Hunting Season: A Novel Page 7

  One evening, as they were smoking pipes and watching the moon after Trisina had gone to bed, the marchese decided to reveal his intentions to Natale.

  “Natà,” he said, “I want to have a son.”

  “With Trisina?”

  “No, with you.”

  They laughed.

  “So where do I come in?” Pirrotta asked, after a pause.

  “You’re going to play the father. You’ll take this son into your home and give him your name. Then I, who in the eyes of the world have no male heir, shall adopt the boy, with your consent. Does that sound reasonable to you?”

  “As for sounding reasonable, it sounds reasonable. But have you talked to Trisina about it?”

  “Who the hell cares what Trisina thinks? She’ll do what the two of us tell her to do, if we’re in agreement.”

  Pirrotta remained silent a long time, pondering the matter. The marchese misinterpreted his field watcher’s silence.

  “We both stand to gain from this, Natà. I’ll have my son, and you can pocket as much as you want for allowing me to adopt him. As much as you want.”

  Pirrotta removed the pipe slowly from his mouth.

  “Sir, I have always respected you. And you, sir, have always respected me. Why do you want to start offending me now?”

  “Please forgive me, Natà,” said the marchese, realizing the mistake he had made.

  “Let me think it over tonight, and tomorrow I’ll tell you what I’ve decided.”

  The following morning, an exchange of glances, without any words, was all that needed. The marchese understood that he had Pirrotta’s permission.

  4

  The only clamor and commotion that Le Zubbie ever saw came with the September grape harvest. Throngs of noisy women would arrive at daybreak, having been picked up at the gates of Vigàta by twenty or so carts, and get straight down to work. Each woman would take a row of vines and, squatting with knife in hand, would cut the clusters and then drop them into a sorghum basket. When the basket was full, she would go and empty it in a reed hamper, which she then hoisted onto her shoulders and upended into a cart with high side panels. Once full, the cart would head down the road to the hamlet of Durrueli, where the marchese had his cellars, vats, presses, and barrels; after delivering its load, it quickly retraced its path. In the spacious kitchen, Trisina and Maddalena—who had been summoned back for the occasion—prepared the calatina, that is, the food for the vine workers to eat with their bread: one day it was macco, a thick purée of fava beans, another day it was caponatina, which was made of capers, celery, onions, and olives stewed in a bit of tomato sauce flavored with a dash of vinegar. At twelve noon on the dot, Natale would blow the whistle, and the women would drop everything and scramble towards the great cauldron in the middle of the clearing. Maddelena would hand a hot bowl to each woman as she filed past. They ate, sang, spoke, and gossiped, scolded each other for rudeness, and then, half an hour later, they all raced back to the vineyard to work until just before sunset. Pirrotta would then give another toot of the whistle, and the women would hop onto the carts, dripping with grape juice, and return to Vigàta.

  The marchese had a ball, walking back and forth between the rows of vines, listening to the shouts the women exchanged with one another. He loved hearing the chatter, the profanities, the insinuations whose meaning was clearer than if stated outright. At one point he took a glancing knife-slash on his hand when he intervened in a scuffle between two women with weapons drawn. Trisina sucked the blood from the wound, then wrapped his hand in a piece of her nightgown, dispelling the marchese’s anger over the incident and putting him in a jovial mood for the rest of the day.

  On the last day of the harvest there was a tradition that had to be respected. One hundred baskets full of grapes were brought to a small shelter behind the house, which had a storage shed beside it with a fermentation vat and a few casks in it. This was the field watcher’s personal reserve of wine. Once this last task was finished, the women were paid by Natale and taken back to town after saying goodbye to Don Filippo. If God granted good health and life to all, they would see one another again at next year’s harvest. Maddalena also left with them. Now that the marchese had arranged everything with Pirrotta, he didn’t want her in his hair.

  The following morning Don Filippo got up late and didn’t hear Trisina about the house. He went outside and circled around the back of the house to the shelter. There he found Trisina, whose job was to empty the baskets when full; Natale was working inside. The building consisted of a single room with a small window and a sloping floor, which was made of cement. Along the lower edge of the floor was a drainage furrow that led to a hole into which the grape juice flowed. The hole in turn led into the fermentation vat in the storage shed. In one corner of the shelter there was a levered winepress to squeeze out the last juices. When the marchese arrived, the floor was not visible, being completely covered with grapes. Naked but for a piece of cloth tied around his hips to hide his private parts, and wearing hobnailed boots on his feet, Pirrotta was treading the grapes, going around the room along the walls and stamping hard. His eyes were half closed.

  “You have to excuse me, sir. I’ve been working since the crack of dawn and I’m very tired and a little drunk. The smell of the grapes is so strong, it’s like drinking five bottles of wine.”

  Trisina didn’t sit still for a minute, either. She kept cleaning the fine screen that covered the hole and prevented other things—peels, seeds, the hard parts of the clusters—from entering the fermentation vat, shoveling and stirring the grapes on the floor, the better for Natale to crush them, and piling the already squashed grapes in a corner so that they could later be squeezed in the press. Every so often she emptied new baskets onto the floor.

  The marchese went out for a walk. By midday he was back for lunch, which Trisina had already prepared.

  “Is Natale still in the shed?”

  “No, sir. He doesn’t feel so good. He’s got a headache.”

  “All right, then. After I’ve had a little nap, we’ll lend him a hand.”

  Around three in the afternoon, the marchese went to the shed, stripped down to his underpants, put on Natale’s hobnailed boots, and began treading the grapes with Trisina’s help.

  “Trisina, my head is spinning,” he said after working for two hours.

  “It’s the smell of the grapes,” said Trisina. “Lemme come give you a hand.”

  Before the marchese’s beclouded eyes, she stripped down naked, throwing her clothes outside the door, and came up behind him, laughing, pushing him in the back to spur him on.

  Suddenly the marchese couldn’t take it anymore and slipped and fell flat on his bottom. Trisina started laughing, first softly, then louder and louder, her head thrown back, when suddenly a long jet squirted out between her spread thighs, foaming atop the juice of the grapes.

  “What on earth are you doing?”

  “I’m peeing, your excellency. Everybody does when they tramp on the grapes. They think it makes the wine come out better.”

  Laughing all the while, she was having trouble articulating her words and started to slip. To avoid falling flat on her face, she leaned against a wall. All at once she stopped laughing and looked over at the marchese, her eyelids drooping, her mouth half open.

  “Come here, excellency.”

  The marchese leapt at her, his body bent slightly at the knees, and began fucking her. When she felt him enter her, Trisina let out a wail and hopped up in the air, wrapping her legs aroung the marchese’s hips. Feeling his back about to give out, Don Filippo remembered a proverb his father had told him:

  Fùttiri addritta e camminari na rina, portanu l’omu a la rovina.

  He had walked on sand and knew how tiring it was, and now, fucking while standing, he was experiencing the whole truth of the saying. But it didn’t last long, because Trisina climbed o
ff him, leaving the marchese in the lurch.

  “Let’s do it this way, sir.”

  She turned, bent over, and leaned her head against the wall, supporting herself with her hands. Don Filippo immediately got going again and gripped her hips tightly, given the slippery floor. Trisina started screaming in a way she had never done before, sounding like a dog being beaten. But her wailing and the thumping of her head against the wall, without a care as to whether she might hurt herself, got the marchese even more het up.

  Sweaty and dead tired, Don Filippo collapsed on top of Trisina, who, unable to bear the weight, fell facedown to the floor, with the marchese still on top. They stayed that way, struggling to breathe, half drowned in grape juice.

  “Where is Natale?” asked the marchese as they were eating.

  “Only he knows,” replied Trisina. “Probably out and about again. You know what he’s like, sir.”

  But the marchese wasn’t convinced. He got up from the table and went outside to Natale’s bedroom. Finding the door open, he went inside. Natale was lying in bed, talking, eyes bulging. He said he had seen the sun fall into the well and a snake fifteen feet long come back out. He said other strange things, too: that Trisina wasn’t a woman but only a cunt with two arms and two legs. Don Filippo put his hand on Natale’s forehead and nearly burned himself. He ran and called Trisina.

  “The sun’s got into his head,” she said. “We have to call Donna Gnazia. I’ll go get her myself.”

  “You’re not going anywhere at this hour of the night. Explain to me where she lives.”

  The marchese was unfamiliar with his own lands and took twice as long to find Donna Gnazia as Trisina would have done.

  Day was already dawning when he returned, on horseback, with a crone a hundred years old following behind him on a donkey. Taking her time, the old woman slowly tied her donkey, asked for a mug of hot milk, drank this down, then went to see Pirrotta. It took her one glance to confirm Trisina’s diagnosis. From a sack she had brought with her she extracted a handful of herbs, which she then boiled in water. When the tincture was ready, she strained it, filled a basin with it, and had Pirrotta, now sitting in a chair, soak his feet in it. The crone then took a bowl and filled it with water. Into this she poured four or five drops of oil, which formed a single yellow spot; then she put the bowl on Natale’s head, holding it there with one hand, closed her eyes, and started muttering some gibberish. At a certain point, before the marchese’s spellbound eyes, the spot of oil burst apart, breaking up into many little spots that arranged themselves in a circle along the rim of the bowl.

  “It’s done,” said the old woman. “It worked.”

  Thus was the sun removed from Pirrotta’s head.

  An hour later, the field watcher behaved as if nothing had happened.

  “I’m very grateful to you for all your help, sir,” said Pirrotta.

  “I didn’t do it for you, Pirrò, but for myself. If you die before my son is born, what the hell am I going to tell people? That you got Trisina pregnant through the séance table?”

  One night in late October, Trisina got into the marchese’s bed, giggling more than usual.

  “What’s wrong with you? You’re laughing like an addlebrain.”

  “I can’t help it, sir.”

  “Well, try not to. When you laugh like that, I can’t do it, you know. It goes soft.”

  Trisina started thinking about things that had made her cry in the past, like the time she was eight years old and her mother accidentally locked her in a closet, or another time when she tore a brand-new dress on a boxthorn bush.

  When he noticed she had turned serious, Don Filippo mounted her.

  “No, not like that,” said Trisina. “I’m afraid you’ll hurt me.”

  “Why should it hurt you? We’ve done it this way a thousand times.”

  “But now it’s different, sir. You know what? You got me pregnant, that day in the shed.”

  Don Filippo said nothing. He got out of bed, staggering to the left and right, made it as far as the window, opened the shutters and fainted, falling to the floor like a sack of potatoes.

  The following morning he raced into Vigàta, singing at the top of his lungs all the way. As a result, when he tried to talk to people in town, he had no voice left. He explained that he had caught a chill at Le Zubbie. His first visit was to the midwife, Signora Schilirò, and he arranged for her to come to Le Zubbie the following Sunday to examine Trisina. He would send Mimì for her with a carriage.

  His second visit was to the pharmacy.

  “I’m expecting a son,” he said to Fofò.

  “Congratulations,” said the pharmacist, looking him up and down. “It doesn’t show.”

  “This is no time for jokes, Fofò. This Sunday I want you to come in the carriage with the midwife and examine Natale Pirrotta’s wife.”

  “I’m sorry, Marchese, but why don’t you ask Dr. Smecca? He has more experience with that sort of thing and knows more than I do.”

  “I don’t trust Dr. Smecca.”

  It wasn’t true. He certainly did trust Dr. Smecca, but he could not forget what Pirrotta had told him: that the doctor had dipped his biscuit in Trisina’s soup. And had in fact been the first to do so.

  “All right,” said the pharmacist. “Have you already been to your house, Marchese?”

  “I haven’t had the time.”

  “Your daughter has been sick. I’ve been looking after her myself.”

  At the thought of seeing ’Ntontò still dressed all in black, Don Filippo decided he wasn’t yet ready to meet with her.

  “Greetings to all,” he said, entering the Circolo dei Nobili. “What’s new?”

  After the riot of greetings, exclamations of delight, and embraces, Barone Uccello informed his friend of the only new development, aside from the detailed inventory of lamented passings.

  “The pharmacist has been broken in,” said the baron.

  “What do you mean, ‘broken in’?”

  “Do you remember the time we talked about him here at the club? Well, since then, and up until last week, Fofò La Matina’s situation had not changed: nary a woman.”

  “But are you sure?”

  “Cross my heart. Neither in Vigàta nor the provincial capital.”

  “But how could he do without it?”

  “Why, don’t priests do the same?” interjected Fede the surveyor, a churchgoing man.

  “Good God, please don’t talk about priests to me,” said the baron. He continued: “Anyway, last Saturday, Signora Clelia, having learned from her maid that the pharmacist would not open shop that day because he had to prepare some medicinal herbs, made herself up and went and knocked at his door. Fofò opened up and found the lady before him. He tried not to let her inside, but there was nothing doing. Signora Clelia insisted she urgently needed to be examined. To make a long story short, she wasted no time; she reached out and grabbed him. The pharmacist froze. Didn’t budge. Encouraged, the lady undid his trousers and knickers and brought the thing out into the open. And that was when the pharmacist popped.”

  “What do you mean, he ‘popped’?” asked Lieutenant Baldovino.

  “You know, carissimo,” the marchese explained, “the way the cork pops when you fill the barrel too full of wine.”

  “Later, in the two hours that followed, the pharmacist attended to the lady till his barrel was empty,” the baron continued. “When Signora Clelia came out of the pharmacy, people say she looked like a cat with a full belly, purring down the street.”

  Fate had decided that the marchese should hear talk of the pharmacist for the rest of the day. ’Ntontò continued where his friends from the Circolo had left off, telling him how Fofò La Matina had devotedly and valiantly cured her of an influenza that threatened to turn into pneumonia, without asking a cent in return.

  “But I
acquitted myself of my debt just the same.”

  The marchese eyed his daughter.

  “Did you make him pop, too?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” said Ntontò, her face a question mark. “I had Mimì bring him two demijohns of good wine.”

  The marchese kept eyeing her, finding her even more beautiful than when he had left her, a bit thinner and paler from illness.

  “When are you going to take off the weeds?”

  “It’s supposed to last three years.”

  “And what if I die in the meantime?”

  “What are you saying?!”

  “How are you going to show your grief then, if I die? You’ve given it all to the others, even your grief for me! You’re all decked out in black, outside and inside!” He was yelling, and didn’t know why he felt so angry. ’Ntontò burst into tears, the marchese following after her for a few steps.

  “You can paint your bottom black, if I die!” he shouted. “It can be your special way of mourning me!”

  He had just woken up from his nap when Mimì arrived.

  “The sacristan’s here, m’lord. ’E’s got a message for you from Father Macaluso.”

  The marchese reluctantly got dressed and went into the boudoir.

  “With m’lord’s blessing,” said the sacristan.