In Calabria Page 10

  Bianchi always remembered the black unicorn as far huger than it could have been, as though somehow magnified a hundred or a thousand times by the mist through which it strode. Its blackness made both the word and the color meaningless: it appeared to him like night folded in midnight and hammered into something resembling a great animal, magnificently grotesque. There was no way that he could have realized it fully: if La Signora’s beauty was barely comprehensible to human vision, her mate could exist for such vision only as fury. The horn blazed and rippled, pointing across the freezing wind straight at his heart. The eyes beneath were the color of lightning.

  “No,” Bianchi whispered into the blackness. “No, Signor . . .”

  He closed his eyes, because the eyes of the black unicorn were too terrible to meet, and flailed his legs as wildly as an infant, struggling to dismount with no assurance that he would not plummet through immortality to shatter like a cheap watch on an earth centuries below. But instead he tumbled no more than two feet, landing erect, though the unexpected impact juddered through all his bones, snapped his teeth on his tongue, and promptly gave him a grinding headache behind his eyes. He lurched forward, but somehow kept his balance and stood swaying, arms out as though he were either trying to keep from falling or yearning after something wonderful and gone. And for the life of him, at that moment Claudio Bianchi could not himself have said which was so.

  Nor could he have told where or when he was—or, really, if he was—for he seemed completely uncentered, derailed, at right angles to everything he assumed. He was certainly standing in what looked quite a bit like his own vineyard, except that, like all else he saw—his fields, his cow barn, his ancient Studebaker—it had turned a pale, almost colorless gray-green; nor would it stay quite still, but kept shivering faintly in and out of focus . . . unless he were the one shifting, blurring, unable to take hold on the world. Is this what La Signora came to tell me, after all? Is this what living looks like to the dead?

  There was no sign of any unicorn. There was no sound to be heard at all, though he saw men of the ’Ndrangheta seemingly attempting to speak to one another, their movements as impossibly tedious and jerky and wrong as even the lines of his own house. Almost all of them kneeling, they huddled in near-transparent gray-green clumps, looking past him, plainly not seeing him at all, but just as definitely staring after something . . .

  And then he actually felt himself going mad, felt his mind slipping from him like a physical thing, because he saw slaughtered Third Cat, as whole as himself, picking its way delicately toward him, unquestionably recognizing him, ghost to ghost, a fellow gone-away. He said, “No, cat. Pass me by, cat,” but could not hear his own voice, nor feel the words in his mouth. “Cat, cat, please . . . pass me by.”

  The monster lay on his face only a few feet from him, but the space between them seemed as vast to Bianchi’s imagining as the desert that the sirocco brought to his doorstep every spring. He never knew how long it took him to cross to the dead man’s side, to take trembling hold of the elegant topcoat, now splotched and sticky with drying blood, and turn the monster over. I can touch him, move him, so that must mean that I am not dead, surely? The broad chest had been split open to the breastbone—like Third Cat, exactly like my poor Third Cat—clearly by some immense force, as though some god had been furiously hammering down a railroad spike. The monster’s face, however, was unmarked, except by damp earth, and his eyes were wide: not at all with fear, as Bianchi read his expression, but with an almost childlike curiosity. Bianchi closed them.

  He began to mumble the few Latin phrases he always spoke at the burial of a farm animal—there, a ghost could never do that—but he never finished them. Staring down at the dead face, no Toscano now between the strong white teeth and the courteously contemptuous lips, a rage such as he had never known took hold of him, shaking him between merciless jaws as he had seen a younger Garibaldi shake a poor mouse or blind, helpless mole. He kicked the corpse savagely, trampled it, kicked dirt over it. Every blood vessel in his body, from the least capillary to the great, rolling arteries of the heart, seemed to be swollen with storm beyond his understanding, so that when he cried out it was as much with vast, impossible bewilderment as with pain and fury. He could not hear what he was screaming.

  Now he became aware that he was moving forward, toward the gray-green, half-transparent men who were all backing away. Some were pointing at him, or perhaps at Third Cat, who, more sociable than he had ever been in life, stalkedbeside him, purring silently. “They are afraid of you,” Bianchi said. “They should be.”

  The storm in his body forced his mouth to open, and a voice came out of him that was not his voice. It rang and echoed through him, and made his headache worse, but he noticed in a detached way that it shook the trees.

  The other voice said, “A unicorn has been born here. You trespass on sacred land.” The figures of the ’Ndrangheta, still unfocused in his sight, kept stuttering in and out of clarity, making him blink constantly, as the other voice grew harsher and more ominous. “Go away. Never come back. Never come back. If you come back, you will be cursed and die. A unicorn has been born here.”

  They were already straggling away, wobbling windup toys close to running down. The voice in Bianchi’s mouth repeated, “Go away. Never come back. You trespass.”

  Those who stumbled past the dry, unremarkable hollow where Bianchi had brought La Signora’s son out of her into a rainstorm, gaped over their shoulders at it, often covering their faces, lurching into one another. Bianchi felt his own knees go, and sank down very slowly.

  He did not realize that he too had put his hands to his face until he felt the tears.

  Dead people cannot cry. I am almost certain of that.

  When he opened his eyes, the dislocated world had slipped back into place, though he never sensed any crack or click, as with a bone. Color and sound had returned—he clearly heard the cows lowing to be taken out, heard Garibaldi barking raggedly at an annoying magpie—and the angle of the just-risen sun made him aware that less than an hour had passed since a pistol muzzle had invaded his mustache. Engines were starting up, tires were hissing and spraying stones; harsh voices were shouting shakily back and forth in tremulous anger. Third Cat was gone.

  And Giovanna was running toward him from the house, as he had imagined her running through the rain to see La Signora’s child being born. He got to his feet again and waited for her, feeling very old. When she leaped into his arms, he promptly toppled over; but instead of helping him up, she laughed and rolled in the damp morning grass with him, until Bianchi was forced to push her gently away, laughing himself for what felt like the first time since his childhood. He demanded, “What happened? Giobella, what happened?”

  She stared. “Didn’t you see? You were . . . you were riding her! Why did you . . . what made you. . . ?” She ran out of words, and was reduced to flapping her arms helplessly, while trying simultaneously to hold him. “Bianchi, why are you asking me what happened to you?”

  “Because I don’t know!” He lowered his voice, peering toward the house. “And who, cazzo di Bacco, is that?”

  Giovanna turned her head briefly. “Oh, that is Paolo—you remember him. He would not let me come out to you, so I kicked him.” The ’Ndrangheta who had been sprawled across the doorstep was standing now, but movement was plainly uncomfortable for him. Giovanna called through cupped hands, “Hurry up, Paolo, your friends are all leaving! It will be a long walk home with your coglioni in a sling!”

  Paolo shot her one weakly murderous glance, and limped away. Giovanna said quietly, “I heard the shots. Three, four, maybe five shots. I pushed Paolo aside, and I ran to the door. You were . . . Bianchi, you were disappearing! You were on her back—I just got a little glimpse of you, and you looked so frightened, my insides just . . .” She held him so hard against her breast that for a moment he could not distinguish her heartbeat from his own. “What were you doing, Bianchi? Claudio, Claudio, vita mio, what were you
trying to do? I thought—I thought . . .” Bianchi could not make out the last words.

  He said, “I don’t know.” Mezzanotte and the three-legged cat Sophia came to investigate them, while pretending immense unconcern. “I think I had some notion of riding her very far away from there, before those men could get at her with their ropes and their tranquilizers. It makes no sense, I know . . . but, Giobella, she would not run, she had no care for such people. She is so different from us, humans, so much better . . .” His voice thickened in his throat. “I think you were right. I think perhaps she was hunted here from some other time. Where they do not have tranquilizer guns.”

  “They had other things then,” Giovanna pushed his head back to look into his face. It was Bianchi’s turn to stare back speechlessly. She said, “I saw him.”

  Bianchi had been shaking his head for some time before he found words. “You can’t have seen him. I never really saw . . . they are not what we see here, down here . . .” He took hold of her hands and pressed their coolness against his closed eyes.

  Giovanna whispered, “I saw night. The sun was rising, but I saw night and stars over you . . . terrible stars. I called out to you.”

  “I called to you,” Bianchi said. “Then I fell, like the boy in that Greek story, Icarus. I thought I fell a long way—across the sky, maybe—but I don’t know now. Did you see me then?”

  “No.” Giovanna’s body had gone strangely rigid, and her voice was shaking. “Bianchi, I have to ask—are you you?”

  Bianchi did not reply. Giovanna said, “You rode a unicorn. That’s not for people to do—not people like us, never mind the old stories. Maybe you fell from the moon, maybe you fell out of a tree, I don’t care, I don’t care. But is it . . . is it still you I am holding?” The deep-green eyes seemed as swollen as ripe fruit, close to bursting with hope and sweetness and fear. “After where you’ve been . . . after what has—I don’t know—happened, are you still my cranky old Claudio Bianchi? Who . . . who warms my feet?”

  Bianchi stood up, lifting her with him. “It’s me,” he said simply. “No better a man than I ever was, no wiser a soul—and certainly no deeper a poet. If you doubt it, listen.” And he recited the last two lines of the poem that had so disappointed him because it kept turning into a kind of testament.

  Giovanna Muscari, sitting in the beautiful sun

  of a long and beautiful life,

  remember that someone called you ‘Giobella.’

  When she had stopped crying, she said, “That is a terrible poem. I am sure the rest of it is just as bad. Only you would have written it.” Then she started crying again, and it took him some while to understand what she was whispering. “Bianchi, I saw . . . I saw you with that dead man, what you did . . . and then when you were walking, when you went toward those others . . . Bianchi, the sun was behind you, and your shadow . . . it wasn’t your shadow . . . there was the horn . . .”

  Bianchi held her. “Sono io,” he said, over and over. “Sono io, it’s me. Whatever you saw, it’s only me now.”

  Cherubino came lolloping up to nose at his pockets, and Garibaldi wriggled out from under the house. Bianchi pretended to wave them off, demanding, “And where were you, my brave defenders, when Giobella and I needed defending? Hah? You should be ashamed!”

  Giovanna sniffled, and laughed shakily. “Do not scold them, Claudio. They were afraid of the guns.” She buried her face in his damp shoulder again.

  The sky was as clear as Bianchi could recall seeing it, and as blue as the pines of the faraway Aspromontes. There were only three clouds to be seen from horizon to horizon. Two were dark, as though with rain; one was a translucent white-gold, as though lighted from within. They were moving away slowly, toward the sunrise.

  “No,” he said, so softly that Giovanna never heard him. “No. It is over. Those are clouds.”

  But inside he spoke to the sky, his mind so frayed by exhaustion that he could barely think coherently. Goodbye. I do not want to watch you leaving, but you believed that I was brave enough to bear your touch, and to see what you are. So now I am as brave as you needed me to be—though no braver than the rest of us who do as we can in this country, even that old thief Falcone—even our senile Madame Leonora. I am glad that you chose my home to have your child—though I must tell you that it has made my life much more complicated than I like. And I am proud that I could be whatever help I have been to you, and I thank you for your shining . . . and for the poems,

  but he was looking at Giovanna as he thought the word. If I never see you again—and I never will—thank you for the poems. Goodbye, Signora.

  Against him, still not looking up, Giovanna said, “And the ’Ndrangheta? Will your . . . your shadow keep them away?”

  “No, I told you, I am only me, no black unicorn. But the land . . . the land will keep them out. It really is sacred now, you know. In a little time, I will be as peacefully alone here as I ever was.” He smiled into Giovanna’s hair. “More or less.”

  “I will never come and live with you,” she promised. “Not until you ask me. And maybe not even then.”

  Bianchi turned to look back toward the ravaged vineyard. “Ay, so much to do,” he muttered. “So much to replant, regrow . . . and how I get the smell of that piscio out of the house. . . ?” Then he said, “I wonder how long unicorns stay together.”

  Giovanna stared at him. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, not so many creatures mate for life. I have read about this. Birds, yes, and foxes, and some of the monkeys . . . and some kinds of mice, perhaps . . . and I think even some fish, oh, and maybe wolves. But my cats do not even want the males around, once they know—and DeLorenzo says his sheep—”

  “Cats—fish—sheep! We are talking about unicorns!” She gripped his coat lapels, dragging him close. “They may be apart sometimes, they may come and go as they choose—what can love be like when you live forever?—but they wait for each other, they find each other, they are together always! You take your stupid fish and mice back, Claudio Bianchi! I would die if I did not think that they would always be together!”

  Bianchi pried her hands from his coat and held them tightly with his own. “Even if they have brothers?” Giovanna blinked in surprise, and then nodded firmly. “Even if one of them is very much older than the other?”

  The green eyes met his own steadily, and drew them into a different forest from La Signora’s eyes. “When you are going to live forever, what difference?”

  “Well, then,” Bianchi said. “Well, then.”

 

 

  Peter S. Beagle, In Calabria

  (Series: # )

 

 

 

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