

### Giada Guidotti

The Long Night   
of the fireflies

translations from Italian by  
Carmelo Massimo Tidona

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The Long Night of the Fireflies

Copyright © 2013 _Zerounoundici Edizioni_  
_ISBN:_ 978-88-6578-276-7  
Cover by Studio A 33  
Via Giuseppe del Papa 33, Empoli

To Giovannina and her sisters.

To my grandparents and their silence.

# The America

Sometimes we are tempted to think mistakenly that the place where we see the moon appear for the first time is absolutely random and of little value. It is not.

I saw it shine, round and full, for the first time from the America. It was white, with a delicate and romantic paleness. It was the moon, the one that would tell me without speaking everything I needed. And starting from it and with the America inside, what was going to be my fate came to fruition. My past as well, and also my future.

Definitely my present. A long row of short moments chasing one another, quivering, alternating sun and moon and making me smell the universe like a small world all to be discovered.

I was lucky to be born among the round hills, lavish with fruits and flowers. And I never got bored, chasing hares down the ditches or watching the rare leaping deer, restlessly listening to their ancient bells. Fascinated, I watched the Orcia river endlessly, as if it weren't that man-eating monster it was, while between the white gullies, sometimes small packs of wolves appeared, in search of water. The call of the quails woke me up in the morning, while larks trilled, vibrating their wings and hovering in the clear sky. In the woods, from time to time, I came across boars with their young at their side, and more than once I had to make a detour because many of them decided to block my path, calm and placid, as if the wood, and with it the muddy roads, were their kingdom only. Every day I wished I would run into the skirmishes between animals so to carefully watch the wary fights they wove, like those between hedgehogs and vipers that peered at one another from a distance, but never had the courage for a challenge. And from what was around me, I learned how to face life, and above all I made a vague mind about who I was.

Full of that innate joy that my valley gave me every day, it never died in me the desire to scare pheasants who, unable to fly too high, made long jumps, losing some of their feathers. Their colourful feathers, especially those of the males, had shades of gold and blue, orange and green, red and brown, that those of the females did not possess. And with those feathers I adorned my head as if I were an Indian, and I played alone rolling in the hay shining with dew.

I rarely lingered to think about why it were males who left more feathers behind, they who swelled beyond belief, dancing ancient and polite dances around the females. The same who ran away in fear with an unimaginable vehemence.

I loved to watch, spy, sneak with the endless need to learn. I sniffed the air and I could feel its resentments, I watched the plants and I wanted to touch the life-blood that sustained them. Everything was alive then. From the large white rock to the old spring, from the dry earth to the moist plants.

I was more attentive to the play of butterflies and bees than to the repetitive dirges that the girls loved to sing, clapping their hands for whole hours.

I did not care to join them, but to learn from them. So I spied them closely, careful not to be seen.

I was also ashamed, maybe.

Boys occasionally approached the groups of girls, but they yelled loudly. They too swelled their chest like pheasants. The dances of human males, however, were more vulgar, less refined. They had a crudeness that I shrank from. They shoved one another, and often a dusty brawl started, soon ending with scratches and tussled hair, among the indignant cries of the girls. The voices of the males appeared pitched, while the girls became frivolous and laughed, and talked into one another's ears, glancing mischievously to the boys, who seemed to lose all dignity.

I could not see anyone among them who would one day become a great man.

I was different from everyone and I had no friends, none of those boys interested me.

I had a luck they did not have, I was born in the America and I possessed the moon.

Everyone in Rocca argued that the America was the area that begun from the ancient home of Santa Caterina going down to the large white rock. But they all were wrong. The America, the true soul of the America, was just my house. It was the only certainty I had. The only firm point of my entire life.

My father had written so in a letter sent to my mother when I was still very young. Beba had kept it for me, gifting it to me when I reached my sixth year of age. A letter seared like a firebrand in my boy limbs.

It said that he would soon return to take me and mom and bring us to the big America, the one across the ocean. We would leave forever, and all three of us would abandon that house that the whole Tuscany called the America. Our house.

This said my father, all of Tuscany knew that the America was my house. Only in Rocca, and maybe in Castiglioni, they thought it was a cluster of low huts. In truth, mine was the mistress of all of the other slums, a real house, with thick walls and a chest facing the wind. It towered over them solitary and hermit-like, like an infamous and murderous leader. It turned its back to the other houses, like I to the people of Rocca.

The America and I, united forever.

The America was everything.

In front of it, the round and quiet hills of the valley, and the woods and brooks. Behind it, a short distance away, the town, and beside, higher up, the Rocca of Tentennano, yellow and brown, surrounded by olive trees and boughs, by cliffs and caves made of dry stones.

No one wanted to come to the America, because they said there was the devil there. Ignorant fools. How can you live in fear? They were terrified they would die in the flames of hell just for getting close to the America.

It was rumoured that if the America did not want you, a Billy-goat with long, twisted horns appeared in the pergola in front of the house, bellowing such a spooky grunt as to make you run away. Then it suddenly disappeared, but it was rumoured that it left a strong chill in your soul.

I never saw the goat, and if it ever appeared in my dreams, it always had the sweet voice of my mother.

My mother, I have almost forgotten her completely. She died a few years after giving birth to me. She never saw the letter my father sent her, and if she did she did not open it and lost it in the mazes of her madness.

Of her, I remember the lullabies, maybe the same that sometimes the wind sang, sneaking through the cracked windows. If I dig deep into my brain, so deep that it hurts, I find the body of a woman flying out and around the America, a woman clothed in light colours, with wavy hair as yellow as wheat in summer falling softly around her shoulders. Her shoulders is what I remember, not a face, not a mouth. And her golden hair.

Only a floating being who sings very sad dirges and watches far away, into the woods, or maybe even beyond, so far beyond as to be able to maybe see my father.

Beba tells me that Attilio, my father, and Viola, my mother, had shared a deep love.

They had chosen her as governess for their house and she, obedient, had never disappointed them.

They had everything, food, ingenuity, love, beauty and money. They were the most beautiful people in Rocca, she said, and maybe even in Castiglioni.

Beba told this and sighed with tears in her eyes. In those moments I saw myself as she saw me, a half brat too slim for his age, too awkward for his height.

"They went away and brought away everything. Happiness, joy, and even all the beauty they brought away. Even yours they took. They bound it on them to never forget you and brought it away, Febuccio my dear."

Beba was certain that it had been the jealousy of the town to bid them ill. Everyone envied them because they were always cheerful, of an innate joy, and my mother walked my father on the street in the village in the morning when he went to teach, and waited at the window in the day when she heard him come back, whistling.

It seems that mom was a thin and pale woman with green eyes. They say she resembled the portraits of the Virgin Mary. My dad instead had chestnut and curly hair, eyes as blue as the sky, and was beautiful like the statues you see in churches. According to Beba, the utmost beauty was closed in churches and, in particular, in the church of St. Simeone.

How could I, with my red hair and gray eyes, have been born from them, I do not know. But I was certainly much uglier than both. Beba did not really say so, but I understood all the same.

It was strange to compare myself to someone I had never seen, or someone I was not able to remember in the stupidity of a baby.

My mother had started showing clear signs of madness a short while after her belly had begun to grow. Maybe I had taken away from her, since my embryonic stage, the joy of existing.

Beba said she seemed like enthralled by a crazy desire to walk and run, the same I have still today, and that every corner, room and landing of the America was too small for her. So she seemed to be flying through the woods, singing along with the wind. My father followed her sometimes, other times he shouted that she was as crazy as a goat, but when I was still very little, he had made up his mind to leave for America.

There, he would find a cure for my mother. Because in America, the real one, the one across the ocean, you could do everything and you could heal any disease, even those of the liver.

He never returned, and my mother followed him by dying when I was still too young. However, I bring in my heart the songs she murmured to the hills, her slender and delicate shoulders, and her hair so yellow as I never saw again in my entire life.

I had jealously kept that letter in which my father wrote that one day he would be back to pick us up.

And I had been waiting for him forever, never straying too far from home for fear of missing his return.

Beba had been my nurse, she had treated me as if I were her son, but she had four other children, and all fools, so making me find a good meal a day was the best I could expect from her. Every now and then, to tell the truth, she washed my sheets and mended my clothes, all remnants of my mother's clothes put together as best she could. And actually there was nothing else I needed.

After all I was the wealthiest of them all, I possessed the moon and the America.

And brats and even adults took their distance from my house. They were afraid of it, of my fortress, they were afraid of dying in there.

There is nothing more foolish than fear of death, because no one, not even I, knows when our time really comes, so better to live every moment as if it were the only one granted us.

My bulwark stood out on a spur of rock, as if it wanted to stretch its head beyond the tower of Tentennano. And its gray and ochre stones seemed to be stuck and coming straight out of hell, held together by black angels whirling around it. There was always wind in the America. A warm mistral wind that could dry a lake and that, if you were not well rooted to the ground, could take you away in a whirlwind of leaves shrivelled by fall.

The villagers were afraid of noises that were in the America, of the squeaking, the drums and voices, but they were nothing more than the confused and uncertain squalls of pitiful 'non-living' who were trying, with the instruments they no longer had, to remember who they once had been.

They used ingenuity, too, my housemates in the America, because I've never seen them, even once, even just in courtesy, using solid objects.

And so they tried to play sounds by creating items with their imagination.

I've often thought about it. It's as if today, someone coming from another world asked me to show him how to build a ship or even just a wagon. I'm sure I would not know how, I would not be able to assemble parts or build something even vaguely resembling a wagon or a ship, and I would make do trying to use the miserable materials that I have available. Or maybe drawing on the ground with a stick the picture I have of those things.

So did my housemates, and deep furrows appeared at times on the ground. Signs of memories of a real life. Or a distant reflections of what they could make up with their fatuous memory.

The only voices you could hear were theirs, and no one else but them, except me, you could find at the America. A multitude of lost souls. Ghosts, the villagers would call them, who died alone or sadly, some with the brutality of a time that we no longer remember. There, with me, they found a little comfort, or maybe only that solidarity they had not received in life. I was fine with almost all of them, fireflies twinkling in the night. Better with them than with the people of the town.

There was Attilio, dead in a land not his own, who roamed looking for his Demetra. He drew confused maps that the wind deleted in a few hours. And when his craving for drawing subsided, he clapped his cheeks creating the sound of a strange drum. He could go on for hours.

There was Palinuro, with his deep loud voice, who on full moon nights cried a heartrending wail. It was perhaps the memory of a life and a death different from those he probably wished. There were Erminia and Temistocle, two brothers who were always quarrelling. They caused frequent and continuous air swirls, lifting dust and dried flowers and leaving strange concentric circles on the ground.

And then there was Aunt Suntina, very thin and dressed in black. She was restless and floated twenty inches from the ground, dragging along a weird gleaming, gleaming like shooting stars, which was supposed to emulate the memory of a cradle she had never rocked.

There was also little Elvira, with her thick bronze curls, jumping the rope all the time, without possessing any rope the poor thing. If she saw a child nearby, she clung on him so close that she scared him for a lifetime.

Every now and then some poor soul looking for rest joined them, and I helped them to find their way if I could. I wasn't always able to, but if I was, an endless sweetness seized me, and I thought about my mother. I wondered whether someone had walked her beyond death?

My floating friends were not sad and, unlike the living, they did not resign to the Dark Lady.

On the contrary, I had seen so many living people already resigned to a death they feared but even more longed for, and that, mocking them, would come so late.

I dare say that I was certainly more afraid of the heavy and wary footsteps of the people of Rocca than of the voices whispered in my ears in the cold winter nights by my friends made of wind. Those lost souls in the America were, in a sense, reassuring.

You could see this in two different ways only. Life as a race towards an uncertain death, or death as a relentless pursuit of an uncertain life.

What is certain is that if in some shreds of moments I happened to feel the sting of fear, I pushed it back as you would do with a deer in the vineyard. I knew in fact, prosaically, that fear is unnecessary and harmful.

But my thoughts were not as accurate as I am narrating them.

I lived a life that belonged to me completely, without regrets for yesterday or worries about tomorrow. I ate when I was hungry and drank when I was thirsty, I ran when I was happy and watched the moon to think and, sometimes, if I was seized by bouts of melancholy.

Always, anyway, waiting for my father.

With the America eternally close, my only confidante and safe harbour of my life.

Like the moon.

I liked my America and at night, when the craving of my fantasies kept me awake, I climbed up and down the endless steps, all of different heights.

There wasn't a story and there weren't even three or four. There was an indefinite amount of different levels. A bit like in everyone's life. The America encompassed not only the existence of entire generations, but much more, as if it were a door opening on different dimensions. It was up to anyone who passed the threshold to decide which level to probe, in the same manner in which you could choose in which of the large rooms of the America to live.

But people did not like the America, as often they do not like living or trying to step trough a different threshold.

To tell the truth even Beba spent only a few hours in the America, and always during the day. You could find her kneading pounds of bread and pasta and then, suddenly, you could glance her behind the house, stoking the fire in the oven to bake the fruit of her developed arms.

She had taught me how to move my hands quickly on the pici to make a simple pasta that needed no eggs.

Rarely, once a year I think, she cleaned the house, always before Easter.

But as soon as the sun tried to turn behind the hills and the sky was tinged with pink and red, she gathered her things, her bread, her pasta, all of her pots, and flew away, to her toothless family. For sure I never saw her in the America in the evening or at night, and neither in the long, black and rainy winter afternoons.

And then I reigned in my kingdom like a lonely king.

To enter my palace you had to climb five steps the colour of wood, that the ivy had thickened and made slippery.

Beba struggled every day against that cursed ivy. She said it was a murderous grass that was devouring the America, eating it up day by day in small steps that you couldn't even notice, and one day, she was sure, she would no longer find me in the midst of all those vines that not even the harrow would have been able to eradicate. I rather liked it, on the contrary, because it carried along lizards and grass snakes, and it smelled damp and cool.

If you managed not to crack your skull on those five steps, you went straight into the large kitchen, where there were three small and dark windows, one to the left of the entrance and two on the right. The one on the left looked out on a wall, tall and deep like half of the house, separated from it only by a small, wet and sticky lane. The wall, made of ancient stones, held the land that seemed to be poorly restrained under the fortress of Tentennano.

The two opposite windows, instead, overlooked the open world. In the middle of the wall facing the entrance, like a guardian, a huge and black fireplace watched the whole house. A great big fireplace in which you could go inside, and which invited you to avoid it, so dark it was. A tiny sink, with gray dots of grit, smelled of tin and stood in the left corner, while a table of olive wood, thick and massive, loomed in the centre of the room. A little cupboard was behind the door, a cupboard where I kept bread, some change Beba gave me, a ham bone and a few rags.

On the right, over the two windows so close that they could not be opened at the same time, there was a red curtain with small pale flowers. Behind it you could decide to climb thirteen bumpy steps, they too of different heights, to arrive quickly, if you didn't trip, to three huge rooms. It was rumoured that someone had badly hurt himself while climbing to these rooms, but that those who really hurt themselves where the ones who tried to escape from my America.

I climbed those steps up and down at high speed, used to jump on each as you do on a carousel. And as I ran up and down the squinty stairs, Beba screamed at me that I was a naughty scoundrel.

Above, in the rooms, you discovered the world. The first large room in the middle was large and airy thanks to a large window that faced south. From there you could see the round hills, and if you leaned out enough you saw the large white rock down below, the one where the boys went to play. But you only saw the tip, and not the boys, who were hidden by the barnyard of my house. This was the room where I spent almost all my time. I slept there, I read there, and however I always dreamed there. It was the centre of the America, and from there you could reach every other room.

It also had a tiny weenie staircase, barely illuminated, that went to the top of the house. Seventeen steps that seemed to be carved in the rock, steep as if to the reach the top of the Amiata.

The difficulty, however, was worth the effort: a part of the roof open to the world where you felt so high that, if you concentrated long enough and imagined you had wings, one day, I am sure, you would be able to take flight. From there, maybe I would fly on the sad eyes of the white moon, accompanied by the wings of my fireflies, or maybe I could even reach America, the one across the ocean, where my father was waiting for me.

I didn't go often to the top of the house. Rather, if the craving for climbing and going high seized me, I climbed the tower and looked at the world as if I were a prince ruling his subjects.

At that time, the fortress of Tentennano was an awkward jumble of rubble, with the tower glimpsed in the middle of the green, like the skeleton inside of a dead body.

The mothers of other children did not let them go there. It was too dangerous, they said. And if they did, they checked on them with mouths full of screams.

But I, who only had Beba to be my nanny for a couple of hours a day, for the rest of the time was free to do whatever I wanted. And climbing the tall fortress was like climbing a mountain. Sometimes the emptiness that was underneath was so much that it make my head spin, and then, full of an adrenaline I did not know existed, I became more stubborn and I longed to reach the top, and from there shout loudly. It was hard to get to the top. Then I liked to put myself to the test, risking a life that to me was, after all, quite irrelevant.

Life is dear only when you are afraid of losing it, and I had no fear.

There were soaked wood planks, on which you had to rely, to bridge the ground to the entrance. Inside, the fortress was nothing more than an empty and gaunt chasm. The spiky stones looked presumptuously like the only handholds and, if you didn't look down, you could reach the top and feel like the conqueror of the world.

The worst part was coming down. The lust of the conquest was over, and all that remained was a resigned return. The others had their mothers waiting for them restlessly, I had a disturbing America and the lonely company of the moon.

And then those cliffs seemed jaws of monsters ready to eat you.

But I was not afraid.

Never.

And I always went back home. Sometimes more and sometimes less flushed. Every time running, anyway.

I always ran. Running took my mind off thoughts, made me free from the weight of brooding.

Running is like drinking, it gets inside you and you can no longer do without.

My America, however, was more beautiful than the tower, maybe more real. Tentennano, if you looked at it from the road leading to the cemetery of Rocca, at one point became so thin as to seem fake. An insignificant piece of papier-mâché. A false nativity scene put there like a fool. And then you understood the deception and shouted it out loud along the ascent of the witches, "You're not real! You are a liar, tower of Tentennano, you exist only to make yourself feared by the other towers! But I am witty, and if I look at you from all sides I immediately understand how young and alone you are!"

The America, however, was mighty from any side.

It almost frightened you, like Attila, and you were afraid that if you set out to find its heart you would go around and around in vain for eternity.

Other times, on the contrary, it seemed so warm and full and sympathetic that it made you explode with uncontainable happiness.

Or perhaps, simply, I loved my fortress so much because it was mine.

Even in those days I felt I was different from the boys of the town. I had often heard them quarrel, sometimes fighting over a loaf of bread or a slice of cheese, for a better piece of wood, for something that the other one had, and that for this seemed to become suddenly fascinating.

For me it wasn't so. The America was mine, and for this reason it seemed to me like the best royal palace in the world, the only place where I could exist.

I would not change it for anything.

And it never ended, the America. From the central room, the one where I spent the most time, you could reach two large rooms, one right and one left. The one on the left was large and with a cornerless ceiling. I called it the room of Heaven for how high it was, yet you reached if after just four steps down. The other room instead, on the right, was the dark room, my secret room. You got there going down eight steps, twisting on themselves, that departed from the middle room and went down black and deep. The dark room looked like a cave, and at times I thought that, due to some strange alchemy, it could really have been dug and carved in the rock that supported the whole town. The walls had turned black due to the lack of light, and even the small loft that shyly hid from curious eyes was completely darkened. You didn't even notice it, not only for the lack of light, but because it was so abandoned that sometimes I forgot it existed.

And there is nothing more true: things you do not remember tends to disappear.

It happened often to me to forget that dark loft, because I could climb there only by a wooden ladder. And I only had one ladder, that I kept in the heaven room or outside, leaning on the olive tree, during the olive harvest.

The moisture in the dark room was intense, the heat scorching, it was the only room in the America to be like that.

I happened to travel with my fantasy, thinking it might have a connection to the warm and thermal waters that came from the mountains and embraced the whole Val d'Orcia.

I often imagined them, the cool waterfalls of crystal water coming from the Amiata, sneaking into strange passages, reach such deep and dark places. I saw them meekly abandon themselves to the heart of the earth and meet, still pure, where the ancient volcano ruled.

I observed them bow before the mumbling volcano amiatino, that by grace warmed them with its incessant bubbling. And I imagined them new and healthy resurfacing to gush fierily hot in a gentle land, and I dreamed of them donating some of their magic to the Val d'Orcia, making my valley the most beautiful valley in the world.

Maybe it was just under the dark room that they parted and gracefully brought a bit of their benefits to the America, the queen of every other house.

Since there was no light, I went there only when I wanted to stay in complete darkness, when I did not want to see anything.

I love darkness: it's full and reassuring. Complete.

Oddly enough, in that room not even rumours arrived, and an impressive silence reigned. I had the feeling that that cave also cured colds and fevers, but in the end the dark room represented my voluntary confinement.

It happened sometime.

One of the episodes I remember clearly is when my eyes met for the first time those of Andreuccia. She did not even see mine, and flew over while I stood there, enchanted.

She was sitting at the large rock, under my house. Children always went there to play in winter, because it was mild, even when the north wind blew strong in Rocca.

From the America I reached the large white rock, a long and pale spur of stone protected by a high wall, through a small and narrow path, as steep as a scarp and full of rocks and stinging boughs. I liked it because it was only mine and also because I could hid there and not be seen.

That day Andreuccia was sitting and looking after her brother, who to me then was just a little boy who must have just learned how to walk.

She had in her hands a piece of cloth and I thought she was sewing a rag doll.

I had never seen her and I did not hear her voice that day, but her black and shiny eyes pierced me like a spindle in a ball of wool and kept me motionless, breathless.

Two black braids, long just above her waist, framed her thin and pointed face, it too dark. Her pronounced cheekbones and her thin nose hinted at measured meals, but she seemed serene without being too obvious.

I stood motionless, behind the path leading to my house, stealing her image to the eyes of the world. She was silent, with an adult face. This was what struck me about her.

It was with a start that I heard Beba shout, "Febo! Where are you, son of the devil?"

Andreuccia turned to my side and I had no time to figure out whether she had glimpsed me or not, so quick I was to climb the path up to the America. Beba was at the door and told me that she was leaving the food on the table, that I ate it if I did not want the chickens to arrive before me. But I ran away from her, too, to the dark room, and there, motionless and silent, I listened to the pulse of my blood that seemed to invade every inch of my little bony body.

I barely had time to hear Beba's hum, "Poor Febuzzo, what will become of this poor Christ?"

Beba thought like that. Everything in relation to God, the devil, the church, the Virgin and the Saints. There were no other thoughts. She feared the dark room, Beba, and she never came there. She said it was where the devil hid and told to me, to frighten me and put off me the desire to hide in there, of a long tunnel connecting the chamber to the centre of the Earth, where fire burned the flesh of sinners. And I stood there spitefully when I wanted no one to bother me. Sometimes I did it as a test of courage, and if by chance a rat gnawed my foot, it made me jump so high that I almost touched the black loft with my head.

Most of the times I went there especially to listen to myself, to understand me, but this was especially after Andreuccia.

Sometimes I stopped and listened to the sound of my breath, and at times it seemed to me I could even hear the beating of my heart echoing in my dirty ears.

However, the America did not end with the dark room.

From the entrance you could go down seven steps carved into the ground and find yourself into a bright basement, where I enjoyed staying in summer. I could also go there from the heaven room, the upper one on the left of the big room, which had a hole on one side, slightly larger than me, where I kept my only wooden ladder of which I already told you. Thanks to that ladder I could go from the heaven room to the cellar, but only when I didn't have to gather olives, because then the ladder was needed to go up in the olive trees.

The cellar had no windows but only one door, that opened only from the inside because it was dug in the ground. And outside, in front, there was my little barnyard. The light came from holes made between the stones.

I had always thought that my father had made them, taking away the smaller stones, to see the distant nature. From those holes you could even monitor the oven, which was just outside, while the bread was baking.

And there everything was, all as far as the eye could see.

Sometimes I thought that even the fortress of Tentennano had been mine, stolen from me by some clever upstart when I was still young and I only had an illiterate nanny to protect me.

Beba was a woman, the only woman I had ever known.

My mother had died of lovesickness after my father had left for the real America, the one across the sea, to find her medicines that he certainly was still looking for.

The disease had worsened, dragging her down in a limbo waiting for her husband. The letter had reached her in the days in which my mother was lazily preparing for death.

Maybe it arrived before, or maybe after her death. For sure, nobody opened it.

Mom was gone when I was not yet two years old.

Beba, caring ignorant person that she was, had given me that precious missive when I had turned six.

It had been the first gift I ever received, the most beautiful that anyone could give me, the first real thing of my family, and it made me believe that the six years milestone was an important one.

She had put it in my hands still closed, as it had been when it had arrived four years earlier. I had observed it with deference, not knowing what to do with it. I'd sniffed it, trying to find the smell of my family, but it was dipped only in the garlic that Beba used to put everywhere.

It was her who shook me.

"Oh, Febo, are you dumb? Go to Zeno and make him read it!"

And I had flown to Zeno, the sexton, who had welcomed me with his gentle eyes. Probably he had been waiting for me because I remember that I found him right in front of the church.

He had sat on the stairs of round stones and I had done the same. Zeno, with his stubby, callous hands, had opened it with precision, without even tearing a corner.

And he had read it to me.

It was beautiful. My father had written it to my mother believing she was still alive. His elegant handwriting, with tidy letters full of curls, recalled the picture of ancient scribes.

Soon he would come back to her and me, he wrote, and would bring us to the true America. We would make the trip all together in a ship, a long and fascinating trip, in which we would see the biggest fish in the world, as there were not even in the Orcia. We would visit cities that never ended, as huge as the whole province of Siena, and there would be at least a hundred doctors ready to visit mom. Then he said that, as beautiful as America was, nothing could compare to our gullies interrupted by round hills. He said that in America there was a stench that we couldn't even imagine in Rocca, but he wrote that there were many theatres and horses of all kinds. And there were even cars, so many as he had never seen! The letter ended like this, "kiss our Febo for me".

Signed Attilio Bianchini.

I had stood gazing at the letter in Zeno's hands for a long moment. None of us dared to interrupt the idyll. Then I had ordered him, "Read it once again! " and he had quietly obliged.

We had stood there on the wide cold stairs for half an hour and I had made him read it over and over again until every word written by my father had become part of me. It was the first thing in my life that I learned by heart.

Then I had told him to shut up and he had gone silent.

"Tell me Zeno, how long ago did my father write it?"

"A long time ago, probably before your mother was gone."

"And why hasn't he come back yet?"

"I do not know," Zeno answered simply.

"But will he come back?" I had asked, with the hunger for affection that I always had for him.

Zeno had shrugged and then I had looked at him, offended.

"You know nothing! You never went to America, go figure. But I tell you, I that have the same blood of my daddy, Bianchini will come back and together we'll go away from here."

Then I had gone back to Beba running and screaming. The suspicion of the abandonment was already stuck strongly in my lean flesh, but I forgot it. I had news from my father. Old news, but new for me, and news nevertheless.

Full only of my exuberant happiness, proud to own something written by my father, I had pretended to read her the letter with the pride of an adult. She had waited for me to finish and knelt, weeping, and my feet.

"It's a miracle Febuccio! You are a genius, just like your dad..." She had wept and kissed my hands and repeated, "Excuse me, my holy Christ, for doubting your will. Febo is equal like unto thee, son of the miracle!"

And then she had kissed my eyes, with her breath smelling of garlic, and repeated: "Bravo my Febuzzo, you learned to read in less than half an hour!"

I had smiled proudly, without asserting, but not even denying. Maybe that day I believed I had really learned to read, but soon I had had to change my mind.

That day Beba decided that I was ready to learn about the important things in life.

# Believe Obey Fight

Zeno, the sexton, was an odd man of the church. He was not only a sexton but also a good farmer who could read, write and do maths. He was the one who managed the lands of my father, because it seems they had been close friends, once, although Zeno never told me. He was older than my father and I imagined him giving him lots of advice as an experienced man. His white hair made him look like a wise hermit and it was difficult to imagine him different from how I had always seen him, a good old man. But I do not know if they had ever really been friends or if it was just me thinking that, because no one ever said it openly. Still it was a feeling I had, as if between the old walls of the town there were remnant echoes of their alleged complicity. It was also the hushed voices of the country, rumours without malignity, but there seemed to rule an absolute silence, that not even Zeno ever broke, about what their relationship had really been.

I know for certain, however, that it had been Zeno, after the death of my mother, to entrust me to the cares of Beba, who from a servant had become a nanny, and he gave her a little money for my sustenance.

With his small physique and his eyes so clear as to be almost white, he looked like an aged angel. He had no wife but he had a sister, Siride, always serious, with a black scarf that left out just a little bit of her red nose. Siride was much younger than Zeno, but you always saw her walk close to the walls with her head down. You could see from how she walked that she had an injured leg. And maybe she was even angry. But when she walked with her shoulders curved, she was scared too. Zeno instead had a open and smiling face, illuminated by the sun and the beautiful thinking. I do not know why but I am sure that he always listened to Siride and, before taking any decision, consulted her like she was an oracle. I do not know where this certainty of mine comes from, I never saw them talk more than half a minute, I never saw them walk together or laugh and discuss together. But there was, in their movements, an affinity of souls that was completely unknown to me. A complicity that I always perceived as a postulate. I am sure they understood each other at a glance.

In the village they said that they loved each other of a blasphemous love. I didn't think so. Zeno was too clean and she was too hidden. Zeno was peaceful and kind. Siride reserved and silent.

Zeno was like I had always imagined God to be.

At that time, a man of the church like that was strange. Those who went to the church were surly, bad, and scowled in front of people like me. They did not want one like Beba in the first row at the mass. She accepted it as a kind of resignation or perhaps as a deserved divine punishment for her sins. I understood little, but neither I cared too much.

By instinct I liked Zeno, with his loud voice and strong callous hands, more than the priest, Don Luigi, with his pale thin hands and his voice too low.

Indeed, the priest too must trust Zeno, because he left the church completely to the care of his farmer hands.

It was a few days after my birthday that Beba made up her mind to let me live the first important experience of my life. Going to mass. I had been in church only once, when I had been baptized, and I had forgotten it. So it was that at Easter, with Beba, I crossed the threshold of the church of St. Simeone.

I did not like it.

Or rather, I was fascinated by the starry ceiling, by the huge and colourful statues, by the gold of the pictures, but at once I felt that bizarre spells took place inside of it. It seemed to me that those high and decorated walls hid bizarre and not so natural things.

When you entered you washed your hands and wetted your head, something that Beba had always told me not to do too often not to get a cold. There, it was mandatory.

"Even in winter?" I asked.

"Always," she said solemnly.

After getting wet, the believers made strange signs, now touching their shoulders, now their heads, now their chests, forcefully turned towards the back of the church, where the altar was. Beba told me that this was the "sign of the cross." Each point that you touched was the extreme point of the cross on which Christ had been crucified to atone for our sins.

"Even mine?" I asked.

"Of course! Those of the whole world."

I did not understand which sins she was talking about. Maybe she knew of the bread I stole her every now and then, or maybe she had seen me as I threw soil down to the big white rock to see the strutting boys run in fear in front of the girls.

However, I too made the sign of the cross. On second thought, I had seen it made at other times, especially from women and older ladies, although it appeared rather inaccurate for a cross.

I paused to imagine what strange biased cross could come out from the crippled body of the man of the farmer's stable.

The whole town was there at that strange ceremony. In the first rows the lords, those who owned farms and lands. Right behind the farmers, with their starched families. Then the shopkeepers and artisans, and at the back the peasants and the poor wretches. Beba and I arrived early but we sat in the back row.

"Today there is the Bishop of Siena," Beba whispered to me, full of emotion. I did not know what or who a bishop was, and when, after a happy and loud ringing of bells, I saw a fat man come in, followed by Don Luigi, a question arose spontaneously between my chapped lips, "What did he eat to get so fat?"

I had never seen any cow or even an ox, not to mention a pig, so full. Definitely he ate something weird, something that we did not have in Rocca. Nobody in my country was so big, not even the farmer's son who was always eating sausages.

Zeno, behind them, did nothing but handing both the things they needed.

The unique ballets that followed were modest, the clothes were very beautiful instead. Sumptuous and flashy, they went from blood red to gold, and they were rich and embroidered.

They too, like I did in winter, wore long shirts down to the feet. This surprised me, I hadn't seen anyone else but me wearing similar clothes. Don Luigi at times, but always dresses in black.

Mine, like theirs, were coloured but, in spite of myself, I had to admit they were less beautiful.

Theirs were magnificent and shiny, mine were worn and bleached by the sun.

Zeno instead, humble and serene as usual, had black and white clothes, simply made, like those I used to wear. At that moment I felt him so much like me that it broadened my heart.

With his white eyes he watched, in profound admiration, the other two. You could see he regarded himself less than them, and maybe for this I immediately felt close to him. He always stood behind and muttered abstruse words. At a nod to one of the two, he obeyed like a condescending subject.

In truth I could not really understand what was happening. Everyone stood up simultaneously and then, still simultaneously, sit down again. It seemed a strange game in which one at random ordered and the others followed. I too tried to get up suddenly, but I only received hostile stares in return. Then I thought I was still too young and that only an adult could control the game.

The words were far away, but then they began to sing even worst songs, now in single now in collective chorus, and they knelt, and some of the men even went beside the priest to read from his book.

It was all fascinating and disturbing at the same time, even the repetitive murmur, in a language that was foreign to me, but that everybody else knew.

Even Beba repeated it ecstatically between her thin lips and missing teeth.

Everybody except me.

At some point, however, something extraordinary happened. I felt the excitement rise. The silence became austere. Everyone looked down to their feet and I imitated them. But I could not stop myself from peeking. The Bishop was holding a round wafer, lifting it to the sky. What was he doing?

The silence was overwhelming and the excitement palpable. I felt in that gesture a moment of sublime importance so, in a breath, I asked Beba, "What's that? What is he doing now?"

The answer shocked me so much as to turn my stomach.

"That's the body of Christ. And the priest will eat it, along with the blood of Christ that is in the jug. Then he will give each of us a piece of that body."

I was silent and horrified and Beba, not fully understanding the gravity of the situation, lowering her head to my ear, whispered, "But you're too young. Little boys like you aren't granted this honour. You, Febo, will only be able to eat in a few years, after you pass Holy Communion, just like me. Only then you will be a true Catholic."

At that point I could not help but get up in horror and, after a few moments of bewilderment, run away screaming.

I did not want to pass Holy Communion and did not want to eat the body of any poor man, nor drink his blood.

"A privilege" Beba had called it! Had she suddenly gone crazy?

While, blushing, I was running out of the church, a clear insight came unto me.

That was why I was so different from the other villagers, that was why I was not comfortable with them.

All of the people of Rocca where man-eaters! I knew that there were people like that, who ate other people, but I thought they were far away, not in Rocca. From someone, to tell the truth, I would have expected it, but not from Zeno.

I ran away from the Church of St. Simeone like a man possessed. The gate slammed behind me in the wooden frame and I was sure that all those horrible people were looking at me, their eyes drooling for the need of eating me.

Who knew what would be of that poor man of the bishop, so rosy and round?

Then a doubt came furiously over me. Was he so fat because he ate people? Had he eaten everyone in Siena, and had he come to Rocca for that reason? What was going to happen to Beba?

But my worry was short-lived. Even in the worst of hungers I would not have been able to eat her. Who would have ever been able to taste a woman so ugly and so reeking of garlic?

The fresh air of that day entered my lungs. I was free and I could run. And I did. I fell down and got up again down the stairs and then down the hill that allowed me to run away from the church. I ran screaming for joy! My legs wanted to chase each other, without stopping, without limits. And I ran far and I bruised my knees on the stony and steep lanes. I passed the narrow, winding streets and I even surpassed the America. At the large white rock I stopped, breathless, ready to start again along the gravel road of the Perelli.

I laughed and I felt really happy while running away from all of them. Enthusiast above all of finally understanding my diversity.

It was there that I saw for the second time Andreuccia. And that day I understood that my destiny was inextricably linked to hers.

Her as an inspiration.

Her who was not in church at Easter. Why?

She was coming up the road, up from the countryside, with the little boy next to her, pulling him and barely smiling at him.

Then I ran to meet her and shouted, "Aren't you at the Easter Mass?"

She didn't even look at me, and passed by, answering with contempt, "No. I'm not Catholic."

That impressed me. Her and I, two lonely souls in a town of monsters. And looking at her thin shoulders moving away, she seemed to me more delicate and gentle of what I remembered. I knew in that instant that I would not be Catholic either. And I ran down the country, running to feel not the excitement of being different from anyone else but that of being equal to her.

Zeno came to look for me two days later. There was also Siride with him. But she stopped a little farther. She was weird when she was still, you could see that her legs had two different lengths and her figure assumed an awkward posture.

Still it was right that she stood aside. Good women do not listen to the speeches of men!

Zeno waited for me under the pergola.

Siride, motionless behind her black scarf and with her red nose out, was waiting for him at the beginning of the road as he watched over the house, but with his eyes turned to look at the hill of Neno.

Zeno said nothing about my Easter run. He did not even ask. He simply realized and, after a quick glance to his sister, who nodded slightly, he said without arrogance but with an ancient certainty, "Febo, you need to go to school. No discussion about it."

That was why I liked Zeno, not only because he could read, but mostly because he felt real. He did not use frills and he did not have them, he would say neither too much nor too little. He spoke precisely for what it was. He did not judge, he understood. And he smelled of soil and damp, smelled as I imagined that Heaven Beba gushed over so much should smell.

It was Zeno who decided to send me to school but I am sure that it was his sister Siride who worked on Beba with stubborn perseverance.

Zeno was too delicate for Beba and the only thing he achieved, with the calm that distinguished him, was to appease the insane idea that I needed to be exorcised by a priest from that goat that had possessed me since I lived at the America.

Siride was more cunning instead. She worked on Beba without showing it, without ever saying a word.

Every day she made so that some housewife would utter sentences like "Clever Febo!" or "That Bianchini boy would need so much to learn to count".

Or, when she saw Beba pass by, full of clothes to be washed, she pretended to talk to her neighbours, whispering in their ears, so Beba, who was curious like a child, fell for it and listened hard to hear the whispers of the talking washerwomen.

"That poor boy, the son of the teacher, is just the same as his father!" Or, "The sexton says that Heaven planned great things for him. He is sure."

Siride did not speak but made others speak, managing without showing.

Siride was weird, always serious and frowning. She was angry with the world, maybe because she was lame. I do not remember her face, only her nose sticking out beyond the scarf. Probably she couldn't even laugh or cry. And yet it seemed she had gotten into that matter of the school.

I do not know if this really is what happened because, I repeat, I never heard her voice, never knew if it was sweet or grim, but she always let others act.

My nanny, full of malice and therefore far easier to fool, fell into the trap at the beginning of summer, when one day Zeno took her aside and told her what to Beba appeared to be a great secret, that I was a clever boy and I was quick to learn. She pretended to forget that the devil had possessed me, and chose to believe her previous certainty, that is that I could already read like a genius, the same as my father.

So was Beba, ugly like a big rat, simple like a brook.

In summer her thoughts settled quietly, calm and placid, on the matter of the school. She liked to believe that I had been born more for school than for church, and seconded that measured, elementary, but maybe true idea.

The school was within walking distance from my house. Just after the house of St. Caterina. I had to go down the gravel path up to the carpenter, then climb a small rise of stones rounded by the rains and I was there, in what looked like a house amidst houses, next to the Town Hall, too. I could get there going through the pergola as well, but I would have had to pass in the midst of too many houses and I did not like that.

The kids of Rocca, seeing me, threw stones at me, like at the peasants who came back filthy from the fields, so I avoided them, if I could. Secretly, however, I enjoyed throwing soil on the road of the big white rock, to see them squawk or fall down like empty sacks. Often I heard them run away shouting, "The goat!" I do not know whether they ever realized it was me to make them roll like marbles in front of the girls, but if they did, they never had the courage to come looking for me in my America.

It was August when, in a hot afternoon, adding to the dozy quiet of the town children, I was seized by the desire to go to see that place, pleasant and important at the same time, that Beba had described to me. She had never been to school, but she liked to repeat that my father had even taught there. I do not know if it was a fantasy of hers, but I liked to believe it, and the letter written in curled and round handwriting gave me comfort on that.

I had eaten little, as often happened in summer, and sleep, which in my mind almost never caught me unprepared, was delaying its coming. Sleeping was a little like dying, and I was always afraid I would not be awake and alert for some major event, like the return of my father.

And also the moment when the noises of the town were suspended was my favourite. I could wander around Rocca, of course always cautious not to be seen by anyone, and observe all that empty space in its entirety.

I loved the large water tank that filled the sloping square, and I refreshed myself drinking from the little burnished spout at the foot of the monumental structure. Next to it, the red brick well seemed to yield to the will of the enormous eleven-sided tank, and was relegated to the role of a humble servant.

Even for it the place of birth was crucial. In the middle of a barren garden, it would have assumed the role of leader, but there it seemed to sadly hide behind the sycamore.

That day, however, I did not get to the square. I wandered around the school, brushing the walls as if I were a cat. I walked silently on the streets of Rocca, never losing sight of the steps of the school. Every now and then, with my back against the opposite wall, I stopped to watch it. The entrance was between the houses, a small staircase, half hidden from the weather, with a banister of peeling wood only on the left side.

I was afraid that someone would see me and understand the fear that it gave me. Not fear, I did not fear anything, but I was afraid of it as of a strange event, infinitely far away from me.

After wandering casually back and forth for a time I judged long enough, being careful that no one was there, I slipped up those tidy stairs, too different from the stairs of my America.

The gate was shut and a large inscription towered over the entrance. I tried to penetrate those letters without success. Then I had an idea, I could fool her as I had done with Beba, and repeated aloud the letter from my father, a couple of times. The writing didn't seem to suffer the effect I wanted. It stood there motionless and I, almost as much, remained unaware of what it wanted to tell me.

Then I had a kind of violent awe. That building seemed hostile to me, and I feared it could understand the infamous lie I was hiding.

I could not read.

And at school, the same in which my father had taught, I would be mocked and even worse, I would become the dishonour of my family. As if my ugliness was not enough to disgrace the great Bianchini house.

It was in those moments, as I ruminated on the sins that because of me afflicted and would always afflict my family, that the voice of Andreuccia came behind me to make me start.

I was on top of the stairs and turned, trapped.

I realized then that in those few months she had changed completely, and already looked like a young lady. With her skinny body, still much bigger than mine, with her black skirt that went down to her feet and a cream kerchief on her head, she towered on my only way out.

The six years that until a few months ago had seemed to me like an important goal, now seemed to vanish before her. I was too young for her, or her too old for me.

I am sure I blushed, and she also pointed it out to me

"I can't figure out your face from your hair anymore," she said, her voice happy but her mouth serious. I was trapped and I feared she could hear the rushed beatings of my heart, suddenly in turmoil. Her fault for keeping me prisoner. But she continued, hostile, pretending not to understand how much I loathed her at the time.

"Do you know what it says?" she asked, going up the stairs and getting dangerously closer to me at each step.

Trying to become as tall as I could, and unable to utter any other sound, I proudly said, "Dunno!"

Someone else in her place would have frozen and, indignant and offended, would be gone, but not her. She kept walking, swaying her hips like the leaves on the spring. She hovered on up to where I was, making me feel even littler than I was. Her lavender scent invaded my senses. My heart began to tremble, ignoring my strict orders to keep quiet.

Now she was in front of me and I felt as small as a cockroach before her.

I hardly reached her shoulders, so much for Beba who had always told me I was too long.

It was then that she unexpectedly took my left hand and, pointing it to each letter, as if I had not answered anything, read, enunciating each letter, "B E L I E V E O B E Y F I G H T".

And then she repeated: "Believe, Obey, Fight, the creed of every good fascist."

I did not know what it meant, I only felt the warmth of her hands and I knew that it was not just the fault of that merciless August. I was sure it depended on her, the girl whose shoulders I hardly reached. And my sweaty hand could not break away from hers, and my oblivious eyes could not stand hers. I wanted to run away, fast as only I could, but it seemed that my legs were stuck in a muddy pond. I was keeping my eyes obstinately on the ground when I saw her feet, barefoot and black, appear under her dark skirt.

They seemed to me the most beautiful feet I had ever seen.

More delicate than mine, less dirty too, with the second toe slightly longer than the big toe.

I was seized by the heart-wrenching desire to kneel and caress them.

It was then, in this mix of new emotions, that I found out her name, when the deep hoarse voice of a man called her too brutally, "Sara? Where are you? Come home at once!"

She blushed.

"My name is Sara," she whispered. "But I don't like my name."

Only then I had the courage to sheepishly look at her, and I do not know from what hidden passage my voice came. I could only hear it, devoid of any will. "And how would you like to be called?" my voice asked for me.

She thought about it for a moment, and, with her eyes turned upward, she pondered.

It was a brief moment, still long enough to show me her true essence. In her eyes, as if by magic, a myriad of golden fireflies appeared, and my heart turned on itself.

"Andreuccia", she finally said. "I had a cat named Andreuccia when mom was still alive, and she was beautiful."

Then she ran away. I stood there holding the hand she had held in hers, imprinted of her faint lavender scent, immersed in the image of those black eyes specked with flecks of gold, with glittering stars.

That was the day I fell in love with Sara/Andreuccia. What did I say? Just Andreuccia. For me, from that moment, she had no other or names.

# Beba

Beba was ugly as hell, with buckled and muscular legs ill-fitted to her swollen ankles. On the other hand, her face was even worse. She had a big red nose which rested on a sparse black down, which, in turn, barely hid a big mouth full of holes, where, as if by magic, here and there a few crooked teeth appeared.

No one in her family had teeth. I had seen them like that.

"We ate too many chestnuts and drank too little milk," she used to say, laughing with the face of a skinny death.

I do not know how old she was, she looked very old to me, but probably she was not.

She was almost always eating garlic. When she got a flu, when her blood pressure got too high from too much wine. She ate garlic to chase evil spirits away and not to feel the pangs of hunger.

She hardly spoke, but when she did she never stopped. And she cleaned badly. However she prepared a decent meal a day for me, which had to be enough for dinner as well. In summer there were more things to eat, and if I was still hungry I went to the orchard that was south, just above the large rock. But in summer I was less hungry.

In winter, it was harder. Beba and her husband in December prepared a pig, but they did not always have enough money to do it by themselves, so then they joined another family. I made use of their leftovers. In those winters hunger was worse, because the meat had to be enough for the whole year.

I had a few chickens but we needed the eggs more than the meat. Only for holidays we ate chicken roasted on the fire. At Christmas and Easter, the only times when I went to eat at Beba's house.

When anything else was missing, I ate chestnuts. I helped my nanny knead bread with chestnut flour, and we baked it in the America, because it was me who had the oven.

To me, since I was alone, she left a little of it, and took the rest to her house.

Even in summer we kneaded and baked bread in the America, but it was a white and soft bread, which lasted even for a week. That fragrant bread could be made as long as there was weath, and it did not always last for the whole winter, then there were the chestnuts.

With chestnuts we also made pasta and polenta. And then, in holidays, I roasted them by the fireplace and then mashed them with a cloth dipped in fresh wine.

I do not remember, however, a really bad hunger, just a slight constant one that I dazed eating sweet rowans in November, the same I had gathered unripe and left to ripen on the straw in the large room. Rowans were the sweetest fruit I had ever eaten, they were so good they warmed you inside. I also liked apples and pears, that I found almost every time. And among the brambles I stuffed myself with black and red blackberries, which left my mouth dark and my teeth stained. Sloes were there in the fall, and sometimes I found some in the boughs until December.

Even arbutus and wild roses were nice, and I also liked apples and pomegranates, but there was nothing like the rowans.

Another thing I did with Beba, a cake that made me crazy. The flatbread of figs. It was made with compressed and dried figs, pressed against one another like grains of wheat. We pressed them into cheese moulds and when they were well-dried they became like a pie that we cut it into slices. I ate a couple of slices and it gave me an energy that could have lasted me for two days.

There were enough sheep, but just enough to give us a little milk and even less cheese. And I despised sheep meat. It seemed to me like rotten food.

Beba anyway always cooked at my house, because there was more space compared to the little house where she lived, in San Sebastiano, with her husband, her father in law, completely blind, and four children.

She never brought them to the America, Maybe she was afraid for them.

She always came to me alone, because she loved me, because Zeno gave her a few lire to do it, and because in the America there was room enough to do everything.

I liked to look at her when she was kneading the flour with eggs to make macaroni, tagliatelle or pici, and I was careful not to skip any detail when she rolled the dough on the olive-wood table. Already back then, details made the difference for me. At times I remembered that the previous time, for three eggs she had put less salt. She looked at me and shook her head. I interrupted her in her work and asked her if three large eggs were the same as four small ones. I asked them why sometimes she made pici with one egg and sometimes with none, and she answered, "It takes all sorts!"

I checked how much time she needed to knead, and each time it was different. And the water needed was a mystery that I could not decipher. Beba kept working and shaking her head. Then, when she was finished, she wiped her hands on her dirty apron and took me on her knees. She stroked my shaggy red head and tried to explain.

"Febuzzo dear, there are no rules to make pasta, just instinct."

I ran from her and hide. The flour she had left on my hair and back, on my bottom, gave me the measure of all her ignorance.

According to her there were no rules to make pasta because she could not learn them. But one day I would find them and absorb them.

The thing that I still would not miss for anything in the world, anyway, was looking at her when she was sewing.

She was not very good at sewing, she claimed, but to me she created miracles.

Her stubby red hands swivelled fast on fabrics, cut with large and long scissors, then reassembled pieces of cloth to create new ornaments out of them.

Beba mainly used my mother's clothes.

The same ones she had cleverly ironed, folded and placed in a pair of trunks full of mothballs in the large room.

Instead, she never touched the old worn jacket of my father. I could have needed it, she said, when I would be older.

I kept growing too fast and Beba, not knowing with what clothes to dress me, had slowly started to unravel, one by one, my mother's clothes. If the fabric of a dress was not enough, she took another and, combining it with the first, built for me colourful and imaginative clothes.

She unstitched them with the help of scissors and needle, then, meticulously, she joined all pieces, creating clothes of extraordinary shine. Blouses and pants, or long tunics, under which I could wear long johns and sweaters.

My mother's sweaters she left to me to unravel, and I rolled them into a sort of ball.

Those that once my mother had worn were small and light, so to make a normal one you had to unravel at least two. Luckily, my mother had a lot of clothes.

When I had unravelled some, in different balls, Beba mixed the wool. She took two, three ends of each ball, and with large knitting needles she made gaudy sweaters. Those wools were not only for me, but also for her children and her husband, and probably even for her father in law.

But this does not meant that she stole them from me. Simply, life was hard, and we helped each other as we could. She was my nanny, even though no one would ever thank her for this, and in return I said nothing when I saw her take away some of my little treasure.

I knew she could have taken advantage of my situation, I was too young and alone, but she never did.

Beba was hard sometimes, and she slapped me so hard that she could have made my head fly. But she loved me and she showed me that by keeping to prepare my lunch, even at Christmas and Easter, when she welcomed me into her family.

She was a humble and kind person. School was not important to her, and she did not send her children there any longer. They had attended the first two years, then down to work.

"They are hard as mallets", she used to say. "Just the same as me and my husband, but in the fields, there they can help!"

The fields were mine, but they worked them, and they sold their fruits too, under the supervision of Zeno. A little remained to them, just enough to buy a half or even a full pig.

In the meantime I had my America, the lost souls, small lights in the America, who kept me company in the lonely evenings, and the white round moon that never forgot to appear.

I had the fields and woods. And I also had Andreuccia.

Although she did not know yet.

# The beatings

Zeno, with his slow and methodical attitude, had persuaded Beba of the need for my education. Aided by Siride, silent, distant, but attentive almost as much as me.

None of them, however, had reckoned with my habit of living day by day.

The last day of September, mid-morning, Beba had come to my house and informed me that the next day school would start at eight-thirty. I had to go there wearing the black smock she had recycled especially for me from I do not know where. It had worn elbows and many patches, but to me it seemed important all the same.

My first uniform.

I also had to wear shoes, she said, because school is politeness, she was keen to explain. I couldn't act like a beggar forever, I was the son of Mr. Bianchini after all.

The excitement kept me up all night and at dawn I finally found rest. When at eleven Beba found me sleeping blissfully, with her precious smock and my shoes on, she did not know what to do. She did not know the rules, but she knew that being late was rude. She woke me up with a strong slap, but the only words she said were, "You start tomorrow."

Beba always resigned to fate, and starting one day or the other mattered little.

But the next morning I had already forgotten, and the next I had to go and help harvesting grapes. I was good at harvesting, I had my lonely row and I walked more than the others, who were in pairs. I loved hearing the laughter of the peasants, being faster than them excited me.

Weeks followed one another with me never setting foot in that fateful school.

After the harvest, other news that I could not miss intertwined; new kittens, a hedgehog that had settled with its whole family next to the oven, where the heat never lacked, an unexpected flight of crows.

One afternoon, however, I saw Zeno come, followed by Siride. They stopped under the pergola. Siride always a little distant, but wary. They did not call me and I pretended not to see them, locked in my fortress. I did not like their invasion. I had not gone to school, but what did it matter to them? I knew how to take care of myself.

I did not need anyone.

They stood there, looking for me behind the empty window, for a long time. Too afraid to approach and stubborn enough not to flee. I did not lean out and I hid from their eyes, silently.

They stood motionless like two scarecrows. Siride black like a raven in that lame posture of hers, Zeno coppery like soil. I watched them for a long time. I saw Siride shift her weight from one leg to the other, remaining weird in both cases, and only when evening started to fall they decided to leave, taking their shadows with them. Then I started running inside my America; I flew in large strides in my confused rooms, and I reflected. I did not want them in my house anymore, and I decided; it was time to go to school.

The next morning, it was about the middle of December, I walked toward that place that was slowly turning into a mythological monster.

It must have been seven o'clock and the air was fresh and clear. Remnants of clouds stationed in the sky, slightly colouring it of pink reflexes.

I wanted to be on time for my first day of school, and I longed to live up to my father.

It was cold but I did not feel it, excited as I was by that new thing that surely would flip my life and my habits upside down.

I had washed and combed, wearing the black smock that covered part of my bony and grazed knees. I'd worn that pair of brown boots that I hated, for how they seized my feet, but I was proud of the result. I looked even taller.

I felt a little awkward, but I was not afraid of anything. I walked whistling outside my house. I leapt over the outside steps managing not to fall, and I thought it was a good sign.

Going down from the America, with the joy that novelties caused me, I thought about how lucky I was. I felt my heart beat fast, as it happened to me at important times, a mixture of reverence and awe that made me feel alive.

Zeno and his sister would never return and Beba would be proud of me. I paused for a moment to look at my kingdom, and I felt that I would really become a king, one day, a king for my America.

It was then, while I was concentrated in gazing at my luck, that I heard some choked screams. I looked among my non-living, but none of them appeared. They were not my shining fireflies, even though that cry seemed to come straight from hell. I followed the bleak noise, my skin shuddering at every step. I followed it beyond the America, first going down my private road, then suddenly going silently up again toward the school, on the road leading to the town. I did not know where that call of a deer in love came from, but I followed it with my heart in turmoil. Next to the school, still solitary because of the time, there was a small window with thin yellow curtains, almost transparent, and thin glass. The cries I had heard a little earlier, which had now turned into a hushed wail, were coming from there.

I listened closely and I was baffled realizing that the weeping and the chocked cries mingled. I silently climbed the stones of the wall to look inside.

The yellow curtain barely covered the window and I pushed myself slightly up, clinging with my dirty fingernails to the railing.

I could not understand then what was really happening, but I only felt an unknown terror invade my soul. A small clean kitchen shined because of the burning stove. Next to the stove there was the child I had seen with Andreuccia, her brother, with eyes wide, letting out a weak wail. What was he looking at? I could not see much, just the large body of a half-naked lying man moving convulsively, and beneath him two small dark feet sticking out, cleaner than mine, beautiful and delicate, with the second toe slightly longer than the first.

I threw myself back in terror, violently fell to the ground, hitting it hard with my back. The terror was paralyzing my limbs. It seemed to me as if a huge monster were pinning me on the ground with its jaws, trying to make me sink in that cold and hard stony ground. But I struggled to get up, I struggled like never again, and ran. Fast, I ran away, not feeling my legs, not feeling the cold and the excruciating pain of the soul, which I knew to be there, but I pushed back. Falling and getting up over and over again, I ran as long as my lungs could sustain my child's effort.

I ran down to the Orcia, through woods and brambles, looking for a physical pain to flay my body to diminish the memory of what I could not understand. I ran breathlessly, for a long, endless time, and the more I felt my lungs ache the more I ran. I forded the river and then kept going across the valley. I climbed up the rocks, rough with white and warm limestone, soaking myself completely, until I came to the millpond.

It looked like an oasis in a desert, with its water as blue as I imagined the eyes of my father to be, surrounded by rocks as yellow as I remembered my mother's hair was. How I wished for both of them to be with me at that time. But they weren't. However, all around, the green and orange bushes hid me, friendly.

There I stripped of my black, worn smock, by then irremediably ripped. I stripped of each and all pieces of clothes, immersing myself in the clear and covering waters of Bagno Vignoni. I did not want to see and I did not want to hear. I just wanted to forget the school, the road leading to the village, and the lament of those dark feet with their slightly lengthened second toe.

It was cold outside, but the boiling water warmed and covered the pain, the humiliation, the shame of having run away. Every now and then I hid completely under water and there I would have liked to die.

Without being seen. Forgotten by the world.

But when my lungs started howling their need of air, the urge to get out was overpowering, then I stubbornly remained immersed, with my eyes bulging out, seeing only an endless blue. I tried to imagine that I had the gills of a fish, so that I could disappear forever in those warm and reassuring waters like in a mother's womb.

But the need to breathe was tyrannical and won over my desire of escaping, and suddenly I came out screaming from the hot water with my face burning and my cheeks swollen, and fished, in spite of myself, fresh air from the world that turned around me.

I was no fish, I was just Febo, a name that suddenly I did not like anymore.

I had always been proud of myself and now I became cowardly, so cowardly as to prefer to be a slimy fish than a man. Little, but still a man.

Only when fall came over me even in there I found the strength to get out. The rags I retrieved were damp and cold, and even my bones chilled immediately. I dressed again, throwing far away the remnants of the black smock, and walked slowly along the ancient Via Cassia. The boots I put back on seemed heavier and colder than I remembered them, and my steps followed one another apathetic and laborious, until I reached the bottom of the fork in the main road. On one side begun the road towards San Quirico, which led to the north, far away, to where I could not imagine, and even to America. On the right there was the Orcia bridge, and the road to my America, who saw me left as a king and would see me return as cowardly traitor.

I would have wanted to run away but I did not; I did not have the courage.

Leaning out from the Orcia bridge, I was immediately hit by the north wind. I felt cold and I was sure it came from my shame. I wanted to put off my return home forever, and I decided, therefore, to take the long way.

I would never pass again in front of that cursed house.

It was not yet noon when I made up my mind to cross the bridge. I had stood motionless, looking at the transparent river flowing, undecided whether to cross it or plunge myself into it. And for the first time I realized that I had an irrepressible desire of life, even though I did not know where to cling to make it.

Motionless, I had observed that water bed as it brought away with it a clarity that no longer belonged to me. It flowed, swell with the rains of a damp and placid September and of a fairly mild October. December did not seem to have yet come for it, but the pale sky gave me no comfort.

And I went back to cling to what I had; in spite of myself I could not leave the moon that would soon appear in the sky and neither the America. What if my dad came back?

That day I felt the ice become overbearing, like insidious blades, penetrate my flesh. I walked along the road. Everything around me had become gray as my mind and my eyes. A thin fog became my friend and seemed to want to hide me from the world.

I passed the Poderina, the farm on the corner that had once been a place for travellers, starting up towards the olive field. The hills did not seem to feel the icy stiffness that had invaded me, and smiled kindly as I passed, ever and maybe forever motionless. How does it feel to be motionless? To see history pass by, over, far and near you, and do nothing?

Not being able to do anything.

I was worse than the hills. I had run away, coward and minuscule, I had not even had the courage of immobility.

And while I was thinking, I trod in the dense woods, to feel the plants, to have their forgiveness, to try to forget.

As I walked, bent and deaf to external events, I did not realized I had got back to the main road, under the spring, where the olive harvest had already begun.

Indeed it wasn't the cheerful voices on the olive trees to shake me up, but an indefinite trot behind me. A group of about twenty boys, all wearing black smocks, was running up the steep slope that led to the road to Rocca.

A big and burly man, behind them all, violently lashed the last of the row, shouting, "Lazybones! How can you, so undersized, be the hope of the country?"And he lashed the one who stood behind.

"The physique of the good fascist is athletic, composed, not scruffy", he shouted. In front there were the more robust and bigger boys, behind the skinnier ones, those who could not run fast, their physiques rendered thin by too many injustices.

Suddenly I saw a stalking man with big, curly moustache, emerge from among the olive trees. He wore a fedora slightly tilted over on his left eye, leaving the right one, small and blue uncovered. He had the imposing height of a real man. He looked like a foreman and had started to watch the scene, interrupting his precious work.

I remembered at that moment that it was December 13th, the day in which the harvesting began, under the auspices of Saint Lucia.

The man with the fedora looked at the passing group with his eyes slightly closed. The boys in the front row greeted him with a gesture he did not return. His attention was elsewhere. He waited until the last of the boys had gone by, then, before the man with the whip could lash once again, he stopped him raising his arm. The man with the fedora was thinner, but he had a more toned physique, a more healthy and virile skin tone.

He forcibly dragged the unfortunate lasher across the street, snatching his unworthy weapon from his hands and started hitting his back against the wall, just in front of the olive field, so violently that he made him shake like jelly. I hid under the olive tree, and the men and women who until a few moments ago had been busy harvesting moved close to me. All silently watching the scene.

"Coward!" the man with the hat said, barely audible. "Is this what your school teaches? To hit the weak with the whip?"

He said no more but he broke the whip in two with a single blow on his bent knee. Then, in a deep voice, he clearly said, "Now confront with me," and he gave him a punch under which the other fell to the ground, his face gray and fearful.

"Don't you dare ever again, you poor excuse for a teacher, to do something like this, or else next time I'll kill you."

"But your children..." the one who appeared to me, as if by magic, in his role of teacher, tried to defend himself, stammering, as a trickle of blood was coming out of his lips, "your children were in front of the line..."

"My children," the man with the fedora answered, "can defend themselves. But for me they are all the same, all boys, especially the last ones", he added, kicking him, as he was trying to get up, to impress on him the memory of him. Then, calming down, he went away hissing, "Forewarned is forearmed."

The people around me were smiling, but he, suddenly addressing them all, shouted, "What's so funny? We have harvesting to do, come on, let's work", and they all obeyed.

From what I understood, he was definitely the foreman of that family.

Then suddenly he saw me.

"And who are you?" he asked

"Febo," I said, trying not to look down.

"The one of Rocca? The son of Bianchini?"

"Yes," I said proudly.

"And don't you harvest olives?"

I barely shrugged.

"What do I say? You're just a boy. Pretty tall, but still a little boy. Zeno will do it for you," he said, gently slapping me. Then he added, "Good man your father, and your mother too". He sighed. "Go back home, you're all red, I wouldn't want you to get a fever."

I obeyed.

I saw the teacher limping away.

At that moment I realized how my father had certainly been, like I dreamed him every day. A man with his cap tilted on his head, who taught in school rather than harvesting olives. But not like that bully. For sure my father had been a right and brave teacher.

Even the foreman had said so.

I wanted to be like my dad, but I also realized that his school would never belong to me. I would learn not to ran away from the whip, I would face it.

In my own way, though.

# The Cats

It was while coming back from that day, completely different from what I had imagined, that, while laboriously climbing towards Rocca d'Orcia, I proceeded into the town. I wandered around the streets, avoiding to go back to my America. I felt like I no longer possessed anything, and I stubbornly wanted to delete all of the memories that crowded confusingly my immature mind.

I had decided to forget what I had seen in the morning, and especially the anguish that it had caused me. A new, powerful terror, that you could not drive away like you do with a fox in the roost.

The idea of the impossibility to shun the fear was more fearful of the fear itself. So I erased everything, as you do with a blackboard full of abstruse words, and I immediately filled it with something else. A new face, the one of the foreman I had seen earlier. I lost myself in his beauty and strength and courage, and I imagined him to be exactly like my father. And there, in the random image of a father never met, I sheltered.

I shuffled my feet, solitary and silent, with my shorts that had dried on my cold body. They were too wide for my bony knees, white with limestone, and perhaps also too wet.

They were so wide because so I could wear them longer, and Beba would have less to do.

But I did not mind, I did not mind the shivers running down my back, neither the sky that was slowly darkening even though it was not even two in the afternoon. Time had lost its meaning, as if it were roaming, ethereal, looking for someone to call it. I shooed it, and if I had been old enough to do so I would have fled away, in a place without moments, where innocence would have been mine forever.

But I only knew Rocca, and also the woods and valleys, the rivers and the mountain. I had been to Castiglioni and Bagno Vignoni, San Quirico and Pienza, Gallina and Bagni San Filippo, but most of all I knew Rocca. Hard and gentle ground, of warm and hostile hearts, but where time was overbearing and did not leave you a way out.

Walking through it all was simple, it was a short route, especially if I avoided the last part, the one toward the school and my house.

I do not know what happened exactly, Gisella asked me often in the following months, but I do not remember.

The last thing I saw were the smooth stones of the town. Round and bumpy.

They have always been beautiful and unlike one another, deliberately put sloping throughout the whole of Rocca, as if coming from a long descent started millennia ago from the walls of the Amiata to arrive down, away, up to the valley above, as if poised on the last giant rock encountered.

I remember that I went up the Piana and stopped only at the large and tall tank in the middle of the square, which served, in my imagination, as a stage over the world.

Usually, when I went to the tank, which Beba said to be the biggest in Italy, I imagined to be on a ship, a strong ship made of stones that no storm would bring down, no animal would eat, no iceberg would sank.

That day it was the same, I really needed not to think about real life.

And the tank appeared magically to me; each of its eleven sides shone because it was protected by a god. And I saw them all, beautiful and powerful, tall three times as me.

My gods were eleven. To them I entrusted the tired thoughts of my defeat.

To the god of the sea, astern, down toward Pienza, and immediately next to the god of the earth and that of the rock, then there was the god of the sky and that of the animals. The sixth god was the god of the churches, the one Beba liked so much, and who you could not make angry by forgetting him, because it was said to be very irritable and take offense for much less.

After there were the god of the sails and that of the sun, of the rains and storms. And there had to be the god of women, a strange god, I imagined, effeminate and overbearing at the same time.

Right next to the god of females, the last of the circle was the god of mystery, the only indispensable god, without which no one would have been able to travel. He was by far the most important, the one who gave the impulse to leave, to discover, and above all the courage to venture.

I saw them all around me, all different and young, with their huge, giant and manly bodies. And I, in the middle, was their captain.

I was only a kid who was looking for a place, a house, a past and a future. And the idea of being the master of those gods, who in turn ruled the world, made me feel less alone.

In that moment I thought I owned a huge kite that would strongly pull us high in the sky, so big and powerful it was. It would have acted as sail to the tank, but with double, triple the power of an ordinary sail. I imagined it tied to the central well, projecting us upwards and then taking us to fly far away, where no man of Rocca, apart from my father, had never gone.

The kite was our engine, what would drive me off, bringing me and my divine men to dominate the clouds and the sun, pushing us powerfully beyond the great sea, in the direction of the moon, to join my father in the Americas.

As I watched the sky fill with black clouds, I smelled the scent of rain approaching and only then I noticed two small cats playing and hopping.

It started to rain lightly, and I was proud of that water because it seemed to me that my ship, made of stones, started that way its trip over the sea. The raindrops were for me the first sprays of the sea waves.

It was just strange that those first heavy drops were really salty. My face was the first to be flooded by the sea.

Many things have changed today, but at that time it was nice to dream and let myself be surprised by fascinating details. I loved getting lost in details and fantasize about being the leader of giants who could do everything.

I could not and I was not able to believe in pain.

Drunk with emotion, shaken by my weakness, prone to seeing only what I wanted, I imagined to feel the earth move under my feet and leave. It was by chance that I got enthralled watching the two cats as if they were two improvised ship's boys.

It happens when we are young, everything is distracting and you go from one thought to another without realizing it, and everyone can be everything.

The cats were small and they were playing. I watched them jump on each other and try their first battles, as I thought happened between two brothers. I followed them, intrigued by the insistent biting of tails, by the high jumps they did just to learn and for fun.

I still think today, as I thought then, that game is useful to confront yourself with the world. Thanks to games you learn how to appraise yourself, to understand your friend and your enemy.

I played a lot, but always alone. Not counting animals.

My attention, however, was captured by the two cats. Small and quick, one was gray and yellow, with short and spotted fur, and watched with a wary face, almost motionless, the movements of the other. I thought that the gray one was female, perhaps for the feigned indifference it reserved to the other, or perhaps because it was smaller compared to the one that what was black and white, instead, with a thick and hairy fur, like a crossbreed with a wildcat. Its blue, wary eyes immediately attracted my curiosity, seeming to me infinitely similar to those of the foreman.

Its muzzle was nice and naughty. It started playing with the strings of my shoes and I stroked it, sinking my fingers into its soft fur. It scratched me playfully, trying to nibble my hand while the other watched us fearfully.

They were cats that the lady of the town, Gisella, would surely welcome one day, but only when both would really feel safe.

I remember that they began chasing each other on the tank, and I pretended to call them to order like a good captain should do. The gray one surprised me, it immediately stopped, sniffing the air.

"Do you understand me?" I whispered. It turned slightly toward the other that was biting his tail and, waiting no longer, jumped down from the tank. The black one followed suit and both hid under the stairs of the tank itself.

I remember that I smiled, that I thought I had frightened them and I looked for them to reassure them. I watched them for a moment once back on the ground. I was almost lying on the wet stones, of this I am certain. Then I remember that I lost myself again in the round stones, polished by centuries, that formed my pedestal. Sparse green grass grew between the grooves of each brick, and I think I wondered how it managed to grow there in the middle, with no food, no soil...

Then I heard a violent bang, like a few years afterward I found out the one of bombs to be.

A relentless thump and then nothing.

Total emptiness.

It was then, as if in a dream, I saw myself from the outside. I felt my limbs shake off like a rubber band from the limbs themselves and I found myself outside of me, a floating soul without a body.

I dreamed, I think, to soar lightly around a strange Febo, while my oblong mass remained motionless and poorly arranged on the ground. I did not understand what actually happened or, if I guessed it, I thought I was quickly veering towards another world, another planet, far and so close. I, my true self, flew ethereally around the sleeping me. And I heard screams, muffled by a continuous hissing. I thought I saw around my motionless figure a group of housewives. In particular I remember one with her feet near my bleeding nose, one with a squat feet that smelled horribly.

It was strange to be inside and outside.

And I saw Beba running towards me, who lifted me up and howled, crying, "Where do I bring him so? In the America the devil will carry him off me without thinking twice..."

Then I felt her garlic smell wet my cheeks but I saw, disgusted, my body stubbornly remaining inert.

In the memories of those moments everything is vague.

I remember Gisella, her face frightened and her cheekbones strained. And I would have wanted to touch the two small cats that, it had seemed to me, had just licked one of my too motionless hands.

Then just details and hazy, uncertain people and days.

Maybe Beba said she could not bring me to her house because there was no room. I have a confused recollection of someone who took me from Beba's burning arms to bring me to a safe place. A big and tall man, I would say, because I felt as if I was rising.

But it is a distant dream, perhaps only imagined.

Only when Gisella confirmed my unfocused images, I was sure of what had happened.

She confided me that she had leant out the window of her house, alarmed, after the bang, from the building just in front of the tank. In that moment she had seen my blackened feet, unnaturally still behind the tank. My shoes were almost completely charred.

She had seen my feet.

Like I had seen those of Andreuccia.

But she did not abandon me to my fate.

Her cries drew everyone else. The whole town ran around me, while rain and lightning followed each other indifferently. She immediately came out and found me in the arms of Beba, who seemed like barking, sitting on the stairs of the tank. She had picked me up from the ground, and she had stood under the rain, crying, unable to see that my red hair was singed and a trickle of blood was coming out of my nose and right ear.

A bolt of lightning had struck me – maybe due to the moisture that happily resided on my brittle bones – leaving me unconscious. It had been Gisella to take me from the arms of Beba, soon after, because my nanny seemed to have almost gone crazy, and she stood there still and wailing without deciding what to do.

She had seemed so tall to me because Beba had been sitting. She snatched me from her arms, hurt and outraged by her vulgar ways and her resulting immobility. And the two little cats, which up to that moment had actually licked my nails, suddenly blackened, had followed her like two diligent soldiers.

Two kittens transformed in minutes from ship's boys to soldiers, sympathetic to their captain.

The villagers were certain that I would die, but it did not happen, even if I was in a state of half-sleep for an indefinite time. The two cats never left the bed.

"See how they love you?" Gisella repeated to a Febo without consciousness. I heard her, but I could not answer. Still I was always tempted to think that they were more enticed by a warm room and a sure meal than by a love inspiration.

In my wandering memories, I distinctly remember the doctor.

He was a little man, small and skinny. Too fearful for the line of work he had chosen, very indecisive and often unnecessarily categorical. He always wore suit and tie and he seemed afraid to touch people. His eyes never rested straight on something or someone, they wandered uncertain on anything but what he was talking about.

Gisella did not trust him, she knew how to treat me by herself, with herbs and concoctions, but the authority of a doctor soothed her insecurities.

He arrived, and without checking me, said, as if I already was not there anymore, "Gisella, I am telling you, he will either die or become stupid."

She replied that he was wrong and they started to argue. Or rather, Gisella spoke and voiced a thousand hypotheses and he, turning his head anywhere but towards me, denied them with his bony face.

I heard the doctor's words, I saw him grope in the dark and felt his fearful ignorance, but I could not make a sound. I wanted to scream at him that he was stupid, that I would recuperate and one day I would slam him hard against the wall of the olive field.

Then I fell asleep immediately, as if in the effort of trying to talk I had lost all my energy.

And I dreamed a lot. I dreamed of my mother, her back turned to me, singing lullabies to the woods and me. I dreamed faces I had never seen, so many people who watched over me and smiled.

"One week you slept, Febo, one week in which you survived thanks to the soup that Siride sent every day. A hot soup half of which you threw up. But she sent you such abundant portions that not only it was enough for you, but for the whole house."

I did not know what to say. I heard only low whispers, and if at the beginning I could not answer her, as days passed by I started to ask her and then to shout at her to repeat louder what she had said.

I was going deaf.

But I felt a warm affection take possession of my soul, no one before her had taken so much care of me. Beba had been my nanny, it was true, but Gisella was different, a continuous and reassuring presence.

And I was amazed by Siride, of whom I only knew a red nose peeking out from her large scarf.

I did not see Beba for a long time.

Maybe she felt that her mission with me was over.

Or maybe it was Gisella to keep her at a distance.

I must admit I missed a little her slaps and her terrified screams when I was racing up and down the America like a man possessed, and kneading bread with her and watching her sew.

But time and events did not gave me too much time to feel sorry for myself.

I liked Gisella's house, however. It was warm and bright, and the sheets in which I rested were white and fragrant. The bed seemed to have been buffed recently, but I kept preferring my straw one, very tall and soft in September and then gradually more and more short and hard, but shaped precisely like my body.

I never asked her why she had not brought me back to the America, probably she was afraid of it too, but I felt that, unlike the others, Gisella had an almost reverential respect for it.

Gisella was strange, so different from the other people of Rocca.

She had a round and gentle face on a small and witty nose, almost jesting. She was thin and small, always elegant and well combed. She wore a scarf on her head only when she went out, but at home I saw her raven-black hair shine.

She did not do heavy work, but accurate ones. She had women who washed and women who cleaned, so her hands kept being small and soft. She had farmers who worked the land for her, allowing her to focus on reading, drawing, sewing, and especially on her herbs and her studies.

She spoon-fed me even after I had recovered, a period in which the doctor advised complete rest for me.

I became hopelessly deaf from my right ear and Gisella told me strange things about this.

"Febo Bianchini, you are special, as special as I've ever seen anyone."

And she fed me with small spoonfuls of the soup made by Siride, which smelled of smoked meat and vegetables, and warmed even my lopsided bones. I would have drank that soup that in one gulp, but she insisted, "It takes composure in life. Composure is a virtue of the strong."

But I was not composed, hunger was back and I was also angry at my ear that only brought back to me an annoying buzz.

She smiled when she saw that I scowled in confusion.

"Who does not have anything like the others, refines what he has. You no more hear from one ear, but you will learn to hear a lot more from the other, and you'll hear with the eyes and the nose, and even with your hands you will learn to hear."

I kept silent, I did not think it possible, and she continued.

"You have no mom, but you will find many, special as you are."

I did not understand her at all, and actually her insistence on the peculiarity of my being discomforted me.

Still, in my heart, the desire to put in her an unlimited trust champed at the bit. And then I pushed it back. I was independent, and I did not need anyone, neither their pity.

I never told her that what I had always been expecting was a real family. I only wished to be able to cry freely and be punished. Laugh and be hugged by delicate arms.

So I acted with her as a grown man, talking to her in a cold and detached tone.

And my thought was peremptory; a woman without a husband for me was worth little, less than nothing.

Strangely, however, she was the only woman I would have entrusted with my life.

Every day I realized that I was getting more and more attached to her, as it happened to me with the animals in the wood. And the more I felt that, the more I tried to appear strong and proud.

I fought against myself then to appear superior to her, like I did with the wild animals, and yet I looked for her and, like with the beasts of the wood, I wanted to grab her, touch her, be comforted by her, but soon after, at a hint of her kindness, I refused her.

She did not suffer from my arrogance, rather she smiled at it, which made me furious.

"How many wonders await you in this life," Gisella said in what seemed to me an irritating whisper. I asked her a thousand times to repeat, she patiently obliged.

"If you knew the strange things that happened this week and how many people came to see you..." she told me, and soon after she was silent and looked out the window. She never told me who had come.

"Beba?" I asked, and she remained silent.

"Zeno then," I guessed, and she said no by simply moving her eyes, while her black hair, styled in a bun, remained still.

"Siride did, she came to bring the soup!"

"No, absolutely not her. She had the soup brought every day by a different kid. I found out by accident that she was sending it. She never cared for us to know."

The fair eyes of Gisella saw far, more than I could.

I wanted to shout at her to tell me who had come to my bedside of a dying child, but I was too proud to do it, so I kept silent. Then I fantasized that Andreuccia had come, but I knew it was not her. And in her demeaning silence I closed my eyes and imagined Andreuccia who caressed me, holding my hands.

And while, in the bed of the room facing the square, I rested my body of a little man struck by lightning and survived, she told me about ancient deeds.

She read to me the fantastic adventures of Odysseus and told me of the amazing journeys of the characters by Verne.

I never told her how much I waited for those moments in which everything became possible. I listened to her excitedly, and delightedly I discovered that there were so many fantastic worlds I had never seen or imagined.

But was there a difference?

Today I know that the only limit to our brief lives is the inability to imagine something better. Back then I perceived that idea but could not really make it mine.

Gisella had time to spend for me. She was a young woman who, after having looked after her old and battered parents, had found herself living for herself only.

I soon realized that Gisella was not alone as I had imagined. She had so much, and of such a fullness, that one hundred people would not have been alone with everything she had.

She was kind, funny, smart, friendly.

Like a mother.

She was rich, affectionate, strong, and she knew how to love.

But she was not my mother.

It is a gift, that of love, that few actually possess. Over time many people have come to ask me for love, but they did not have the slightest knowledge of what it was. They were not ready to lose everything for love, they were not brave enough for a love, often they did not want to see where their love was, and at times they were simply not worthy.

Gisella never asked me for love, simply because she had much more love than the whole world could imagine.

I never asked her to be my mother because she was too universally in love with mankind to be able to limit herself to me.

Gisella, however, was the first person in whom I recognized an unconditional love for the world. Banally, she did not know how to hate.

Of course she could be spiteful too. She did not understand evil and she hated ignorance. She loved ignorant people as well, but she could not stand those who thrived in ignorance.

Sometimes she was also vindictive, but then went over it and remained with just a heart full of affections and forgiveness.

She had many cats that hung around her house, which she fed as you do with children. They were her guards, but only one, until that day, had always been with her and slept at the foot of her bed, Garibaldi.

Garibaldi was an old red-and-orange cat, as big as a dog, and it purred so loudly that it seemed to snore.

I did not like it at all, it looked too much like the bishop of Siena, but to her it was special.

It was her favourite, but never, not even for a day, I saw her forget to feed the cats that framed her patrician house.

She emulated their attitudes, and you could see her become all rounded when something was wrong, become sinuous when she wanted to obtain some favour, while she craned her neck uncannily when she was about to attack.

Rich landowner and generous woman, she did not need to work for a living, but she lived to work. After having taken care of her parents with the kindness of a young cat towards her kittens, she devoted herself to the needy. She sent grain to the mountain and searched the woods for plants to make healing concoctions.

Then her servants, with whom she liked to surround herself, carefully following her instructions, dried them or put them in alcohol, and they brought them to those in need. She healed without seeing, she saw with the eyes of her servants, and to them she confidently entrusted her medicines.

With my ear she did not even try.

"You have what nature has decided for you."

I said nothing, and bitter tears remained hidden between my burned eyelashes.

# Gisella

One morning when, getting out of bed, I felt stronger, she noticed immediately.

We went to have breakfast in the lounge, followed by the two cats that had crossed the threshold of Gisella's house with me. She had called them Castor and Pollux, in honour of that union which seemed to make them absolutely faithful to each other.

I found to greet me a nice cup of steaming milk with white and fragrant bread and wild rose jam. On the floor, near my feet, two bowls contained leftovers for the cats.

For me, that was a gentlemen's lunch.

Gisella was standing with Garibaldi next to her, curled up on a chair. Both seemed already sated and neither of them seemed to lend us too much attention, but I am sure that they were keeping an eye on us, Gisella on me, and the tabby cat the on the two small kittens.

I gulped down everything with the hunger of a wolf, and Castor and Pollux did the same. Only after finishing I wiped my dirty mouth with the white tablecloth.

In that moment I realized that she was motionless, still and vigilant, looking at me with her back to the window.

I sat up straight, erect, as if I had to give her some kind of explanations.

She shook her head.

"The work will be long," she sighed.

I misinterpreted her words.

I knew that when someone made you a favour you had the duty to reciprocate, and so I deciphered her speech.

"I'm not afraid of work. Tell me what to do and I'll be fast."

She smiled and came to sit next to me.

"What were you doing at the tank?" she asked in the tone of someone who demands an answer.

I did not know what to say, so to take time I asked her, "What did you say? I cannot hear!"

She, patient in spite of her wary eye, repeated in a louder tone.

"What were you doing at the tank with all that water coming down?"

I was not able to lie to her.

"I was looking for me dad, I was trying to see him there, far away."

"Where?"

"In America."

She was silent, then, looking straight into my eyes, she tried to explain without too much preambles.

"America is too far, you cannot see it."

I laughed in her face the same as if I were talking to a person of little intellect.

"But if I had a kite, I could fly to America."

She studied me for a long time. She paced back and forth. She raised her right hand to her eyebrows and then, stopping suddenly, as if she had had an epiphany, she declared, "You have to go to school."

I froze. That thing of school was a fixation!

I hesitated a little, then the room started spinning around me, and I was afraid I would regurgitate all the good things I had just eaten.

And Gisella noticed.

The idea of reliving the emotions of my first day of school – those cursed moments – of hearing again that muffled and heartbreaking sob, was intolerable.

The sad thought of running not for fun but for the fear of the whipping of a teacher was nothing compared to the sight of two clean and delicate feet, with the second finger slightly stretched, prisoners of an indecent destiny.

And for the first time that I could remember I cried in front of a woman. Not a light and delicate weeping, rather a strong and violent one. And the more I cried the more it seemed that my eyes produced tears. And I saw Gisella looking at me in amazement, and I wanted to tell her to calm down, but the more I tried to talk to her, the more my voice broke into heartrending sobs, in the end sounding like animal wheezes.

She pulled a chair close to mine, and, as if it were the most normal thing in the world, she took me in her arms. She began to lull me, stroking my face, my hair, and cradling me she waited until I calmed down. I don't remember how long it took, I only remember the warm feeling of her thin arms twisted around my body, wizened by the vacuum of my heart.

Gisella was beautiful and cosy, and maybe that day I secretly fell in love with her.

She smelled of spices and warmth, she smelled more than anyone ever. And as my words came out in gasps, I closed my eyes and saw a distant future in which she ran beautiful and happy among the flowers and fields, with her black hair flying against the wind. Her who, with her red face red and her eyes bright, found another love.

I do not know if she saw what I saw, but she held me close as if I had gifted her a piece of my heart.

She did not return on the subject, but the next day, while I was going back to the bedroom after breakfast, she called me from her studio on the ground floor.

In front of the light wood desk, she had had a small table arranged with paper and ink. Behind it, in a corner of the library, she had hung a small blackboard, that back then I did not recognize for what it was.

"I'll teach you to read and write, I will teach you maths and you will know geography and history. It will be a nice refresher for me too."

I smiled, heartened. But she looked at me with a stern face.

"In here I will not be Gisella for you anymore. You'll have to call me teacher."

That sudden change of mood at first amused me, but when she started scratching the blackboard with a piece of chalk I felt some kind of awe and, flying with my fantasy to the days to come, I imagined her running after me up the road to Rocca, violently whipping my ass, because I was the first but also the last of the line.

And I could answer to my troubles, "Anyway, when we get to the olive field the foreman will take care of this!"

Gisella looked at me sideways, not understanding, and slightly turning to scowl at me she ordered, "Be quiet!"

She returned her eyes to the blackboard and, drawing some strange signs on it, she said only, "Copy them all!"

The first day was a real torture.

I could not stay sit too long. It seemed to me I was writing abstruse things. And to be honest I was not even interested in them. After the first week, I asked to go back to my house.

She looked at me with suspicion. She had sensed my disappointment in staying still at a small table for so many hours.

"I'll walk you there," she declared, without accepting counterproposals, "so we talk a bit."

After all those days in bed, the cool air of a winter that was already full gave me a jolt to the head, so intoxicating that I was afraid I would fall.

Gisella steadied me.

"Can you make it?" she asked.

"Sure," I said, proud, distancing myself from her.

Castor and Pollux followed us right out of the house and then, when we reached the tank, they started meowing. They did not want me to go, but they wanted me to know that if I did they would not follow. I stroke them and immediately they started wheezing in continuous purrs. Then I left them to their future with Gisella.

When she saw me take the alley of San Sebastiano instead of the Borgo Maestro, which was shorter and less tiring, she asked me the reason.

I tried to beat around the bush, then the voice of Beba, who was singing out of tune from inside her house, gave me the answer.

"I wanted to be seen by Beba."

Gisella stood silent, and a strange frustrated expression appeared on her face.

"Beba?" I shouted "I'm Febo, lean out!"

The voice fell silent.

"Beba," I shouted again, and I got only silence in response.

Then Gisella intervened.

"She must be out."

"No, she's not out! I heard her singing!"

Gisella pulled me away while I continued to call my nanny who, suddenly silent, seemed not to want to greet me.

I got home speechless and angry.

Under the pergola I asked Gisella, "Oh what did I do to her? Why won't she see me?"

Her face turned red.

"I don't know, but when tomorrow morning you come to my house for the lesson go to her first, I'm sure she will answer you."

Then, standing still, she watched me approach my house, jump over the steps at the entrance and disappear into the America.

I flew up to the top of the roof to see, unseen, if she was still there. And I found her motionless, with her legs firmly anchored to the ground, looking at my house the way you look at an ancient monument. I felt proud of myself. Gisella was looking for me and maybe she would miss me. I was the master once again.

She remained immutable in that rich-lady posture, watching my America as if she wanted to communicate it something. Then, when a gust of wind swirled around her, it was as if she woke up from a dream and, with a greeting nod to my estate, she went away.

Being alone in the America for the first time made me feel a slight melancholy.

Even my little fireflies seemed distant, became only feeble lights at the America.

The house seemed colder than I remembered, so I hastily lighted the fire. I did not want to run, the lightning had drained me of all energy. Stopping to watch the purple and orange flames that sprang forth from the wood, I thought about those last weeks.

In her house Gisella had a big mirror and I often stopped by it to look at myself. At first I had struggled to recognize myself. I looked like someone new, bigger, and taller too. Then I had slowly got used to the image of the new Febo. No longer a child but a young boy who heard so many noises around him, muffled voices due to the "off" ear.

I took a blanket and, staring at the heat that emanated from the coloured flames, chasing away memories and longing for visions, I curled in the song of the fire and hoped I would dream.

With my eyes closed, my fireflies came back and I could lose myself into sleep.

And then I dreamed of running through my green and scented hills, and I dreamed of three talking deer. Or better, I understood them but not through words, rather with my mind. They told me that I should not be afraid of anything. I asked them what I should have been afraid of, and then Beba appeared and screamed "I don't want to see you anymore because you're as ugly as a lizard", and she ran away. So I ran after her and Gisella appeared, with a whip in her hands, and made me ran down the main street of Rocca. Then she stopped in front of the house of Andreuccia and told me to watch. I did not want to and she whipped me, and as I felt the whip violently sting my legs I saw the little feet of Andreuccia filling with sores and blood. I could feel their pain too.

I woke up with a start. A log had rolled near my feet and was burning like live ember. I put it back in with hatred. I did not want to learn anything, the only one who could teach me anything, maybe, was the foreman.

The morning after I had no intention of going back to Gisella. With the dream of the night before she had become hostile to me, and if she wanted me she would come looking for me.

While I was wandering around the America, I felt a gentle, even melancholic song. It came from the large rock. I approached that sound cautiously and, like Odysseus enchanted by the sirens, I climbed down at the mercy of a strange stirring of emotions. I crept silently along the narrow lane and I thought that I would be welcomed by a fairy, who maybe would have turned into a witch, but I only found my life.

Andreuccia sang incomprehensible words, a song never heard, and as she sang she combed her younger brother's hair, pulling lice away. I was enthralled by her hands. Little, slender and fast hands, hands to be smelled, to be caressed and held tight.

The little boy was darker than her, like milk stained with barley coffee, with wavy and quite short hair. His two big and brown eyes, distant eyes, were ill-fitted to his round and full face. He watched, captivated, joint flights of crows, and stood silent, as if captured by the voice of his sister.

Andreuccia instead had lost the childhood from her persona.

Leaning against the large rock, she made the delicate notes of her voice vibrate. And while she sang she worked methodically on her brother's head. She was simply beautiful. Lean like I did not remember her, her hair tightened in two braids shorter than I remembered, and a gaunt and lovely face, a mouth as pink as clouds at sunset.

As soon as she saw me she interrupted her song and turned to me in a such a scratchy tone that it dazed me, "What are you looking at?"

I stammered something I do not remember, and it was her brother who came to my rescue with his just blunt language, "Sara, don't get mad, you have a voice so beautiful..."

She smiled at him as she had never done at me, forcing me to lower my miserable eyes to the ground. And then I saw a paper sheet that the wind was taking away from them, toward me.

I ran to take that piece of paper and turned it over in my hands, looking at it from every side.

Andreuccia immediately stood up and said, jarring, "It's mine. Give it back," and she took a step toward me. I backed away as if someone had wanted to take away my heart.

She looked at me for a second, then, suddenly changing mood, she chirped, "No, you can keep it. It does not mean anything, childish nonsense I wrote long ago. And then you're ignorant, you'll never be able to read it."

Then, seized by a sudden illumination, she pounced on me and furiously hissed, "Promise me you would not let anyone read it". I said nothing, frightened.

"Promise," she repeated, shaking me and raising her voice. I nodded and she let me go with a shove.

I ran home with my heart in my throat and I stopped only under the pergola.

A slight and healthy drizzle had started to come down from the cloudless sky, but my thoughts were elsewhere.

It was the second time she had touched me, and the excitement had been even higher than the first. But now I had in my hands something that had belonged to her, something she had written and thought, something she had touched and even kept in her pocket.

I sniffed it and smelled her scent for the second time, but not only the lavender one, that sheet was soaked with all of her; freshness and milk, bread and flowers.

"I promise Andreuccia, no one will ever read this except me," I repeated to myself with all the seriousness of which I was capable.

Between the words of that solemn oath, Gisella came unexpected. Sudden and untimely.

I did not want her in my house, she took away from me the savour of that idyllic moment, and instinctively I scowled at her. Something made me do so. Maybe the vivid memory of the dream, maybe the fact that she had never told me who had come to see me during my sickness.

But suddenly I stopped. One thing was stronger than all that. Only one thing mattered. A new and inevitable thought.

I had before me my one and only chance; the chance of learning how to read. Only she could teach me the secret to translate the words of Andreuccia.

Not the school, and not even Zeno. My only chance was that gentle and absurd woman, without a husband, rich but lavish of care towards beggars like me, one who surrounded herself with cats and servants, fantastic books and herbs, who knew more than anyone else I had ever met.

I wanted to tell her "I'm coming, teach me how to read", but I found her face more frowning than mine.

This unforeseen event made my certainties drop.

"We had an agreement, the two of us" she stated without screaming, but with a tone so severe that it seemed to me like a deafening cry.

"Your father was a man who honoured every promise."

I felt belittled.

I wondered if she had heard the oath I had just made to Andreuccia? I hoped not, and I was afraid of not being able to honour it, as I had not honoured the one to Gisella.

I felt cowardly and felt like crying, but I did not. I said nothing and she suddenly changed her expression.

"What's wrong Febo? Why do you flee?"

I did not answer and I turned my head toward my America, my only safe haven. How to tell her about my fears? How to tell her about the need of her that I felt and about a new fear? How to tell her about a love just blossomed?

"Let's make a new pact. You and I," Gisella said after a short silence.

I remained stubbornly turned towards the America, while my heart somersaulted waiting for this new pact.

She did not realize that I was going to accept whatever she would propose, anything to make it up to her, to learn how to read the words of Andreuccia.

Unaware, she continued, putting in her tone a patience she did not possess.

"One day we make a walk through woods and rivers, and you show me what you like and I, if you want, will teach you the names of the plants. And one day instead I school you, with letters and numbers, history and geography."

Gisella had forgiven me and was giving me a chance to redeem myself. I wanted to jump to her and scream my happiness, but I was not like that. My solitary life had made me disinclined to pleasantries, dark and shady, suspicious especially in front of those who had seen me cry. And while I intimately rejoiced, on the outside I stood tough and strong, the only ruler of my America.

So I wanted to point out that I was to decide what and when to do some things.

"Except Sunday?" I said, turning to her with the most frowning look I could find.

"Except Sunday," she said with a smile that appeared suddenly and naturally, as if it had been sleeping and ill-concealed for too long, on her pretty round face.

# The passion flower

Thus began for me a whole new time, interspersed between long and passionate walks through ravines and hills, woods and streams, brooks and tributaries, where I never ended to learn. Andreuccia seemed to disappear into a house that I never wanted to see.

Gisella was faithful to the agreement, even if we made some logical changes to the plan, but only after the first few times, once we learned to trust each other.

I showed her the woods that I thought she did not know, and then the hills and rivers. She smiled and told me how they were called, where they were born and where they would go to die. She also explained the names of plants, and then she showed me how to harvest them, when to do it, how to dry them and how to put them to soak and, fundamental thing, she told me which pains, moods, wounds, inflammations they healed.

Strangely, everything about every kind of affliction, from the heart to the body, and how to treat it, seemed shockingly interesting to me.

At home Gisella had many medical books and kept telling me to read them, but the beauty of the valleys was inalienable for me, and she understood that. I was able to learn more by taking care of the wing of a baby bird fallen from a tree than by seeing it in the books.

Gisella, with cunning half-moon eyes, laughed and shouted to make me hear it better while I ran in the woods, "For now, I study and you live, then will come the day when you will study and I will live."

I did not understood her fully. I knew that nothing would ever make me deny my beloved woods and sweet hills.

Nothing.

Gisella, from her side, grasped truths that were unknown to me and, with her full eyes, she told me of a world that belonged to me in its entirety.

"Our valley is full of magic, Febo. Not the vulgar magic of Beba, real magic, the one that comes straight from the earth, and that it tenderly hides among its safe limbs. Only a few are able to grasp all this."

I looked at her and wondered whether she thought that I was able to see that magic.

Sometimes I thought about Beba. The first woman I could remember, my faithful nanny, who had suddenly vanished. I did not really understand the reason and sometimes, passing in front of her house, if I heard her sing, I called her. She promptly fell silent.

She did not want to see me. Why? I sensed in the words of Gisella severe judgement toward the woman who had raised me, and I did not dare ask why. She despised Beba, of that I was certain. I could see it in her face, that hardened when some of her apprentices mentioned her. And I accepted my fate, the same that had always taken away my affections. I humoured it like a cow humours its calf when labouring.

Gisella sometimes, during our treks, fell suddenly silent, kneeled and gestured for me to look. Showing me a bud hidden by wet leaves she got excited.

She always carried a stick with her, to lean on she said, but I soon realized that she used it to test the ground, to be sure not to step on precious herbs, not to stop the growth of mushrooms, not to change what the creation had so finely made.

"We have everything and we look for something that does not belong to us, we look for the power of command, and kill for this, while we forget that we have in our hands the power of life."

Most of the time, however, we stood in silence, listening to the echo of the valleys, the rustling of the animals, the whistle of the wind. She made me deeply realize how fundamental the observation of plants and their location was to understand what they should be used for.

"Poppies", she explained, "bloom in spring. Why, do you think?"

She did not want an immediate answer, she just wanted a reflection.

"Think, Febo. What are they for?"

"To relax and soothe" I said.

"Bravo Febo. As pain relievers, sedatives, antitussives. They are needed at a time when tempers are all too ready to rebirth, when sometimes we dare more than we should, and then there is need to calm."

She fell silent, and I perceived that she did so to search for simple words for my understanding, examples that would remain etched in my mind forever.

She took up a handful of soil and divided it in two. Then she filled her hands evenly. Then slowly she began to pour the soil from one hand to the other.

"In life there is always a balance to be kept" she said, "and if the scale is too much on the one hand, if the weight you give to a portion of your being is far superior than everything else, you create an unbalance."

Then the soil ended all on one hand, she pretended to stagger until she collapsed. She ended the lesson by saying, "And if there is no balance, if any part of our being is not kept under proper control, the body gives way."

It was true, I knew. I had seen it when the birds were making a nest and it seemed to balance on two branches. Birds were smart, a millimetre to the right or to the left, a little higher or lower, the same nest would never have stood.

So it was that Gisella taught me what balance meant, and when I could I showed her.

I took her to the fortress of Tentennano and screamed from up those rotten trunks that were the only bridge to the inside, "See how I'm balanced? It would only need a foot out and..."

I pretended to slip and I saw her turn red and pale at the same time. And I appreciated that she did not shriek awkwardly like women usually do.

Mothers shouted coarsely.

Gisella instead remained silent and kept her innermost thoughts to herself.

That's why I liked her so much, for that innate reluctance in having to speak. For that elegant and slightly detached posture.

We stood silent together, and in silence we discovered endless novelties.

I showed her the skill learned in years of unconsciousness by hanging like a spider from the shaggy wood, and injuring my hands I climbed down to her.

Then Gisella bandaged my fingers and my nicks with achillea stalks and did her magic without saying anything.

Rain and fog, wind and snow, sun and freshness alternated with an unexpected naturalness. I learned to sense when they would come and it was then that we determined to rely on nature to decide whether to have lesson or wander around the countryside.

If it was sunny and the temperature was suitable, we walked like two explorers, if it was raining or snowing and it was too cold, I ran to Gisella's and, in front of blueberries and blackberries infusions, I learned to recognize letters and words. We did not agree on anything the night before, we got up in the morning, everyone home, and we understood what to do. Even in uncertain weathers we learned to understand each other, and there was never a misunderstanding. We were in harmony, at that time, and we knew how to listen to the magical nature that surrounded us.

At Gisella's house I learned everything from cooking to pharmacy, from herbs to words. I understood where Rocca was compared to the rest of the world, and found out how far my father was. I learned that we were in an ancient land, while America, before, was unknown. An Italian had found it in the middle of a huge sea.

Gisella told me of ancient peoples, she told me that we were children of monkeys and that we were born in the earth and in the earth we were destined to die.

"Just for that," she claimed "we have to respect every person, animal, living being. Never forget that every day we walk on the effort of past generations."

So it was that I learned to walk almost on tiptoe. Gisella said nothing at first, then eventually she asked me why.

I did not answer her, I did not know how to explain my thoughts; in every corner of the country there could be a part of my mother, and I imagined her lying down with her sun-coloured hair spreading in every street, in every nook of my little Rocca.

And among the hills I felt her even more alive, and often I fell softly asleep under an elm thinking I was hugging her as she sang lullabies to me and the wood.

Walking on tiptoe like a ballet dancer, I tried to show her that respect that I had failed to show as a small child, and in the same way I declared my love for her, walking lightly on her eyes, her cheeks, her hands, and it seemed to me to hear her singing for real, then I was filled with nostalgic happiness.

Every now and then Gisella tried to ask me if remembered how this or that flower was called. Running, I screamed, "I forgot!"

Hills and woods, animals and plants filled me almost completely. And I ran with the innermost desire to hug everything, make every hidden nook and cranny mine.

When eventually Gisella reached me, she found me exhausted by the long run, she made me sit down and so she could make a little lesson.

"You might need reminding, indeed you have to, but always learn by heart."

"I don't understand," I said. And she explained.

"If you need reminding, it means that something went out of your mind and must be put back there. But if you learned it by heart, it is still in there, into your heart. You see the difference?"

I nodded and she continued

"You might need to be reminded a name, but always keep it into your heart!"

The lesson was over for the day, and even if I later needed to be reminded some names, I always knew how to use them and I was always able to find their pictures in my heart.

What surprised me was to find myself extremely interested not only in the plants and the long hours in the laboratory, but also in literature as well as history, geography and maths. Every afternoon, when calm invaded the streets of the town with silence, I stealthily went to Gisella and asked her one of her adventure books. Reading in front of her made me slow and insecure, but when I sat on the large tank and read just for myself I was quicker, although still not very fast, and I dreamed of distant worlds and weird winged animals.

Gisella nodded and smiled, and even if she never said 'You are talented for reading. I know. I'm a woman that sees far', I am sure, however, that she thought that.

When I heard that the chatter of the people was beginning to fill the stony streets of Rocca, I fled to my America, where no one would disturb me, and I read all the books that Gisella could provide me.

Obviously the first thing I read in full and read again every evening at candlelight were the words of Andreuccia. I never left that sheet written in light handwriting, and guarded it like I did with nothing else. I always had it with me and at times, if I touched it from within my pocket, I had the feeling that I was touching her. In the evening I smelled it and I was convinced that it still smelled like Andreuccia.

It seemed a poem, without rhymes but full of her.

I love autumn... this season really suits me.

I love its colours so intense and full... determined

rounded, full-bodied

(they nourished and vibrated and sweated and now they get ready to end the cycle)

I love autumn... I feel it belongs to me

with its sense of melancholic yet vibrant and alive decadence

(a sort of controlled explosion... reasoned... contained)

I love to look autumn around me...

It is like crossing a path that separates

the anxiety of wanting to do, the slowness of those who have realized that it is useless to waste breath

I love autumn

I feel the chill of the first raw cold penetrate my flesh

and savour the warm rays of the sun as if they were the last

A poem on autumn that spoke to me of her, and every time I read it, it seemed to me to feel her hands on mine, it seemed to me I knew her a bit better.

How the others discovered my passion for reading, I do not know. I just know that one day Zeno came with a book.

"Read it," he said, "it's the Bible. It talks about God. But I am not giving it to you, it's just a loan."

I still appreciated it as if it had been a gift. Gisella had mentioned that book to me only in passing, maybe she did not consider it important, and I struggled to find the right time and place to read it.

Then one day, kept awake by my insane lust for movement, in my nocturnal and solitary runs, I found myself in front of the church of St. Simeone.

I was no longer afraid of cannibals and man-eaters, Gisella had explained me what it meant to eat the body and drink the blood of Christ, it was a metaphor.

I tried to open the door, but it was closed. Then I lock-picked it. I was good at that, my hands were precise and I had had to fight more than once with the door of the America that did not want to open. And anyway, if I put something in my mind, I achieved it.

It was cold inside, and the smell of incense hung all around. I sat on the front bench, the first one, the one destined only to masters, and watched. Gisella had taught me that the knowledge starts with observation. And I saw a Saint, I listened to him, maybe it was Saint Simeone who was holding a baby in his arms. He did not have a mother, just like me. And then that man looked to me like my father, and that child took on, as if by magic, my red head and freckled face.

I ran home and took the Bible. Then I went back to the church, and for the first time I started to read it. It was dark but I had brought a candle, and in that place it seemed to me to understand another story, another one of the possible chances.

I went back to the church each time I felt the desire to read the Bible, always at night, but strangely, from that time on, I always found the church open and three lit candles on the first bench.

Zeno maybe, but I did not care too much. What mattered was that whoever had left those candles lit, was a man bent to my will.

I was young then, but I had in me a kind of arrogance, taught me by loneliness and maybe by stupidity.

That, however, was the time when everything for me became a frantic search for knowledge.

Even my America gathered the fruits of what I was learning. I did not bring Saints in the America, I did not like them too much with their meek or injured faces. I surrounded myself with plants instead.

The passionflower was the first thing that I planted, near the oven, in the garden facing south, just above the large white rock. What a satisfaction it gave me to see it bloom throughout the whole year, with its large purple and pale-blue flowers, with white giving splendour to the inviting colours.

I watched them and it seemed to me to see Andreuccia. That flower, the passion flower, looked like her. It looked like her turned into a corolla, her appearing unexpectedly, and then hiding, her peeking out suddenly with all her eternal beauty, her blossoming and soon dying, her who belonged to me without knowing. Her are so clear and dark and purple.

I planted marigold and mallow, hawthorn and lavender.

The desire to know, to understand, to learn, made me more exuberant every day, until I noticed the arrival of spring.

Soon I would turn eight, but no gift would be comparable to that I had received at six, when Beba had delivered to me my father's letter.

It was Sunday, and as usual I had woken up at the cock-crow.

That day I was free to roam wherever I wanted. I must say that I missed Gisella quite a bit in lonely Sundays, but I would never have admitted it.

A merry sun was accompanied by a cool and energetic breeze. I went outside and thought with regret that I had no more seen Beba. She had given me that wonderful gift and then she was gone. But I knew that she got up at dawn, so I decided to wait for her in front of her house. I would not call her, giving her the chance not to answer me. I would take her by surprise, and I was sure that, after all, she would be happy.

I lied in wait in the road just above the alley and, leaning against a corner wall with an open book in hand, I waited. When I heard her coming down, stomping hard her huge boots, I waited to see her set a foot out of the door and started to read.

"Always dear to me was this solitary hill,

and this hedge, which, for its part,

excludes most of the far horizon"

I heard her freeze, but she did not move, and I went on without so much as glancing at her.

"But sitting and gazing at such

endless spaces beyond it, the transcendent

silences, and the most profound silences,

letting my wandering thoughts

engulf me; where my heart almost fears. As the wind

I hear rustling through the trees,

I must keep on, pondering

that infinite silence with this voice

I recall the eternal,

the dead seasons, the present one,

the living, and the sound of her;

So in the mist of this immensity

my thought drown, and to me,

sweet is the sinking in this sea."

Only then I looked up at her, and what I saw I shocked me.

Her eyes shone with love for me, but they had, at the same time, become strangely hollowed. Her ugliness was, if possible, more evident. Her curves were gone, leaving room to an empty and yellowish body. I closed the book to see what I did not want to see.

She would soon be dead.

And instincts took over. I ran to her and hugged her like maybe I had done many times before, and as I hugged her I whispered, "I can read now, and I know arithmetic. I will take care of you, you don't need to worry."

I felt her become as fragile as a sparrow in winter and I helped her sit on the stairs of her house.

She did not speak. She looked at me and kissed my head, then she ruffled my hair and hugged me tight.

Finally her voice came out tired from her toothless mouth.

"How much you grew," she whispered, and kissing me she added, "and how handsome you have become."

I did not believe that, but I knew that when she said it she really thought so.

"Why didn't you come to see me anymore? " I asked her between her kisses.

"Ask your Gisella" she replied promptly and bitterly.

"What about Gisella?" I asked, more fearful than ever of her answer.

"Nothing, sorry. What could she have to do with it? It's me sick head that makes me think wrong. The truth is that she would be better than me to heal you. You wouldn't fit in here, and I would never have left you alone in the America. With that one, maybe you could be saved. And she could teach you all you had to learn. And she did it, it seems. You read really fine, just like your dad!"

I stroked her hollow cheeks.

"But I'm deaf in one ear," I said, as if to cheer her up. She laughed with her empty mouth and, breathing labouredly, she concluded, "That's no good thing, you know!"

Then she looked me straight in the eyes and said, in such a fragile voice that I barely heard it, "But, that one, taught you to read, I couldn't even send you to school!"

"But Beba, you're my nanny. You have seen me grow. You've been there when I had no one."

"Oh..." she sighed, "I did my mistakes too."

"Who cares? From now on, I will come every day to see you. If you want, of course."

"What do you think? For my Febo my door is always open."

I kissed her hands and ran to Gisella.

I knocked loud. Surely she was still sleeping, but the servants were certainly already at work.

I was wrong. She came down to open the door, and when she saw my dark face she asked me what was wrong.

She did not let me in, she held me on the door as you do with beggars. Gisella was accurate, and if it was not for a serious reason, she would not tolerate my presence there on a Sunday. After all, it had been me to me to decide that we would not meet on that day.

I did not know how to tell her that I demanded explanations. But I was certain that Beba had not mentioned her by chance. I answered with a question, "Do you know where I've been?"

"Where?"

"Can't you imagine that at all?"

"No..." she said, just a little more hesitant.

"Where you didn't want me to go," I said casually.

"And where is it that I didn't want you to go?" she asked, finding again her irony in her voice.

I waited a few moments as if to savour a payout.

"To my nanny."

She smiled a half smile, those she used to make fun of me.

"Good," she simply replied.

"Oh, tell me why Beba never came to see me while I was dying in your house."

"Are you sure you want to know?"

"Sure," I told her, strutting in my certainty.

She looked away, out of the doorway, beyond the tank. Her eyes suddenly appeared to me filled of a heart-rending melancholy. Then, pointing straight at my eyes, she found solidity.

She decided to tell me only part of the truth, I knew it instantly.

"Because she is ill and I didn't want you to worry for her."

Then abruptly she closed the door behind her, leaving me there with my mouth open like a fool.

# Dreams

Children must respect adults, even I knew that, in spite of having been raised by an illiterate nanny. Gisella spoke once, and with that she considered the discussion closed.

One evening, one of those when it is almost summer, dark but with a thousand stars, I was wandering around the town, always grazing the walls so I had to give no explanations to anyone about my life of free boy.

I was walking towards the church of St. Simeone with the Bible in my hands when I heard a hushed quarrel. I immediately recognized the voices, in spite of my dead ear, and not due to any special ability of mine, but because those vocal vibrations belonged to people that I knew well.

Gisella was saying, "You have to tell him. It's for his own good."

And Beba was replying, trying not to shout, "What do you think, that because you're the owner of half of Rocca you can command me?"

"It's not for that, you know. It's that the child must know."

"What must he know? I know nothing! And you?"

"Let's not kid ourselves, I really don't know anything, you do. You're the one who knows everything, the only one who knows, the only one who can tell him how things really are..."

"And it just happens that I know nothing. Is that clear?"

I heard Gisella try to sweeten up her words, "Look Beba, I don't care about anything. I don't want to know anything. It's not me you have to talk to. But if there is anyone who could take responsibility for this boy, let them take it."

"I know only one thing, that his mother died half-crazy and his father is in America! But sooner or later he will return, he even wrote a letter!"

"But then you're as ignorant as a friar's heel! The letter arrived when Febo was a baby! Do you understand?" Gisella cried.

I had a strong shock that started from my head to get to my feet. They were talking about me. Beba thought that my father would come back. Gisella did not. I was immediately on the side of my nanny. Even if she were hiding something, provided she did.

I stepped in between them.

Beba was every day more wrinkled and I pitied her. Why did Gisella keep bothering her?

"What's going on?" I asked with the most demanding voice I could find in me. It was Beba who answered.

"Ask Mrs. Gisella", she said, bowing to her, "it seems that she has to know things that us ignorant don't know."

Gisella stammered, confused, "No, it's not that..." she seemed to get lost. She looked at me with pity and at Beba with contempt. Then, offended, she briskly went toward her house without saying goodbye.

Beba and I were left staring at each other for a few minutes, then she said, "Take me to the church, my little Febo."

I barely hesitated. How did she know I was going there? She misunderstood and was quick to reassure me, "No masses, I assure you, there will be just Zeno blowing out candles. I need to chat a bit with the Virgin, and even God, if He's willing, and maybe with all the saints."

She was limping and struggled to walk up the steep climb. I did not feel like asking for explanations. With me on one side, by then I was as tall as her shoulders, and a stick in the hand on the other, she managed to reach St. Simeone.

The portal of the church was ajar, and the smell of incense hit us immediately, but inside, unlike the days of mass, an unusual stillness reigned.

Many lit candles made it look like a night full of fireflies.

I had become accustomed by then to the church of St. Simeon, but getting used to something does not mean loving it. That day, instead, I loved it almost as much as my America, and for the first time I felt at home away from home.

So many lit candles, as many as I had never seen before, made the church so mystical that it seemed a corner of heaven.

A man, small and thin, with tussled brown hair, was sitting on a chair in front of the confessional with in his hands a kind of lute, only much bigger. He had a stubble beard and looked like a traveller, but you cannot imagine how he played.

The instrument he held in his hands was strange and stretched, and only later I learned it was called theorbo. An instrument I had never seen, as tall as a person and funny too. It looked like me, and like me it had a small and round belly, and its neck was like my legs, long and lanky. But what magic it spread, such a welcoming and engaging sound that it made you forget the world around.

The man played and filled everything with an unimaginable warmth, an irresistible finesse. He really seemed to be able to talk to God without using verbal language.

I could intimately enjoy such fullness and forgot the earlier quarrel, immersing myself immediately in that sublime music.

I learned only afterward that the man who played was a traveller who had asked for shelter for the night. The next day he would leave and disappear forever. I stood listening to him dazed and satisfied at the same time until he got tired of playing, while Beba was praying kneeling in the last bench.

I had always heard only a little music, apart from the off-key songs of Beba, and that one was new to me, absolute, unique. It is a bit like the first time you climb a mountain and from the top you can dominate the valleys. It is like the flight of an eagle, but much more. That music entered me, touching strings of my heart that I did not know existed.

I did not read the Bible that night, but I could still hear God

I walked my nanny home without realizing it, full of wonder for a music that, from being unknown, had become a part of me. A voice never heard before that was now indelibly imprinted in my heart.

Summer came quickly, and with it the warm weather and the wonderful nights at the America. One thing I liked most of all, the fireflies, the real ones, that you could watch in the dark of the black night.

In those dark hours, when shops closed, spoons stopped tapping on the empty plates, and the sun quietly set behind the hills, a myriad little lights appeared, as if by miracle, apparently coming from other worlds. Stars detached from the sky, flying all around the America and down in the fields.

I ran down to the large white rock, near Volpi's vineyard, and I lay on the ground, and from there I saw many fireflies fly around me, and I realized that they belonged to me as much as I belonged to them.

In the midst of those small floating flames, then, I saw the face of Andreuccia, talking to me of love, with her rose mouth.

I stood motionless among those delicate candles until I felt like it, until the red soil became too cold. And on those nights I dreamed the voice of Andreuccia, and I imagined her, beautiful and charming, lie down with me in the midst of those magic lights.

I imagined her combing her hair, and washing her feet in the river. I imagined her also because it was so long I had not seen her. Cowardly, I never got close to her house, but in my dreams she was every time more beautiful, always more woman, always more Andreuccia.

And that period of sunshine and diving in the Onsola was too short. Fall came back, and cold with it.

You could breathe a strange restlessness that seemed to wander undecided between the walls of the town. Even in Gisella's house, the same uncertainty stagnated. The younger kids had gone off to war, but everything, even the sadness, in Rocca only seemed to graze the ancient walls, without ever penetrating inside of them.

Not even death seemed to affect it much.

Death is strange, like life.

I saw it approach Beba without showing it, I saw it follow my nanny for months, sometimes brushing against her arm, that suddenly became unusable, sometimes her face, that took, almost without me noticing, a strange evil grin.

Beba kept sewing and embroidering until the end, stopping only at times when the pain was so excruciating that a long, thin whistle that seemed to embrace the whole valley became inevitable.

Great pains expand. They do not stand still, they embrace the borders, rejoin distant people, close everyone in the same speechless silence.

Beba's disease was the same.

Every day a housewife came to her door bringing flour and advice.

I heard the most original of those. One that I still remember clearly was made by an old woman who had forgotten how to love, and full of that forgetfulness had nourished in her soul an incredible aversion to beauty.

"Drink a litre of virgin's urine every day. This will purify you."

Even Beba, so dutiful to the advice of the old crones, laughed while answering, "With these clear moons, virgins are rarest than angels."

She did not want to see her anymore. She said she brought in her the evil of resentments brooded for too long.

Then she got bedridden.

Death is stranger than life, because everyone deny its existence, while it is always by your side, like an inopportune owl, and suddenly jumps on you and eats your eyes, leaving a body serene but deprived of life.

Beba, now crippled by the disease, had kept on her bones only a thin layer of yellowed flesh.

Every day I went to see her and stroked her paled skin, while the sooty walls of her house, the resigned faces of her husband and her children, framed me like black crows. Their toothless mouths remained open before the end of Beba.

I wanted to chase them away, so intimidated by the pain, but they were faster. After having looked at her dazed, without seeing her, they found some excuse to get away, and I rejoiced at being able to devote myself to my nanny.

Her father in law, however, was different. He watched over her day and night, without words, without being able to see her, blind as he was, and yet I was under the impression that more of the others he understood the gravity of the situation.

As Gisella said, deficiencies bring balance by making what you have bigger and more valuable. The lack of eyes had honed his other senses.

I read slowly to Beba the books that Gisella lent me, Around the World in Eighty Days, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the Iliad and the Odyssey.

I did not read only for her, but also for her father in law and for me, with the effort of those who have learned to read too recently.

I do not know if she ever understood what I read, but I am sure she was happy. She often fell asleep, and then I saw her face, until then shaking with pain, relax a bit. And then I waited and looked around, watching the empty eyes of her father in law and his quivering skin, receptive of any change. If I moved noiselessly he felt it, and followed me with his face turned up to the roof. I waited, and when Beba woke up with a slight tremor, I restarted reading.

Her father in law, motionless, sitting at the foot of the bed, waited quietly for my silence, and foresaw when I would start reading again, like a watchful guardian.

Death is stranger than life, because they should teach you that it is rightfully yours, and show it to you as a natural cycle, instead adults hide it, fear it. And it, mocking, never deserts you, and when the black lady wraps you in its grip, finally your face becomes again the smiling face it was once, but your body has no life left.

This was what happened to Beba one evening, late in winter.

Her husband Foffo dressed her with the care you reserve to an infant. He put a scarf on her head to cover a the thinning hair that had remained on her gray head. A scarf that also served to keep her mouth shut, otherwise her astonishment would have been too evident on her toothless smile.

Didn't you expect such a death Beba? A sinner like you?

I said goodbye to her from the America the way you greet yet another abandonment.

There followed a period of efforts and fears, too much like the one I felt on that day that was to be my first day of school.

A warm sunny morning I was cataloguing with Gisella the plants we had gathered. We had taken many, and we were putting them with care in glass jars. One, the most beautiful, we put between two sheets of tissue paper and pressed it between two heavy books. It would remain motionless in the dark for about two months, only this I knew. It was the confusion in the street that made us look out.

A group of men in black uniforms were gathering people in the square.

"Fascists," Gisella whispered, her face suddenly pale.

"Who are they?" I asked, more curious than afraid. They seemed to me people with silly faces, only a little older than me.

"Bad people, really bad, Febo. And to make them so bad, they tell them a lot of lies."

"What lies?"

"They tell them of chosen and lower races, they say that women must only make children. They want power and they want the people to be ignorant. Always remember, Febo, the greatness of a leader is measured by how much culture his subjects have."

I did not understand much, those were too many words and I wanted to touch everything with my hands.

Barely peeking from the window, obscured by purple curtains, we clearly heard what they were proclaiming. A kilometres-long list of what was forbidden to the Jews. They forbade them to work in any industry, to go hunting and fishing, to possess enterprises on their own. They could not even own a radio.

We listened to them. Me curiously, Gisella with impatience and anxiety. After the proclamation, they posted their rules around the town. Gisella slumped in a chair, her face deadly pale.

"I had heard talking about this for some time, but I didn't want to believe it..." she whispered with her face in her hands. "How dare they? Who do they think they are? Why do we allow them to desecrate our town so?" she said while silent tears slid down her round cheeks.

"Are you Jewish?" I asked then, stupidly.

She looked at me with angry eyes.

"No," she replied promptly. Then soon after she became sweeter.

"What does it matter, Febo? No, I am not Jewish, but it doesn't matter. They take away from these people any chance to exist. Did you hear that list of things they are forbidden to do? How will they live? What will those poor people do? Jews have already fled the cities, but here I thought they were safe. Ours is a small town... Children will not be allowed to go to school, it's a shame. And what does the Pope say? Where is he now that these children of God need him...?"

Then she suddenly quieted down.

"We have to warn them, we must do something for them!"

"But who are they? Where are these Jews?"

Only then she realized my absolute ignorance. She made me sit down and told me, with the simple voice she could use only in the moments of special need, "That girl, the one you like so much, the girl who wrote that sheet that you always carry in your pocket..."

I pressed my shoulders against the back of the chair, as if taken by surprise. How did she know all those things? I had never told her. Actually I had never told anyone.

Gisella, as if to answer my unspoken questions, sighed, "Observation Febo. How many times have I told you observe? I noticed, you know, that you touch your pocket every five minutes. Every now and then the tip of a letter comes out, and I know her handwriting. She brings me the reports of the milk of her father's cows. And she is the woman of that house."

How much she had told and how many things she did not know, could not know. Was it true that the fate of my Andreuccia was to play the part of his father's wife? I had a moment of anger, that she misunderstood.

"Love is beautiful Febo, don't be ashamed of it."

I was not ashamed of it indeed, I was ashamed of my cowardice and that of her father.

But she went on, "They are Jewish. Or better, the mother of that child, who died giving birth to her youngest brother, was. Some say, however, that her father became one too, since he never goes to church. Theirs is one of the richest families in the town. They have cows and give milk to those who have enough money to buy it. They have many acres of land they work hard. What will they do now, and what we will do without milk?"

Gisella, however, quickly recovered from those infamous thoughts, and exclaimed in a sharp tone, "Go there and warn them."

Not even for a second she considered my refusal.

"What should I say?" I asked, afraid at the idea of facing her father, whom I did not know and did not want to know.

"Tell them to hide the beasts, to take them away from the barn, to bring them in the wood or where the fascists cannot find them."

I obeyed. I ran out and those black men were still there. They looked funny to me, comical, with their faces trying to look superior and their stupid hats, with a pigtail no less.

One, the one with the cheekiest face I could remember, asked me, holding me by the scruff of my shirt, "Where are you running, wretch?"

I looked at him with my face ablaze, and he seemed to rejoice of my redness, and without thinking I said, "I'm going to look for plants for Mrs. Gisella, we miss ash and elder, she must put them to soak and there isn't much time."

He looked at me as if to say that there was as much time as he wanted. He slipped into the pocket of my worn jacket one of those hateful posters.

It was then that I feared that everyone knew of my love for Andreuccia. Was I so obvious? Were those fascists keeping me immobile to immobilize a part of her? Was I so obvious to the world as I had been to Gisella? That feeling was mine alone, and I did not want it to belong to anyone other than us. I was not afraid for myself, but for her. What would her father do if he had known...

I did not see Gisella arrive behind me, I only heard her voice. She called that man that showed no signs of wanting to let go of me.

"Stefano," she said aloud. "How's your mother? I know my herbs worked on her," she continued with the determined voice of those who are accustomed to command.

The little black soldier immediately let me go, giving me such a shove that it made me prance on the ground. The others laughed.

"Mrs. Gisella", he said, bowing.

But Gisella paid no attention to his naughty attitude, maybe she knew him well, and maybe she had also helped him being born (I wonder if she ever regretted it). Gisella spoke directly to me. Her tone was purposefully reproaching.

"Febo! What are you doing still there? I ordered you to find the plants and you don't obey? Get a move, dawdler. You know I urgently need those herbs to treat those in need."

"Even the Jews?" the soldier asked, sarcastically.

"Sure," she said with her face dry. "If they have the money to pay," she added, and everyone burst out laughing.

Not Gisella though.

"From now on, they will not have it, don't worry Miss Gisella." Stefano kicked my butt and shouted, "Run Febo. Miss Gisella must make money!"

I ran away with my heart in my throat, wondering if really Gisella would only cure wealthy people. What if Andreuccia had gotten sick and did not have money to pay? I passed the house of my beloved, I could not knock on that black door and I hoped to find Andreuccia at the large white rock, but there was no one there. I was going back on my steps when I heard her haunting dirge. She was coming up with her brother on the long slope of the Perelli.

I ran to meet her without fear.

"The fascists are here," I said, moving closer to her delicious ear, slightly getting up on tiptoe.

"They're putting this all around the town," I whispered, handing her the paper I had in my pocket. She browsed it quickly, and from that I realized how fast she was at reading, much faster than me. For a moment I forgot the reason that had brought me there, and I abandoned myself to the thought of her, in her intellectual, physical superiority, in the superiority of her complete being. Andreuccia abruptly brought me back to reality.

"It's impossible, it must be a joke. My uncle died in the war in Africa, we are fascists, they cannot..." she said, backing off as if to look for a place to lean on. But she was in the middle of the street, and there, behind her, there was only a long slope of white and red pebbles.

"You have to tell your father to take the cows away, where they cannot find them, in the woods or down to the Orcia. Take them away before the fascists steal them."

She kept making small steps backwards, not making up her mind to run, looking alternately at me and at the piece of paper that denied her survival. Then she turned and started running, followed by her brother who kept falling and getting back up without protesting.

"You're Jewish," I said too softly for her to hear. "You are only Jewish. Not fascist."

# Febo II

Andreuccia disappeared as if sucked into the black of those fascists. I heard Gisella say that they had saved the animals, but bringing milk in town was out of discussion. They would risk prison or even deportation in who knew what terrible prison camp. I did not know where she lived at the time. I did not go close to her house out of sheer terror.

I imagined her hidden with her brother down towards the Orcia, barricaded in a shack, delousing the little boy and drinking fresh milk every day. I never imagined her father.

Spring had just peeked out from the hills of the Orcia Valley, but it had mysteriously deprived them of their innate beauty. The sky seemed less brilliant, the hills more opaque. Everything seemed clouded, or maybe it was my eyes which were affected by the absence of my little muse.

Every day I wondered where she was, what she was doing, how she spent her day. So I read her poem and I ended up dreaming of her facing another sun, singing while she combed her hairy little brother.

Only at night, in the company of a moon that was now becoming big and full, now shrinking to a fraction of itself, I breathed the real air of my beloved valley. Only the moon could not be affected by the general discontent, the deprivations, the mutilations that history forced on us against our will. And with it I still felt a knight of other worlds. I climbed on its round face, riding its sad eyes, its rose mouth so alike that of my beloved, and then I conquered the endless space. The fireflies of the America remained as faithful companions, quiet and nearby lights.

But slowly the night waned and I went laboriously back to days that had nothing of my past springs.

In town we breathed an unnatural air of submission. Everyone walked painstakingly with their heads down, all except the fascists. I hated them, I did not like their arrogance and I did not like that they had made Andreuccia flee somewhere. I avoided them and locked myself alone into my palace, comforted by my wandering souls.

Lights at the America.

Soon I would turn nine and I would have no one to remind me that.

My clothes had become too short now that Beba was no longer there to make some original and colourful ones for me.

Zeno tried to give me some new ones, sewn by his sister. They were more sober than the previous ones, I liked them less. They too seemed to be affected by that period of deep pains never openly asserted.

However, they were certainly fitting for Febo.

A new period of lacks began. Years in which there was no flour or bread, eggs, meat and milk, and Andreuccia with them.

Everyone became invisible. Even my visits to Gisella diminished. She often said that she had things to do and disappeared for whole days, so I, locked into the America, greedily read her books, and when my legs began to tremble from the desire to run, I walked through the whole house, jumping over the stairs, sheltering in the large room as if to escape a war that I had not yet seen nor understood. And when the America was no longer enough, I went into the woods and ran until my lungs seemed to explode in my chest. I searched for unknown herbs and mysterious corners. I wanted my old life back.

I remember those months and then those years like days one like the other filled of an immense solitude. A melancholy feeling that I had never experienced before Gisella, before Andreuccia.

Moments in which I searched for hidden, secluded places, secret and unreachable caves, always in the hope to see Andreuccia appear as if by magic.

It was during one of these long runs that I suddenly found myself in a strange and unexpected, almost sacred place. A place that seemed to be kissed by angels, so hidden and pure as to seem unnatural. A gash of golden light appeared suddenly in the middle of the dense wood that climbed up the hostile slopes of the valley.

The wood formed a small sunny clearing in which centre, right in the middle of the short and fresh grass, there was a tiny slab of travertine. Thin as tissue paper, almost transparent, with bronze letters heavy as lead.

On the tomb there were wildflowers picked recently. I approached, intrigued, and started reading what the inscription said.

"Here lies little Febo Bianchini, torn too soon from the arms of his desperate parents who will always remember him in their hearts". At the bottom, a date. 14th April 1931 – 2nd May 1931.

My heart leaped. I suddenly felt like the ghost of myself. That child had been born on the my same day and in the same year.

Another me died prematurely. A thousand questions flocked into my baby mind.

Who was he? A relative of mine? My brother? A twin I had killed shortly after having left my mother's womb, making her go crazy? Beba had never told me about this, neither Gisella and Zeno. Was this the secret that Beba had brought with her beyond the grave?

And then I wandered in conjectures. Maybe a namesake... And why so hidden from the rest of the world? Who was it that had brought him flowers, if the only person who could know was dead? Someone else who knew his story, or a pitiful hunter?

I thought of Beba's secret, the one she had never confided to me. I went back to when she was still alive and was discussing with Gisella. To that day in which she later asked me to go with her to the church to talk to all the saints in the world. What had she taken away forever, the secret of that Febo and me? Something about that clearing? Maybe that child with my name was really a twin, hidden from the eyes of the people because I had killed him with my malice.

And who knows, maybe even my mother had died for that.

Was really this concealed tombstone the secret of Beba?

I stood immersed in that silence and strangely I found there an unhoped-for peace, while the leaves seemed to whisper words of ancient times. I put around the tomb a lot of white pebbles to form a delicate frame, and with other pebbles I drew all around houses and the face of a woman. I took care of those unknown remains as I would have done with a wounded sparrow. I immediately considered him a miserable brother. Something in that grave disturbed me and reassured me at the same time. There was another Febo Bianchini before me, or better at the same time as me, a less fortunate boy that death had taken away prematurely.

When the sun began to set, I started towards home, my soul full of infinite tenderness.

The wood was alive at sunset, more than in any other time.

That night I could hardly get to sleep. The America spoke to me, telling me ancient stories. My floating fireflies had surrounded me, warming me with their reassuring presence.

Why only I could see them? Was I born crazy like my mother? And why no one could hear them, sense them and love them how I did? I thought about that lonely tombstone in the middle of the wood and meditated on that clearing, inhabited by a child too small and abandoned. I wondered whether he looked like Andreuccia's brother?

And I tried to imagine whether that little boy had ever felt alone in the middle of the wood, but I told myself that no, you cannot feel alone in the midst of such beauty. His parents, in desperation, had managed to find him a piece of paradise, a place that no one would ever reach...

Except me.

I wondered if some animal would stop next to the other Febo? Who would keep him company at night? Which owl would sing while he slept?

I went out and ran toward the large white rock. There was no one, the curfew that would come only in summer was not yet in force, but people had already got into the habit of burrowing fearfully. Fascists wandered the town and beat you up if they felt like it, but I was just a kid, though much taller than the others.

On the large rock, two young were exchanging kisses, hidden among the branches. I pressed myself as I had seen foxes do and became invisible in their uninterested eyes. I walked past them without letting them see or hear me. Then I started running down the gravel roads. And I ran through the woods guided by the moon that shone almost round, with the joy I could not forget, with the desire to go back to him. I ran until I was breathless, until I reached the small clearing of Febo II.

So I had renamed it.

The moon, which was slowly filling up, came to light with its silent rays even the small white tombstone. The trees all around seemed to radiate a new and muffled light. Everything around us, me and the other Febo, was alive. I lay on the pebbles that I had diligently lined up in the afternoon and there, with my face turned to my reassuring moon, I felt a new sensation of completeness. Each of us feels to be incomplete, to have gaps, lacks that must be filled. For the first time I felt complete. A unique and perfect being in my uniqueness.

It was as if the soul of Febo II surrounded me and filled all of my empty places. And at the same time an incredible feeling of pure happiness.

It did not last long, but enough to be able to use the memory of it each time that sadness appeared, from then on, in my spirit. This and three other thoughts I used, three new special events that happened later on.

# The Onsola

Three years went by fast and slow at the same time, full of studies, research, unquenchable fear and thoughts for Andreuccia.

I had no longer seen her, but every day I had read her poem, and imagined her growing beautiful and strong next to her brother.

A war at home that annihilated souls, a war that I searched as I could to forget, locking myself within the walls of my palace.

The America, the moon and my fireflies were the only reliable companions left to me.

And when I wanted to run, I ran to Febo II, and in that clearing I tried to imagine a better world.

I had done much more, however. Especially studied. Men, animals, and philosophy. I used my ingenuity to treat the wounded beasts that I found in the wood, even though they often died, unfortunately. But I kept trying, undaunted. My legs had lengthened and strengthened, and looking at my image in the water of the ponds I found a new self. My hair, which was still bright red, in summer tended to fade. It had grown as long as to reach my shoulders, then suddenly stopped. It formed tangled curls, as Beba always told me my father's did. That is why I decided not to cut it. I kept it stretched back, held by a thin iron circlet.

I often wondered if the height difference between me and Andreuccia had decreased, and dreamed of towering a whole head over her, and being able to raise my arms and make her spin like a top.

July had come almost suddenly. With no signs of a heat that was a stranger to me. The pressing desire I felt was to undress of my skin to feel a coolness that I could hardly find.

Everything seemed dormant in that summer of 1943. Working the fields was more tiring due to the unexpected heat, and I saw Zeno pass along with other farmers, blackened and curved under the weight of a temperature that was surprising even with their experience. They were always cautious and careful not to talk too much, afraid of the fascists.

Even the guys my age went to work. I had talked about that with Zeno, and he had told me that my place was not in the fields. He had told me that the land was mine, I gifted to others almost all that I deserved by birthright, so working it was for those who enjoyed that privilege. Fate wanted something else from me.

And I, waiting for a destiny that did not reveal itself yet, if on the one hand I wanted to show my skills to the villagers, on the other I seconded that speech that saw me master of my valley.

Proudly, I retired into the solitude of my America, living in thoughts fomented by the lights of the house and running into the woods, but always with my face looking up at the moon.

When I asked Zeno for some change, he gave it to me without replying. The money was mine and I was entitled to it.

However, I was not accustomed to money. I did not need it. I lived because I loved life and I ate it when my body felt the need to. I felt, however, always a pressing urgency to learn and not even Gisella, in those dark times, seemed to be interested in my miseries.

From the full woman that she was, she had become thin as never before. However, she gave the impression of having strengthened her muscles, and watching her, as she had taught me to do, I saw her hardened calves tighten under her black stockings. Her alabaster skin had become dark and hard. The sun seemed to have slightly scorched her skin. A sign that she still went to look for herbs, but she no longer wanted me to go with her, if not rarely. Maybe she had found special herbs that I was not ready to know, and they must be far away, for having made her body so lean and strong at the same time.

She always told me to go and study, and I did, but then she never verified that I had really understood. She had become even more silent, Gisella, and at the same time more ironic. In the presence of the fascists she donned a mild attitude that did not suit her, but more than once I was under the impression that she was brutally mocking them. She never lost her dignity, anyway, her rich-lady elegance.

I would have liked some more explanation, I had a searing need of them, but boys like me could not ask for much from adults. My twelve years also prevented me from yielding too much to the ravings of what was still just a woman.

Adults, anyway, talked when they wanted to, and I listened to the children in silence.

I, who did not speak with anyone, tried to learn from her as much as possible, never sated of knowledge.

I felt that every adult had secrets that they kept close.

Zeno was bending to age, and had become even more taciturn, if possible.

Gisella spent days and days looking for her magic herbs, and I wandered through the woods looking for coolness.

I did not talk about Febo II to anyone. If adults did not make me part of their secrets, I would not make them part of mine. And Febo II remained wonderfully anchored to my heart like the brother I had never known.

It was July the 1st, while I was in search of a coveted coolness, that the second best event of my life happened, the one to which I always went back with my mind, and to which I still go back today while I am on my bus for freedom.

The sun was high and fiery and I walked aimlessly. I felt the need to go down to the valley, because every rise would wear me down. I would be back with the coolness of the evening. From home I went through the town going towards the plains, and, staying away from the houses of Castiglione, I ran along the road of Rocca cemetery, which went through the fields towards the spring, the ancient house of the moustached foreman whom I kept, with enchanted respect, in my memories.

But, come to the road of the well, I got an idea. If I had taken the Capanna road, I would have reached the Onsola brook, and there I could cool off from the heat. I willingly ran downhill, and my sweat slightly froze with my speed. I was already tasting the coolness of that little, clear, blue ditch, which flowed from the Amiata to slowly dive into the Orcia down in the valley. My legs moved in long strides, and my feet seemed to not even touch the ground. I ran toward the Liti, where I knew that the riverbed was wider, and the first thing I smelled was the scent of water.

Of those hours I remember everything with a sharpness that rarely belongs to me. Moments and hours bound to eternity, which would belong to me forever.

I heard the light and continuous rustle that accompanied the slow flowing of the water, and magically savoured the feeling of freshness I was craving so much.

But it was only after I approached the green plants, which were lavishly born on the banks, that I noticed her.

She was immersed in the clear waters and occasionally disappeared under them to reappear with her face that seemed to shimmer with dew.

Three large trees shaded the river, that at that point was calm and placid like a harmless pond. Luxuriant plants partly hid the pale waters, as the fiery sun threw its thick swords among the thick vegetation.

And her face...

Her face had turned into a woman's face. Her lips had filled, slightly emptying her cheeks that had become more hollow. Her hair, which I saw loose for the first time, had stuck to her neck and reached her shoulders. The desire of her became overbearing. I undressed quickly and, like a grass snake, without thinking too much, I snuck into those waters that seemed to belong to her. She did not notice me immediately, but when she did she stood motionless. I had the certainty that she was considering whether to leave immediately or stay forever. I did not want a dramatic gesture from her, I simply wanted to be her friend for life.

It was then that I became myself. I just wanted to play with her as I had never done with anyone. And I started to spray her with water.

At first she seemed surprise, "what is this little monster doing?", her eyes seemed to say. Immediately after she got angry, and without saying a word her face spoke for her, "How dares he? I am a girl, not a child." Eventually, the need for a too long suppressed fun for the sake of it seemed to suddenly appear on her whole body. And she began to spray me as well, and we played like two friends who have known each other forever, like two accomplices, forgetting the war outside, the pains, her father. And while we laughed without talking, I became aware of her nudity, and of her body so different from mine. This bolstered my desire to see her smile, and we played more, hiding among the bushes to suddenly reappear scaring each other. We swam along the river and occasionally her foot brushed mine and I thought, exulting, "She's touching me", but I did not dare to interrupt that magic moment. Words would have taken something away from our feeling. We became two slender fish, two light butterflies, two pigeons in love. Our eyes, our smiles, talked on our behalf. And I felt like her humble servant. She was already much more grown than me, with her woman hips, her round and tonic breasts. I looked at her and she laughed. She filled her angel mouth with water and suddenly spat on my face, hungry for her. If someone had seen us, we would have been split for good. But that was a precious gift that we were given without asking anything in return.

If we realized to be in a point where few plants hid us, we retreated, never having enough of that great liberty that we had been extraordinarily granted.

Outside bombs, armed struggle, desolation, his father, and in the water me and her.

Alone.

Two souls, happy for a moment, a beating of wings that would give us back joy for eternity.

Then, suddenly we heard voices not far away, approaching. I felt Andreuccia's hand shut my mouth and pull me back right into the thick boughs. Her body matched perfectly my back while the fresh water of the Onsola bound us in an immortal embrace.

I felt her soft breasts press against my back, her strong legs tighten around mine, her soft pubis stick to my naked butt.

It was soldiers coming to refresh themselves. She pulled me under the boughs of crespolina, where the impenetrable branches intertwined with ivy vines. And there she breathed in my ear, "Hushhhh..."

I stood silent, and I wanted nothing else than staying there, so tight to her forever. I felt our hearts beat in unison, with the fear of being seen pounding red-hot in our bodies, and my urgent desire to stay there, glued to her. Her breath pressed hard on my wet nape. She was trying not to be heard, so she pressed her mouth on my immature net so not to make a noise. I do not know if what I felt most were shivers of pleasure or fear. I had heard that fascists did despicable things to children. What about Andreuccia? What if she had been found so still and naked? What would happen to her? But at the same time I felt her really mine for the first time. Andreuccia and I melted like ivy up the trees.

I stood rooted to her, unchanging. I listened to the skin of my Andreuccia clinging to mine like a leech. We stood still and silent for a long time, that seemed to me still too short. The soldiers, called by some whistles, left, going back towards the road.

We waited a bit before going out of the Onsola, standing tight and silent. It was her who broke the sublime embrace only when she was sure that the soldiers were gone.

She had only looked for a hiding place, while my immobility was primarily due to my desire to prolong that contact.

When we came out from the water she hurried to cover herself, while I lied down under the sun. The prolonged cold to which I had submitted my body needed heat as if I were a lizard. She dressed quickly and came near me. She sat down beside me with her legs close to her chest, while her black hair, already tied, drenched her thin white shirt. She looked at me for a long time without speaking, and I let myself be looked at as if I were a Greek God, feeling on me the power of the immortals. I rejoiced those moments as the most beautiful of my life.

I was not ashamed of my nakedness, I had not been taught shame, and she spied on me with a smile that did not want to come out.

There was no need for words, we had experienced the same emotion, first the game and then the fear, but we had been together. And again I felt that sensation of completeness, of oneness, like with Febo II, the same with Andreuccia.

No one spoke and at some point she handed me my clothes like a wife does to a husband. She stared at me as I awkwardly donned the shorts first and then the tank top dirty with soil. Then I sat down beside her and began to draw arabesques on the ground.

"You're good!" she said, just to say something, "And you've grown a lot."

I shrugged, not having the strength to say anything. I was terrorized that my croaking voice could disrupt our idyll.

"Did you learn to read and write?"

I nodded without looking at her.

"I cannot go to school anymore. It is forbidden to us Jews."

Only then I turned to her face and saw a tear silently trickling down her cheek. I did not move immediately, I let the tear hit the ground, before drying her wet skin.

It was then that she abruptly stood up.

"I shouldn't be here. If my father knew..."

It was the first time that she had talked to me about her father, and by the terror I saw appearing suddenly on her face I knew that he was still acting as her master.

I did not ask her anything, it was her to speak again.

"What counts is that no one sees me. He will not be back until tomorrow night."

She was thinking and speaking loudly, more to herself than to me.

"He's gone to Siena with my brother. I had to look after the house."

Suddenly, she looked at me with hatred.

"Don't you ask me what for?"

"Dunno," I replied. I did not want to know anything about the only person that I really considered a beast.

"But what am I expecting?" she said, shaking her head. "You might have grown taller, but you are still an ignorant boy! I'll tell you anyway. He went to bring my letter directly to the Federal Fascist Inspector of Siena."

"What letter?" I asked then, more eager to take away from her the idea that I was a stupid kid than really interested in what her father was doing.

She smiled, and in smiling her mouth became tenderly round.

"A letter I wrote myself to the Duce."

I did not know who the Duce was, and I came to know it well only shortly after, because of his dismissal. The only picture that appeared in my memory was that of a round and smoothed bowl. Anyway, back then, I did not dare declaring it, and she continued, "I've written and re-read it a hundred times, to be sure that there were no mistakes. It said,

"Duce!

This is one of your Young Italian Girls coming today before you to pray for herself, for her father and her brother. I am a fervent Young Italian with a Cross of Merit, team leader among the Young Italians. My name is Sara Andrea Rossi Coen, I am fourteen years old and my brother, who is only six, is already a Son of the She-wolf. Now I would like to begin the IV year at the Royal Grammar School Gymnasium of Montepulciano. I am desperate, because they do not allow me to study and we have to leave Italy because my mother, God rest her soul, was German of Jewish origin. We have been living for eight years in Rocca d'Orcia and we have asked for Italian citizenship. My father is Italian, catholic and fascist. And like me and my brother he loves you and Italy.

Duce! I want to serve Italy for my whole life with all my strength, I beg you from my Young Italian heart to let us stay in Tuscany. Dad is also bringing his documents, so that you can see that we are not bad people, and let us stay.

A Fascist salute

Sara Rossi Andrea Coen"

Now I knew how old she was, but I was surprised to hear her say those words, to know that she had written them. She still believed to be fascist, this was surprising. After she had been prevented from living decently, from working, from going to school.

"Where do you live?" I asked suddenly, as if trying to make her understand that they had taken everything away from her.

"In Rocca!" she said, surprised. "Close to your home, next to the school. But I rarely go out." Then she stopped to think, while a sharp line deepened between her black eyebrows.

"Last week we received a letter of eviction. They say we must leave. They want to send us to Germany."

I do not know if I was hit more by the fact that she had never moved away from her home and I still had not seen her, or that the fascists wanted to send her to Germany. I know that I was gawking like a fool. Her eyes quickly changed, becoming melancholic.

"That letter is not going to help, I know," she said after a long silence, blowing against the gentle breeze that was rising.

I wanted to stroke her hand, tell her that I'd always be there for her, but I spoke saying what seemed simplest to me, "Gisella says that your animals are safe. I thought you were hiding somewhere."

"Why should I hide?" she said proudly, finding again her stern tone. "I did not do anything, I serve the motherland as I can, I am just Jewish!"

"All this time without seeing you and you were so close..." I whispered, but she did not hear me. She paused again and looked away with the melancholic face of someone who knows that he is telling himself a nice fairy tale.

"I have been always locked in the house, never leaving. But tonight I want to do what I never did, I want to be free."

I told her yes, with my head but even more with my heart and soul. We waited for the sun to fade, then hand in hand we started towards Rocca.

I realized at that moment just how much I had grown, because now I was as tall as her, maybe more.

We went through the fields so not to be seen, and ran laughing.

She relied upon me as if I were an adult and I, next to her, felt like I was. Whenever we heard voices we hid, with the help of the night and the thick vegetation. We stopped at the vineyard under my house, and while she waited for me under the olive tree, stuck inside the hollow trunk, I went up into the house to take from the cupboard the ham I sparsely consumed. I cut two large slices, put them between some bread and brought them to her as a gift.

She took the bread in her hands and looking at what was inside she simply said, "I don't eat pork."

"Me neither," I said suddenly, throwing away that piece of meat that instead I would have eaten with the infinite appreciation of the hungry. But I was sated with her. We ate the bread and laughed, going fast down to the wood. We walked a lot and I took her to the clearing of Febo II.

"Who is it?" she asked in her melodic voice, the same I had heard her use with her brother. I shrugged and laughed.

"I haven't the faintest idea, maybe my brother, but I really do not know," I replied. "But this place makes me feel good, and from here I can look at the moon."

We lay down on the cool grass, looking attentively at an immense starry sky that dominated over us. She told me about the constellations, the North Star, the Big and Little Chariot, the Milky Way, her dreams. I listened entranced by so much wisdom, and it seemed to me that she was the best girl that could exist in the world. And she was, to me.

And as she spoke I heard the sound of her voice penetrate me like a second blood and run through my veins and heal my lonely soul.

Her voice like the lute of the traveller.

It was then that she fell silent at the wonderful sight of a thick fleet of fireflies. It was the first time that I saw them that year, and they came silently, warming us with their delicate and intermittent light.

There were so many!

"Only now I realize how much I missed this," she said softly as the fireflies filled the clearing of Febo II, and filled me and Andreuccia.

They surrounded us and came to rest on our arms, on our bent knees. With them we flew to other planets as if in a dream, and travelled to other dimensions. They embraced us in a time that I had never known, they filled us of a new love.

The fireflies that honoured that moment, in that place, at that very moment, were all I ever wanted to shape the most beautiful day of my life.

# Rebelling

"You should rebel," I said while I was taking her home in that cool night of July.

She looked at me grimly. I do not know what she thought, how she interpreted my words. I only know that it was the end of that day.

She said nothing, but once we got to the large white rock her voice turned back into the grim one I had once known and already forgotten.

"Mind your own business, brat. You know nothing about life."

Then I saw her shoulders bounce lightly as she disappeared behind the curve at a run.

I wanted to forget those moments and I dived back into the wonderful sensations I had experienced during that wonderful day.

It was only after a few months that I had the confirmation that each of us rebels only when life gives us a chance, and if, at that time, we can muster enough courage to do that.

Andreuccia did. In her own way, but she succeeded.

Gisella had had me called at dawn. There were large amounts of herbs to prepare, with the war at the gates of the town.

We worked until about eight and a half, when a large hubbub called our attention. The boy was knocking loudly at the gate of the building.

We went down and him, his face red and his eyes desperate, said in a voice so low that I could hardly hear, "Here we are, Black Pen, the fascists are collecting Jews, gipsies, homosexuals and communists, dissidents in general, for deporting them to Germany."

Gisella stood motionless, with her beautiful, ice eyes. Then she turned to me.

"Run Febo. Run and never stop Febo dear. Take the Jews to the cave under the fortress. You know which?"

I nodded.

"Go through the bushes behind your house, not through the streets. Be careful that the fascists don't see them and you, or you'd end up like them. Stay close to them, keep them in sight. Hide them. There are others who hide there every day. Then in the evening I'll come and guide them to safety."

I stood still in surprise.

"No time to beat around the bush, Febo. Run!"

And I ran, I ran fast as I never had, and stopped only in front of the house with the yellow curtains. My heart was pounding in my chest, not for running but for fear. But Gisella had told me that there was no time to lose, I had to get over my fears to save Andreuccia. With cold sweat running down my back, I climbed the wall that had opened my heart to fear. What if I saw again that bloodcurdling scene? How would I react? Would I be able not to run away? Peeking with effort into that house, I was lucky. Inside I found only Andreuccia and her brother. He had grown too. I knocked on the glass and, as soon as she noticed me, she looked at me with hostility and turned her back. Months had passed, I had not seen her in the meantime, and she still had not forgiven me.

But it was not the time to be touchy.

I knocked again, with greater strength, and she came angrily to open the window.

"What do you want?" she said, irritated.

"Come with me. Fascists are going around the houses to take people they don't like to Germany, in the labour camps."

She was stunned but she did not seem unprepared. She was quick to take a small suitcase and put in it her three things. She also took some money, a lot of money, and jewellery. She put on a heavy jacket and put one on her brother.

"I'm hot," he complained.

"Shut up. That's all we have and we must hold tight to it."

The child obeyed. Then she went out into the street with her brother by the hand.

"And your dad?" I asked. Time stood still. Birdsongs suddenly fell silent. It was time to choose.

In the distance we heard a rifle shot that made her jump.

It was then that Andreuccia rebelled against her father. Once and for all, definitively.

"He's down in the vineyard. But let him stay there."

I looked at her without understanding. Then, turned to her brother, buttoning up his jacket, she said, "They won't do anything to him. He's catholic."

The child's eyes looked at her, then lowered, accepting her decision. They both knew, and I knew too, that she was lying. The letter had arrived addressed to all three.

In that moment she decided the destiny of her father, a destiny that would never saw them together again.

We ran to the America, where a swirl of wind ruffled the dry soil. It was my lost souls in turmoil. The lights of the America.

I shouted at them, "Calm down, all of you! I'll be back. I'll take my friends to safety and come back. You protect the America!"

Then we climbed the wall that was behind the house, and climbed up through the brambles. Andreuccia's brother struggled hard to keep up, and the brambles had found new strength with the first autumn rains. They scratched and blocked him especially, and we helped him not to fall, to keep a fast pace, to stop when we heard noises.

We had to go past Rocca di Tentennano and down the other side to get to the cave. We stopped for a moment and Andreuccia asked, "Who were you talking to earlier?"

"My fireflies," I replied simply.

"Are you crazy?" she said. "There was no one. And there are no more fireflies."

"At the America there are fireflies all year round."

"It's not true. I did not see anything!" she insisted

"If you don't see someone or something, it does not mean it doesn't exist. Did you see how the wind subsided?"

"Sheer chance," Andreuccia said, looking down. And we restarted.

Once at the cave, however, we found a nasty surprise. The rock naturally dug under the hill that held Rocca, was half full of people. When I went in and told them that I would leave there Andreuccia with her brother, the protests began. They did not want them. They were too young, that little one could have made turmoil, and even the girl, after all, so thin, too frail and helpless and... too Jewish.

My words and those of Andreuccia, saying that they would have fared on their own, that they had money, that they were good and obedient and strong, were to no avail.

The thing they did not say outright was that they mostly did not want them because they were Jews.

"You're all here for the same reason," I shouted at them.

And a woman with the face of death finally grinned, "But not with two Jews. Look at them, you can see who they are from a distance!"

"And you see yourself?" I yelled back at her in fury.

The woman did not move. Looking at me straight in the eyes, she cruelly grunted, "If they find us with those two they'll have us all killed. We don't want them. Take them away, and if you want my advice do not let them see you with them."

"I want no advice from a shrivelled dead woman like you," I replied, showing a confidence that I did not possess. I left, dragging behind me Andreuccia and her brother.

I never knew what happened of that cowardly people. For sure they did not go back to Rocca, or at least I did not see them anymore.

That day we went out of the cave, hunched by our humiliation, our pain. Even of refugees there were different categories.

I sat down under the big elm. What would I do? Where would I bring them now? I would have done anything to avoid seeing my Andreuccia disappear.

She settled her brother a bit to pass the time. She combed his hair with her fingers and picked him up in her arms. When she was finished, she said in a gentle voice, "Thank you, my friend, you've done a lot for us. I'll remember you in my prayers. But go now, that old woman was telling the truth, if they found you with us..."

"I'm not leaving you," I whispered her. She smiled at me as if I were her brother.

"What's your name?" she asked suddenly.

I was surprised that she did not know my name, the name of the man of her life, but an idea before anything else lit up my mind.

"I'll tell you my name when the war is over. If you trust me, follow me. I have an idea. It will not be easy, but it will still be better than deportation."

Andreuccia trusted me.

We climbed up to the tower and then descended back to the America, more silently than before, even more precisely.

I left them behind the high wall of the house and ran to open the cellar. Then I joined them again, and when I was sure that no one could see us, I let them in quickly.

"You cannot keep us here. They'll find out. They'll shoot you for helping us."

"None of this will happen. Only I know my America. And everybody fears it."

From the basement we went to the kitchen, where I quickly locked the door and shut the windows.

When I turned to them, I suddenly realized how dirty my house was. I understood it from the eyes of my beloved, that had become hesitant.

Hens had used the America as a latrine, grass grew freely around the corners and along the windows. On the floor, the earthenware was covered with soil and stones and wood. Since Beba had died, no one had cleaned it.

I ran to check that every door was sealed behind us and saw the eyes of Andreuccia and her brother become afraid, large and round. We climbed the stairs to the large room upstairs and then I took them to the dark room. In that shelter I left them motionless, in the company of a faithful darkness, and I went to take the large ladder that was in the heaven room. I took it to them, saying slowly, "Don't be afraid. There is a loft. You will sleep there." In the dark I heard that one of them was crying. I never knew who it was. It was a bad place, I knew, but it was also their only chance at safety. Or at least the only one I knew. And there was no time to think too much about it. Gisella had told me, "Run Febo. Run!"

I heard them disappear up the ladder and let them alone again. I got out and then I called my fireflies, trusted companions of a life together. And they all appeared. Palinuro, little Elvira, Attilio, Erminia and Temistocle, aunt Suntina. I had no one other than them. Not Gisella, for whom I sensed without knowing a future outside Rocca, not Zeno, too fearful, no longer Beba.

I asked my lights of the America solidarity for the two friends who had to be protected by the wickedness of the world. And all of them granted it without saying it.

They would ensure us some of protection, and certainly they would be able to warn us of any danger. They would chase away intruders, if needed.

Then I went up to Andreuccia again. I had a candle in hand and I took it all the way to the loft, where I could not remember ever having been. The little flame gladdened her smile.

"In daytime you can stay in the house, go through the America high and low. My house is big, you know, but from now on it will be yours too. No one will disturb you, but you must never lean out the window. If there is any danger, someone will warn us!"

"Who?" Andreuccia asked.

"Someone whom you cannot see but who exists."

Then I went on, "Keep the candle up here, but if you hear anyone coming blow it out. At night you will stay up here and I will take away the ladder."

"Does anyone know we're here?" Andreuccia asked.

"Nobody. It will be our secret."

"And if you left, we would be stuck here forever?" the little boy asked.

"I'm not leaving. I will always be with you. It's a promise."

Then I went down to the town to look for Gisella. I needed to tell her that they were in my house, and not to go looking for them in the cave. But the house was empty, the cupboards open and her clothes disappeared. Her precious herbs were half gone and half closed in pharmacies.

Black pen. Only then I thought about that word. What did it mean?

I ran to the square and I realized that even the cats were gone. The house ones and those outside.

All vanished, as if Gisella had taken them away with her, as if she were the Pied Piper.

Gisella, the pied piper of cats...

I sat down behind the tank when I heard some soldiers arrive. I hid. I did not want them to see me. But I heard their words.

"Walk, filthy Jew."

"I'm Catholic, not Jew," a harsh voice said. Then I heard a dull thud, loud enough to be heard even by my deaf ear. The soldier, laughing coarsely, said, "What about your children? How come they are Jews?" He did not answer immediately, he thought about it.

"Their mother was," he finally said.

"But if you married a Jewish woman, and you've had children with her, you are contaminated. Everyone here knows that you're a Jew, too." And there came another thud.

I spied upon those figures as they went from the square down to the plain. I only saw the shoulders of that man, his last memory like that of my mother.

And I knew that he would never return. 

# Living

Thus began our life together.

I never told them that I had seen their father taken away, and neither of them asked me.

I worked hard to settle the blankets and a small straw mattress in the loft because it was very high and inaccessible, and inside also extremely low and black. You could barely stand inside on your knees. But it was dark and hidden. What we needed in those dark times.

The heat was really impressive in the whole black room, and in the loft it was even more so, as well as humidity. They never complained about it though.

Still, I did not forget that first weeping that had joined them, and that had clenched my stomach so much.

During the day they inspected the house, staying away from the windows. I had not covered them, I left them free to avoid arousing suspicion, but to prevent any of them from being tempted to lean out, I had put in front of them chairs and benches and anything that could prevent them to go close.

When I was not home, if they heard footsteps outside, they had to run to the dark room. It would be my croaking voice to tell them whether to remain hidden or appear. "Maramao perché sei morto?" was the song of silence to tell them not to move from the loft of the dark room and not to say a word. It meant extreme danger. I had to scream to convey my off-key voice to them, especially if they were in that lonely room, but if needed I would have done that at the top of my lungs.

If all was quiet, the song was "Mille lire al mese," which would set them free to welcome me in silence behind the door.

Even the silence of footsteps, without any out-of-tune song, meant danger. It meant it was not me to be walking around the America, so they had to take refuge immediately in the dark room, better if in the loft.

The three of us loved to stay in the cellar anyway. It had no windows and I had dared to fill all the holes. In fact no one, apart from Beba and my father, knew how many there had been, and none of the two would come and complain.

There we played cards and Andreuccia, who was better than me, quietly read Gisella's books. I lied on the ground, curled into a blanket with the little boy in my arms and, at her feet, with my good ear alert, we listened to her telling in a feeble voice about the deeds of many ancient heroes.

It was after a few months of living together that I fully realized the words by Goncharov that I had read some time ago, "A close, daily intimacy between two people has to be paid for: it requires a great deal of experience of life, logic, and warmth of heart on both sides to enjoy each other's good qualities without being irritated by each other's shortcomings."

I learned it on my skin. There were times in which I did not understand the accomplices glances between Andreuccia and her brother. An absurd jealousy gripped my stomach and I hated that child because he could take away from me a part of her that I could not make mine. Andreuccia I just could not hate. She knew it, and she asked me with her face disguised as an angel's why I looked askance at her tender little brother. Sometimes she even did everything to make me angry, then I acted just the way she hated, I ate with my hands and cleaned them on my shirt. Andreuccia was offended and I felt bad.

We never shouted, we knew we could not risk to, but we teased each other and exploited each other's weaknesses to feel greater, maybe better.

With them I learned that to live with someone you have to be really generous and simply altruistic. We all needed a maturity that we not always had, and sometimes it was easier to shelter in the other's defects, taking advantage of the weak points we slowly learned to recognize, rather than putting ourselves into discussion. And I also realized that if I could make a virtue of this knowledge, if I could treasure the merits of the other, life would be better for everyone.

I understood this intimately after suffering for many nights of an overpowering lovesickness, to the point of envying that scared little boy who had the good fortune of being allowed to rest his lice-ridden head on her chest. I understood it not by virtue of intelligence, but by necessity. I really loved them both, and the three of us could be a family, the one I had always wanted. For them I would have gone to hell, I would have fought against angry bulls, I would have gotten myself killed.

I simply gave up grievances. And everything became almost beautiful. I did not try to explain anything, it would have been impossible and unnecessary, but I made the first step and tried to give both comfort and love and joy. It was not easy, sometimes I saw them so close that I felt strong pangs of jealousy, other times I saw them looking at me like they would look at an ignorant beggar, and I wanted to shout that they owed everything to me, even life. But I did not want gratitude, I did not want to humiliate them, I only longed for all their love. So, simply, I loved them both. Only that way I could make a place for me in their hearts.

And who knows, maybe I did.

I learned to really take care of my new family, and Andeuccia, docile as never before, followed me, and her brother with her.

So it was that we learned to live together with dignity, or at least as much as three children could.

Gisella had not returned. I often went to her house, especially at dawn, shortly after the curfew. But the house was empty. There was only the cook who every time would say, "Dunno where she went. She had to find some special herbs, but maybe tomorrow she'll come back."

Days passed, and even months, but she did not return. Yet I knew she was fine and, thinking back to her strong legs darting under her black stockings, I was sure she was doing something grand, as only she could do.

It was Andreuccia to tell me later who my mentor had become by then. She told me that in the woods she was known as Black Pen, and for years she had been moving back and forth from the hills to the mountain, bringing food, clothing and medicines to all refugees.

She had stayed clean thanks to her social status, she was rich, she healed people, in town everyone knew her, and no one would suspect her.

"And how do you know?" I asked her then.

"It was her who helped us settle our beasts. One for each camp, the people in the woods kept them and fed with them, and gave us the few pennies they were able to gather."

I wanted to ask whether she still considered herself a fascist, but I thought it was superfluous. Actually I figured that repeating it in the past years and months had been just a way to convince the others, and maybe herself too.

Andreuccia told me that Gisella had a big and noble heart. She said that for years she had been dressing layer under layer and walking for hours, carrying everything she could bring. Clothes, food, medicines, cigarettes, and maybe even love.

It was even rumoured that she had an affair with one of the partisans.

And I thought silently that her moment to live had come. I wondered if mine to study for real ever would?

Andreuccia talked about Gisella, and from her bright eyes you could see how much she admired her.

And for this I loved her even more.

It was thanks to Andreuccia that I knew that Gisella had not abandoned me. She had actually tried to protect me. She had not wanted me with her simply not to put me in danger.

And then life had done its part. At a time it had quietly asked me to choose, and I had. I had chosen to protect Andreuccia, while Gisella, that day when she had asked me to hide the Jews, had decided to go definitely into hiding.

The cook could not believe it and kept making up stories every day, and waited for her, cooking that nothing she could find.

In previous years Gisella had always helped everyone, young and old, who had fled to avoid joining the ranks of the fascists.

Andreuccia was always telling me that in the woods there were whole families who were in need of everything.

I was proud of Gisella, of her strength and her courage, and knowing her in the woods and believing she was still fond of me made me more determined, filling me with a new courage that started from being filled with love.

Living with my little Jewess, however, was special and beautiful. Charming and curious. Andreuccia cooked and I had to be at home when she did. Then I looked at her in ecstasy, as I had never done with Beba, and watched how her small hands moved quickly on the dough, her care for details, the finesse with which she cut the various herbs I picked for her and for us. And then, while she docilely washed dishes in a zinc basin that I had placed in the cellar, she seemed to me the only woman that I would be able to accept in my America, my only eternal love.

We mustn't cook things that smelled too much, probably in the town they knew that there had always been someone cooking for me. So Andreuccia cooked vegetal soups that warmed us all. Then, to fill our empty stomachs, we seasoned the boiled vegetables with good olive oil, salt and pepper.

Sometimes in the night I felt my stomach grumble, but the thought of Andreuccia huddled in the dark room with her brother, the thought that I was their only shelter, filled me with a rare pride, and made me feel strong, almost omnipotent. I felt like a sort of good master, who granted her much more than others had ever granted her, but she, I am sure, knew the great power she actually had on me. I obeyed her like a little dog, her every word was an order for me. In exchange, she held a kind of submissive attitude. She did like Gisella did with the fascists. And I must admit that I liked it a lot, it flattered me.

Her face was every day paler and more serene. Sometimes I watched her and thought that my America was slowly becoming her real world. She felt good there, and it showed. She did not suffer from not being able to go out, and if she did she did not show. Her brother was more restless, but he was very obedient.

We had studied well the behaviour I had to keep. I had to stay out a few hours, so as not to arouse suspicion. Too long for my new tastes, and for the first time I longed to go home and listen to her low voice.

Often I could not hear everything Andreuccia said, because of my deaf ear, and she could not scream, but the dirge of her voice made me company as it never had happened to me.

I remained outside for the established hours, but I was never able to go deep in the wood, I felt I needed to keep a constant eye on the house. I even abandoned Febo II in the wood, I could not do otherwise. I was the only living being who could protect Andreuccia and her brother. The fireflies of the America wandered incessantly, present and floating, and the warm gust that accompanied them seemed never to give way to nothingness. They had listened to me and were protecting my guests like diligent soldiers, but they were still fireflies made of wind, and I was afraid of an insolence that the people of Rocca had never dared.

I was afraid of the Germans. It was said that they were terrible, and angry, and sometimes in the grip of madness.

For this I had taught Andreuccia to listen to my lost souls, and she had learned to perceive some of them.

She still did not know how to talk to them, she only gave them orders that they inevitably disobeyed. Poor thing, that was how she had heard me talk to them the first time, and she did not understand that my tone was only due to the need of the moment. She did not fully understand how a solid trust, an absolute solidarity, had formed between us. However, I was confident in her good soul, purer than what she herself believed. Sooner or later she would have learned to talk to them with her heart.

For now, however, she did not see them. Still she sensed their intentions and, if in the beginning it had made her restless, in time she began to see the bright side. They would have been able to scare almost everyone who arrived without an invitation.

Her brother, instead, was terrified by them. Maybe it was because Elvira always gravitated around him, or because he was forced to live in the closed space of a house that sometimes seemed like hell to him. Asthma burned his will and intellect, and, at times, I found him pale and feverish, crouched in a corner of the dark room. The open air would have done him good, as well as the smell of the sea that some days came from the Maremma.

Maybe he even missed his brutal father, but the fact was that he had a real obsession for my fireflies. They were horrible nightmares to him, and he peed himself even though he was six years old.

This was a problem because I was the one who washed the clothes. If by chance I met the housewives at the springs, they recognised the smell of urine and, looking at me with pitiful faces, I know they thought, 'Look at him, so big and he always pees himself'.

Andreuccia, instead, washed her own things alone in the house, and put them to dry in the loft, although sometimes it took days and days for them to dry.

Her brother was a helpless little child, he stuttered and sometimes he said he could hardly breathe, he became pale and was drenched in a cold sweat.

He suffered of asthma, yes, but aggravated by fear. I recognized in him a fierce terror, the same that I had felt for the first time right in front of their house.

Poor Andreuccia, what cowardly men she had by her side. She had always had plenty of cowards.

I treated the little boy from the start with Gisella's herbs. In the evening, before taking him to the dark room, I massaged him for a long time with lavender oil, then I prepared for him teas of red poppy and camomile.

I hugged him and rubbed his wrists to calm him down like Gisella had taught me. I taught him to breathe slowly and always keep at hand a paper bag, in which he breathed in case of need.

Slowly, the child started to trust me, and he sheltered in my arms when he felt the need. I felt great then, and I was filled by an infinite tenderness toward that hairy little black head.

Then, when we ate dinner in the song of fire (at the table we were too close to the window) every now and then he stopped and looked now at me, now at Andreuccia. Then, with a smile on his lips, he went back to eating.

I remember that as one of the best periods of my life. It seems absurd to say so, with my friends prisoners, me forced to spend long hours outside my house, the war closer, outside and inside, the fascists and Nazis at every door. But I finally had a family, the first and the only one I had ever possessed.

We played adults, Andreuccia and I, with her brother playing the part of our son.

Sometimes we looked at one another and burst out laughing, suddenly, without a reason. We laughed and cried with happiness.

Three children trapped in a war that did not belong to us, this is what we were. And the world out there could have learned so much from us.

In those moments of whooping hilarity, it was Andreuccia who intimated us to be quiet, that it was dangerous for everyone. And us, our jaws sore, calmed down, but our smiles remained, inside.

So we braved even the winter.

Finally I was able to stay home more than before, because that year snow fell tall and whimsy, covering boughs and walls.

The snow was convenient for us all. Because it quieted the war down here for a few months. For me, who could stay home to look at my family. For the fascists, who were less willing to patrol the streets acting like our masters. But the food was scarce, and I slowly began to take out all of the hens to warm our stomachs.

The dark room became more comfortable. Even though the humidity was huge, the warmth calmed our souls. The asthma of the little boy calmed with that wet warmth, especially if I put some camphor oil on his chest.

With this excuse, I got used to stay there with them, in the darkness. We climbed all three in the loft, I massaged Andreuccia's brother and occasionally, by accident, I brushed against her, who not always pulled back. When my hands met her soft skin and she stood still, it was me to flee. I quickly climbed down the ladder and, removing it from the loft, I carried it to the heaven room. Then I ran back to them and, leaning against the wall, I sang. They sat hugging in the loft and I stood below. I sang to both the songs that Beba had used to sing, and I was maybe more out of tune than she had ever been. It was my serenade, the only way I knew to tell them who I was. And I heard Andreuccia's little brother laugh at my awkward voice, and rejoiced of his laughter as of a breath of freedom.

Andreuccia never said anything.

Every now and then she slapper her brother, and he fell silent for a moment, but then he started again. No one heard us in that faraway room, fortunately protected from the rest of the world.

We were more natural there in the dark, perhaps because no one could see us, so we were free to really be who we really were.

# The Witchboy

They remained at the America for several months, until that summer that carried them away, stealing a family from me.

We had bought a radio, more to cover our voices than for any other reason, but thanks to it I knew that the allies were coming up along Italy, from the bottom up, and were coming strong and victorious. What I had not understood well was that, before them, the Germans would come. Young and angered, with their idea of winning or dying. Mad of an unreal anger, of a frustration glued to them by the lies about the superiority of their race.

Every day, during those absurd and extraordinary months, I had gone to Gisella's house, and suddenly I had realized that my time to study by heart had come. Methodically, I had read, reread and learned all of her books on pharmacy and medicine.

At first I had found it hard, but then I had slowly got used to the idea of being able to make my staying away from home useful.

The Val d'Orcia, at the time, had lost in my mind the dominant role, graciously giving way to family.

I asked the cook permission to take one of Gisella's books, and she gave it to me like a good master. Then I went under the pergola in front of the house and there I studied for hours. I wrote on a notebook the words I did not know, and in the evening at home I asked Andreuccia their meaning. The ones she did not know were but a few, and when there was any we looked for them together in two dictionaries that had been left dusty and unused after My father's departure.

Under the pergola I spent my days motionless, studying and checking that no one wanted to sneak into my lands. At times I whistled a tune, so that who came around could hear me, if not see me. There was a small road, above the pergola, from which, for a short distance, I could be seen, and every day I hoped that someone would pass and notice me engaged in living normally.

Strange that I never thought how absurd a boy reading huge medicine books might look.

And away from the people of the town, but visible to them, I stood undisturbed to let myself be watched. No one dared to walk the two gravel roads that led to my house, after all I was still at the America.

I read all the books Gisella had, all those concerning herbs and ointments. I asked the cook the permission to take bandages, oils and herbs, and she gave them to me, at first hesitating a little then, thinking back to when the housemistress had praised me in front of her like a guy who would go far, she seemed to find courage.

I treated chickens and rabbits, dogs and cats, in short, all the animals that were injured in some way and tame enough to let themselves be handled.

To reassure the cook, I loved to repeat her the same old story every time it was needed, "When Gisella returns I'll give you everything back!" This cheered her up, not for the promise of seeing herbs, ointments and books returned, they were worth nothing to her, but because I was saying that I supported her belief that Gisella would soon be back.

I learned from the books all that Gisella had taught me while walking in the woods, and even more.

Every now and then Zeno, seeing me reading under the pergola, peeked from the road and shouted to me asking if I needed anything. and every time I would answer, "No, thank you."

That, though, was the period when I felt the most urgent need of money, and the moment when it happened to Zeno to answer that he had none.

I knew it was true.

Young men had been called to arms, either with the fascists or against them, and strong labour force was lacking.

There were days that we were left without food and days when I managed to make the orchard more fruitful. But the winter was harsh, and seeing Andreuccia fade in thinness and her brother getting tall and slimmer than ever made me feel uneasy with my new conscience of head of the family.

It was then, after a night of heavy snow, that I realized what I had to do not to see my little family of Jews starve to death.

The sun was shining impetuous and generous, like it does only when there is snow. The glare of its rays warmed my skin, reddened by the cold as I shovelled snow from the yard in front of the house. I made small piles, then pushed them down, towards the large white rock. The voices of the town kids came clear, they were for sure sliding down the hill, on sleds or simply on their bottoms. Suddenly I heard a thud coming from below, and immediately after a long, continuous moan. Some confused screams, then silence. I ran to the house, I told Andreuccia to hide with her brother in the loft and I took away the ladder. Then I ran to the large rock. For sure there was someone who might need me.

I was lucky, it was a skinny young man, a little shorter than me, but definitely older. I had seen him around the town a few times, but I did not know his name. He had a knee twisted on itself, swelling visibly. His friends had gone, scared, to call for someone. But who? The doctor only took care of rich people, and without even touching them, and Gisella had been missing for several months.

They had left as guard a small little boy whose eyes were round like a full moon. I ordered him to go home, I would take care of the boy. The child ran away, as if freed by too great a burden, and I picked the wounded boy in my arms and struggling carried him home. I had to be fast, before someone claimed him from me.

I risked a lot that day, for me and especially for Andreuccia and her brother. But I had to try, I had no choice.

That boy howled with pain, and with each bump that he took in spite of myself, he cried more. I motioned my fireflies to follow me and I opened the America to a stranger.

I made him sit in front of the fireplace. My fireflies swirled around him, and he, terribly frightened, whispered, "I'm dying..."

But it was only when he saw me approach his knee with a knife toasted on the fire that he begged me, crying, "Leave me alone, don't hurt me, don't kill me please!"

He whimpered like a little girl and I felt a bit of pity for him. How could fear make someone so blind? Couldn't he see, couldn't he understand that I was just trying to help him?

I looked at him, determined and serious. I said only, "Shut up, I'm just trying to ease your pain."

Then, praying the sun and the moon and all the cosmos to give me the ability to do it right, I pierced that knee with the red-hot point. A violent splash of blood squirted from it. I was under the impression that Mario, that was the name of the boy, was about to faint, then the pain slowly subsided. I made him lie down on the table and took off the convulse chairs that hindered the window. He seemed not to understand anything, surrounded by my insistent fireflies, and it was exactly what I wanted.

I bandaged him not too tight and took him home.

Luckily no one had time to come to look for him at the America.

Mario lived at the beginning of Rocca, down towards the plains, and it took us a long time to reach our destination. His mother opened the door for us and looked at me grimly. Then Mario said, "The son of Bianchini saved my life!"

It was not true, I had only given vent to the hematoma, but I said nothing. I knew how terrible the pain he had felt was, and I let him believe it was that of death.

That night I went home with five eggs and some white bread.

At the age of twelve, almost thirteen, I became the Witchboy.

The people of Rocca, in the spring that came shortly after the snow, found nothing better than to trust a boy already as tall as many adults, with red curly hair cascading on his shoulders, but who had or could find a remedy for everything.

It was then that I won my natural reluctance towards the villagers.

And they were able to welcome me like a shaman, a bit crazy but to be respected.

Those who needed me came to Gisella's house at dawn and I, if there was a need, went to their houses. I was not upset by wounds or blood, nor stench or pain. My ignorance was huge, and sometimes I made awful mistakes, but there was only me for the poor people.

Gisella's books almost always gave me the answers I was looking for, and if could not find them there, I tried to learn them from the nature that surrounded me, from animals, plants, even from the moon and the natural cycles of life.

One thing though I was really good at, maybe because I had always done it. I understood without a doubt when there was nothing more to do. I did not know the exact moment when death would come, but I sensed it was in the air. And I was also good at accompanying those poor souls beyond. I told them goodbye as fireflies and saw them disappear, smiling, behind invisible doors.

The people of Rocca knew this, and for this, more than for the awkward and approximate treatments I provided them, they respected me.

From that day of white snow I became the Witchboy to everyone.

Often in the morning, under Gisella's house, I found women and men waiting for me with a piece of bread or some sheep-milk cheese bound in a rag. Those who were waiting for me without having the courage to enter, often asked me for love, health and money, as if I were a sorcerer who could do magic.

Then I listened to their stories, looking at them in the eyes and hands, and I knew if they were lying or telling the truth. I gave them fancy advice about a life that I had never known, and they thanked me with food that I proudly brought to my family.

Perhaps madness had always accompanied me, as it had done with my mother, but I felt that what I was doing was important.

That first day when I had taken care of Mario, everything had already been thought without knowing it. For months I had been waiting for a good opportunity, even though I did not know which one. Mario's wounded knee had been perfect. I had just hoped that I was not wrong about my abilities.

I wanted to help someone, and for him to say it to the townsfolk, but also to tell them not to set foot in the America.

I relied on the gab of a chosen one, at random, the first that would happen, and Mario did not disappoint me.

The town knew that I was able to heal wounds with strange spells and that, living in the America, I was half-demon.

People were not interested in where the solutions for their problems came from, whether from heaven or from hell.

I became the first contact for many things, from cough to abandonment, from lice to jinx.

Mario told everyone that he had seen the face of death in the America, and he had heard ghosts and smelled goats.

Of goats there were none, apart from him, and the ghosts kept definitely away nosy people from my America.

# The ladder

It was April when the Germans arrived.

During winter, everything had been asleep, and we had almost felt out of the world conflict. A new life as the Witchboy, and a new family.

With spring came the frantic moods of those who knew to be losing a war and the excited ones of those who felt victorious and too far from home.

The country was in turmoil, and me too.

I learned that the Germans were in Rocca one morning while, like every day, I was at Gisella's house, preparing concoctions and treating blisters, giving advice on sexual life to an old man who had a wife and a mistress.

While I was thinking about how bad people should feel to trust a boy, unaware of a life that I had not yet lived, I heard cannon shots from the countryside, from the direction of Rocca cemetery.

And the rumours came fast. It was the Germans.

I excused myself saying that I had to fetch a book from home, and I ran to Andreuccia.

I arrived home breathless and looked for them, shouting 'Maramao perché sei morto' at the top of my lungs. Among my off-key screams I found them on the roof, romantic, intently watching a landscape that seemed to had become foreign to them.

I shouted terrified that the agreements were not those. We were all risking our lives, and they had to be always alert. It was not the time to look at the valley.

Andreuccia became pale. She was not used to my fear, and the little boy started to pant. He did that when I reproached him, and when I passed him the terror that was mine, it was even worse.

I tried to calm him down. To calm them both.

It was a matter of time now and the Americans would free us. But now was the time to pay more attention.

I gave to the child all that I had understood to be good for him in the last months. I warmed a chamber pot of a decoction of hawthorn, enula and helichrysum, telling him to drink it quietly in the loft. Then I took his essential oil concoction made of hedge mustard, eucalyptus, thyme and lemon balm and rubbed it fast on his chest, wrists and feet.

Separately, I gave them a bottle containing an infusion of red poppy and passionflower, to drink if fear made them undisciplined.

To Andreuccia I just said, "Trust me."

She looked at me straight in the eyes but did not answer.

I brought them back to the dark room, giving them all the food we still had, and as soon as they were in the wet and dark loft I intimated them not to move or breathe for any reason at all.

"You will live here until danger has passed."

Both were silent, but it seemed to me to see their white, terrified eyes in the dark.

And I took the ladder down to the fields. Far away, under the olive tree. No one had to get a chance to reach them.

Then I went back to Gisella's house, with my soul tense and my usual vacant stare.

The people at the beginning had remained motionless in front of the Germans. It only took obeying and bowing their heads. Then, slowly, without making too much noise, those who lived along the roads had moved with caution in safer and hidden places. Many came to the town, others went to the farms scattered through the countryside.

The Germans, however, got into homes and stole food, took hens and killed them one by one, then ate them, and the people saw them taking away from under their eyes what they knew to be one of their few sustenance.

But if you said nothing, you survived, and trying to survive was what everyone wanted.

In order not to see the defiance, the people tried to find far and unreachable places. But in the countryside it was often more dangerous. The Germans took the men with carts and forced them to mine entire fields, killing them right afterwards so they could not disclose the mined locations.

Andreuccia and her brother learned to live always in the loft. I climbed there myself before dawn, bringing them food, water and large amounts of red poppy and passionflower, then I took their wastes and immediately went down, taking away the ladder.

I was frantic and it seemed that I feared their escape from me more than the arrival of the Germans.

But it was not so, maybe.

In my heart I knew that sooner or later they would go away from me, as everyone else had. First my father, then my mother, then Beba. Gisella too, in her way.

But I did not want to think about it. What counted now was that they lived.

Immediately after the curfew was over I threw everything in the compost heap behind the yard, and I took the ladder to a different place every day.

One morning I arrived at Gisella's house and the Germans were already there, in a state of great agitation. They were young, with bony white faces made red by the sun. They had turned everything upside down, looking for something they could not find.

As soon as I got there, the cook turned desperately to me, pointing at me, and those men surrounded me as if I were a criminal. Everyone around me bawled random words in their understandable language.

I did not understand what they wanted to tell me, but I thought they had somehow discovered Andreuccia, and a reckless madness seized me. I started screaming too. It was one of them to slap so powerfully that I fell to the ground and, without another word, they dragged me down the street outside the town, to the old graveyard. I thought my time had come, but I did not mind. On the contrary, the pain of knowing Andreuccia and her younger brother locked in the suffocating dark loft with no way out was immeasurable.

They pushed me and I fell and got back up more than once. We reached our destination quickly and, while they shouted loudly, I realized that there was a wounded among them.

In front of the graveyard, beyond the stony road, there was a large olive field with low trees, but what caught my curiosity was the small patch of hard court the Germans had created, where cannons pointed toward my valley stood.

We were at a high point, and you could see the world from there, a perfect place for sightings.

They gave me no time to reflect on what damage they would cause to my gentle hills. They threw me at the feet of a man who had a bleeding leg. I fell face down, where his blood was leaving a stain that was spreading before my eyes.

I understood instantly that, if I wanted them to leave me alone, I had to heal him, and do it well. For the second time in my life, I was afraid.

For Andreuccia and her brother, and me.

I was young and inexperienced. I had already seen rifle wounds, especially on hares or pheasant, but only from them I had tried to extract small and thick pellets. I had made them fall asleep with ether, and often they had not woken up anymore. At home I had everything, bandages, iodine and ether, but they were at home, at my America, where no one must enter. Only then I realized my stupidity. In the frenzy of having everything at the America, I had left Gisella's house unsupplied.

But I could not beat around the bush and I made up my mind. I took my shirt, tore it and tried to stop the bleeding of the soldier. I gestured to those bony faces to bring the wounded man to Gisella's house. Only later did I learn that that man was their captain.

From there I would invent something to go home and take what I needed.

One of them held me tight by one arm as I lead that funeral procession. It was the most handsome, with a feminine pink face, and very short blond hair. I guessed that once it had been long, and I saw soft curls invade his young face. But the young man was now only a terrified soldier, and his cut hair, in addition to his bullying attitude, reminded this to me.

I became aware of hidden eyes spying on us from behind the closed windows, and I knew that no one in Rocca would fight for me.

You fight for someone you love, and they did not love me. They respected me, maybe, and probably they were afraid of my Witchboy's influences, but loving was something else.

Once we got at Gisella's palace, I made them lie down the captain in the same bed that had welcomed me when, still young and struck by lightning, I had struggled to live. I thought that that man would not live, and I shouted inside that it mustn't happen. I thought of when, confined to bed, I heard the doctor saying that I would never make it.

I would not do like him. I would not abandon him to his fate.

I would save him.

Although he had a scary cheeky face, even though I did not like him at all, I would make him walk again. The handsome soldier had left my arm to go and moisten the brow of the captain who was slowly losing consciousness and looked at him, sometimes stroking his hand. There was terror in his eyes. That soldier loved his captain as much as I loved Andreuccia, and he was telling it to me with his pleading face.

I tried to explain the Germans that I needed things that I did not have there, and I tried with all my might to make them understand that I would be back. But a sharp blow to my waist with the butt of an old rifle made me realize that I had no choice.

The man with the handsome and pleading face had suddenly hardened and was afraid that I would run away. Instead, he demanded that I went back and heal that wounded captain of his. He ordered three soldiers to follow me, and they obeyed immediately.

I went down to the America as if in a terrible nightmare.

The things that I had to take were in the large central room. Too close to the dark room.

Once we got to the America, my fireflies started swirling around us, and I hoped that the soldiers would get scared, but something worse happened. The Germans became even more evil and started firing shots to the wind.

In hindsight I think I should have predicted that, but it did not happen. I was only thirteen years old and I had never heard so many shots at the same time. My deaf ear started whistling and I knelt down, with my face down on the ground, and told my lost souls to be silent.

And suddenly everything was calm.

I opened the door with the key that I kept in my pocket and one of the Germans stumbled on the slippery steps, and angrily shot towards the pergola. I jumped. Fear was taking away my intellect, my hands trembled. I offered them wine and what scarce food I had in the bench, and I tried again to make them wait in the kitchen. One of them, however, with his rifle pointed at my back, followed me up the stairs. I started to sing "Maramao" and I hoped that Andreuccia would hear me from the dark room, too isolated. The soldier told me to shut up. And I did.

Silence.

I was struck by the silence that reigned in my house, I had never heard it. Downstairs, the two soldiers talked and laughed drinking. But the silence that reigned in the large room had nothing real about it.

My fireflies had followed us in silence. And surrounding us they had created an aura of eerie silence.

I hoped that Andreuccia would be silent and that her brother was not seized by an asthma fit.

I took what I needed while the man warily looked around. When he realized that I had everything I needed, he ordered me with his rifle to go. I went downstairs and only then I realized that only one of them would go back with me, the other two would stay at the America, feasting. While I locked the door, I begged my souls, "protect the family."

We quickly ran to Gisella's house. The captain was unconscious. I put a tight tourniquet above his wound and made a sharp knife red hot. Then I prepared to cut the flesh of the German.

On me would depend the lives of many people. That of the cook, of Andreuccia and her brother, and maybe even of some villagers. They said that for any dead German, ten Italian people had to die.

As the captain felt the hot point on his skin, he woke up screaming. The man with the handsome face pushed me to the floor, away from his beloved. Then I dipped a handkerchief in ether and put it on the face of the captain, who soon fell asleep. I picked up the knife again and with my bare hands I tried to remove what was hurting the man. I was lucky and fast. Soon I had in my hands a splinter the size of a finger, long and silvery, coming probably from a malfunctioning cannon.

I immediately dabbed the wound and closed it as I could, then disinfected it with iodine and put some yarrow leaves on it. Then I bandaged it and hoped that it was my lucky day.

I wanted to go home, but the man with the handsome face did not allow me to. In a few hours, my destiny would come to an end.

The weather became insolent and mocking, every moment I thought of her and her passionflower face, while I carefully watched the breath of the captain. Then I prepared magical infusions and decoctions, and for the first time I prayed for the safety of my family.

The prayer comes to the mind in times of despair, and it arrived without me noticing. It came silently, and I humbly clung to it as if it were my last chance.

I spent the whole day monitoring the patient, who remained motionless and pale. I feared the worst every time his breathing became longer and more imperceptible.

And then I suddenly healed him, and that was it. I forgot about the world, I became his Witchboy. There was nothing else but that wounded man to wake up.

I did what I could to lower his temperature, and in the meantime I changed his bandages several times.

It was at sunset that he moved. And I was free to go back with my mind to my family.

The man with the handsome face let me go and I flew to the America.

Still silence.

The front door was open and two soldiers were asleep in the kitchen. I sang the song of silence and cautiously I went upstairs. I went down the stairs to the dark room, and I wanted to scream when, near the end of the ladder twisted on itself, I realized that the dark room was open. The darkness that was inside invaded part of the stairs and I kept singing 'Maramao perché sei morto', my voice choked by despair. It was then that a hand, coming out of the darkness of the black room, clung to my throat, throwing me to the floor and making me bump my head against the hard steps.

It was the German who had accompanied me in the morning in the large room. His eyes were bulging, he was screaming and clenching my neck convulsively. I struggled to speak and I was weaker than him.

He was a terrified men, pale and with nervous hands that could not let go of my neck. I tried to climb the stairs with him clinging to my neck, drooling like a maniac. I was almost on top when the German was hit in the head and let go.

It had been the soldier with the handsome face. He had followed me and I had not noticed.

"Thanks," he just said with his harsh accent. He forced the other three to get out of my house. From the window I saw them disappear beyond the pergola.

And then I ran to her.

It took what seemed like an eternity, as they say the backward journey we do before dying is, and I saw everything again. I saw her again the first time that I had seen her at the white rock. I saw again her eyes shine, and again I heard her sing, and felt her take my hand to make me read incomprehensible words. I saw again her beautiful feet trapped under a giant and terrible body, and I saw again her naked body shine in the blue water.

When I got to the dark room I was crying.

"Andreuccia..." I said softly, "My Andreuccia..." I repeated.

"Febo..." she replied, faint and wonderful.

My heart seemed to explode in my chest with happiness.

"Wait, my love," I said straight off, without thinking. "I run to take the ladder and I am there!"

"No," she answered quickly. "There's the curfew, you can't go out, they would shoot you on sight. Stay with us. "

"I'll get a candle," I said then.

"No, don't leave us."

So I sat in the darkness of that empty room and I could enjoy them, and suddenly I realized that she had called my name, for the first time, and that sound coming from her throat was even sweeter and more desirable than any other sound.

And so I spent that night without seeing her, but with the happiness of knowing her still alive.

And we talked about everything and nothing, She told me of the soldier that had arrived suddenly in the dark room, talking like a madman. Then her brother had coughed and the man had gone to fetch a candle, but when he had returned, he had found all of the fireflies of the America to welcome him. And they had howled and whirled around him and had reduced him to nothing. The German had lost his mind.

She told me that she and her brother had covered their ears not to hear the terrible howling of dead and alive mixing and confounding.

Then suddenly they had heard my voice singing 'Maramao' and the German had clung to me not to die of fright.

On my part, I told her about the wounded German, and how I had healed him, and I told her about my fear, about the faces hidden behind the windows, and maybe I fell asleep while I was telling her of all my love.

# The silence

No German ever came to disturb my family again. Every day I treated the captain, and put him back up, although limping. They repaid me by not invading the America anymore.

They left in June, and with their flight the new allies arrived.

I saw them coming from the plain.

It was then that I realized that the worst evil of all wars was the lack of freedom they brought with them. The brutal repression of any kind of expression.

I had seen the townsfolk double-locking themselves in their houses and hide. I myself had bowed my head and obeyed without a murmur.

But that day a vision filled my heart with renewed happiness.

You can breathe peace even from soldiers.

I remember that that day I smelled cheerfulness again.

It was June 24, 1944. It was early, but the sun was already high. It was then that I saw walking along the town a platoon, in single file, wearing brown clothes, different from Germans'. Many little men, shorter than me, their faces yellow and smiling. The commander in front of the line spoke in French, I recognized it from the rustling words that came elegant to my healthy ear.

It was mainly Siride, though, to gift me with that memory of coveted reconciliation with the world.

She who gave me the thickness of the torpor under which they had crushed us in those years.

Siride, closed and wary, fearful and hostile.

Lame.

I remember her well, with her scarf well-pressed on her head and a flashy smile in her eyes, even though I was not convinced that it really started from her heart, maybe a little further, maybe from an arm, or even from her head.

But I saw her happy.

In the plain I watched her run limping towards that file of small men. I had never seen any like them. They were shorter than me and marched with tired, colourful and benevolent faces. They were not Americans, but neither Germans. Their leader was taller, more handsome, maybe.

That day I fell a little in love with those foreign men, yellow like a lukewarm sun, far from home and close to us. They surely were saviours. And with their short legs they seemed not to find peace of mind in their thick rhythmic steps. They smiled. They knew they were carriers of peace.

It was then that I saw Siride hug and kiss them, one by one.

Siride opened up to the soldiers, as does a flower of a cactus plant to the sun, just for one day, and for this it excites you.

She did not remove her scarf, no, but she kissed each of those men, hugging them. I did not hear what she was saying to each, but on the faces of those soldiers appeared a mixture of embarrassment and a shadow of unbecoming hope. Yes, they were the saviours, and they were glad of discovering it again in the kisses and hugs of an old ugly woman.

The little soldiers with their faces carved from fasting did not see her ugliness but only her joy.

And, from the constipated and closed woman that she was, I saw her transform into an angel of peace uttering kisses and hugs that did not hold back happiness.

The soldiers walked, their faces slightly crushed, but open and polite, maybe even for the perspective of a day that seemed destined to be cool and beautiful. They walked and advanced toward the town.

Siride was happy, and finally I saw her desire of infinite space, and thanks to her I sensed the badly contained desire of freedom of each of us, and in her, that day, I also understood the elegance of saying what we really are.

With Siride and thanks to her I savoured the taste of finally being free.

After the yellow men had passed by, I ran to Andreuccia and, taking her in my arms, I shouted that she could go back to life.

That day we opened all the windows of the America and she and her brother stuck their noses out.

They were paler than I remembered them at home, but in their faces you could read something other than happiness.

A sort of fear to trust someone again.

"We'll always be together," I said to both.

And both were silent, absorbed.

It was in the evening, before dinner, that we risked everything we did not imagine.

And the game saved us again.

We were happy and at the same time uncertain for a future that we did not know how to predict, so we decided to play. We were all children, Andreuccia perhaps a little less, but just for this she needed it most.

Her brother was the one who more than any other had absolute necessity of not thinking.

I put on my head an old cracked pot and ran to take a wool blanket with which I started to play the fool, and Andreuccia asked, "Who are you, a queen or a king?"

"A fool," I said. "Here ready for you."

"And who am I?" she asked me, her eyes shining with laughter.

"The housewife", I replied.

"Oh no dear, that I already am for real, I want to be someone else!"

"Then you'll be the foreman!"

I ran to the trunk and took my father's old threadbare jacket and a straw hat.

She wore it all and we burst out laughing.

"It needs a finishing touch," I said, taking a piece of black coal, and drawing on her pale face moustache curled at the edges and a black beard on her chin.

We were still laughing when we heard a knock at the door. The scare made us wince. We did not have time to go to the door that it swung open.

Strangers.

My fireflies seemed to have disappeared.

They were four. A family looking for a shelter that no one seemed to want to give them. A tall foreman with dark, gentle eyes, with eyebrows that filled his brow. He had big burnished hands, a thin and scared wife, an old curved mother and a very sweet daughter.

They were tired, they had been wandering for days and no one welcomed them.

"Too many women," they said in the farms and in houses in which they had sought asylum. "And with them too many dangers."

They had reached Rocca after long days of useless requests for help. Even in my town they had knocked on several doors, that had remained still as skeletons though. Then they heard a lot of shouting from afar, and gunfire too. So they had run with their hopes to the last house of the town.

My America.

We welcomed them, but it was not enough. Although it was useful. Although this took forever away from me my Andreuccia.

I remember the little girl, Giovanna was her name. She had a tense, afraid face. Her brown hair was tied to the sides of her head with two large bows that formed two ponytails.

Those bows ill-fitted her frightened little face, her large eyes and furrowed eyebrows.

She was held tight in her mother's arms, with her grandmother behind that seemed to want to protect both.

"There are Moroccans," the foreman said, "and they take women."

We all stood silent.

I turned toward Andreuccia and saw her tremble in the song of the fire. She was taking off her man clothes when I stopped her. She obeyed, understanding.

The lazy flame lit her up, so I pushed her into a dark corner with her brother and everyone else. It was then that I suddenly saw Elvira, my little adored firefly, enter the house, and she was upset, very upset. Even Andreuccia sensed her presence, but she said nothing.

Then it happened what made me choose, what made me lose forever my only great love.

Elvira barely brushed me, and I saw too far, things that I wouldn't want to see. Things that remained imprinted in my heart forever and made me choose a future of loneliness.

Perhaps it was Elvira, with her anxious and rash wind, or maybe it was the moon to open to me another world, a different possibility.

And I saw.

I saw what was going to happen.

I saw two big and black men come in.

Tall and strong men who ate our bread and drank our wine. Then, sated of food but with other hungers, they decided to get completely sated.

They levelled their guns on men, on all of us. For them, in the dark of the night lit only by a meagre fire and a burned-out candle, we were many men, even Andreuccia with her painted moustache, and my father's jacket and hat.

And I saw the other man approaching the only acceptable woman, the mother of the girl, to take her and enjoy her.

The girl clung convulsively to her, and the mother had eyes so scared that they could kill by pity alone.

I saw the grandmother shield her young daughter in law and the defenceless child. I saw her scream words too long dormant, gathered during the long starving months, the sleepless nights, the days spent wandering in search of respect for a family whose only defect was an excessive female presence.

I saw her scream loudly, "Begone, damn you, we have already given you everything we had!"

And I saw one of those, black as I had never seen, obsessed by the desire of a body that was not his to have, fire a shot. A shot that should only have scared us, but that bounced off the floor and smashed the girl's legs. A shot that passed through both of them, small and lean as they were, from side to side, two round wounds as large as a finger that I would not be able to cure.

I also saw the two men run away and saw our inability to take the child to the military hospital of Bagno Vignoni.

I saw Giovannina die in the dismayed arms of her mother, her grandmother, her father.

And then I saw the silence.

The silence that would accompany them forever.

A silence that all three of them would have brought along.

A silence that would appease only after their death.

And I decided.

I decided to lose Andreuccia.

We were all in a corner and the fire lit did not warm the cold that came only from our own fear. After less than two minutes, a couple of big black men came through the door, and my house was violated for the second time.

Then all the fireflies appeared and stood firm to the side. Only little Elvira started to go around the child.

She spun slowly on the little girl and seemed to desperately act for her as a protecting hood.

The men, big and strong, black as I had never seen, ate and drank a lot. Then, sated of food but not of other things, pointed their rifle to us all.

They only wanted the girl's mother. And Giovannina, terrified, clung to her mother.

Maybe it was the sight of Elvira to take me to pity, she would have done anything to keep the little girl alive. Or maybe it was the silence that I had sensed would accompany them for the rest of their days without Giovannina and her ponytails.

The old grandmother was about to start screaming when, from behind, I shut her mouth whispering, "Shut up, you don't know what could happen."

The old woman looked at me askance. I saw that she was not used to silence, but surprise left her speechless.

Even the father tried to move, but my hand and the rifle pointed against his chest blocked him.

Andreuccia saw that I prevented both from defending the woman from certain violence and looked at me with hostility. She thought of herself, then only of my cowardice.

"Bon," the black man said, winking to me, and they brought the little girl's mother in the cellar.

One pointed the rifle at us and the other was in the cellar. Then they changed places.

And they went.

# Starting again

Andreuccia and her brother would soon leave to go to Rome, with the foreman and his family.

Me, as the kid that I was, and as the coward I had proven to be, would not have been able to take care of them.

I wanted to shout to the world what I had seen, but I did not. I did not have the courage.

And then, after all, maybe I deserved it.

Andreuccia immediately felt sympathetic to that humiliated mother, and became the older sister of the girl with the two ponytails and two intact legs.

The brother of Andreuccia would be an additional male in the family.

They asked me if I wanted to go with them.

But the eyes of the foreman's wife could not look at me.

And I had to wait for my father. There I had the America, my fireflies and the moon.

None of these reasons would have been enough to make me renounce to her. The truth was that I could not stand the reproachful look of Andreuccia.

She no longer believed in me.

Now there was a real foreman in her life, a foreman with a wife and a daughter, a brave man she could always trust.

They stayed a few more days at the America, days made of preparations, of sadness and tears, of silences broken by muffled sobs in the night.

Then Andreuccia, with her new family, moved to her old and small house next to the school. The wife of the foreman hated my house and her little girl was afraid of it as much as Andreuccia's brother.

They went a few steps away from the America, though already far.

I had to learn to live alone. For the first time.

A continuous solitude that Zeno only partially placated with his gift.

He came to the America one evening and I heard him cough outside, under the pergola. It was a fake cough, one of those made on purpose to be heard.

I longed earthly presences so much that I ran to him.

"They told me you've been good with those two children, the little Jewess and her brother," he said, his eyes serious.

"I did what everybody would have done."

"It's not true Febo, and we both know it well". He fell silent.

"You know that her father was taken by the Germans?" I shrugged. I knew, but I did not tell him, and he went on.

"I wonder if he will ever come back home? Probably he's already dead."

Death is strange. It catches you anyway, even if you do not want, even if maybe you deserve it. And I knew that the man of whom I had only seen the shoulders, like of my mother, would not return.

But Zeno went on, "The only one who defended them in the whole Rocca was you. We preferred to turn our heads not to see."

I wanted to say something, but suddenly I lacked imagination.

"A child alone who even dares to act as a doctor," he said, more to himself than to me, looking at the America. He was not judging me, though, although he knew that I had lied to everyone, I had pretended to be something I was not. And he continued, "Maybe you'll really become a great doctor, but the most important thing is that you will definitely be a great man, even greater than your father."

Zeno spoke little, but when he did it came from inside.

"I've got a present for you, I left it at the beginning of the street, because I didn't know if you were home."

He returned after a couple of minutes with the theorbo.

"Remember the traveller? He was one who was escaping from fascists. He was a man against nature, he loved men instead of women, but when he asked me to play in the church I could not say no. He was running and he wanted to play one last time. The instrument was too big and heavy and would have prevented him from escaping. Can you deny one last wish those who have too many people looking for them?" I waved no.

"He told me to keep it for when he'll be back. If I had not seen him again, he told me to give it to that red boy who seemed so fascinated by his theorbo."

"Maybe he will come back..." I told him, excited

"Maybe. But in the meantime you keep it, and if you want, learn to play it."

And I learned to play the theorbo, badly, but something came out of it. It was too big and too difficult for me without any notion of music, but note after note I managed to create a strange melody. Sweet, sour and melancholic. Simple, but still music. I played it at night, in the dark room, where no one would hear me, apart from my lights, where no one would say I was presumptuous. I dreamed of singing lullabies to Andreuccia and her little curly brother. I saw them in the dark in the loft without ladder, and maybe my tears accompanied my melody out of tune.

The theorbo partly filled my nights, but not my days.

A long and winding loneliness that clouded my joy of living and that not even the return of Gisella placated.

I really wanted to resume the old habits and go with her to walk in the woods, and learn so much more, but it was Gisella herself to say no.

I saw her come to the America on a summer morning. She was wearing trousers tucked into brown leather boots and a black shirt with a vest over it. She was more beautiful than usual, more woman, even with the trousers.

She whistled at me from the pergola and I recognized her even though I had never heard her whistling.

I flew to her, and I realized I was now taller than her.

She ruffled my hair.

"How big you are now Febo", she said, suddenly realizing how much time had passed.

I shrugged. I wanted to cry in her arms like I had done that day at her house, but I did not feel like doing it, because Gisella was happy. And if I had so much desire to be little again, and not think about anything, and forget about the world, she instead had begun to live. You could tell from her shining eyes, from her hollow and colourful cheeks, from her nose, quivering as if to sniff life.

Gisella had changed. Before she had been just a smart woman, now she was a happy smart woman.

We walked through the wood and she told me about life in the mountains, ambushes to the fascists, her dead comrades.

Then she told me that she had heard great things about me.

"The Witchboy eh, so they call you. Do you like it?"

I did not answer, I had never thought about it. I just knew that to protect Andreuccia I had to be a believable Witchboy.

"They told me you've healed many people, even a Nazi!"

I looked down. Gisella fought them and I healed them.

And she again, like in the past, understood my thoughts and, stopping me, took my face in her hands and said in a loud voice, "You need not be ashamed, Febo. You have healed a man who was in need. We are all equal before the cosmos. You will become a great... Witchboy."

And then I told her about my living with Andreuccia and her brother, and about the Nazis, but I did not mention the story of the Moroccans.

We reached the clearing of Febo II without me noticing.

"Where are we?" Gisella asked.

"At Febo II". And I showed her the tombstone on which there were no flowers, and thorns had grown.

"Febo Bianchini," she whispered. "Born when you were born..."

She looked at me surprised, then looked at the tombstone again. We sat in silence, and for the first time I dared to ask her something important, something that I had never had the courage to ask.

"What secret have you been hiding? What were you talking about, that day, with Beba?"

She smiled a faraway smile. Some wrinkles creased the corners of her eyes as I had never seen before. She had learned to live with the fullness of her intelligence.

"It was not me to hide secrets Febo" she said after too long a time for my hunger for knowledge. "You know me, I am a woman of science, seeking truths, and I was seeking for the truths of Beba. I hate deception, lies, ignorance. I will not deny that I did not like her, too obedient to the church, too prone to fear, too fearful of God and jinxes. I especially didn't like that she was so subdued to oaths as not to see what would have been good. Good for you."

"Oaths? What oaths?"

"I don't know Febo, Beba took them with her in the grave."

"Secrets? Things that concern me?"

"Maybe Febo, but I know nothing more. That first morning that you had to come to my house to study, when I told you to go see Beba. Do you remember?" I nodded.

"I talked to her and I had almost convinced her, maybe she had even felt threatened. She had to tell what she knew. It didn't interest me, but if there was something you didn't know, about your past, she had a duty to tell you. I saw her falter in front of my passion, and I knew that I was right. She knew something that concerned you, of which only her and who knows who else could know. That day she was afraid of my threats and perhaps she would have told you everything you needed to know."

She was silent, as if to recall a too distant time.

"But you didn't come to me, so you didn't pass under her house. You decided to stay at the America, and forgot about Beba, and later I was more concerned with your education than with a secret held by a silly housewife. However, I tried again after she fell ill. Do you remember when you found us there arguing? But nothing, she was a wall again."

"But what is this secret? How do you know of its existence?"

She said nothing, restless.

"Rumours, Febo, things murmured in the work, gossips haunting like ghosts."

I thought of my fireflies.

"Tell me about these rumours," I asked.

"No, Febo. I never report anything murmured by old gossipers."

I knew she would never told me more than that. Maybe my fireflies knew something.

I suddenly felt them around me. But how to hear their voices clearly?

They all fell silent.

Or maybe they told me things that I did not want to know, words that would take away my freedom and bind me forever to Rocca, from where now I only wanted to escape.

I learned that I would never know.

On the way home, Gisella told me that the cook had reported her of all the books that I had taken and read.

"Keep them Febo, and read them again every day. I will not be there. The war brought so many deaths and so many orphans and widows, and too much work to do. Only this way I can make myself useful to others."

So it was that Gisella kissed me goodbye, giving me all of her books and flying to save needy souls, like mine had been once.

# The Long Night of the Fireflies

They would all go to Rome. There was a cousin of the foreman's wife waiting for them there. She would welcome them gladly for some time. They did not know how long they would stay with her, but their precise plan was to wait for the right time to move to Genoa. In Genoa, in fact, the foreman had a sister, some nephews, a house, a new life. If the war had passed without leaving damage, of course.

They would wait in Rome for the Allies to free Italy and, at that point, in that city on the sea, the story of a new family could begin.

I had only one wish left, kiss my Andreuccia goodbye alone. Kiss her goodbye and take off her that last image of a cowardly Febo.

And that poor girl did not know that I had really been cowardly, but not that night, rather one morning, before the school opening, in front of a house with yellow curtains. I had cowardly ran away in front of her beautiful prisoner feet, and maybe I knew I deserved her contempt more than she suspected.

I had learned a great lesson, life gives you back what you give it, even though not always from the direction you would expect.

I longed that she had of me a different memory, a memory that was ours only.

It occurred to me when I saw that man. I did not recognize him immediately, but he recognized me. I welcomed him in my house like you welcome spring after a foggy winter, and he was not afraid of my floating souls, he understood.

It was the 13th of September of 1944.

The following day they would leave.

Night had already invaded the streets, but down in the town you could hear the cheerful noise of children left free to roam where they wanted. It seemed that the end of summer was late to come, perhaps longing for a cheerfulness it had missed too long.

And I, unlike everyone else, was flooded with a sad melancholy that ill-fitted my way of being.

The moon was thin like the one that children draw, and millions of distant stars shone scattered in the sky.

But I did not want that, I wanted something ours, something that did not belong to anyone but us.

We had set an appointment at the pergola of the America at nine, but my preparations had been frantic, also because I had to find a lot of material.

However, now everything was ready for us.

She arrived and, with her white dress and her hair tied in a braid, she seemed smaller, more beautiful, more unattainable.

We did not speak, but I took her hand and led her up the streets of Rocca. She laughed and asked, "Where are you taking me?", but I, like a real man, did not answer.

We arrived at the church of Saint Simeone. I started to open the gate when she stopped me saying, "I'm not Catholic, I don't want to go in the church."

"Now it will not be a church for us, but the house of a boy and a girl."

I opened the door and saw her face go from hostile to surprised to amazed.

"They look like fireflies" she said, enchanted, "many little lights gathered in our house!"

"Yes," I replied, my heart full of love. "This will be our long night of the fireflies."

I had moved the benches on one side and filled the church with many small candles. It had taken a lot to achieve that effect, and I had gone to look for them up to San Quirico.

A dense swarm of fireflies seemed to be there only for us.

Or a cemetery where we would said goodbye.

We sat down and stood silent.

And in that church, for the first time, we really loved each other. Of a higher love, magical, comforting, immense and eternal, that few have experienced.

The church was made warmer by all the candles that flared shyly.

There, I created my third dream.

There I spent the most fervent hours of my life.

And while we looked into each other's eyes, holding hands, we heard a music that came from the outside, a theorbo, a light and reassuring music that invaded our souls in unison.

The player had survived. He had returned to get back the theorbo, and I had welcomed him in the America. He had immediately understood a love that only those who have experienced it intimately are able to understand, and he had decided to play for me, for us, for a new freedom.

I speak on behalf of Andreuccia as well as mine because that night, from two we became one. And we put all the passion of which we were capable in our hands, that barely brushed, and there, motionless, we listened to the beat of our hungry hearts.

In her eyes, but I'm sure in mine too, there was an eternal love that would not end with us, but would wander eternally as long as at least one being on earth would love.

A feeling present and strong, gentle and violent at the same time, a love tangible, like pressing energy.

Nothing more than love happened, a foolish and futile feeling for many, indispensable to me like oxygen.

And hand in hand we stood in silence, dreaming of a life together, passing each other all that we would no more be able to give. And our hands found themselves immediately warm of all that fullness, and I saw her cheeks become red as if I had kissed her.

But between us there was more than a kiss, more than a life together, it was all and immediately. I gave myself to her and I knew that she was giving me an Andreuccia whom she had not been able to love. I took that small woman and made her become a brilliant, licking away from her all of the bad things that life had subjected her to, and then returned it to her as my most immense gesture of love.

And she took back a different girl, ready for a new life.

A girl that I would never know.

# The letter

Before that letter arrived, my heart was in full turmoil.

It was a time when I wanted to leave to discover the world, but even more I wanted to go to Genoa and see Andreuccia and her brother, and tell them to leave that family, already full, and come back to me. But I could not.

Andreuccia had made her choice, she had found a solid and welcoming home, a mother who would always understand her, a father who would really respect and protect her, her and her brother.

I had to accept it.

Gisella, as the brave partisan that she was, was devoting herself today to a new cause, that of children orphaned by war, and there were many. She said that I understood about herbs almost more than she did, and that I had something she did not have, I could see beyond.

Zeno, thinking that I was old enough, had left me to manage my land to go back to be just a farmer, which was most appropriate to him.

Accounting was not, however, my destiny. I wanted more, I wanted to learn. And from money I learned very little, if not that to have it you had to take it away from others.

People made long queues to talk to me, but they wanted a chiromancer, not a true healer.

But a strong desire, an absolute need, kept binding me to Val d'Orcia. Waiting for my father.

That letter solved all problems. A few words, but the world to me. A letter that brought me a new and violent emotion.

A feeling so quivering and complete that it was the cause of my fourth wondrous thought.

"My dear son.

Only now I learn of the death of your mother. I've been fighting our war, and we won, but because of a mine I have been bedridden for a long time. Now I'm fine, although I will limp forever.

My heart bleeds at the very thought of having left you alone all this time. I know that many people have taken care of my beloved Febo, but I guarantee you that from now on I'll be there for you.

Sell everything and reach me in America. Here is the ticket that will take you from Genoa to me. I will be waiting for you at the harbour.

Your father Attilio Bianchini"

I was fifteen and I sold all my lands. My house, instead, I left as a donation to Sara Andrea Rossi Coen.

I wonder if she would ever come back... maybe after the death of her parents she would have a desire to see the America again, that 'fortress' that had been her prison and her salvation, and then I would be able to join her and together we would finally crown our love dream.

But it was a dream, and I knew it.

The notary would deliver the letter to Andreuccia, anyway, while I would already be on the ship to the new world, turned toward my father.

The letter dispelled all of my doubts. Finally, someone who thought and decided for me.

I was big. I, Febo Bianchini, in my proud fifteen-year-old frame. And I had in my pocket a one-way ticket to America, the real one, across the ocean.

I had no regrets. Andreuccia had left, and maybe in me vibrated the strong hope to see her one last time at the port.

Beba had been blown away, her body emaciated by the disease. Gisella had given me everything she could, and now she had in her heart only her cause for war orphans.

Nothing more bound me to that golden valley, made of flowers and fruits, of elegant beasts and unlearned and good men, with an atavistic culture coming from a generous land.

Zeno and maybe her sister too.

It is true that each of us rebels against a destiny only when life gives him a chance, and if at that time he can muster enough courage to do it.

Zeno and Siride were the only ones that I saw from the bus. I recognized him from his white hair and her from her lopsided walk.

I could not read, then, the lips of their old mouths.

And maybe I would not have understood what they said to each other. A thought sprang to my heart for a moment, then vanished forever in meanders of the unconscious.

"Maybe we should have told him," Zeno said more to himself than to others.

"What?" Siride answered. "Of a love that broke out between a handsome man and a ugly woman?" She was silent for a moment. "Or about a man who, in the midst of the madness of his wife, did not see any better solutions than falling in love with another woman? Or maybe we should have told him that they tear him away from my arms because it was not love, because the baby of the crazy woman died after less than a month and he became his bland substitute. Tell him what Zeno? That I did not want to see him? That we gave him up to a mad woman who no longer wanted to live? That we forced him into her arms because if I'd kept him I would have become a bad woman, and that out of cowardice I never demanded my only great love? Tell him what? Zeno my dear?"

I could not understand. Or maybe I did not want to know about a love that would have killed me with pain, or that I would not be able to understand. A truth that would make me give up on life itself, the search for the mystery, the knowledge, the unknown of another world. I forgot about them, about Rocca, about my America and maybe even about Andreuccia and her brother.

But they were always in my heart.

It was still dark when I left my valley. Rocca loomed tall and still over me, the America had by then disappeared from my sight, and a swarm of fireflies, true ones and ones that had lived in different times, lightly floated to say goodbye to me.

The pale moon, instead, would follow me faithfully.

Zeno and Siride did not wave me goodbye. Not a gesture, not a hinted movement.

It surprised me not a little, however, to see Siride suddenly take off her black scarf from her head and discover a mass of red curls exactly the same as mine.

#  To read only in case you liked the book

To date, the price of an advertisement on TV can be up to 220,000 € (one single ad costs more than the mortgage of my house!) without choosing specific programs of which I dare not imagine the price. Considering this fact quite indecent for various reasons (not least the economic crisis that we are, unfortunately, forced to pay, going through infinite roads up to the obscene interruption of films to show us advertisements of intimate moments), I ask, to those who think like me, to look for other ways.

I believe in real people and word of mouth rather than in the falsity of a message repeated endlessly in order to impose a behaviour. I believe in the power of writing and in human intelligence rather than in brainwashing. If, and only if you liked this book, give it to a friend (if you can) and maybe we will make together a small battle against one of the great economy monsters.

#

# Acknowledgements

Thanks to Michele Pasotti, for the concert of theorbo and medieval guitar he held in the church of Saint Simeone, exciting and inspirational.

To Cristina Moretti for her sweet poem.

To Dente, Severo for me, a man and partisan of great moral stature. The man who made me love that America.

To my dad, to my mom.

To my grandfather Gino for his short stories.

To Cristina and Marco, the booksellers of Capoliveri.

To Simone Gallorini of Librorcia.

To Vincenzo Ganci of Dulcinea.

To the architects Alessio Galasso, Andrea Pianigiani and Mascia Cioli (also sister of life)

Thank also to those who have helped me since my first book, the actresses Stefania Casini and Debora Villa, the professional publisher Beatrice Meacci, Raffaele Giannetti and Lorenzo Meacci.

To the photographer Giancarlo Soldi.

To the 'barmen' Valeriano Rossi and Mauro Capecchi.

To Luca Zamperini and the farm 'Il Poggio Grande'.

To the publisher Mario Papalini.

To Sienalibri.

To the cultural association Astrolabio and Graziella Faralli.

To Annalisa Coppolaro Norwell, to the DJ Cesare Guidotti, Radio Siena.

To Constanza Giunti and "Friend plants for prevention, care and welfare" Annulli Editore.

Thanks for the historical memories to my large family and www.memoriaeimpegno.org.

To my husband and our daughters.

To the photographer Franco FrandinaIl and the director Gianfranco Carotenuto for his video.

For the availability shown to me over the years, thanks to the City of San Quirico d'Orcia, Radicofani, Castiglione d'Orcia and Capoliveri.

#

# The author

Giada Guidotti was born in the hills of Tuscany. She teaches theatre to groups of children and teenagers.

She has already published two novels:

"Nudo di donne" Effigi Editore, 2011

"Una piccolo pietra di melanite" Zona Editore, 2010

 The author's blog

