In that house I had the same feeling. I wanted to jump down. Then I remembered reading in one of Salvatore’s books that lizards can climb up walls because they have perfect weight distribution. They spread their weight over their legs, stomach and tail, whereas human beings put all theirs on their feet and that’s why they sink into quicksand.
Yes, that was what I must do.
I knelt down, lay flat and started to crawl along. At every movement I made, bits of masonry and tiles fell down. Light, light as a lizard, I repeated to myself. I felt the beams quiver. It took me a full five minutes but I reached the other side safe and sound.
I pushed the door. It was the last one. At the other end was the window that overlooked the yard. A long branch snaked across to the house. I had made it. Here too the floor had fallen through, but only half of it. The other half had held. I used the old technique, walking flat against the wall. Below I could see another dimly lit room. There were the remains of a fire, some opened cans of tomatoes and empty packets of pasta. Somebody must have been there not long ago.
I reached the window without mishap. I looked down.
There was a small yard skirted by a row of brambles and the wood behind it pressing in. On the ground there was a cracked cement trough, a rusty crane jib, piles of masonry covered in ivy, a gas cylinder and a mattress.
The branch I had to get onto was close – less than a metre away. Not close enough, however, to be reachable without jumping. It was thick and twisty like an anaconda. It stretched over more than five metres. It would carry my weight. Once I reached the other end I would find a way to get down.
I stood up on the window sill, crossed myself, and threw myself arms first, like a gibbon in the Amazon forest. I landed face down on the branch. I tried to grip it, but it was big. I used my legs but there was nothing to get hold of. I started to slip. I tried to claw onto the bark.
Salvation was right in front of me. There was a smaller branch just a few dozen centimetres away.
I steeled myself and with a sudden lunge grabbed it with both hands.
It was dry. It snapped.
I landed on my back. I lay still, with my eyes closed, certain I had broken my neck. I couldn’t feel any pain. I lay there, petrified, with the branch in my hands, trying to understand why I wasn’t suffering. Maybe I had become a paralytic who, even if you stub out a cigarette on his arm and stick a fork into his thigh, doesn’t feel a thing.
I opened my eyes. I gazed at the vast green umbrella of the oak that loomed over me. The glittering of the sun between the leaves. I must try and raise my head. I raised it.
I threw that stupid branch away. I touched the ground with my hands. And I discovered I was on something soft. The mattress.
I had a flashback of myself falling, flying and crashing down without hurting myself. There had been a dull, hollow sound at the exact moment I had landed. I had heard it, I could have sworn it.
I moved my feet and discovered that under the leaves, the twigs and the earth there was a green corrugated sheet, a transparent fibre-glass roof. It had been covered up, as if to hide it. And that old mattress had been put on top of it.
It was the corrugated sheet that had saved me. It had bent and absorbed the force of my fall.
So underneath it must be hollow.
It might be a secret hiding place or a tunnel leading to a cave full of gold and precious stones.
I got down on my hands and knees and pushed the sheet forward.
It was heavy, but gradually I managed to shift it a little. A terrible stink of shit was released.
I swayed, put one hand over my mouth and pushed again.
I had fallen on top of a hole.
It was dark. But the further I shifted the fibre-glass sheet the lighter it became. The walls were made of earth, dug with a spade. The roots of the oak had been cut.
I managed to move it a bit further. The hole was a couple of metres wide and two, two and a half metres deep.
It was empty.
No, there was something there.
A heap of rolled-up rags?
No …
An animal? A dog? No …
What was it?
It was hairless …
white …
a leg …
A leg!
I jumped backwards and nearly tripped over.
A leg?
I took a deep breath and had a quick look down.
It was a leg.
I felt my ears boil, my head and arms hang heavy.
I was going to pass out.
I sat down, shut my eyes, rested my forehead on one hand, and breathed in. I was tempted to run away, run to the others. But I couldn’t. I had to have another look first.
I went forward and peered over.
It was a boy’s leg. And sticking out of the rags was an elbow.
At the bottom of that hole there was a boy.
He was lying on one side. His head was hidden between his legs.
He wasn’t moving.
He was dead.
I stood looking at him for God knows how long. There was a bucket too. And a little saucepan.
Maybe he was asleep.
I picked up a small stone and threw it at the boy. I hit him on the thigh. He didn’t move. He was dead. Dead as a doornail. A shiver bit the back of my head. I picked up another stone and hit him on the neck. I thought he moved. A slight movement of the arm.
‘Where are you? Where are you? Where’ve you got to, you pansy?’
The others! Skull was calling me.
I grabbed the corrugated sheet and pulled it till it covered the hole. Then I spread out the leaves and earth and put the mattress back on top.
‘Where are you, Michele?’
I went away, but first I turned round a couple of times to check that everything was in place.
I was pedalling along on the Crock.
The sun behind me was a huge red ball, and when it finally sank into the wheat it disappeared, leaving behind it something orange and purple.
They had asked me how I had got on in the house, if it had been dangerous, if I had fallen down, if there were any strange things in there, if jumping onto the tree had been difficult. I had answered in monosyllables.
Finally, bored, we had started back. A path led out of the valley, crossed the ochre fields and reached the road. We had collected our bikes and were pedalling along in silence. Swarms of midges hummed around us.
I looked at Maria, who was following me on her Graziella with its tyres worn by the stones, Skull, out in front, with his squire Remo beside him, Salvatore zigzagging along, Barbara on her oversize Bianchi, and I thought about the boy in the hole.
I wasn’t going to say anything to anyone.
‘Finders keepers,’ Skull had decided.
If that was so, the boy at the bottom of the hole was mine.
If I told them, Skull, as always, would take all the credit for the discovery. He would tell everyone he had found him because it had been his decision to climb the hill.
Not this time. I had done the forfeit, I had fallen out of the tree and I had found him.
He wasn’t Skull’s. He wasn’t Barbara’s either. He wasn’t Salvatore’s. He was mine. He was my secret discovery.
I didn’t know if I had discovered a dead person or a living one. Maybe the arm hadn’t moved. I had imagined it. Or maybe they were the contractions of a corpse. Like those of wasps, which keep on walking even if you cut them in two with scissors, or like chickens, which flap their wings even when they’ve lost their heads. But what was he doing in there?
‘What are we going to tell mama?’
I hadn’t noticed my sister was riding beside me. ‘What?’
‘What are we going to tell mama?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Will you tell her about the glasses?’
‘Okay, but you mustn’t tell her anything about where we went. If she finds out she’ll say you broke them because we went up there.??
?
‘All right.’
‘Swear.’
‘I swear.’ She kissed her forefingers.
Nowadays Acqua Traverse is a district of Lucignano. In the mid-Eighties a local building surveyor put up two long rows of houses made of reinforced concrete. Cubes with round windows, light blue railings and iron rods sticking out of the roofs. Then a Co-op arrived and a bar-cum-tobacconist’s. And an asphalted two-way road that runs straight as an airport runway to Lucignano.
In 1978 Acqua Traverse was so small it was practically non-existent. A country hamlet, they would call it nowadays in a travel magazine.
No one knew why it was called Acqua Traverse, not even old Tronca. There certainly wasn’t any water there, except what they brought in a tanker once a fortnight.
There was Salvatore’s villa, which we called the Palazzo. A big house built in the nineteenth century, long and grey with a big stone porch and an inner courtyard with a palm tree. And there were four other houses. Just four. Four drab little houses made of stone and mortar with tiled roofs and small windows. Ours. The one belonging to Skull’s family. The one belonging to Remo’s family, who shared it with old Tronca. Tronca was deaf and his wife had died, and he lived in two rooms overlooking the vegetable garden. And then there was the house of Pietro Mura, Barbara’s father. Angela, his wife, had a shop on the ground floor where you could buy bread, pasta and soap. And you could make phone calls.
Two houses on one side, two on the other. And a road, rough and full of holes, in the middle. There was no piazza. There were no lanes. But there were two benches under a pergola of strawberry vines and a drinking fountain which had a tap so that water wouldn’t be wasted. All around, the wheatfields.
The only thing of note in that place forgotten by God and man was a nice blue road sign which displayed in capital letters the words ACQUA TRAVERSE.
‘Papa’s home!’ my sister shouted. She threw down her bike and ran up the steps.
Parked in front of our house was his truck, a Fiat Lupetto with a green tarpaulin.
At that time papa was working as a truck driver and would be away for weeks at a time. He collected the goods and carried them to the North.
He had promised he would take me with him to the North one day. I couldn’t imagine this North very clearly. I knew the North was rich and the South was poor. And we were poor. Mama said that if papa kept working so hard, soon we wouldn’t be poor any longer, we would be well off. So we mustn’t complain if papa wasn’t there. He was doing it for us.
I went into the house still out of breath.
Papa was sitting at the table in his vest and pants. He had a bottle of red wine in front of him and a cigarette in its holder between his lips and my sister perched on one thigh.
Mama, with her back to us, was cooking. There was a smell of onions and tomato sauce. The television, a big boxlike black-and-white Grundig, which papa had brought home a few months earlier, was on. The ventilator fan was humming.
‘Michele, where’ve you been all day? Your mother was at her wits’ end. Haven’t you got any consideration for the poor woman? She’s always having to wait for her husband, she shouldn’t have to wait for you too. And what happened to your sister’s glasses?’
He wasn’t really angry. When he was really angry his eyes bulged like a toad’s. He was happy to be home.
My sister looked at me.
‘We built a hut by the stream.’ I took the glasses out of my pocket. ‘And they got broken.’
He spat out a cloud of smoke. ‘Come over here. Let’s see.’
Papa was a small man, thin and restless. When he sat in the driving seat of his truck he almost vanished behind the wheel. He had black hair, smoothed down with brilliantine. A rough white beard on his chin. He smelt of Nazionali and eau de cologne.
I gave him the glasses.
‘They’re a write-off.’ He put them on the table and said: ‘That’s it. No more glasses.’
My sister and I looked at each other.
‘What am I going to do?’ she asked anxiously.
‘Go without. That’ll teach you.’
My sister was speechless.
‘She can’t. She can’t see,’ I interposed.
‘Who cares?’
‘But …’
‘No buts.’ And he said to mama: ‘Teresa, give me that parcel on the kitchen cabinet.’
Mama brought it over. Papa unwrapped it and took out a hard velvety blue case. ‘Here you are.’
Maria opened it and inside was a pair of glasses with brown plastic frames.
‘Try them on.’
Maria put them on, but kept stroking the case.
Mama asked her: ‘Do you like them?’
‘Yes. They’re lovely. The box is beautiful.’ And she went to look at herself in the mirror.
Papa poured himself another glass of wine.
‘If you break these, next time you’ll go without, do you understand?’ Then he took me by the arm. ‘Let me feel that muscle.’
I bent my arm and stiffened it.
He squeezed my biceps. ‘I don’t think you’ve improved. Are you doing your press-ups?
‘Yes.’
I hated doing press-ups. Papa wanted me to do them because he said I was puny.
‘It’s not true,’ said Maria. ‘He’s not doing them.’
‘I do them now and again. Almost always.’
‘Come here.’ I sat on his knee too and tried to kiss him. ‘Don’t you kiss me, you’re all dirty. If you want to kiss your father, you’ve got to wash first. Teresa, what shall we do, send them to bed without supper?’
Papa had a nice smile, perfect white teeth. Neither my sister nor I has inherited them.
Mama replied without even turning round.
‘It’d be no more than they deserve! I can’t stand any more of these two.’ She really was angry.
‘Let’s say this. If they want to have supper and get the present I’ve brought them, Michele’s got to beat me at arm-wrestling. Otherwise, bed with no supper.’
He’d brought us a present!
‘You and your jokes …’ Mama was too happy that papa was home again. When papa went away her stomach hurt, and the more time passed the less she talked. After a month she went completely mute.
‘Michele can’t beat you. It’s not fair,’ said my sister.
‘Michele, show your sister what you can do. And keep those legs apart. If you sit crooked you’ll lose straight away and there’ll be no present.’
I got into position. I clenched my teeth and gripped papa’s hand and started to push. Nothing. He didn’t budge.
‘Go on! Have you got ricotta instead of muscles? You’re weaker than a gnat! Put your back into it, for God’s sake!’
I murmured: ‘I can’t do it.’
It was like bending an iron bar.
‘You’re a sissy, Michele. Maria, help him, come on!’
My sister climbed on the table and together, gritting our teeth and breathing through our noses, we managed to get him to lower that arm.
‘The present! Give us the present!’ Maria jumped down from the table.
Papa picked up a cardboard box full of crumpled-up newspaper. Inside was the present.
‘A boat!’ I said.
‘It’s not a boat, it’s a gondola,’ papa explained.
‘What’s a gondola?’
‘Gondolas are Venetian boats. And they only use one oar.’
‘What’s an oar?’ my sister asked.
‘A stick to move a boat with.’
It was really beautiful. Made of black plastic. With little silvery pieces and at the end a little figure in a red-and-white striped shirt and a straw hat.
But we discovered that we weren’t allowed to handle it. It was made to be put on the television. And between the television and the gondola there would have to be a white lace doily. Like a little lake. It wasn’t a toy. It was something precious. An ornament.
‘Whose turn is it to fetch t
he water? It’ll be suppertime soon,’ mama asked us.
Papa was in front of the television watching the news.
I was laying the table. I said: ‘It’s Maria’s turn. I went yesterday.’
Maria was sitting in the armchair with her dolls. ‘I don’t feel like it, you go.’
Neither of us liked going to the drinking fountain so we took turns, one day each. But papa had come home and to my sister this meant the rules no longer applied.
I gestured no with my finger. ‘It’s your turn.’
Maria folded her arms. ‘I’m not going.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’ve got a headache.’
Whenever she didn’t want to do something she said she had a headache. It was her favourite excuse.
‘It’s not true, you haven’t got a headache, liar.’
‘Yes I have!’ And she started massaging her forehead with a pained expression on her face.
I felt like throttling her. ‘It’s her turn! She’s got to go!’
Mama, exasperated, put the jug in my hands. ‘You go, Michele, you’re the eldest. Don’t make such a fuss.’ She said it as if it was a trivial matter, something quite unimportant.
A smile of triumph spread on my sister’s lips. ‘See?’
‘It’s not fair. I went yesterday. I’m not going.’
Mama said to me with that harsh tone that came into her voice a moment before she lost her temper: ‘Do as you’re told, Michele.’
‘No.’ I went over to papa to complain. ‘Papa, it’s not my turn. I went yesterday.’
He took his eyes off the television and looked at me as if it was the first time he had ever seen me, stroked his mouth and said: ‘Do you know the soldier’s draw?’
‘No. What is it?’
‘Do you know what the soldiers did during the war to decide who went on the dangerous missions?’ He took a box of matches out of his pocket and showed it to me.