The daughter of Sans Souci was already foaled when the farmer and the horse doctor arrived in Magliano Toscano. She was already dropped on the bed of straw, and there she lay, flat and wet, like a rug left out in the rain. Her eyes were closed and her nostrils not even fluttering.
The doctor, a sharp-eyed, determined little man, hastily pulled out his stethoscope, and falling to his knees in the straw, held it to the foal's side, listening. The farmer stood looking on, pale and helpless. No less a person than Sans Souci's owner, the Prince of Lombardy, wanted to buy the foal, but only if it were sound and sturdy. He had even agreed to pay the horse doctor's fee. Would he, if she died? She must not die!
"The heart?" the farmer whispered anxiously. "It beats? No?"
"Only faint," the doctor replied, "like butterfly wings." Straightening up, he snapped out his orders. "You got to help. Lift her up! No! No! Not like that. By her hind legs, hang her upside down. The blood, it'sgotto flow to the brain."
Frightened into submission, the farmer did as he was told while the doctor began furiously rubbing the foal's sides. The perfect little head was thrust back, mouth agape. The doctor stopped a moment, placed his hands against her chest, but there were still no signs of breathing. He pulled an old towel from his satchel, doused it in the watering trough, and slapped the colt. "Wake up!" he cried. "Get courage, little one! Breathe! Ahead lies the world!"
Still no response. The gray lump hung from the farmer's hands like a carcass in a butcher shop.
"What we do now?" the farmer asked.
"Lay her down!" the doctor shouted, unwilling to give up. "Fetch the wheelbarrow."
Puzzled, the farmer hurried out to the lean-to beside the barn.
The doctor crouched on his knees and with slow, forceful motions pressed the tiny squeeze-box of the colt's ribs. "Breathe! Breathe! Breathe!" he panted as he tried to pump air into her lungs.
The mare all this while had been lying exhausted. She lifted her head now and let out a cry that was half squeal, half whinny. As if in answer, there was a gasp from her foal. Then a shallow cough, followed by a whimper.
When the farmer came rattling in with the wheelbarrow, he stopped in awe. "She does not go under!" he exclaimed. Then he laughed in relief. "The wheelbarrow—you don't need now?"
"Now I do!" Cheeks flushed in triumph, the doctor kept on pumping air into the filly's lungs and at the same time barking out directions: "Be quick! Fill a gunny sack with straw! Lay it flat on the wheelbarrow!"
The gasps were coming closer together. They were stronger. And stronger.
The doctor stopped pumping. He listened through his stethoscope and heaved a deep sigh. "Is greatest thing I ever see! The mare, she helped me just in time." Proudly, he lifted the newborn on top of the stuffed gunny sack. "We take her now into your kitchen and dry her by your fire."
"But why?" the farmer asked, more puzzled than before. "Why, when already she breathes?"
"Please to remember this, my friend. For eleven months she is living in a very warm place. Today is windly, and it blows cool into the barn."
Nodding, the farmer trundled the little creature past the stalls of cows and bullocks and through the door that led into the kitchen.
"Maria!" he called to his wife as he lifted the foal from the wheelbarrow and placed her beside the fire. "See what it is we bring!"
The farmer's wife, a plump, pleasant woman with eyes as shiny as olives, came running from another room. Politely she greeted the doctor, set out a bottle of her best wine and a glass on the table for him. Then in an instant she was on her knees cooing, "Ah, poor little one, poor dear one!" Without thinking, she had taken off her homespun apron and was rubbing the filly as if its ribs were a washboard.
"Brava! Brava!" cried the doctor between sips of the golden wine. "Your wife," he remarked to the farmer, "is a nurse most competent. Guard well you do not burn the little one so close to the fire. Rub the legs and the body until nice and dry. Then take her back to her dam." He knelt down and put a finger in the filly's mouth. "See? Already she sucks! By herself she will find the mare's milk faucets. And now I must leave.Arrivederci, my good people."
The doctor's happy laughter rang out behind him as he walked across the dooryard to the hitching post.
In the warm kitchen a second miracle was taking place. The foal, yawning, looking about with her purple-brown eyes, was stretching her forelegs, learning so soon that legs were for standing!
The farmer slowly shook his head as if now he saw her for the first time, her frailty, her pipestem legs.
"Already I have a name for her," he said dully.
"So? How will you call her?"
"Farfalla.Butterfly."
"Is so beautiful," Maria sighed.
"Beauty, bah! Is not enough." In the farmer's eyes was a look almost of hatred. "Astouthorse the Prince of Lombardy wanted. Nice strong legs to race over the cobble streets of Siena. With a colt by Sans Souci he hoped to win a Palio. Better that horse doctor never came!"
With a flirt of her tail, the foal tried a step, and fell down in a fuzzy heap.
The farmer winced, almost as if he heard a leg snap and break. "Spindle legs have no place in Palio," he snorted. "And for sure I cannot use such a skinny beast in farm work. Better the hand of death had taken her. Farfalla," he laughed bitterly. "She will live only the short and useless life of the butterfly."
The Prince of Lombardy did not come to see the colt for several days. He was a busy man—an art collector and a sportsman who raced his horses not only in Italy but in France and Spain. His burning desire, however, was to win a Palio. This, he knew, required a special kind of horse, one not too finely wrought.
He knew too that the marshy land of the Maremma made an excellent breeding ground, developing horses with strong, heavy bone. And so he let the farmers of the Maremma bring their mares to his Arabian stallion to be bred. Then if the mating brought forth a strong, rugged colt, he would agree to buy it at weaning time.
When he finally arrived at Magliano Toscano late one afternoon, the farmer broke into a nervous sweat. Maybe, he thought to himself, the Prince will buy the little one, not for the Palio but for racing on dirt tracks.
The mare and colt were out in a field at the time, wallowing in a sea of grass. The farmer whistled them in, and as they approached, he turned to the Prince. "Here comes Farfalla!" He trumpeted the words as if they could make the filly as big as the shout. "She will lighten in color, Signore, and become pure white, like Sans Souci. No?"
A quizzical expression crossed the Prince's face. He watched the foal dance and curvet in front of him. His eyes went over her, inch by inch, studying her legs, her hindquarters. After a seeming eternity, he repeated her name. "Farfalla," he mused. "The name suits her well. She appears capricious, nervous; not what I had hoped. She has none of the bulk and brawn of the dam. But nonetheless I will pay the cost of the veterinarian, and it is my hope you will find some use for her."
Waving his gauntlets in good-bye, he stepped into his open-top car and roared off into the twilight.
The filly grew—skittish and frivolous as her name. Every time the farmer let her out of her stall she bolted past him, and snorting like a steam engine, she flew down the aisle, sending goats and geese scuttling out of her way. Then at the end stall she slowed just long enough to sink her teeth into the buttocks of the black bullock. In the split second before he could kick back, she was out in the sunlight, squeaking a high hello to the world.
"It is a painful thing for the bullock," the farmer told his wife one day. "But if he is not there, the rascal nips me in the pants instead."
The wife burst into a fit of laughter. She threw her apron over her face to stifle her merriment.
"Bah!" the farmer stormed. "Women and fillies, they think alike! For them biting is a funny joke." And he stomped out of the kitchen, slamming the door behind him.
Away in Monticello, young Giorgio Terni inquired of travelers and tradesmen about the daughter of Sans Souci. He learned only that she was fiery and mischievous, unlike her work-horse mother. But he dreamed often that she had taken the place of his blind mare. In his dreaming she was an Arabian all the way—an Arabian whose ancestors had raced swiftly across the sun-scorched desert. She would be steel-gray, of course, with her muzzle nearly black, and her fine legs black from knees and hocks to hoof, and her eyes enormous and dark. As for size, he thought of her as big enough.
He longed to see her, but Magliano Toscano was many kilometers away, and now was the season of the grape harvest.
Each morning before daybreak, the whole family piled into the donkey cart and drove off to their vineyard. Up and down the rows they snipped the purple bunches, dew-drenched in the morning, shiny warm in the glare of noon. They filled basket after basket to roundness, and emptied them into big tubs. It was Giorgio who lugged them, two at a time, to the wine shed, dumping the grapes, stems and all, into a huge vat. Then at dusk after the animals had been fed, he clambered up the wall of the vat, grasped the pole across the open top, swung himself inside, and with his bare feet pushed down the slippery seeds and skins that had risen to the surface.
One evening when the family, dusty and weary, was returning home by starlight, Giorgio spoke shyly to his mother. "Some day I would go to Magliano to see the filly of Sans Souci ... if only I had the time."
"Maybe on Sunday after the mass," the mother suggested.
"I will go!" he cried, and the weariness of the long day suddenly melted.
But Giorgio did not go. On the next Sunday he was chosen watchkeeper of the church. And now the Sundays stretched out longer than all the other days. He had to scrub the floor inside the church and sweep the earth outside. He had to dust the altars. He had to arrange the benches and chairs. He had to play the bells, calling the people from houses and barns. He had to help serve mass. And when the services were over, he remained on watch. Alone in the deep hush, he listened to the wind moaning in the cypress trees, reminding him that each tree in the churchyard stood for a soldier dead. He tried to close his ears to the dismal sound, but the trees kept on whispering, and the mourning doves added their plaintive lament.
There was reward, however, in being watchkeeper. It meant that the people of Monticello considered him more man than boy. His voice was changing, too, and now when he sang in the choir it cracked, sliding far off key.
"Tsk, tsk!" the father remarked one Sunday. "Our Giorgio is getting a voice most strange. More howl than human. Sometimes," he laughed, "I look up quick to see, is he growing flap ears like basset hound, or great furred ones, like Pippa? Because he knows how animals think, must he sing like them, too?"
The family was seated around the table eating their Sunday supper offritto misto, a mixed fry of little fish from the River Orcia.
Emilio put down his fork in great seriousness. "Maybe some day my big brother will be saint of the animals, like Saint Francis of Assisi," he said proudly. "Then, Babbo, you will not laugh."
Giorgio's eyes glanced up from his plate and found the Palio horse he had made, standing big-chested on a shelf. He saw that the spennacchiera had fallen off, and he got up to press it back in place.
The mother watched him cross the room. "There are many ways," she said softly, "for a boy to bring honor to Monticello."
Her eyes and Giorgio's met and held for a brief instant.
It was late in November when the farm work lessened and the fun began. Hard by the village of Monticello were horse-rearing farms, and often in the afternoons the older boys who helped in the barns challenged Giorgio to a race. He was quick to accept each time, but he seldom rode the same horse twice. "Never do I want to love one so much," he explained to his father, "the way it was with Bianca, the blind one."
Always he rode bareback, no matter how rough the horse's gaits, and always he used only his left hand on the reins. Some of the horses in the Palio, he had heard, were no better bred than those his father bought and sold. And if they had to be ridden bareback, with the right hand free for the nerbo, he must practice now.
The other boys were older, taller, and they rode by gripping hard with their legs. But Giorgio had to work for balance, leaning always with his mount, thinking with him, flying together like one streamer in the wind.
The boys soon recognized that Giorgio had a special way with horses. Even the poor ones ran well when he was their fantino, and when he had a good one, he was almost never defeated.
In time the races developed into hard-fought contests held on the winding mountain road. Giorgio's heart sang a high tune as he flew around the curves, his face lashed by his horse's mane. He was in Siena! Riding in the Palio!Thiscurve was San Martino,thisthe Casato. The rippling of his horse's muscles against his thighs made him feel like a man-horse, a centaur! He was no longer an earthling; he flew.
With each race the make-believe intensified. The boys pretended they were in the Palio, each riding for his contrada.
"I race for the Eagle!" one would shout.
"I race for the Panther!"
"I for the Wolf!"
"I for the Porcupine!"
It was fun at first, but for Giorgio the make-believe did not last. He saw it for what it was, a pitiful imitation. None of the horses wore spennacchiera in their headstalls. Nor did the fantinos fight with oxhide nerbos. It was no battle at all!
As Giorgio rode to one victory after another, more and more people came to watch. Word of his skill began to travel. It trickled like a wind with a growing strength, first to the little towns on the fringe of the Maremma, then to the foothills of Mount Amiata, and finally it sifted through the mountain passes to the ancient walled city of Siena.
There, at the bottom of a steep, winding street known as Fontebranda, lived a horseman belonging to the Contrada of the Snail. He was owner of some rental properties, farms and homes, and he lived comfortably on the rents they brought in. But what he really lived on was an intangible thing, a pride in his daughter, Anna. For her he would have plucked the moon and the stars. But since she shared his love of horses, he settled for a fine stable. He kept four horses, sometimes five, and he made sure they were burnished like copper, trained by the most skilled, and ridden by men with sensitive hands.
His name was Signor Ramalli. He had never won a Palio, but he never gave up trying. One day in the spring of the year he made an excursion to the Maremma for the express purpose of seeking out a certain horseboy. He did not leave Siena until after his noon meal, and he stopped here and there in villages along the road to buy a bottle of olive oil, a jug of wine, and a brisket of veal; so it was nearing nightfall when he reached the hilltop village of Monticello. He inquired of a cobbler the way to Giorgio's house. The man poked his head into Signor Ramalli's automobile and with a breath rich in garlic directed him up the steep, tortuous lane to a flight of steps flanked by potted geraniums.
When the Signore found the house, there was scarce room enough to park his car nearby, but he managed to wedge it in a crook of space made by several lanes coming together. Then with a smile for the curious children who gathered around, he walked up the worn steps and knocked on the door.
Giorgio's small brother opened it. "Buona sera," he said politely. "I am Emilio. And I have a sister Teria who bosses me, and a big brother who is watchkeeper of the church." All in the same breath he added, "Your vest is nice; it looks like our newborn calf."
"Newborn calf it is!" The man laughed in amusement.
Emilio's mother came hurrying out of the bedroom, tying a fresh apron over her black dress. She saw at a glance that the stranger was a city man from over the mountain.
"Buona sera," she said. "Please to excuse our little Emilio. He chatters like the wren."
Signor Ramalli bowed and removed his hat. "You have an elder son, Giorgio?" he asked.
"Si," the mother replied anxiously. "Has something happened to him?"
"No, no, Signora. Everything is most right."
"Then will you please to come in and have a coffee while you wait? At this moment Giorgio should be in the barn, bedding our donkey. Soon he comes."
"Thank you kindly, but I will go to find him; that is, if you will be so good as to direct me."
The mother stepped out onto the porch. "You go only a little downhill," she said, "just beyond the public fountain. As you go, it is on your right hand. My little Emilio here can take you, but he must hurry back."
Emilio, flushed with importance, took the stranger's hand and led him the short distance to the stable. "Giorgio!" he called out. "Here is a Signore who wants to see you!" Then reluctantly he turned and headed for home, glancing back at every step.
Giorgio was leading Pippa out between the shafts of the cart. "You come to see me?" he asked of the strange man.
Signor Ramalli stepped up and shook hands briskly. "Go on working, Giorgio, while I talk. From the fragrant smells at your house I believe a good bean soup is simmering, and I must not delay you."
Giorgio pulled the cart to the far end of the stable and tilted the shafts against the wall. The donkey, freed, trotted to an empty manger and in a raucous bray demanded her supper.
Signor Ramalli sized up the boy as he watched him pour out a measure of grain. He could not help thinking how small Giorgio appeared in the bigness of the barn, but he was not going to change his mind now. The boy might be little, yet he was wiry, had good muscle, straight, sturdy legs, and he worked quickly and with purpose. The man laughed softly to himself; he was analyzing the boy as he would a horse!
"I am Ramalli of Siena," he explained. "I am a Snail."
Giorgio spun around. "You arewhat?" He took in the man's features, and saw on his forehead a wen bigger than the bulb on a snail's antenna. Is that why, he wondered, the man calls himself a snail?
"I belong to the Contrada of the Snail."
"Oh?" The word contrada sparked a lightning chain of thought direct to the Palio.
"My main activity is horses and racing."
Giorgio stopped his work. He bowed to the man as if he were a king or a cardinal. Then in his excitement he began scratching the donkey, kneading down the dark stripe along her back. He took a breath, listening.
"I have heard of your skill in racing, and...." Signor Ramalli paused to let the full weight of his words take meaning. "I propose that you ride for me."
The boy's heart seemed to stop altogether, then hammered wildly against his chest. Speechless, he waited for more.
"Yes," the man was saying, "I propose that you ride for me in the little races in the provinces."
Giorgio felt suddenly as if he had been dropped into a well. "Wh-wh-where?" he stammered, hoping he had misunderstood.
"In the nearby small towns—in Asciano, in Montalcino, in Poggibonsi, and others. You can continue to work on your father's farm, and come away only on festival days. And you will not need to bother with special racing costume."
Signor Ramalli came forward, and now he too began ruffling Pippa's mane. "Does it not please you?" he asked.
Giorgio blushed, trying to hide his disappointment. In his mind he could hear his father saying, "All in one day Rome was not built! Time it takes to build a city; and time, too, to build a man."
Everything was quiet, except for Pippa's teeth grinding the grain to a mealy mush.
At last Giorgio nodded soberly and replied in a voice he hardly knew as his own. "Grazie, Signor Ramalli, I will ride for you."
Across the donkey's back man and boy shook hands.
"In Siena," Signor Ramalli smiled, "each contrada has 'protectors.' Do you know what they are, my boy?" He waited for an answer, but when none came he went on. "A protector is a person who believes in the people of a certain contrada and does all he can to help them; he offers friendship, advice, and money, too. It is a kind of kinship."
"I understand."
"It is my wish now to be protector to the little runt of Monticello!" He smiled again, and the term from his lips took on a note of affection. "In you," he said with a final warm handclasp, "I have great faith."
That night in bed Giorgio lay awake a long time, thrashing out his disappointment. To race in the little festivals was not what he had hoped for; but perhaps—he tried to comfort himself—perhaps it was a beginning.
Giorgio's disappointment vanished with his first race. In the company of a strong, willing horse how could he be anything but sublimely happy? Compared to the lesser creatures he raced against, the entries he rode for Signor Ramalli were always in top condition, sleek and fit. And so, nearly always he won.
The entire family basked in Giorgio's good fortune. He brought home trinkets and treats from hilltown and valley. From Asciano one evening he burst into the kitchen with an armful of surprises for everyone—a singing canary for Teria, three goldfish for Emilio, a brooch for his mother, and a pouch of tobacco for his father; even a mouse toy for Mom-cat and her kittens. For himself he had bought a shiny new flute with extra stops.
Later that evening, with the younger children in bed and the supper dishes done, the mother turned to Giorgio. "Now then," she spoke in delighted anticipation, "stop playing your flute, close the light, and come tell to Babbo and me how you won at Asciano. In the dark," she added, "our mind goes to the place and we live better those moments with you. Besides, it saves the electricity."
White moonlight flooded the room. It silhouetted the father, comfortable on the couch, head leaning against the wall, pipe jutting out in sharp profile. Now and then it belched a little shower of sparks.
"I did not win today," Giorgio announced.
If he had flung a stick of dynamite into the room, the effect could not have been greater.
"No! Oh no!" the mother cried in dismay. "Where then came the money for birds and brooches and fish? Where? Where!"
The father jerked bolt upright. His mouth fell open, and the pipe clattered to the floor. "How can this be?" he demanded. "Explain yourself, boy!"
Giorgio deliberately lifted his flute and tootled a string of giddy notes to the faraway mountains. Then he laid it down. "Idid not win," he said simply. "My horse won. I was passenger only."
"Bravo! Bravo!" The father laughed in relief. "Of you I am proud. Man should not pump himself up when the victory is not his own."
From his first days of racing, Giorgio felt himself a man. He changed from short pants to long. He had his hair cut oftener and kept it slicked back to discourage the waviness. He walked more erect, trying to make himself taller.
All summer long he was excused from farm work whenever a race was held nearby. Signor Ramalli himself seldom attended, but when he did, he was accompanied by little Anna. The two of them shouted and cheered so lustily that it seemed to Giorgio his horse sailed in on the sound waves of their voices.
Summer spent itself. The time of harvest came again to the Maremma. And afterward the wind blew cold and the autumn rains sluiced down the mountains, making rivers of the little streams. Giorgio and his father no longer went to the farm, and for now, racing days were over and done with.
To help out the family, Giorgio went to work for the town cobbler. It was interesting at first to learn to use a lapstone and awl, and it was fun to sew with a pig's whisker, driving it like a dagger in and out of the leather. As he worked, he made believe that the tap-tap of the cobbler's hammer was the tattoo of horses' hoofs.
In a few days, however, the newness wore off. Then the tiny shop became a prison. It closed in on him, choking off his breath. The tap-tap never varied from trot to gallop to walk. It was deadly monotonous, always the same—tap-tap-tap-tap—until some days his head was fit to burst. As the door and then the single window had to be closed against the increasing cold, the pungent smells of turpentine and benzine and neatsfoot oil were almost more than he could bear. All these, mixed with the perspiration of feet and the garlic of the cobbler's breath, made a stench that lingered in Giorgio's nostrils long after he reached home.
As if this were not torment enough, he often made mistakes at his bench—filing a heel unevenly so the wearer walked quite unbalanced and raised a storm of protest; or hammering nails so they protruded inside the sole and gave no end of discomfort. For these blunders, he sometimes had to forfeit most of his meager pay.
But at last the winter days dragged to a close, and all at once spring came in with a rush and a flood. Melting snows bubbled and boiled down the mountainsides. Fruit trees exploded in white popcorn buds. Birds gathered up more straws than their beaks could hold.
Giorgio felt like a bird, too, a bird suddenly released from its cage. Once again he and his father were out in the fields. Each worked with a zest to his own goal, the father to win the land, the boy to harden his muscles, to increase his wind power. They ate with the same spirit and gusto, opening the lunch bag as if it held the secret to more power and strength.
"We stoke and stoke to make the hotter fire! Not so, Giorgio?" Babbo asked every noon. And they laughed as their hands broke open the crisp loaf of bread and their hard white teeth bit into it and then into a chunk of wild boar sausage. Noisily they chewed them both together so that the deliciousness of one brought out the deliciousness of the other. Some days there was a good thick pea soup as a surprise. Then they sang a rollicking blessing after instead of before their meal.
"We bellow out so deep from the soul," the father chuckled, "that God in His heaven can hear without even pushing aside the clouds. Eh, son?" And they both roared in laughter.
Afterward they lay down on the earth and snored like tired animals.
Plowing. Harrowing. Seeding. No task too big, none too small. And always in the twilight hours Giorgio's feet unerringly took him around to the horse barn. Some inner need urged him, drove him, compelled him to gallop into the sunset as regularly as he ate or slept. Was it a need to flaunt his freedom from earth and cobbler's shop? Or to give the horses a taste of Paradise before they went to the butcher's block? He did not know. He knew only that at day's end when he was sweaty, dirt-creased, and limp, he found joy in thundering across the swales as if in the next moment he and his horse could float over the mountain and into the sky.
The seasons wore on. The festivals came again, and again Giorgio rode for Signor Ramalli. The Umbrella Man came and went, and with his coming the Palio dream intensified, yet remained always the same—always beautiful, always on the other side of the mountain, always out of reach. Winter closed in and the days in the cobbler's shop piled up endlessly, one on top of another, and all were alike.
One day in the following spring, Giorgio felt as if his life had come to a standstill. He seemed to be marking time, doing the same things over and over and over again, working each summer in the fields, riding each fall in little unimportant races, sweating out each winter in the cobbler's shop. He was like a turnspit dog, running in a treadmill cage, smelling the roast but never tasting it.
In this mood of despair he arrived home to find the family in a high state of excitement. They met him at the door, all speaking at once.
"A letter! A letter! A letter!"
"For you comes a letter!"
"It says: 'Sig. Terni Giorgio.'"
"Open it, quick!"
Everyone waited on Giorgio as if he were king. Emilio hung up his lunch bag after fingering inside for the crumbs. Teria brought him a cup of hot coffee.
The mother handed him one of her long hairpins. "Here, Giorgio, with this you have a fine letter opener."
The father entered unnoticed. "Is it no more the habit in this house to greet the father come home from work?"
Hurriedly the children showered him with hugs, then ran back to Giorgio.
"Letmeopen it!" shouted Emilio.
"No," Signora Terni said firmly. "It is Giorgio's."
Giorgio stood very still. He took the letter and the hairpin with trembling hands. The blood throbbed in his head. He had once received flute music sent from Rome, but that was in a thin roll with his name printed by machine. This was a real letter, handwritten in black ink.
"Don't stab too deep," the mother warned. "You might cut also the paper inside."
Cautiously, as if a Jack-in-the-box might pop out, Giorgio slit the envelope. He unfolded the fine white paper and silently read the few lines. His face paled, then flushed.
"What is it?" asked the mother in alarm.
"What does it say?" cried Teria.
"The news, is it good?" asked Babbo.
"Is it bad?" shouted Emilio.
If Mount Amiata had suddenly risen from its base and marched across the valley, Giorgio could not have been more amazed. "It's from Signor Ramalli! Never before has he written me!"
"Read it out," cried Teria.
Giorgio cleared his throat and read slowly:
"Siena, 16 March, 1952"Dear Giorgio:"If your Babbo can spare you from the fields, I desire you to come at once to Siena. I have now four extraordinary horses and would wish you to be their trainer. The Palio of July, as you know, is on the second. We must hurry."Expecting you soon, I am,V. Ramalli"
"Siena, 16 March, 1952
"Dear Giorgio:
"If your Babbo can spare you from the fields, I desire you to come at once to Siena. I have now four extraordinary horses and would wish you to be their trainer. The Palio of July, as you know, is on the second. We must hurry.
"Expecting you soon, I am,
V. Ramalli"
Grown as he was, Giorgio grasped Emilio by one fat hand and swung him around and around until the pots and pans on the wall went flying. Then he swooped up the letter and held it on high as if it were the Palio banner itself.
"Mammina!" he cried. "Everybody! Everybody! Bring out the satchel. I go to Siena."
Babbo rose to his feet. In the darkening room his eyes gleamed in pride. "I have goose flesh! I cannot believe it could be! Today a letter is come. Tomorrow our Giorgio goes over the mountain. To please Signor Ramalli," he declared, "he must arrive in Siena tomorrow."
Plans were quickly made. It was decided that in his new importance Giorgio should not walk the long way to Casalino to catch the autobus that would carry him to the train at Sant' Angelo, and thence to Siena. Instead, the entire family would drive him in the donkey cart directly to Sant' Angelo, where they could all bid him good-bye at the railway station.
It happened just so. Even Pippa took part, giving out a steamwhistle bray that nearly drowned the conductor's cry of "Ready!"
As the train pulled away, Giorgio leaned far out the window, waving his satchel. Wistfully, he watched Mamma and Babbo, Teria and Emilio climb into the donkey cart, and his eyes held them there together until nothing was left, nothing but a tiny blur against the yellow of the station. Then that, too, was gone.
Hands still clutching his satchel, he kept right on standing in the aisle, staring out at the fast-moving landscape. And all at once the hollow pain in his stomach left him, and he faced the bigness of his adventure. It was as though the rushing wind and the chugging engine were taking possession of him, lifting him out of himself, over the mountain, and into a new world.
The cone of Mount Amiata loomed ahead with clouds toppling along its ridges, and streams spilling whitely down its face and into the river below. Still at the open window, he could feel the train laboring on its long climb from the valley of the Orcia to the folded hills. He saw with surprise that it was not just one valley, but a succession of countless hills and vales. Like an earthworm the train wriggled through them, and up through a wilderness of boulders broken only by tufts of broom and brush.
He saw the kilns of charcoal burners, and a goat girl knitting as she watched her flock, and he saw stunted sheep scrabbling upward toward the mountain pastures. He was glad he was not a sheep, nibbling his slow way to the top. And he was gladder still when the desert of rock gave way to dark forests of chestnut trees, and then to beech, and then to scrub pine. The little hills were ridges now, and as fast as the train could make the turns it pushed on up steeper and steeper ascents until it reached the summit, the bleak bare summit where the sharp wind held a bitterness that made his eyes weep.
"Boy!" The voice of an old woman startled him. "Close that window, if you please. My old bones shudder with the cold. Besides, your face grows red and smudged."
Giorgio quickly closed the window, wiped his face on his new handkerchief, and found a seat. He placed his satchel between his legs and tirelessly scanned the horizon as the train began to roll down out of the high country. Every frowning castle in the distance, every bold fortress, every hamlet he mistook for the city of his dream. But when at last he caught his first glimpse, he knew it for Siena, yet was unprepared for its splendor. In the clearness of early evening the jewel-like city rose up on the shoulders of three hills, its slender towers jutting into the sky. They were like none he had ever seen. One was shining white with stripings of black, like a zebra; the others were pink and carmine, or was this rosy color a trick of the setting sun?
His heart raced. He felt her ancientness at once. Here were battlemented walls, and pinnacled domes, and steeples piled high and higher—all jumbled, yet ordered.
Siena! Siena!
It was the hour of early evening when the train pulled into the station. Giorgio was first to jump out. He hurried through the groups of waiting people, impatient to find Signor Ramalli. Searching faces, hoping to see one he dared ask directions, he threaded the network of narrow streets. The people seemed different to him, like figures in a painting. He wondered if they might even speak a different language!
Slight-built as he was, he kept clumsily bumping into the passers-by. Each time he tried to work up his courage to ask, but no one took notice of him. It was like walking in sleep until a deep-timbered voice broke into it.
"Young lad! Come here!" The voice belonged to the Chief-of-the-Town-Guards. He was an enormous man, handsome in a dark blue uniform with gold epaulets. "Young lad, you will find better the walking if you move with, not against, the promenaders. Now," he asked solicitously, "can I help you?"
Giorgio felt a surge of relief. They spoke the same language! "Signor Ramalli," he burst out, "his house I must find. If you please!"
The Chief-of-the-Guards looked down from his great height. "To find Signor Ramalli's house," he said, "you have only to follow your nose."
"My nose?"
"Yes," he laughed, "your nose. You go down and down the Via Fontebranda, and when your nose is stinging with the stench of animal hides in brine, then you are there. Almost." He held onto Giorgio with one white-gloved hand while with the other he stopped an autobus to let by a team of scrawny horses drawing a load of wood.
"Feed the bony beasts," he cried to the portly driver, "instead of yourself!"
Then he turned again to Giorgio. "Now, young man, after the smell from the slaughterhouse you will run into a new smell of lye and bleach from the public laundry. Then turn in at the next doorway, and there you are!"
Giorgio hesitated. "ButmySignor Ramalli must have a stable."
"Yes, yes, I know," the Chief replied in friendly annoyance. "It is as I said. Through the bad smells you must go until you come to the nice fragrance of horses and hay. You see, lad, the house of the Ramallis is at the end of the street, with magnificent vista of the valley beyond."
No directions were ever given more clearly. Down, down the Via Fontebranda Giorgio hurried half-running, not to get past the cow hides in brine, but because the descent was almost perpendicular.
Just as the Chief had said, the last door belonged to the Ramallis. The family of three welcomed him as if he were a son come home. They were in the dining room, and at once the mother and daughter arose to set an extra place.
Signor Ramalli hooked his thumbs into his calf vest and smiled at Giorgio. "After we eat, we give you choice of two rooms for your sleeping quarters. One is in our home, and the other is the empty storeroom over the stable where you can hear the slightest whinny in the night. That room, though barer, is bigger and...."
"I would rather prefer the storeroom," Giorgio interrupted, "where I can be closer to my horses."
It was, in fact, a tremendous room. It faced the east where the first rays of the sun came slanting in, touching off the strings of purple onions and garlic, and peppers, shiny red. Besides these gay decorations there was a wide and comfortable brass bed, a trestle table and chair, and an ancient sea chest that had been emptied for Giorgio's clothes.
Comfortable as his room was, it was only a place to sleep. Sixteen hours of the day he lived with his horses. There were three mares and a gelding depending on him for all the creature comforts of food and water, and new shoes, and warm blankets at night, and small friendly talk.
But more, Signor Ramalli was depending on him to bring them all into bloom for the July Palio. This was high challenge. Here he was, still a boy in his teens, barely shoulder-high to his pupils; yet he was master of their destiny! Ambra needed schooling in being mounted; a race could be lost before it began. Lubiana was stubborn, always wanting her own way. Dorina was awkward at maneuvering; she could lose the Palio at the hairpin turns.
Imperiale, however, posed the most interesting problem. He was a big-going fellow, part Arabian, sired by the famous Sans Souci. What he needed was soothing words to quiet his nervous habit of biting on the wood of his stall. He reminded Giorgio of a frightened child chewing his fingernails.
Each day Signor Ramalli grew more pleased with Giorgio. The boy was two persons in one—skilled trainer in the morning; stableboy in the afternoon. He attacked the cleaning of the stalls, the oiling of the bridle leathers, the currying and grooming with the same chin-thrust of determination as he did the fine art of teaching.
And so, nothing was good enough for him. Morning and night, he ate at table with the family, but this, instead of making him feel jolly, stirred up the beginnings of homesickness. There was something about Anna that reminded him not of his sister, Teria, but of Emilio—a kind of puckish eagerness, wanting to know about the horses, wanting to help, wanting to ride.
It was after supper, after darkness, that doubt and anguish and the sharp pangs of homesickness set in in earnest. His dream of the Palio seemed as far away as ever. "I am only an outsider," he thought as he sat alone and forlorn on the sea chest. "I belong to no contrada, for I am not born Sienese. There are seventeen contradas, yet no one of them has asked me to ride. I have four horses, but I have none." He smiled a crooked smile, recalling how he had longed to be in Siena, but now that he was here something had gone wrong with the dream.
In humiliation and despair, his homesickness washed over him like a wave, and he could see the Maremma where earth and sea and sky come together, and the earth's humps that form Mount Amiata. And in all that wild sweep the only man-made thing was the cross on the mountain. In his loneness he closed his eyes, and there were the warm, smoke-wreathed rooms at home, and in the smoke he saw the whole family, clustered about a sausage hanging from the kitchen ceiling. Each in turn was rubbing a slice of bread against it for flavor because the meat itself had to be saved for supper. Yet in the poverty there was a closeness and understanding he now missed. For moments he seemed unable to breathe; it was the same tight, suffocating feeling he had known in the cobbler's shop.
The only help was to run, run, run! Night after night this need took possession of him. Like a colt spooked by an imaginary devil he bolted out of his room, raced up through the canyon walls of Fontebranda, across the busy Via di Città, down a flight of steps, and out onto the vast and beautiful Piazza del Campo. Here he could look up above the circle of turreted palaces and see a wide patch of sky and the same old dipper that winked down on Monticello, and all at once he felt less alone. Gulping and panting, he could squeeze the heaviness out of his lungs, could breathe in cool fresh air.
Night after night he had to escape, always to the deep stillness of the Piazza. It became his habit to stand first before the dazzling Fonte Gaia, admiring the frieze of white marble statues in their white marble niches, and the marble wolves spewing water into the marble pool. Then he would face about and look across the broad shell of the amphitheater to the Palazzo Pubblico, where the city officials worked, and his eyes went up and up its soaring tower until he imagined he saw a bell ringer away up there, no bigger than a spider.
He tried not to torture himself by studying the race course around the empty shell, or wondering which contrada might some day choose him as their fantino. Instead, his mind went back to the years before the Palio, when men battled bulls in the square. If he half-closed his eyes, he could array himself in coat of mail and he could see the blade of his spear flashing silver in the moonlight as he thrust it into the flesh of a charging bull. Then heavy with weariness, as if he had slain a score of bulls, he trudged back to his room and slept.
But in sleep he could not wear the blinders. His dreams were always of the Palio.
As the first month wore itself out, Signor Ramalli sensed a growing restlessness in the boy. One day he recognized it openly.
"Tomorrow," he said to Giorgio, "is a Sunday. A quick journey to Monticello is the best cure I know for ailments like homesickness. In a day you will come back feeling more content here. Now then, in the morning when I get out my car to take my wife and Anna to the early mass, I will at the same time take you to the station. My wife will prepare for you a little lunch to carry, and I will buy you a ticket, both ways."
He held out his hand. Giorgio put his small calloused one inside the great warmth of the Signore's and felt it close around his with a clasp so strong it made him blink. Giorgio's heart leaped in joy.