Hunting Season: A Novel Read online

  What kind of bloody Christmas Eve is this? he asked himself. I think I’ll go to the club and gamble one of my properties.

  He felt overcome with fatigue, however, and his shoulders ached as if he had been carrying a heavy load. Very slowly he opened the door to Donna Matilde’s room and looked inside. Only one small lamp was lit, and he felt reassured. He didn’t want there to be much light. If his wife saw him and recognized him, she was liable to start another riot.

  He sat down in an armchair at the foot of the bed. Donna Matilde was sleeping with her mouth open, and every now and then emitted a moan. Don Filippo slowly reached out and rested his hand on his wife’s cheek; then he withdrew it, brought it to his nose, and inhaled. Nothing. His hand smelled only of rancid sweat. He stayed a little while longer, watching Donna Matilde, then spoke to her.

  “I’m going to spend the night with you. Merry Christmas, Matì.”

  When ’Ntontò, back from Mass, went to check on her mother, she saw Don Filippo asleep. She didn’t wake him.

  The marchese took the road to Le Zubbie at a gallop, as if he were being pursued, and arrived in such a rush in front of the house that he very nearly frightened to death Trisina, Maddalena, and Pirrotta, who was saying goodbye to the two women before heading back to Pian dei Cavalli.

  “Natà, can’t you wait till tomorrow morning to leave? You need to explain something to me.”

  That evening, after supper, the two men sat down near the well, and the marchese asked Pirrotta how he could build himself a small fireplace in his bedroom.

  “Why don’t you hire a stonemason?”

  “Because I want to make it with my own hands. Don’t you worry, I can do it. Anyway, it’ll help me pass the time.”

  “But you have to climb up on the roof, which is dangerous. My poor wife certainly learned that.”

  “Pirrò, I want to do it my way. Have you got the necessary tools?”

  “You’ll find everything you need in the house.”

  After listening to Pirrotta’s instructions, the marchese felt sleepy. He said goodbye to his field watcher, who would be leaving at daybreak and would sleep in the stable so as not to disturb the two women. Then he withdrew to his room. He sat for a short while at the window, smoking his pipe, and when his eyelids began to droop, he went to bed. But, as if cursed, once horizontal he no longer felt sleepy. For hours he tossed and turned, with the sheets twisting around his sweaty body. He finally became convinced that the only thing to do was to return to the window and watch the morning star. He heard Pirrotta in the stable, saddling the mule and then leaving. He waited until the dawn light allowed him to see the line of the sea in the distance, and then he lay back down, eyes wide open, hands crossed behind his head. Such was his position when Trisina came in, lay down beside him, and began kissing him through the hairs in his armpit.

  “We have all the time we want,” she said. “I drugged the old woman.”

  “You did what?”

  “I put a little poppy extract in her soup.”

  “Won’t that hurt her?”

  “No, your excellency. I tried it once when you weren’t here. It only makes her sleep late in the morning. And she’ll complain she has a little headache.”

  She began groping him and started laughing.

  “Excellency! Are you drugged, too? Let me wake it up for you, the way my lord likes best.”

  She pulled away the sheet and started sliding down the marchese’s body, but he grabbed her by the hair to stop her.

  “Let it be,” he said. “It’s feeling a little melancholy this morning.”

  Donna Matilde made her decision around the middle of January. She had just been brought lunch, which was set down on a little table in front of her armchair, when ’Ntontò heard a tremendous crash in her mother’s room. Going in, she found the little table overturned and the broth and soft-boiled egg dripping from the broken plates and onto the rug.

  “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?”

  “Yes. The balcony squirt.”

  “You were always walking around looking up at the little girls on the balconies and crashing into things. One time I found you planted under one of the windows of this house, and there was ’Ntontò, not yet eight years old, and you were looking at her, spellbound. But she was looking at you, too. I gave you such a kick in the pants, you must have flown ten feet. The tomatoes you were carrying in your basket spilled all over the ground, and you started crying. Do you remember?”

  “No. I got kicked so many times in those days, my ass still hurts.”

  Don Filippo heaved a long sigh.

  “I’m getting old, my friend,” he said. “I’m starting to talk about times gone by.”

  And they waited in silence for Donna Matilde to die.

  Two hours after the funeral, Don Filippo, having taken to his heels, was already on his horse, preparing to return to Le Zubbie. Mimì, holding the animal by the reins, led his master out of the stable to the exit, then locked the great door behind him.

  Before applying the spurs, the marchese stopped to look back. On the right half of the double door hung three conspicuous signs of mourning: three black rosettes—the first one discolored by the sun, the second a bit less, the third brand- new. Under the first was a scroll with the words For my d
ear father; under the second, the words For my beloved son; and under the third, only three words: For my wife.

  “At least there was still some space left,” the marchese thought as he rode off.

  In the sixteen months of life that remained to him, Don Filippo spent his days peacefully. There was nothing for him to do at Le Zubbie except to lie with Trisina and take long walks. Thus it happened that, one day, as he was walking through his vineyard, one row at a time, he made a distressing discovery. He waited for Pirrotta to return from one of his ever more far-flung journeys to speak to him about it.

  “Natà, have you seen the vines?”

  “No, since I’m not the one looking after them.”

  “Come with me.”

  Pirrotta’s expert eye immediately recognized the damage.

  “They’ve caught the disease,” he said. “They need a sulphur treatment.”

  “Well, why don’t you give them one?”

  “Because it would take many days of work. And I don’t want to sleep under the same roof as Trisina.”

  Don Filippo eyed him thoughtfully.

  “I think we can find a solution to that.”

  Natale Pirrotta accepted the solution suggested by the marchese, but only because diseased vines made his heart ache. The arrangement thought up by Don Filippo was very simple. If Natale didn’t want to sleep under the same roof as Trisina, they needed only build a room, with its own roof, beside the main house, for Pirrotta. It seemed a reasonable proposition to the field watcher, who with great gusto got down to work on the stones, sand, and lime. The door and window arrived on a horse-drawn cart driven by Mimì. Some twenty days later, Pirrotta was able to sleep in his new annex. And Maddalena, Peppinella’s sister, was sent back to Palazzo Peluso in Vigàta to accompany Signorina ’Ntontò on those rare occasions when she left home to go to church. At Le Zubbie, the rules were always respected: after the evening meal, Pirrotta would go and sleep in his room on the ground floor, Trisina would go upstairs to the master bedroom with twin beds, and the marchese would withdraw to his own. What went on between Don Filippo and Trisina after the lamps were extinguished, only God, Pirrotta, and all of Vigàta knew.