In the end the Germans managed to destroy the defenses of the Republic of Montefiorino, but partisan groups continued to act independently in various areas of the mountains, trying to coordinate as best they could as they waited for the Allies to launch the final offensive. Bruno Montesi took refuge with his men on the other side of the Allied lines. Fabrizio was spirited back to town using the country lanes and back roads of the region. His parents welcomed him home with all the warmth and affection they were capable of, trying as best they could to hide their dismay at the terrible toll that the war had taken on the once-perfect body of their beloved son. They did everything in their power to distract him and to help him to find ways to face this new life in which he’d never be equal to the others. But he was always sad and melancholy, and they’d often find him sitting under the big oak at the end of the courtyard with a lost expression.
Rossano seemed to have vanished into thin air. His parents’ frantic efforts to locate him turned up nothing; no one had any idea of what might have happened to the boy or where he might be. Fabrizio heard he had gone missing, and in his nightmares the boy with the black shirt whose shoes he had taken became Rossano. One day when his parents were in the fields and he was home alone, he took the shoes from the closet where he’d hidden them and burned them.
Sugano managed to reach Bologna with the few comrades who had decided to stay with him, including Spino. Disobeying his commander’s orders to lay low, Spino snuck out of the safe house one night to visit his mother and let her know he was all right. He was recognized and surrounded by a group from the Black Brigades. He put up a fierce fight with his pistol, but he didn’t have time to assemble the pieces of the Sten he kept in his rucksack and he was captured. He was tortured to death; for one day and one night, his enemies inflicted unimaginable abuse on him. Then they publicly exposed his scourged, lifeless body as a warning to anyone who followed his example.
Like Sugano, many other partisans had gathered in the cities, imagining that the Allied offensive was imminent, but General Alexander halted the Allied advance in November, postponing the campaign until the following spring. The outcome was that the fascists who had run off came back to trap the partisans.
Perhaps that was the blackest hour of the whole millenary history of Italy. Never had her sons been pitted so ferociously against one another.
There was no limit to the violence.
The slaughter lasted all winter and spring, when the bombing started up again on a wide scale. Alexander’s armies finally succeeded in breaking through the Gothic line and occupying the vast plain, the Po river valley. The Allies entered Bologna on the morning of April 21, 1945: there were Poles, British and Americans, but also Italian soldiers from the Friuli, Legnano and Folgore brigades and a great number of partisans.
Many of the locals were finally free to return to town: Bruno Montesi, Aldo Banti, Amedeo Bisi and others. Long beards, submachine guns slung around their necks, grenades in their belts: well-brought-up people regarded them with suspicion, or with a mix of fear and scorn.
Montesi went to visit Fabrizio as soon as he could.
“How are you?”
“You can see for yourself how I am.”
“Fabrizio, what you have to consider is that you’re alive. You can be with your parents, your friends, you can read and study, meet people, travel. You can see your country finally liberated and embarking on a new road, building a new future. For the dead, it’s all over with.”
“They’re better off than me.”
“That’s not true. You’ll get used to it. Little by little, things will change.”
“Forgive me, Bruno, you did everything you could to save my life and I’m acting like a mean, ungrateful bastard.”
“You would have done the same thing for me. And maybe, in your place, I would have said the same things. We still need you. I’ve got big plans and you can help me, right here. Work on regaining your strength, in your body but most of all, in your mind. I know you can. I’ll come back to visit again soon.”
When Montesi came to visit Fabrizio again, it was to lay out his projects and plans; he had founded a section of the NLC right there in town, along with Banti and Bisi. But the transition proved to be anything but smooth. In the months that followed, you could cut the tension with a knife: people figured that the day of reckoning wouldn’t be far off, and they were right. A number of prominent people were justly or unjustly accused of collaborationism, of spying for the Social Republic or the fascists, and were simply dragged out of their houses in the middle of the night and put to death. For some it was a question of justice, for others ruthless revenge. In a nearly complete vacuum of rules and laws, anyone could decide, from one day to the next, to get rid of a personal enemy, to seek revenge for some perceived snub, to have the satisfaction of punishing someone who had wronged him in some way.
One day the news spread in town that Tito Ferretti, one of the most important landowners in the area, had been killed near the Samoggia as he was travelling by carriage to the stock exchange in Bologna to check on the price of pork. He had neither sons nor daughters because he was unmarried, and for this reason his workers and tenant farmers respectfully called him “il signorino,” the term reserved for a gentleman bachelor. His mother, an elderly noblewoman, had gone to live in the city because, she said, she didn’t feel safe any longer, given the mood in town. She had often asked her son to join her, but he refused because he was much too fond of the farm, of the land and all the animals, to want to give it all up.
“And really,” he would tell her, “who could have it in for me? I’ve given money to everyone: to the fascists, to the partisans . . . ” He was throwing ears of corn to the pigs as he spoke with her.
“You just don’t want to part from those pigs of yours: you care more about them than anyone or anything else. You’ll end up breathing your last breath on a pig cart, Tito!” the countess continued haughtily, referring to the wagon with folding sides which her son used to take the sows and butcher hogs to market. “Anyway, you’re not a child anymore and you can do as you like. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Unfortunately her prophecy was confirmed, almost to the letter.
For two days and two nights, the body of il signorino was left lying on the side of the dusty road, because no one dared approach the site of his murder. In the end, his niece, a twenty-five-year-old girl, went to where he lay, loaded his body onto a cart and wheeled him back home. She crossed the town from one end to another, making her way down the main road. The strain of pulling the cart soon had her dripping with sweat. There was not a soul to be seen, but closed doors and drawn shutters on either side of her. A desert of fear. The only sound to be heard in the deathly silence was the creaking of the iron rims of the cart wheels on the cobblestones. Sometimes she had to stop, when she felt she couldn’t pull her load a moment longer, but then a strength born of her hate for those who had done this to her uncle gave her new energy and pushed her forward. She knew that people were watching her from behind their windows, perhaps even the murderer himself! and she wanted them all to know that she wasn’t afraid and wouldn’t be intimidated.
Five days later, the carabinieri of Verona sent a routine request to their colleagues in Castelfranco regarding a transfer of title for a horse and carriage which had been sold at the Verona horse fair. The local carabinieri traced the plates to Ferretti and thus the murderer’s identity was discovered, although they were not able to apprehend him because, after trying to sell off the carriage, the man had fled to Belgium and was working as a miner there. He died, not long after he had arrived, crushed under the prongs of a forklift, smashed flat as a cockroach. Word had it that before he met his unfortunate end, he had decided to talk, to reveal the names of those who had organized Ferretti’s murder. But if that was the case, no one would ever learn the answer.
Some in town were sure that the murderer was a partisan who had asked Ferretti for money in the name of the party, had even produced a receipt on NLC letterhead, but had then put the money in his own pocket instead; in a panic that he would be found out, he killed Ferretti to keep the story quiet. Others spoke of certain activists in the party who were plotting to install the communist party in power by forming a cooperative with Ferretti’s land holdings, and had decided that the easiest way to do this was to take il signorino out of the picture. There was no lack of conjecture about the most plausible and implausible motives, because in that climate, anything could seem reasonable.
Each new occasion for bereavement cleared the way for more contempt and resentment. Fabrizio knew well that his friend the Blacksmith had always spoken against, and acted against, any form of violence, but he also came to realize that in such dark, uncertain, lawless times, there were others who had become accustomed to wielding power and deciding a man’s life or death with impunity, and they wouldn’t be easy to stop.
Astorre Roversi, known as buférla, craven tormentor of women and children, was found lying stiff along the road that went to Magazzino. Someone had shot him from behind the hedge.
As the months passed and the structures of the State were gradually reorganized, the worst of the emergency receded, but the tension did not let up. Many partisans had refused to surrender their arms, or had turned in defective or unserviceable weapons. But although there were many of them who believed that the time was ripe for a proletarian revolution, like the Russian revolt of 1917, very few were convinced that such nation-shattering change was really possible. Exhaustion had begun to set in, and worry over an uncertain future. They sensed that the blood which had flowed, the dead and the wounded, the terrible battles, would all be forgotten. The laws would be administered by the same bureaucrats who had served the old system; the new system couldn’t get off its feet without their help.
The fire slowly turned to ash.
With the new year, as societal structures and the norms regulating everyday life settled back into place, the turbulence seemed to cease. The few remaining loose cannons of the movement were silenced. A dull, heavy calm ensued.
At the end of February, Armando Bruni found himself once again in the painful position of facing one of his wife’s increasingly frequent breakdowns. As he had in the past, Doctor Munari ordered her hospitalization. It was then that Armando was heard threatening the good doctor; he supposedly said: “If you send her back to the insane asylum I’ll kill you!” Or at least that was the rumor that was circulating in town.
Three months later, one Sunday in May at eleven o’clock in the morning, Doctor Munari left home to go to church, as he was accustomed to doing every Sunday. Not out of devotion, but rather because he had become fond of watching the pretty young women chatting in the square after the high mass. He hadn’t walked more than a hundred meters when someone shot him three times with a pistol at close range, causing him to collapse in a pool of blood. His young wife heard the shots and, flooded by a sense of dread, rushed out into the street and found him in that state. She ran to him, screaming in despair, and reached him in time to hear his last breath. She fell onto her husband’s body, sobbing.
The shots had been heard distinctly in town as well and Aldo Banti, who was sitting out in front of what had been the House of Fascism, now restored to its original role as the House of the People, took off in the direction of the noise and came back shouting “They’ve killed the doctor!” People would much later remember that he was the first to announce the doctor’s death, as if he had somehow been waiting for it to happen.
No one else dared to approach the scene of the crime, afraid of becoming involved in some way; it was wiser to wait until the carabinieri came. The sergeant who showed up tried to question the people living in the vicinity, but no one had any information to offer. He wrote up a report to send to the judicial authorities, but they had no choice but to dismiss the case. The memory of how accounts had been settled in the recent past was still very fresh in everyone’s mind; best to steer clear of such nasty business: no one had seen anything and no one knew anything.
Rumors abounded, however. Some even said that a woman who lived above the Osteria della Bassa had seen two individuals riding off at great speed on their bicycles towards Madonna della Provvidenza, but she never reported it, so that was the end of that. After a few months, no one even mentioned it anymore. The widow retreated into her grief. She turned the house into a museum in her husband’s memory: the book on his desk was left open to the page he had been reading, his suits and shoes remained in the wardrobe, and the armor in his collection was polished every Saturday.
Fonso and Maria tried to spend time with her whenever they could, but she was inconsolable. She did nothing but speak of her husband, for whom she still had the utmost admiration. She always kept the windows closed and shunned the sunlight, she never cooked for herself and hardly ate anything. Every now and then Maria would bring her a little pot of hot soup or a piece of boiled meat with freshly baked bread. She’d say: “Eat something, signora! You’re still young, you can’t let yourself go like this.” Fonso thought that only time would be able to heal such a painful wound, especially because she didn’t have a guilty party to direct her hatred at.
Three years passed during which important things happened: the king was sent into exile and the Republic of Italy was proclaimed. Someone shot at the secretary of the communist party and everyone feared that a revolution, or civil war, would break out. That didn’t happen, but people were still divided along political lines. Even cycling, the most popular sport after soccer, pitted right against left. The “whites” rooted for Bartali, the “reds” preferred Coppi, and the fights that broke out in bars regularly exploded into a white heat: tee-shirts soaked with sweat, neck veins bulging. Political rivalry poisoned everything; each individual saw in his adversary an enemy to be destroyed. At the same time, everyone was struggling, everyone wished that the world around them were different. There was very little work; many men had to migrate to Belgium, where they ended up working in the coal mines. In the dark, like mice, breathing in the black dust.
In order to control a situation that always seemed on the verge of erupting, the local carabiniere chief was replaced by a sergeant sent by Rome who was said to be tough as iron. With his coming, the town was once again cast into turmoil.
One day, three years after the doctor’s murder, the news got out that Armando Bruni had signed a police statement in which he declared that his remorse had finally forced him to speak up and to admit that he had killed Doctor Munari. But that wasn’t all: he had also fingered Bruno Montesi, Aldo Banti and Amedeo Bisi as the organizers of the crime. Political activists, all, and the founders of the local chapter of the National Association of Italian Partisans.
Fabrizio, who over those three years was slowly beginning to learn to live with his disability, was profoundly shocked. Montesi came to see him the next day, ashen faced and red-eyed, looking like he hadn’t slept all night.
“I’ve come to say goodbye. They’ll be coming to get me soon; it may be a question of days, or hours. I just wanted you to know that I’ve done nothing. I’ve always been against violence and besides that, why would I want to kill the doctor? He never bothered with politics and as far as I know, he did his job well. It makes no sense. Even as far as Aldo and Amedeo are concerned. They may be hotheads, but they’re not stupid. Even if they had been planning such a thing, they would have had to run it by me and I would have said no.”
“Leave here, then. Leave Italy, go to Yugoslavia—the party will help you.”
“No. I’m staying here, I’ll stand trial if I need to. They have nothing against me . . . except Armando’s confession.”
Fabrizio dropped his eyes, embarrassed.
“I didn’t believe it for a moment. Your uncle is not capable of killing a fly. But the truth is that he is so hard up, in so many ways, that anyone could have convinced him to sign anything, with threats or with promises. Even just for a bowl of soup for his family.”
“Bruno, they’ll find other witnesses. They’ll find a way to trap you, this is only the beginning. Get away while you can!”
“No, you’re wasting your breath. I’m not going. This is my country and I fought to free it. Like you did. You’ll see, in the end the truth will out.”
Fabrizio stared straight into his eyes: “You’re so sure?”
“It’s what I hope,” replied Montesi. “Goodbye.”
Fabrizio watched him walk off with a cigarette in his mouth and his hands in his pockets, just like always. He felt tears come to his eyes.
“Good luck, Blacksmith,” he said to himself.
The same evening, Maria went to the house of the doctor’s wife with the excuse of bringing her the clothes she had washed and ironed, but as soon as she stepped in the door she burst into tears. “It wasn’t him, signora,” Maria sobbed, “he didn’t do it! I know him well. He may be a poor wretch but he’s not a murderer! He wouldn’t even know how to kill someone.”
The doctor’s wife touched her face: “I know Maria, I know he couldn’t have done such a thing. It was those other mutinous fanatics!”
Maria was confused; she hadn’t meant to blame anyone else. But she left the house badly shaken: this was the second of her brothers who had been accused of murder.
The accused were transferred to Sondrio, a mountain town in the far north of Italy, so they could be tried in a court outside of their region because of presumed bias closer to home. But the trial had taken on great political significance and journalists from a number of the Emilia Romagna newspapers had been sent out on assignment. On the first day of proceedings, there was quite a crowd present in the courtroom. All eyes were on the doctor’s wife, deathly pale in her black dress. Her eyes were heavily made up and her lipstick was blood red, making her look like a mythological Fury. She stared at the defendants with contempt in her eyes; the hatred that had been seething within her had finally found its target.
As the members of court filed in, the buzz of voices lowered, only to be silenced completely when the clerk said: “The accused may rise.”
Armando was the lead defendant but also a witness for the prosecution; he was separated from the other three and never looked at them.
After he had had been sworn in, the judge asked him: “What pushed you to speak three years after the fact?”
“Remorse,” replied Armando. “I couldn’t hide the truth any longer.” The Blacksmith tried in vain to meet his gaze.
Armando was not a very convincing witness: he often got mixed up and contradicted himself. The defense attorney, a clever, seasoned professional, had an easy time poking holes in his testimony. Armando was soon gasping like a fish out of water at the increasingly cogent questions the lawyer was barking out in rapid succession. The poor man was sweating, and his spit had dried up at the corners of his mouth. The day ended with the two sides more or less equally placed, and the courtroom in an uproar.
As was to be expected, the prosecution produced more witnesses. One was a twelve-year-old boy who on the day of the crime had climbed to the top of a cherry tree, from where he had seen everything. The other was a fortune-teller whose testimony was quite vague; she gave the unpleasant impression of speaking as if someone were prompting her. The defense rebutted by producing a doctor’s report which certified that the boy on the cherry tree was so nearsighted that he couldn’t have recognized his own mother at that distance. The entire house of cards built up by the prosecutor came tumbling down. In the end, the defendants were acquitted for lack of evidence.
The public prosecutor would not give up; he appealed the sentence in an attempt to save the face of those who had constructed the entire investigative and prosecutorial machine: the new iron-tough carabiniere sergeant and those who had installed him in office. The appeal ignored the fact that the sergeant, who had personally interrogated Bruni and obtained his confession, had already been accused of abuse, violence, sadism and assorted other iniquities by none other than his direct superior, Lieutenant Rizzo, in an official report. The superior officer’s efforts to make the truth known were met with his transfer first, and later his dismissal from the force.
In the end, the prosecution and defense made a deal, at Armando’s expense. The prosecution asked the court to take into consideration testimony from several more reliable witnesses who were present at the moment of the shooting, and came up with a more believable motive for the murder than the phrase that Armando had purportedly shouted in anger when the doctor had ordered his wife to be sent back into the psychiatric hospital.
The deal was this: the court would lighten the sentence as long as the defense agreed to pass Bruni off as the town idiot. They played their part with a vengeance: “He’s a poor half-wit, as anyone can clearly see. He can’t even pronounce two words in a row, the man is mentally deficient . . . ”
Armando was weeping with humiliation and shame, sobbing and covering his face with his hands as those present in the courtroom snickered at the scene. But then an individual who had never been seen during the trial suddenly rose to his feet. No one had noticed him there before or knew who he was or what he was doing there.
He shouted: “That’s enough!”
Floti.
He had, somehow, made his way down from his mountain haven and reached the scene of the trial in the middle of the Alps. Before anyone could stop him, he strode towards his brother and held him close, as if to protect him from that hostile, hurtful gathering. A deep silence fell over the courtroom; the presiding judge, about to call out some stern injunction, paused with his gavel in midair. Nothing was threatening the regular proceedings of the court, nothing was endangering the safety of those present. He decided that it was best to leave room, if only for a brief moment, for the human emotions unfolding there, for the humble actors of a tragedy much bigger than they were and whose victims they had become.
“He’s suffered enough,” said Floti in the silence weighing so heavily in the air. His voice trembled with disdain. “Leave him in peace or I’ll come looking for you, and then we’ll see whose turn it is to cry!” And he walked out.
Floti went back to town, for a short time, without letting anyone know. He wandered through the fields like a stray dog. Unseen, he observed his brother Savino, the boldest and most courageous of his brothers, prematurely white-haired and haggard, marked by adversity. He watched his nephew, handsome young Fabrizio, lurching along on his crutches, making his way down to the irrigation ditch that bordered their land and sitting on its bank, grimly staring at the flowing waters.
He went to the cemetery and left his dog tags on the tomb of Captain Alberto Munari who had sawed the arm off one of his comrades in war, with the hope of saving the boy. Then he started down the road that would take him back up to his mountains. The troubles he had suffered reopened his old wounds; the unhealable grief at losing his son finished him off.
No one in town would ever see him again.
EPILOGUE
The trial concluded with reduced sentences, which were later completely amnestied. But Armando spent one more year in prison than the other defendants because his lawyer had neglected to sign the release papers.
The homecoming of Montesi and the others was greeted with great celebrating on the part of their supporters and comrades in the party.
No one noticed Armando’s absence, no one tried to do anything about it. When he got back home he was unrecognizable.
One evening in mid-autumn, Fabrizio came to town along with his father Savino, who was driving their small methane-fuelled truck. Savino was going to the mill to load up some fodder for the pigs and Fabrizio got out to buy the newspaper. He told his father that he’d wait for him in front of the café and Savino agreed to pick him up on his way back. Every now and then he would raise his eyes from the paper to check and see whether his father’s truck was coming around the bend. All at once he noticed a young man walking down the middle of the road in his direction; he was wearing a pair of fustian trousers, a gray-green high necked sweater, boots and a brown leather jacket. His long hair covered his forehead, and his beard only partially covered a scar that crossed his face from his left cheekbone to his upper lip. Greatly changed, but surely him.
Rossano.
Fabrizio was the only one to have taken notice; none of the others sitting out in front of the café showed any signs of recognition.
He leaned into his crutches, pushed himself up and went towards Rossano. They stopped, standing face to face, at less than a meter’s distance. A gust of wind carried the smell of their childhood on it and the colors of the fall.
“It’s you,” said Fabrizio, almost with relief.
Rossano looked at his leg. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well. Stuff happens . . . ” Fabrizio fell quiet. “I can’t even say I’m happy to see you.”
“I guess not, given the circumstances. And we can’t even shake hands . . . ”
“No. Sorry.”
“Maybe, one day or another we’ll . . . talk?”
“Maybe,” replied Fabrizio in a breath, “maybe, talk . . . ”
“See you around,” said Rossano as he started off again amidst the drifting dry leaves.
“See you around,” thought Fabrizio, but he said nothing.
When the plowing season came, Iofa showed up one evening in the courtyard to talk to Savino.
“What’s going on, Iofa?” he asked.
“What’s going on is that Bonetti wants to level the Pra’ dei Monti hills to turn them into arable land.”
“So what? It’s his land and he can do what he wants with it.”
Iofa took him by the arm and led him a few steps away with a secretive air. “One night, many years ago, your brother Floti and I took a walk out that way after a vagabond appeared at the Osteria della Bassa, a fellow with fire in his eyes and a beard down to his waist, saying that he’d seen the golden goat there.”
“So did you find what you were looking for?”
“No. But we found something else. D’you remember the umbrella mender?”
“Vaguely.”
“That’s who we found. He was inside a hole on the third hill, all curled up like a dog. Dead.”
Savino scowled: “What the hell is this story? Floti never said a word to me about this.”
“It’s the pure and simple truth. We found some tools in the grass and buried him with a few shovelfuls of dirt . . . ”
“So get to the point, Iofa.”
“What if they find him now?”
“He’s not going to mind if they find him. Where’s the problem?”
“You had leased out that land until just last year. With that carabiniere sergeant we’ve got now, he’s likely to think that it’s one of the fellows who have gone missing over the last few years. It’s you he’ll come looking for, asking questions . . . Given what happened to Armando, that’s all you need . . . ”
“I see what you’re getting at. But what can I do about it?”
“I know exactly where he is. We’ll go there tonight and we’ll dig him out. There won’t be anything left but a few bones; it won’t take us long.”
Savino took a long breath and tried to sort out his thoughts.
“Let’s go,” Iofa pressured him. “The sooner we get this done, the better. I told you. It’ll only take us ten minutes.”
“All right,” replied Savino. “We’ll use your cart. It’s less likely to attract attention.”
He loaded up a basket, a sack, two shovels and a lantern and they set off, after he’d told Linda she should go to bed if she wanted to, that they would be very late.
When they got to Pra’ dei Monti it was pitch black out. They began to dig at the spot which Iofa pointed out. When they were about four or five strokes down, they found the head and then all the rest. They put everything into the sack and the sack into the basket, and they didn’t even bother to shovel the dirt back in, because one hole more or less, on those heaps of ground, wouldn’t make any difference. They were getting ready to leave when Iofa noticed something in the middle of the freshly turned soil and shone the lantern on it.
“What is it?” asked Savino.
Iofa picked up a sort of oilcloth sack. It was smallish, and contained a leather cylinder, which he opened. Inside was a sheet of paper with about fifteen lines written in a very simple, regular hand. He passed it to Savino.
“What does it say?”
“I really can’t tell . . . it must be Latin.”
Iofa called out to the horse; he didn’t want to stay in that place a moment longer. They headed for home through the open countryside. It was cold, but Savino barely noticed. His mind was on the words written on that piece of paper and he racked his brains trying to find an explanation. How had the umbrella mender died? Who had left that message, and why was it written in a language which had been dead for centuries?
A solution suddenly came to mind. “Amedeo!” he exclaimed. “Amedeo Bisi. He studied at the seminary with the priests and he knows Latin. He lives only a kilometer from here . . . ”
“Wait, you want to wake him up now?”
“Why not? He’s not going to shoot me.”
“You never know these days . . . ” grumbled Iofa.
Bisi, rudely awakened in the middle of the night, opened a crack in the shutters with the barrel of his rifle and peered down: “Who’s there?”
“It’s me, Amedeo,” replied Savino in a whisper, “and Iofa’s with me.”
“What are you doing here at this time of night?”
“We need to talk to you. It’s urgent.”
Bisi’s wife had become alarmed. “Who is it? What do they want from you? Don’t go . . . ”
“Calm down. They’re friends.”
Bisi went down in his pajamas, turned on the light and opened the door.
“I was about to shoot you,” he muttered.
“Just what I said,” commented Iofa, shaking his head, “but there was no stopping him.”
Savino pulled out the leather case and told the story of the umbrella mender. “Maybe you remember him yourself.”
“I do, I think I do. He was a client of Hotel Bruni, wasn’t he?”
“That’s the guy. Iofa told me that Bonetti is planning to level Pra’ dei Monti and that maybe, given the situation, it would be best to dig up the body before someone else does. I was leasing out that land until just last year and you know, with what’s been happening lately . . . ”
“Do you have him with you?”
“Yeah, in a bag. But then, as we were about to leave, Iofa found this. It looks like Latin to me, and I thought that you . . . Sorry about waking you up and everything, but I started feeling I just had to know what it said.”
Bisi took the paper. “It’s been a while since I’ve read any Latin,” he sighed. “Let me see . . . ”
He put on his glasses and started to slowly scan the lines. Every now and then he’d scribble something using a pencil stub, on the back of the Old Farmer’s Almanac. He got to his feet. “I must have a dictionary around here somewhere.” He opened a cupboard. “As luck would have it, here it is.”
He got back to work, his expression becoming more and more intent as the words took shape. His eyes, behind the thick spectacles, became wide and filled with wonder. Savino was trying to interpret every furrow in his brow, every flicker of his eyelids.
“Holy Christ!” exclaimed Bisi in the end.
“What does it say? Don’t keep me hanging!”
“Do you know who the umbrella mender was?”
Savino shrugged. Iofa hobbled closer; he didn’t want to miss a word of this.
“Don Massimino, the old pastor who was said to have died in a state of grace.”
“That can’t be!”
“His beard, his long hair, the years of living rough as a beggar, the remorse over a tragic mistake committed in his youth, the years of penance . . . made him unrecognizable.”
“What are you saying? When the umbrella mender used to come to Hotel Bruni, Don Massimino had been dead for years. He’s buried in the cemetery, under an oak tree.”
“Don Massimino is inside a sack on Iofa’s cart.”
“Well then who’s there in the graveyard?”
“Who knows? Sand, stones, someone else’s body . . . you’d have to open the tomb to find out. Remember, it was Don Giordano who held his funeral. Maybe he knew the whole story, but he decided he would rather have the tomb of a saint in the cemetery than the memory of a disgraced priest in town.”
“But why would Don Massimino have organized his own funeral?”
“So he could drop out of sight, and atone for his sins. Here it says that he had a relationship with a girl when he was a young pastor up in the mountains. The girl became pregnant and, for fear of a scandal, poisoned herself. Her mother lost her mind.”
“Oh holy God,” exclaimed Savino, “that’s Desolina’s story!”
“Right,” confirmed Iofa, “right you are!”
They told Bisi they story of the poor madwoman who would come to Hotel Bruni to seek shelter and warmth in the middle of winter.
“Maybe the umbrella mender used to come back here,” suggested Bisi, “to the town that considered him a saint . . . I’m not saying he wasn’t fond of your family, but maybe he would come to Hotel Bruni so he could meet up with this Desolina, to ask for her forgiveness. Anyway, he never found the courage. In the end, he decided to die like the girl he loved, by poisoning himself. A horrible death, to be sure. Look at this:
“‘Venenum quod semper mecum habere consueram, sumpsi.’
I drank the poison that I always kept with me. The Latin is quite easy to read, it’s taken from an author that we did our first translations from in the seminary . . . He ends up with a phrase which begs for God’s mercy. ‘Miserere mei Domine.’”
“But why did he choose to die there, on Pra’ dei Monti? He always said it was possessed by a demon.”
“To drive the demon away? Did he sacrifice his own life to exorcise this demon? We’ll never know.”
“So that’s why the umbrella mender was so strange. That’s why he spoke like a fortune teller, or a prophet . . . Don’t tell anyone what happened tonight, Amedeo. Nor you, Iofa.”
They both nodded in silence. Savino and Iofa returned home and buried the bones of Don Massimino at the foot of a century-old oak tree, on the edge of the field that bordered on the consecrated land of the cemetery.
The winter that followed was particularly harsh and, just before Christmas, there was a big snowfall. It was said that a wanderer surprised by the storm hurried down a road followed many a time in the past, sure to find refuge at the end and a bowl of warm soup. It wasn’t a man, but a woman. A ragged old woman, dragging herself through the deep snow in her broken shoes, clutching a worn shawl around her shoulders. It was Desolina, who had vanished without a trace such a very long time ago.
She entered into the Bruni family courtyard, strangely plunged into darkness. She looked around in bewilderment, as if she couldn’t quite recognize the place. Her eyes set on the jumble of burnt beams and crumbled walls where the enormous stable had once stood: the great Hotel Bruni. The house was still there. There was no doubt about it, that was the house. She knocked again and again, calling out with a querulous voice: “It’s Desolina, poor Desolina. Open the door for Desolina . . . ”
But no one could answer her from the dark, empty house. The old woman looked around, at the ancient walnut tree lifting its naked branches into the twirling white flakes and then, again, at the closed door. She curled up on the threshold to wait, unable to believe that Hotel Bruni might not welcome her. Surely Clerice would soon show up in her white apron, with the soup ladle in her hand.
Iofa, the carter, found her like that the next day, covered with snow, her head leaning against the door, the tears frozen on her ashen face, her eyes staring in pained surprise.
THE END