In Calabria Read online

  As there was in living in the old house where the dirt road ran out, inhabiting a life that he was perfectly aware could have been a nineteenth-century life, if one ignored the electricity, gasoline, and the telephone he often went weeks at a time without using. Sometimes, when the reception was not too erratic, he watched news broadcasts on the little television set he had accepted in payment for helping to recover a neighbor’s escaped black pigs (come to visit his own half-dozen) and then repairing the gap in the fence through which they had made their getaway. He could not remember the last movie he had seen, nor the last doctor; and he was more likely to whistle ancient Neapolitan canzone about his work than operatic arias. His teeth were excellent; he most often cut his own hair, washed and mended his own clothes, and quite enjoyed his own simple cooking. He knew something of sorrow, remembered joy, and devoutly hoped—as much as he consciously hoped for anything other than proper allotments of sunshine and rainfall—never again to encounter either of those two old annoyances. Asked, he would have grumbled, “Sono contento,” if he bothered to respond to such intrusion at all.

  The universe and Claudio Bianchi had agreed long ago to leave one another alone, and he was grateful, knowing very well how rare such a bargain is, and how rarely kept. And if he had any complaints, he made sure that neither the universe nor he himself ever knew of them.

  The morning after Romano’s last visit—he had few other regular callers, except for the one local policeman, Tenente Esposito, who was near retirement, and would sometimes stop by without notice for a cup of coffee with a dash of grappa in it, and two hours of complaining about his grown children—Bianchi stepped outside on a sunny, frosty morning, the American scientists are right, something is changing, determined to finish pruning his tottering grapevines before the sirocco blew in from Africa to deceive crops with its treacherous warmth. The Undertaker’s Wind rasped his cheek, late, it should have been blowing well before dawn. He looked around for Cherubino, mildly surprised that the goat—a far more aggressive sentinel than Garibaldi—was not at the door to greet and challenge him, then bent to scratch the black cat Mezzanotte behind the ears. He straightened up and shrugged into his battered, beloved leather jacket, thinking, there is a poem in this coat—stretched his arms pleasurably, yawned, scratched the back of his own shaggy neck, and saw the unicorn in his vineyard.

  Cherubino was a little way from it, seemingly frozen in the attitude of a fawning acolyte: head bowed, front legs stretched out on the ground before him, as Bianchi had never seen the old goat. The unicorn ignored him in a courteous manner, moving with notable care around the fragile arbors, never touching the vines, but nibbling what weeds it could find on the cold ground. It was a kind of golden white, though its mane and tail—long and tufted, like a lion’s tail—were slightly darker, as was the horn set high on its silken brow.

  As Bianchi stared, it looked up, meeting his eyes with its own, which were dark but not black: more like the darkness of a pine forest in moonlight. It showed no alarm at his presence, nor even when he took his first slow step toward it; but when he asked, “What do you want?”—or tried to ask, because the words would not come out of his mouth—the unicorn was gone, as though it had never been there at all. He would indeed have taken it for an illusion, if Cherubino, anarchist and atheist like all goats, had not remained kneeling for some time afterward, before getting to his feet, shaking himself and glancing briefly at Bianchi before wandering off. Bianchi knew the truth then, and sat down.

  He remained on his doorstep into the afternoon, hardly moving, not even thinking in any coherent pattern or direction: simply reciting his vision in his head, over and over, as he was accustomed to do when shaping one of his own poems. Garibaldi, who apparently had not even noticed the unicorn, came up and nuzzled his cheek, and Mezzanotte and Sophia in turn pressed themselves under his hands, seemingly more for comfort than caresses. Bianchi responded as always, but without speaking or looking at them. The sun was beginning to slip behind the Aspromonte Mountains before he stood up and walked out to his vineyard.

  He did not bring his pruning shears with him, but only stood for a time—not long—staring at the faint cloven hoofprints in the still-near-frozen soil. Then he went back to the house and closed the door behind him.

  At some distance, he was aware that he had eaten nothing at all that day, yet he was not at all hungry; in the same way he thought somewhere about opening the bottle of Melissa Gaglioppo that he had been saving most of the year for some unspecified celebration. In fact, he did nothing but sit all night at the wobbly kitchen table that served him as a desk, writing about what he had seen at sunrise. It was neither a poem, insofar as he could judge, nor any sort of journal entry, nor a letter, had there been anyone for him to write to. It was whatever it was, and he stayed at it and with it until Garibaldi scratched at the door to be let in, and brought him home from wherever he and the unicorn had been. He lay down on his bed then, slept not at all; and at last rose to stand in the doorway in his undershirt, looking out at the stubbly fields that comprised his fingernail scratching at the earth.

  Not much for forty-seven years, Bianchi. You have let this place melt away under you for such a long time. When you are gone, it will all melt back into the earth, and who will even know you were here?

  The moon was down, but its absence made the sky seem even brighter, crusted thickly with more stars than he was accustomed to seeing. The unicorn was in his melon patch, and Cherubino was again with it, this time close enough to touch noses with the creature. The goat’s stubby tail was wagging in circles, as it habitually did in those uncommon moments of excitement over something other than eating. Bianchi was almost more astonished by the fact that Cherubino was taking the same care as the unicorn to avoid trampling any of the fragile vines than by the bright apparition pacing daintily among the husks of the melons that he faithfully planted for the deer, in appreciation for their leaving his tomatoes alone. He hardly dared to look at it directly, until the unicorn stamped a forefoot lightly, as though to attract his attention. There was no other sound in the night.

  For a second time, Bianchi asked, “What do you want of me? Are you here to tell me something?” The unicorn only looked calmly back at him. Bianchi fought to clear his throat, finally managing to speak again. “Am I going to die?”

  The unicorn made no response, but Cherubino bleated once, as though as to say, “And leave me here alone, at the mercy of the wolves and the weather, with nothing fresh-budded and tempting for me to eat? I should hope not, indeed!” The unicorn looked sideways at the goat, and there was a quick star-glint in one dark eye that Bianchi might have taken for humor, if he could have imagined unicorns sharing that particularly human attribute.

  Bianchi walked toward it, taking one wary step at a time, as before. He said, more clearly now, “If I am to die, I must make some provision for the animals. Please tell me.”

  The unicorn met his eyes fully once more, and then vanished so swiftly that Bianchi would have, with time and determination, remembered it as a play of shadow and starlight, but for the single distant chime of a hoof on stone. He was left alone with Cherubino, who gave him one dismissive glance out of one slit yellow pupil, then fell to eating withered rinds. Bianchi said, “Mal’ occhio, you know what you saw,” and shooed him out of the melon patch.

  But the unicorn returned that same day. Bianchi saw it as he was gathering the last windfall apples to pulp and dry for feed that, along with last summer’s timothy hay, would keep the cows all winter. It seemed almost to be pacing the boundaries of his land, instinctively sensing and measuring them, for what purpose Bianchi could not imagine. There was no fear or apprehension in its bearing: it neither came closer than twenty feet or thereabouts, of its own accord, nor darted instantly away if he approached or addressed it. Its beauty struck him like a blow, even when he was not actually looking at it; with his back turned, his body still remained aware—not altogether comfortably, either—of the unicorn’s nearness
.

  He did not dream of it when he went to bed that night, nor did Garibaldi rouse him. He did not need to see the cloven tracks by his doorway the next morning to know that the unicorn had been there.

  It remained a constant presence on his land from that day forth, whether he happened to catch sight of it or not. Garibaldi accepted it from the first day, though he was too old and indolent to attend on it as worshipfully as Cherubino, while Sophia, Mezzanotte, and even the feral, near-wild Third Cat, whose true name he had never discovered, as one has to do with cats, trailed after it like watchful children, keeping their distance. The pigs ate and snuffled and drowsed, and tried their fence one more time; only the three cows, led out every day for air, manure production, and such cold grazing as there was, seemed at all tense or uncomfortable at sight of the stranger. They would kick up their heels and lumber clumsily away if the unicorn drew too near. The unicorn took no smallest notice of their behavior, clearly having something profoundly other on its mind. Bianchi’s admittedly total ignorance of what that might possibly be was not made easier by his suspicion that Cherubino, the goat, knew.

  Paradoxically, or perhaps not, this frustration did set him writing poetry with a furious energy that he had never before experienced. Not all of the poems were directly about the unicorn; not even when, sitting at his little kitchen table, he could see the horn glimmering like a firefly among his bare apple trees, or glowing on a far hillside at the edge of his land. He wrote from the point of view of Cherubino, or Third Cat, or a passing cloud, or the winter earth itself, warming to the light impress of the cloven hooves.

  Unlike his usual way of working, which involved laborious crossing out, scribbling between lines, perpetual starting over, and patient, stubborn searching for better words, these new poems were written without a single backward glance—quite often without rereading. As he completed each one, he shoved it with the others into a rickety schoolroom desk inherited with the house. He gave them no titles; he never saw the point of doing so. If a poem did not tell you immediately what it was about, then, to Claudio Bianchi, it needed more help than a label was likely to provide.

  The weather continued untypically cold, and more people than Bianchi complained about it. Michaelis’s tourists, who tended to be hikers more than skiers, looked at the television reports and canceled long-established reservations by the busload. This in turn seriously affected the fortunes of Domenico the village wineseller, Dallessandro the butcher and plumber, Rossi the barber, Broglio the baker, and even Leonora Venucci, the ancient fortune-teller, palm-reader, medium-at-large, and respected full-service sibyl.

  The rains came early that winter, and they came savagely enough that Romano Muscari’s blue van could not always struggle up the winding dirt road to deliver Bianchi’s inconsequential mail. When he did manage the journey, Bianchi invariably made a point of assuring him of his gratitude for being spared their twice-weekly chats. “You always talked too much when you were a skinny little ragazzo, and it has only gotten worse with the years. When you are my age—if no one has strangled you before that time—you will be as impossible as your father, rest his soul. That man at least knew how to be quiet once in a while.”

  Romano would grin cheekily back at him, and even take the liberty of nudging his shoulder. “Poetry not going so well, non e vero?”

  “I have told you, I do not write poetry. Go away, and take this dog’s dinner of a post with you—and do not waste your time and mine bringing me travel brochures and information on how to lose weight, become rich, and buy property in Spain with my new wealth. And be careful going home on those bald tires, ascoltame. Do you hear?”

  “You would miss me? You would be just a little distressed? Incommoded in the slightest degree?”

  “Go away.”

  The unicorn was never in sight when the young postman visited; nor, for all the rain, did he once notice that the cloven prints near his habitual parking place were too small and clean to have been made by cows. The poems kept coming, as steadily and strangely as the downpours; and Bianchi did on occasion admit to himself that it was almost—almost—tempting at times to show or recite a couple of them to Romano. But this would inevitably mean revealing the existence of the unicorn as well—there was nothing symbolic or figurative about it in the poetry—and that Bianchi was not prepared to do for anyone. The creature had come to him of its own will, had chosen his rundown farm for its own reasons; if it had wanted to show itself to anyone else, it would surely have chosen to do so. He had no right to make choices for such a being, as though it were a vine to be pruned, a tree to be grafted, a dog to be put down when it grew too old to hunt. And besides . . . besides . . .

  . . . it was his unicorn, and no one else’s. He fought bitterly against that private confession, knowing perfectly well what it said of him. But Claudio Bianchi was an honest single man—a long time now, and the best thing for both of us—with no one to answer to but himself. His sense of honor was his own; and if he knew that what he felt deeply was selfish and shameful, at least he knew it, and had no wish to pretend otherwise. Is that what makes me write the poems? Perhaps so.

  Curiously, he saw the unicorn more often, and more closely, during the rains, though it never appeared to be seeking shelter from cold or dampness or wind. It did seem to him to be moving more purposefully, though he could not quite have said what he meant by that, and to be narrowing its search—if that was what it was—down to certain particular areas of his farm: the little apple orchard, for one, and a wide, shallow hollow within sight of his house, which always gathered water during such weather as this. He had tried potatoes there more than once, and turnips and rutabagas as well, but unfailingly lost them to rot, despite the partial protection of an eyebrow overhang of earth, held together by grass and the half-exposed roots of a dying chestnut tree.

  The unicorn kept returning to those two places, lowering its head often, as though smelling the ground itself, testing its solidity with a forehoof, even prodding the chestnut with its horn, for no reason that Bianchi could comprehend. He caught cold twice that winter, trying not so much to follow the unicorn as to make sense of its wanderings on his land. “Your land now,” he said to it in a poem.

  Your land, who can doubt it?

  as you reclaim all lands stolen

  from you

  by those whose only gift is for stealing beauty

  take it back from me now

  take it all back . . .

  Cherubino, accepting him as a fellow acolyte, often kept him company, as a younger Garibaldi might have done, often bumping his own horned head against him when he hesitated on a muddy path, uncertain of direction. Bianchi found this behavior slightly unnerving in an animal as self-willed as Cherubino, but when so much else was changing so fast, why not a goat? For that matter, why should my cows, ten thousand years bred down from their wild ancestors to be slaughtered and eaten, forced to pull ploughs and produce milk for the children we slaughter in turn, have any reason to see in a unicorn anything but a poignant reminder of their own lost freedom? As do I, as do I, that is what all these new poems are about, and maybe all the others, long before, from the beginning. It is not the same thing, of course, but still it is.

  The unicorn neither avoided him nor came any closer than it ever had, even when he stood perfectly still, emptying his mind, as much as he could, of all thought, whether concerning poetry, farming, rain, cooking, or a beauty that hurt his heart beyond naming as pain. On occasion, without warning or conscious intent, everything in him seemed to focus entirely on the shining horn, as though the unicorn itself, and all around it—not merely his handful of hectares, but the far mountains and the tourist sea as well—had converged to that one bright, sharp point in the universe. He would stare at it until his eyes ached and watered, and his head drummed so that he always had to go back to the house and lie down. I am past visitations. What do you want with me?

  He spoke those words aloud, into the air, having fallen into the habit
of talking to the unicorn, whether it was present to his view or not. This was more than simply new for him—despite what he had told Romano, his speech to his animals never went beyond a command, a rebuke, or a nearly wordless murmur of affection—it actually frightened him to hear his own voice. Once Uncle Vincenzo began talking to his chickens, everybody knew. The dog was one thing—but the chickens! Everybody knew then. But this was different, surely—this was more like the poems, a way of finding out what he felt about things, telling himself the truth of what was before his eyes. That had to be different from Uncle Vincenzo.

  “You are just as much out of place here as Romano says I am,” he told the unicorn. “Either you belong in the highest ranges of the Aspromonte or the Pollino, where only the bravest climbers will catch a glimpse of you, and take you for a mountain sheep . . . or else you should be sporting in the magical woodlands of Tuscany, a legend out of the fairytales and the songs of the podestà troubadours. What can you imagine you are doing here, with no princes and dukes to hunt you, no noble ladies to embroider you—no one to do you honor but a tired, tired old farmer with his tired old dog and his cows and cats, and his pazzo goat? You have no business in poor, tired Calabria, and we both know it.”