waiting for you to come! I have a bottle of wine. Francesca brought it today. Real Chianti.”

“What you need is sleep, Michele,” Cass said. “Then also I’ve brought you this special clever medicine which will put you on your feet in no time at all. How is the pain in the leg?”

“It is bad, Cass,” he replied, still smiling. “Very bad, Cass. But when you come, I—I do not know. There is a difference. We talk, you know. Make jokes. There is a difference in the pain. It is not so bad.”