In Calabria by Peter S. Beagle
Then he found a spade and walked slowly—a one-man funeral cortege—to the nearby hollow where La Signora had chosen to give birth to her black colt. He buried Third Cat there, marking the grave with a small white stone.
None of the other animals had been harmed, though the cow Gianetta had developed a runny eye that warranted attention. Bianchi determinedly put in his usual afternoon of spading, wheeling, spreading, weeding, and loaming, despite a sudden new flurry of scholars, romantics, and venture capitalists—what else are the ’Ndrangheta, really?—as well as a return visit from a pair of television personalities who had plagued him for weeks since La Signora’s existence had first become rumored. Bianchi was more polite to them than he had been, having had more practice; but all the same, he was wearier when they left than a full day’s work should have made him.
With them gone, he called the cows in to be milked, put away his tools and put food out for the cats and Garibaldi, and sat down on the old wicker chair that Giovanna had urged him to bring up from the barn, “ just in case a friend might actually wish to stay and talk with you. You never know, Bianchi.” Personally, he felt that the chair offered much too open an invitation to interviewers; but he found himself doing it nevertheless, because she had asked.
The unicorns came to him in the slow, slanting light of late afternoon. He was too tired and downhearted to rise, even for unicorns, but sat motionless, watching them walk toward him, the white-golden and the black, shining with their own moonlight, even in the sun of the mezzogiorno, their cloven hooves making no sound. They came all the way to where he was and stood as still as he, and he put his hand on both their heads without fearing to alarm them. He said, “Third Cat is dead.”
La Signora looked into his eyes, as she had done before, but this time Bianchi looked back and lost himself in a bright wilderness: a forest filled with glowing, shifting shadows, where nothing threatened, but nothing he knew applied, nothing he recognized held its shape for long. He felt himself altering, amending, as he wandered there—for how long?—until he had to make himself return while there was still a himself to command. And that is why men hunt unicorns, and why they will always kill them when they capture them. Not the beauty, not the magic of the horn . . . because of what lives and waits in the eyes. Finally I understand.
“I have asked before why you stay on, for all the trouble, and the danger. Whatever you are waiting for, it must be very important to you. All I know to say to you now is that bad people will be coming here soon, looking for you. You do not know them. These people are different from the fools and clowns and silly children who have been hunting you over my land all this time. They are clever, they are organized, and once they have their hands on you, they will use you, use your existence, in every way they can. I cannot protect you, and I do not know how to advise you, so I can only beg you to go away now. As I have begged my . . . someone as important to me as any unicorn to stay away from me.”
La Signora did not move, nor did the black colt. A sudden wave of cold bitterness overtook Bianchi, and he stood up from the wicker chair and shouted, “Everyone I care about should just stay away from me! People—animals—everyone, all of you! Do what you want, but stay away!”
The unicorn did a strange thing then: she lowered her head and touched him with her horn, lightly, glancingly, on his left shoulder, almost as though she were making him a knight of some order whose sense and purpose he would never know. It hurt him, though the point of the horn never broke the skin, or even penetrated his frayed old workshirt; it hurt so that he cried aloud and thought that he must surely vomit from the pain. Then it stopped hurting.
Bianchi said, “Oh.” After that he said, “But I can’t.” He touched his shoulder. He said, “I have to.” He turned without saying anything more, walked into his house, sat down at the kitchen table, where we had our dinner at midnight, a life ago, and began to write a poem.
It was not about the unicorns; or if it was, he never knew it. Nor was it about Giovanna Muscari, though he meant it to be. Poems come as they will, and when; and this one insisted on being a calm farewell to Cherubino, and to Garibaldi, Sophia and Mezzanotte, and to Gianetta, Martina, and Lucia as well, and to the pigs. The poem asked them all to take care of one another as best they might be able—he worried especially about the cows not being milked, but Romano will know, Romano will surely hear them calling when he comes—and if they kept some memory of him at all, to remember that he had loved them.
He was very precise about it all, addressing everything that had shared his life, even in small ways. He urged his grapevines to guard themselves against crown gall, shoot necrosis, and spiral nematodes; reminded his apple orchard to keep cold, and the deer to keep their word and continue leaving his tomatoes and his vegetable beds alone. At the end, he wrote only two lines to Giovanna.
When he finished, he was sharply disappointed, seeing it as far more of a last will than a real poem. He considered destroying it, but then decided that since he did not have a will of any sort—nor any heir, no better than crazy Uncle Vincenzo—it should be left where it could be discovered after his death, for whatever use it might be to anyone. So he put it away in the desk with the poems, because Giovanna knew where he kept those.
He had become strangely calm, and wondered at it in a distant way. If this is happening because she touched me with her horn, that is a splendid and remarkable thing, of course, but I wish that she had made me bulletproof instead. That would be practical, at least. He completed his evening tasks later than usual, sat in the kitchen for a while with his pipe and the last of the red Ciro, and at last went to bed. Remembering when he was too sleepy to get up again that he had forgotten to call Giovanna. He smiled drowsily, thinking about her . . .
. . . and woke up just as the door crashed in with a splintering squeal of hinges, and he was on the floor, being kicked scientifically and enthusiastically by all the feet in the world. The work was actually being done by only three pairs, but he did not realize this until he had been hauled upright a couple of times, slammed against his bed, and knocked down again, so that the kicking could continue. Somewhere in the process, he struck out in the darkness, felt a nose give, heard a gasping obscenity, and doubled over from a hammer-blow to his stomach. He clung to his assailant with all his strength, clawing for a grip on arms and shoulders he could not see, fearing to go down again. None of them said a word—a message was simply being delivered—and all he could think, as much as he could think, was thank God she isn’t here . . . oh, thank God . . . thank God . . .
. . . and then the motorcycle—Romano, he bought that used muffler from Malatesta—and the beating stopped at the sound . . . and she was there, raging among them through the broken door, swinging a tire iron like a flaming sword and screaming like a maniac. The ’Ndrangheta had no time to prepare for such an attack; in the close quarters the iron got home with every swing, and Giovanna drove them from one wall to the other, round and round, until they blundered outside and fled, lurching and limping, to the car that Bianchi had never heard arrive. She did not pursue, but dropped the tire iron and ran to him, dropping to her knees to catch him as he sagged, cursing steadily and fluently, and crying through it all. In the end, it was Bianchi who had to hold her.
“I am all right,” he kept telling her. “Giobella, I am really all right, they did not injure me much.” But even as he said it, he retched thinly in her lap, and she had the light on and the nightshirt off, and was prowling around him, assessing his bruises. There was almost no blood, except from his mouth—the ’Ndrangheta know their business—but everything hurt, and would hurt worse the next day, and for many days after that. Giovanna went back to cursing as she heated water and found clean cloths to wash him thoroughly. She only started crying again after she got him into bed and climbed in beside him.
“How did you know?” he managed to ask her. “It isn’t Friday.”
“It is Wednesday night, or Thursday morning by now. And you did not call, and
As I would feel it . . . “So you stole your brother’s motorcycle, which you do not know how to drive—”
“I did not steal it. Stealing is when you don’t bring it back. And I only fell once. Well, twice, but that one was the truck’s fault. No, that is just a small scrape, leave it alone. What matters is that I got here.”
“Yes,” he said. “Thank you, Giobella.” After a moment he added, still somewhat shy about it, “Giobella mia.”
She was silent for such a while that he thought she must have fallen asleep. But presently she said, “They will come back. You cannot be alone when they do.”
“It will be different this time. Perhaps they will send that man I first met, the one I told you about—”
“No, it will be worse! Ascoltame, Bianchi, listen! They have lost face tonight, they have been shamed—”
“That was your doing alone, not mine. God knows, it was not mine.”
“Which makes it worse, because now it is not simply a matter of business, not just about unicorns, land, papers they want you to sign. Now it is la vendetta!” The word hissed in the night, in the bed, like an angry snake. “I will not let you be alone up here.”
“And I will not let you . . .” It was quickly becoming painful to get words out through split, blood-encrusted lips “You have risked enough, woman, enough! They may already have been asking questions about you, about us—if they do not know tonight who it was on the motorcycle, they will tomorrow. No more. Not even on Fridays.”
In the end—and it took all the rest of the night—they came to an agreement which satisfied neither of them. For the sake of propriety, Giovanna would arrive with her friend Silvana on every Tuesday evening, and go home the same way in the morning, as she had done before, returning on Friday for her regular mail delivery. “It is not that Romano doesn’t know. He knew what was happening before I did—as I told you, sometimes he understands more than you would expect from a brother. But if he does not ever admit to me, or to you, that he knows, then he is not lying when he tells other people that he does not know. Men amaze me.”
But she agreed, or seemed to agree, that she would not come to his house on any whim or impulse, even if by some chance he did not phone her; nor would she stay any night but Tuesday. He, in his turn, promised faithfully to report the attack to the police—even though neither one expected any result but paperwork—but refused firmly to visit a doctor. “I have been hurt worse by donkeys, cows, my own tools. Nothing is broken, nothing is damaged inside. If something else starts hurting . . . bene, yes, then I will go. Will that content you?”
“No, that is just stupid. But we will let it alone—for now—on one condition. One condition only.” She paused, waiting for a response. “Do you not want to know what that condition is?”
“The poems I have been writing lately are not very good. I should tell you that.”
Giovanna was lying on her side, her chin resting on one closed fist. “No, this has nothing to do with poetry.” She smiled at him: the particular burst of challenging mischief that he had seen, once in a while, on the reserved, serious face of the child he remembered. She said, “You must allow me to buy you a pair of pajamas.” Bianchi stared at her. “If you are going to continue offending people who will continue to drag you from your bed at all hours and . . . and attack you, then at least you must greet them wearing something more suitable than that horrible nightshirt. For the sake of your dignity.”
Bianchi gaped for a moment more, then began to laugh for what felt to him like the first time in a great many years. “So now I am not dressing for myself, not even for you. Now I am dressing for the ’Ndrangheta. Perhaps I should ask the cows for their opinion of my underwear. Or Cherubino, better; he ate some of it once, off the drying line. And Mezzanotte—he slept wrapped in that nightshirt when he was a kitten. Does he not deserve a vote, too?”
He saw the green eyes grow large, and quickly put his arms around her. “Giobella, I am sorry for making fun of you, please forgive me. But they are not going to attack me like that again. That was the first message—” he did not mention Third Cat—“the second one will be different. I do not really think I will need to dress for it.”
“The second could be a fire!” she cried out. “The second could be a bomb, dynamite, a single shot while you are milking your cows. What will you do then, Bianchi? What will I do?”
She was actually shaking him, with her hands painfully tight on his shoulders. He caught them, kissed them both, held them in one of his own large hands that had never been made for writing poetry. He said quietly, “You will have to finish milking the cows.”
They repaired the door together, picked up whatever had not been broken, and threw away the rest of the wreckage. Breakfast was caffe latte and toast, spread with the last of the preserves that had been a recent gift from Matteo Falcone, for the lean merchant’s own strange reasons. They ate in near-complete silence, and then Bianchi walked out with her to her brother’s motorcycle. It was parked precariously on damp, yielding earth, and he could see deep boot-heel marks where she had leaped to the ground and come charging to his aid like an avenging angel. He said in a mix of wonder and mild reproof, “You must have been carrying that tire iron in your hand all the way—there is no saddlebag big enough to hold it. That was very dangerous.”
“I left it on the bed for you.” She held him very tightly, and though her breathing was harsh and irregular, she was not crying. “Please do not get killed, you stubborn, foolish man. I am too young to be hurting for the rest of my life.”
“And I am too young and silly for you. But you will be my Giobella for the rest of my life. So be very, very careful going home, because you don’t know how to drive. And call me when you get there, capisci?” She promised.
Watching the motorcycle wobble out of sight down the dirt road—her friend Silvana took the curve much faster on her Vespa—he felt an absurdly wrenching urge to go after her in the old Studebaker, to make certain that she reached home safely. You cannot protect her from anything, Bianchi. Not from herself, not from the ’Ndrangheta—not from her stupid, idiotic, miraculous love for you. The best you can do for her is to try not to get killed. And hope she forgets about the pajamas.
He did call the police, keeping his own word, and weary Tenente Esposito came out to take a full report, drink two cups of coffee, and tell him, as they both knew he would, “Bianchi, what do you imagine we can do about the ’Ndrangheta that the police of five, six countries have not been able to do? I can send someone out a couple of times a week to sit and drink coffee with you, as I do, but beyond that . . .” He shrugged as expressively as only someone who has spent an entire life in southernmost Italy can do. “Of course, if you were to sell your farm, now, and move down into town . . .” Bianchi raised his eyebrows without replying, and Tenente Esposito did not bother to finish the sentence. “Well, you have friends in town—even you—and you have neighbors, everyone has neighbors. You could alert them, they could organize a patrol . . .”
“Aldo Frascati,” Bianchi said. “Yes, he would be thrilled to defend me from the ’Ndrangheta. I will start with him, and then I will enlist Madame Leonora. More coffee?” Tenente Esposito indicated that that would be very nice.
As a gesture, or as a sort of charm—both are taken quite seriously in Calabria—Bianchi began keeping Giovanna’s tire iron close to him at all times, even carrying it with him when he went out to work the farm. The shotgun meant nothing to him, nor he to it, but the tire iron had been brought for his protection by someone who loved him. He told Giovanna that he did this, because she believed devoutly in such things; but not that he slept with it cold by his side on nights when he was most lonely for his green-eyed girl. On some mornings he woke up gripping it tightly, as though preparing to face further attackers; but if he had been dreaming of the ’Ndrangheta, he never recalled the dreams. And the ’Ndrangheta did not come.
Neither di
Instead of answering the question directly, she asked him, “And when you think of me? What happens then?”
Very gravely, Bianchi responded, “When I think about you, sometimes I cannot breathe.” She looked up at him and hugged his arm, saying nothing at all.
On all evenings except Tuesdays, when she came on her friend’s motorscooter, he would sit still in the wicker chair, neither reading nor writing, but waiting to feel the unicorns, without expecting to see them. He would close his eyes, whisper “Vieni, vieni” into the warm appleblossom breezes, without caring whether or not they carried his plea to two pairs, white and black, of silken pointed ears, and listen for them with the skin of his face, which was where he most often felt their reality. Sometimes he fell asleep like that, and always woke up smiling.
During that time, he was regularly surprised by more visitors from town than he had ever been accustomed to receive. Rossi, Dallessandro, Falcone again, wheezy-voiced Frascati—even Madame Leonora, stately in the sidecar of young De Santis, her police-officer great-nephew. All brought gifts of one sort or another, according to their professions, and all came bearing equally varied warnings and advice. Bianchi should sell the farm to the ’Ndrangheta and move down into town . . . no, he should simply leave town altogether and emigrate to Canada or New Zealand . . . no, he should electrify his fences and mine his property so completely with grenades and dynamite that the first step any gangster took on it would be his last in this world . . . no, he should hire bodyguards, gangsters of his own, to patrol his farm night and day . . . Killer dogs were also mentioned.