Hunting Season: A Novel (9 page)

“Did it fall?”

“Nnh-unh.”

“What happened, then?”

“I did it. On purpose.”

“Why?”

“I got fed up.”

“With the food?”

“Nnh-unh.”

“With sitting down?”

“Nnh-unh.”

“With what, then?”

“With everything.”

And from that day forward, there was no way to get her to swallow anything. She took to her bed, sustaining herself only with a little water in a glass on the bedside table, and she no longer wanted to talk to anyone, not even ’Ntontò. Dr. Smecca, when he came to see her, threw up his hands.

“I’d been expecting this sooner or later. It’s not that she’s sick; she simply no longer wants to go on living.”

’Ntontò, however, wanted to give it one more try and sent for Fofò La Matina. Polite and solicitous as ever, the pharmacist examined the marchesa, corroborated what Smecca had said, and returned to the pharmacy. He reappeared an hour later.

“We’re going to do an experiment,” said Fofò, pouring the contents of a small envelope into Donna Matilde’s glass. “This should stimulate her appetite.”

But Donna Matilde’s appetite did not return, and try as the pharmacist might with a variety of differently colored powders, the result was always the same. In fact, when Donna Matilde finally noticed changes in the taste of the water, she decided not to drink anymore, but only to wet her lips with a handkerchief. At this point, Fofò La Matina, too, had to throw up his hands in front of ’Ntontò, who had no tears left to cry.

Don Filippo sat in front of his fireplace, glorying in his creation as if he had built the royal palace of Caserta, and warming himself up with Trisina on his lap. It was early evening. Maddalena had already gone to bed, duly drugged, so there was no danger of surprises. The surprise came instead when the marchese heard someone calling him from the yard. Armed with a rifle, he cautiously opened the window and shutters.

“It’s me, sir. Mimì.”

“What is it?”

“You must come into town. I brought the caleche. The signora marchesa is dying.”

They left, with Mimì blindly lashing the horse all the way.

“I’m afraid we’ll be too late.”

When he entered his wife’s bedroom, the marchese was immediately shot in the middle of the forehead by a dirty look from Father Macaluso, who was reciting prayers accompanied by ’Ntontò and Peppinella, who were kneeling at the foot of the bed.

“Is she alive?” he asked.

Fofò La Matina, who was standing by the window, nodded yes.

“I want you all out of here,” said the marchese. “I’ll let you know when you can come back in.”

They obeyed. Raindrops began to patter against the windows as Don Filippo grabbed a chair to sit down in at the head of the bed. Then, bending slightly forward, he took his wife’s hand in his. He stayed that way for a while. Then he had the impression that there was a leak in the roof and that some rain was filtering inside. Looking up, he saw that the ceiling was intact.

“Ah, well,” he said to himself, “that must mean I’m crying.”

Instead of letting Fofò La Matina into his wife’s bedroom, Don Filippo stopped him in the doorway.

“Do you really need to be here?”

He led him into his office, sat him down on a sofa, offered him a cigar, which was declined, and lit his pipe.

“Do you mind if I speak informally with you? I’ve known you since you were about ten years old.”

“I’m honored, sir.”

“And don’t call me ‘sir’ or ‘Marchese.’ Just call me ‘Don Filippo.’”

“As you wish.”

“Forgive me, but I feel I need to talk to somebody.”

“Here I am.”

“You know something? It was I, in a sense, who made your father’s fortune.”

“Please excuse me,” a young Filippo Peluso, barely more than twenty, said as he began to rise, huffing and twisting and muttering as much as was necessary to lift his three hundred pounds of flesh and bones into a vertical position. “I’m going to take advantage of this little pause while my friend Uccello is dealing.”

They were playing briscola, the young versus the old. The young were Peluso and Uccello, the old, the Marchese Fiannaca and Don Gregorio Gulisano.

“And that makes four, dammit,” Gulisano commented under his breath. As someone who weighed barely a hundred pounds, he felt a sort of dull, irrational irritation whenever Filippo Peluso began his maneuvers to stand up.

“Why, do I have to pay a toll?” said the marchesino, who was keen of hearing.

“For what?”

“For pissing. For the last hour you’ve been counting how many times I get up.”

“I only wonder why someone would have to go to the privy four times in two hours,” Gulisano snapped back, turning green in the face.

“Come on, gentlemen, let’s be serious,” the young Barone Uccello cut in. “If you start arguing, we’ll never finish this blessed game. And I have to be back home at the stroke of midnight.”

“You can go right now, if you like; the door is open.”

“Come now, Marchese . . .”

“Come now, Marchese, my bollocks. We’re going to be here till morning if Signor Gulisano doesn’t explain to me exactly why it bothers him so much when I feel the need to urinate. What, does the outhouse belong to him? Is he afraid I’m going to fill it up?”

Gregorio Gulisano, visibly making an effort to remain calm, opened his mouth, took a breath, but said not a word. Silence descended. The Marchesino Peluso didn’t budge, one hand gripping the back of his chair, the other leaning heavily on the card table; the Marchese Fiannaca was counting and recounting the gold and silver pieces he had in front of him, while young Uccello kept cutting the deck. After a suitable pause, Filippo Peluso continued:

“Either Signor Gulisano deigns to explain himself, or in one minute, since I can no longer hold it in, I’m going to whip it out and inundate the whole table.”

In the face of this threat—which, given the young Peluso’s capriciousness and bright ideas, was not at all a hollow one—the Marchese Fiannaca decided to intervene.

“My dear Gulisano,” he said, “would you please do me a personal favor and clarify your attitude for our friend Peluso? That way, we can forget about it and go back to our game.”

Fiannaca was a good, kind man of few words and sound judgment, but it was known far and wide that it was unwise to deny his requests.

“Because it makes me angry,” Gregorio Gulisano explained between clenched teeth. “How can this be? For years he’s been boring us with the fact that his difficulty in urination makes him fat as a pig, he tells us in such great detail about the medical examination he got in Palermo that it’s coming out of our ears for two days, he explains how he can only fuck when he’s lying on his back and not like the rest of the human race, and then he comes here tonight and starts pissing every half an hour, so that I can’t follow the game anymore.”

“And you, Marchese, how do you explain it?” asked Fiannaca, continuing his mediation.

“It’s all because of four miraculous pears that Santo La Matina gave my father. And now, with your leave, may I?”

“And there you have it,” Don Filippo concluded. “That was how your father, who worked a parcel of our land as a sharecropper, became known. My father and yours liked each other very much and often talked. And when Santo found out that I was so fat that I had trouble moving, he said he had a remedy for it, and sent me the pears. Then, when I ran out of pears, I went personally to ask for more. And so the two of us set out from your house and rode for two hours, going out past the Crasto mountain and finally up Dead Man’s mountain. It was a desolate spot; even snakes avoided it. We started descending the slope, which was all rocks, and at a certain point the gorge was blocked by a great many boulders. We tied up the horses and slid into a hole. Coming out on the other side, I thought I was in the Garden of Eden. It was barely two acres of land, but it had everything: nectarines, pearlets, sorbs, peaches, oranges, lemons, grapes, sweet almonds, bitter almonds, pistachios, as well as chickpeas still green, tomatoes, fava beans, peas . . . There they were, all these things, one beside the other, in profusion, regardless of the season. How the hell Santo did this, only he knew.”

“He used to fuck the ground and make love to the plants,” Fofò said calmly, after listening impassively to Don Filippo’s reminiscence.

“Are you kidding me?”

“I would never kid you, Don Filippo. I’m telling you something I’ve never told anyone else. I once saw it with my own eyes, when I was pretending to be asleep. He would make an opening in the ground or the trunk of a tree and begin to fuck it. He used his sperm as fertilizer. But he didn’t do it all the time, only on certain nights when a crow he used to talk to would tell him to do it.”

“He used to talk to a bird?!”

“Well, as far as that goes, he also spoke to ants, snakes, lizards, you name it. At first my father seemed batty to me; I thought he was talking to himself.”

“Why is someone who talks to crickets not batty, in your opinion?” asked Don Filippo, polemically holding fast to natural reason.

“But, you see, Don Filippo, the fact is, those animals would answer him.”

“They talked?”

“No, they didn’t actually talk. But they would reply in their own way, with a movement of the body or a sound of their own. But he alone could understand what they were saying. Once, under a scorching sun, he had a three-hour discussion with a lizard.”

Upon hearing this, Don Filippo felt his head begin to spin. He decided to steer the conversation onto more solid ground.

“So, I was saying how your father’s name came to be known. And I should mention that that snake Gulisano had secretly followed me. When I came back to town with my pears, Gulisano, with typical cheek, introduced himself to Santo and said and did what he needed to do so that Santo gave him four fennel bulbs to make him gain weight. In three months’ time, Gulisano and I had both become fashion plates. But the rumor began to spread, and soon everybody started asking Santo for things. Your father didn’t know how to say no, but since he was afraid the garden’s location might be discovered, he would send you into town three times a week to deliver the necessary things to the people who needed them. Do you remember what they used to call you?”