In Calabria by Peter S. Beagle
Another time, waving an ancient bulb-setter (daffodils were his one floral weakness) at the radiance in his potato field, he announced, “When the wind changes, and you smell the new moon and dance off over the hills and far away, the only heart broken around here will be the goat’s. I want you to understand that. You are a miracle, yes, truly—the one miracle of my life—but miracles do not break the heart. Foolish, ridiculous things do that, songs do that, smells do that, everyday stupidities do that . . . not a unicorn leaving town. Pity poor Cherubino, not Bianchi.” And after a few moments of kneeling and twisting the bulb-setter in the still-damp earth, he added, just as though the unicorn had spoken to him, “Of course I will miss you. When did I say that I would not miss you? But just so you know.”
At times the unicorn actually appeared to be listening, even cocking its delicate, almost transparent ears to catch the words. Bianchi did not flatter himself that this was so—I was practically a child, I liked it when Uncle Vincenzo used to tell me what the chickens said to him—but he did rather enjoy hearing his gruff, unpracticed voice addressing someone other than a postman or a butcher, a wineseller, a mechanic, and speaking of matters that he had not discussed with anyone but the poems since his earliest youth. To the unicorn he spoke without grooming or ordering his thoughts, without concern as to what such a creature might think of him—as though, in fact, to the oldest of old friends.
Perhaps that was the reason—for one pays at once the deepest and the most casual sort of attention to a friend of that standing—that it took him longer than it should have to connect the unicorn’s increasing interest in the half-sheltered hollow near his house with a slight change in its graceful outline, visible only in a certain light, at a certain angle. He had been cleaning and sharpening a scythe outside his toolshed at the time, and actually cut a finger painfully when the realization finally descended upon him. The three words he uttered then clearly startled Cherubino, who had never heard them before. They were medieval in origin.
“You could have told me!” he growled at the goat. “You knew—you could have said!” Realizing the absurdity of this before the words were out of his mouth, he put the scythe away, wrapped his wounded finger in the tail of his shirt, and started directly toward the hollow, where the unicorn was visible in the lengthening twilight. It turned its head sharply at his approach, but did not flee him this particular time. He noticed signs that it had been pawing at the ground: not aggressively, but more like a cat or dog—or a bird, for that matter—making a nest.
“It is not the stupid goat’s stupid fault,” he muttered. “How could I not have known, gran’ disgraziato?”
The unicorn made the first sound he had ever heard it make: neither a whinny nor a low, but something almost like the quiet ripple of water against a riverbank. Bianchi said in his most reasonable voice, “Why here? In the sweet name of Jesus and his mother Maria, not to mention every porca miseria saint in the porca miseria calendar, what can have possessed you to choose my porca miseria patch of dirt for your lying-in? Go to Palmi, by the sea—that’s the place for someone like you. They have the Casa della Cultura there, they have the big folklorico museum, they will know how to honor a unicorn. What is there here for you . . . for you and your little one, but an old man living with a bunch of old animals on a forsaken hillside farm? There has been a great mistake. You must know this.”
The unicorn made the soft sound again. It—no, she, I must remember now—abruptly folded her legs under herself and lay down, only to rise almost immediately and recommence lightly pawing the earth with her sharp, small hooves. Feeling utterly foolish, Bianchi asked, “Do you need me to help you? With my rake or something?” The unicorn looked at him. Bianchi said, “Then I will go now. If you do need me . . .”
He left the sentence unfinished, and turned away to walk to his house. He did not look back, nor did he stir out of doors that night, nor even steal to the window in hopes of spying on the unicorn, despite his knowledge that she was surely nowhere near ready to drop her . . . colt? Or would it be fawn? Fawn, I suppose—but maybe not. Well, it will surely not be born soon. I can think about it?
He wrote no poetry that night, not feeling the need at all. Nor did he feel like going to bed, but drifted through the little house, smiling at nothing, humming no song he recognized to himself. That time he did open the Melissa Gaglioppo, though he drank only sparingly, feeling a vague and primitiveurge to use the wine to sanctify the spot where a unicorn had elected to give birth. But she might very well be offended. I don’t think unicorns are Christian beasts, but how would I know?
But in the morning he went outside before he had even had his breakfast, and found the unicorn again lying down in the nest that she had scraped out for herself, having apparently lined it with grass—or did Cherubino do that for her? She rose swiftly as he approached, lowering her head in a warning attitude that he had never seen her take before. He halted immediately, not retreating, but holding up his hands, palm out, saying, “It’s me, you know me.” Which, when he thought about it, was probably true: without a word or a touch ever between them, the unicorn might very well know him better than anyone ever had. Bianchi said, “I will ask no more about your purpose, your choices. But if you should need me, I will be nearby.”
And he kept his word, as best he could, being both a southern Calabrese and a Bianchi. From then on, he almost never left his land, except when absolutely necessary, to shop for food or tools in the village; or, once, to help out Romano when the mail van bogged down on a muddy curve. That time, he provided only the stubborn strength of his back and shoulders, and then hurried home without staying for talk, or for the postino’s gratefully-proffered flask of strega.
It was not that he imagined the unicorn to be in danger if he were, in fact, not close at hand; his farm animals all gave birth without anyone’s help, and seemed to prefer it so, as far as he could ever tell. But the little he knew about unicorns suggested that they mated seldom and gave birth even more rarely, and that she might indeed have some need of him when her time came. Over the years, he had developed a proper respect for Cherubino’s goat-wisdom and Mezzanotte’s mysterious feline reveries, but he had no great faith in their obstetrical skills.
From that point he began calling the unicorn La Signora, though only in his mind, and in the poems. It seemed more respectful.
Romano thought he had a woman, and was glad of it. “As long as we have known him,” he said to his sister Giovanna, “which might as well be all our lives, he has been alone.” He paused briefly, scratching his head. “Except for the little time when he was married. And I think he was alone even then.”
Giovanna’s heavy, dark eyebrows drew together. “I don’t remember that at all—him being married. It is impossible to imagine.”
“You were too little. I remember her, in a sort of way. She hugged us when she left.” He was digging into his dinner, speaking to her with his mouth full. “He has lived like a hermit ever since. Up there in an empty house, growing sourer with the years, never seeing how much his solitude has changed him. A woman would tell him.”
Giovanna shrugged. “He was always cranky—I never knew him any different. I liked him well enough when we were young, but I would not care to be the woman involved with him. Who, as you have never seen her, most likely does not exist at all.” She rumpled his hair fondly. “Now you werealways a romantic boy, and an extremely imagina tive one. People do not change so much.”
“Well, you tell me what you think when you see him next,” Romano answered her, a bit pettishly. “You are good enough to drive my route right now—in a little while, when the roads are dryer, you will take over for me one day a week.” He frowned heavily over the last of his tonno cunzatu, pretending to ponder. “I think it will be . . . Friday. Yes—every Friday you can deliver mail for me, gaining experience and making any number of new friends—”
“—while you pick up Tessa Moro on your motorcycle and whisk her off to wherever the two of yo
“It is a very old goat, and no danger at all to you. And when you meet Bianchi’s woman—”
“—if I meet her—”
“—I want you to study her as you are forever studying my Tessa—”
“—I like your Tessa a great deal, more or less—”
“—then you can tell me if you think she will make him happy.” Setting his dinner plate in the sink, Romano turned to put his hands on his sister’s shoulders. “Because I would like him to be happy. I really would.”
Giovanna patted his cheek. “We will see. Perhaps I can persuade him to read me some of the poetry you tell me he writes. That would be at least interesting.”
Romano shook his head decidedly. “I have never been able to make him show me even one poem. That won’t happen.”
“We will see,” Giovanna said.
The unicorn continued to show few of the obvious signs of pregnancy as the weeks passed. Claudio Bianchi had no idea of how long such a gestation should normally take: he could only go by the gradual rounding of her sides, which hardly showed from even a middle distance, and by the fact that she spent more and more time resting in what he thought of as her nest. Shyly, rather like a lover leaving flowers at a sweetheart’s doorstep, he began to bring her both a share of the cows’ hay and such new grass as had begun to emerge after the rains. He left water for her as well, but she drank very little of that, seeming to take moisture—as in the old fairytales—more from the morning dew that collected on the grass and in the cups of certain leaves. Beyond that, he had no notion of what she might actually need of him, nor of how he could tell and what he could do if she were in serious discomfort.
Once or twice, when he was sitting silently by her in the night, nearly asleep, she made the little river-sound that she had made before, and he woke immediately to find her gazing at him out of eyes huge with understanding—or with sorrow for his stupidity, for all he could judge, or with bewilderment at how she could possibly have arrived at this place, this time, in her immortal life. Then he would say the only thing he knew to say to her: “Sleep, I am here,” and fall back into his own wondering doze. But whether she herself actually slept or not, he could never tell.
He rarely wrote poetry during those nights when he sat lost beside the unicorn, doing nothing but listening to her breath, watching her sides move regularly in and out. But it was during one early afternoon when he had brought her a handful of the very earliest snowdrops and celandines—she would never take food from him directly, but seemed to have no objection to his watching her nibble what he set down before her—that he saw the first white ripple that was not a breath, or not her own. He did make up a poem about that; but he wrote it in his head, and by the time he got back to the house it was as vanished as any dream. He wrote another poem that night; but, as he told Giovanna Muscari, it was not nearly as good as the first. “One should never try to remake what is gone. I still forget that sometimes.”
Because, as it happened, it was Giovanna, on her first day of substituting for Romano at the wheel of the blue van, who caught him tending the unicorn. Dark, slight, quick, and mischievous as her brother, but with the startlingly deep-green eyes that turned up once in every couple of Muscari generations, she had parked, as Romano always did, in front of the house, hailing him as she got down from the cab. Receiving no response, she turned and glimpsed the back of his grizzled head, his heavy shoulders bent over something she could not see.
She picked up the three computer-printed envelopes addressed to him—two political flyers and an advertisement for something I cannot believe he would have sent away for—and started across the field between them, calling aloud, “Signor Bianchi, here is your very own mail, personally hand-delivered at great expense, without a moment’s care for her personal safety—” for Cherubino was capering along beside her, so far unthreatening, but plainly enjoying her anxiety—“by a valiant postina who fully expects a proper cup of coffee for her efforts . . .” The last two or three words did not emerge entirely coherently.
Bianchi leaped up with a hoarse gasp, turning to face her, as the unicorn simultaneously sprang to her feet. Giovanna, being a woman, wasted no time in denying what she saw, which was a unicorn, and—to her eye—an unquestionably pregnant one. When she found her voice, she said, mildly enough, “Actually, your mail is not very interesting. I wouldn’t bother with it at all, myself.”
Bianchi looked back at her without speaking, his eyes stunned and helpless beyond appeal. Giovanna said, “Someone would have found out, sooner or later. Probably my brother.”
The unicorn had not fled, but had halted a little way beyond Bianchi, regarding Giovanna with a curious, wary thoughtfulness. Bianchi said accusingly, “You drive softer than he does. You sneaked up on me.” But he half-laughed before he was finished, realizing the absurdity of the charge. “No, I was careless. Usually I wait until he has been and gone. But ever since . . .” He gestured, not so much toward the unicorn as toward the hollow that she had arranged to receive her newborn when the time came. “I cannot tell when it might happen—it is not like with a cow—and I need to be here. I was thinking that tonight perhaps I might sleep . . .”
“Then you would catch a cold to no purpose,” Giovanna interrupted him. “I am no farmer, but I can look at her and know that she will not give birth for some weeks yet—at least three, maybe more. Men!” and she shook her head in a certain resigned annoyance that her brother would have recognized. She stepped past Bianchi, holding out her hand to the unicorn, who stayed where she was. She asked, “No one else knows?”
“No one has seen her.” Bianchi smiled crookedly. “It is something to have a reputation for being a bad-tempered hermit.” But his expression remained anxious.
Giovanna hooked her thumbs into her belt and leaned back on her heels, much in the manner of Romano, which it would have infuriated her to realize. “Stop looking at me like that. Of course I will tell no one—what sort of person do you think I am? But there are conditions attached.”
“There would be. Are you not a Muscari?” But there was no spite or mockery in Bianchi’s voice—nothing but relief. “Name these conditions, then.”
“First—” Giovanna ticked the clauses off briskly on her fingers—“you will give me your telephone number, so that I can call you every evening to inquire about her health and her . . . progress. Second—”
She was interrupted by one of Bianchi’s explosive snorts. “As though you could be any sort of help if she were in any sort of trouble. You know less about her than I do, and I know nothing.”
Giovanna nodded, tapping a second finger on her palm. “Just so. So you and I must trust her to have this little one by herself, without getting in her way. Do not make yourself ill spending your nights out here with her; do not concern yourself with feeding her, not as long as she is on her feet. After that . . . after that, I think she will tell you what she needs. Yes, I am quite sure she will let you know.”
Surprisingly, Bianchi uttered a slow, rusty chuckle. “Because you are sure that she is just like you, and you would never hesitate to let anyone know if you needed something. Very well, I agree to that. And the third condition?”
Giovanna was a long time in answering him. She looked away across the hollow at the watchful unicorn, and it seemed to Bianchi that something soundless passed between them in which he had no part. When Giovanna turned back to him, her manner was that of the small, shy, dark girl tagging silently behind her brother, clutching her stuffed monkey. She said, “Would you read me one of your poems about her?”
The request—so clearly not a condition—caught Bianchi amidships, leaving him literally wordless, though he spluttered a good deal. Even Romano, with all his sly prodding about the poetry, had never really asked to see any o
Her voice trailed away, and she did not attempt to finish the sentence. Bianchi had no idea of what to say to her, so what came out of his mouth had no thought at all behind it. “I will tell you the first one. Maybe it is the one you wanted to write.”
Giovanna frowned uncertainly. Bianchi scratched his head and closed his eyes. “Listen.”
It took him a long time, not because of the poem’s length, nor because he had forgotten so much as a word, but rather because having a listener disconcerted him. Giovanna’s attentive eyes and the way she clasped her hands in front of her made him at times cough and stammer, or lose his place and have to start a line over. He often thought that it might still be the best poem he had yet written about the unicorn; but Giovanna’s presence made him increasingly unsure of this, and he disliked the feeling greatly. Nevertheless, he repeated it all the way to the end, and then turned abruptly away, saying over his shoulder, “I have work to do. So do you.”
Giovanna caught up with him within a few strides, catching hold of his coatsleeve and pulling him to face her. “Yes. Yes, that is just the way I felt when I first saw her. If I could write a poem, I would have written exactly that. Thank you. Here is your mail.”