Soul of the Border Read online

  To the free, the just, the poets, the saints:

  spirits without borders

  He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

  CORMAC McCARTHY,

  All the Pretty Horses

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  PART TWO

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  PART THREE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  Author’s Note

  About the Publisher

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  1

  THERE ARE VILLAGES that smell of misfortune.

  You just have to breathe in their air to recognize them, air that is murky and thin and defeated, like all things that have failed.

  Nevada was one such village, with its handful of men and women living in hovels that clung to the steep slopes on the right-hand side of the river, hovels half-hidden by ragged woods and scattered here and there among the masiere: those little terraces, reclaimed from the mountainside, that descend towards Enego to the east of the Asiago Plateau, and then plunge into the Brenta and Sugana Valleys.

  It was on these masiere, demarcated by walls built up from the chipped stones that spring from that earth in greater profusion than moles, that the locals grew tobacco. They had been doing so for generations, for centuries, because there above the Brenta Valley tobacco grew well and was of better quality than any other in circulation, which was why it had already replaced the timber trade by the seventeenth century, at a time when down in the valley, from north to south, bubonic plague was raging and it seemed as if there was no future for anybody.

  2

  AS THE NINETEENTH CENTURY drew to an end, only three families lived in Nevada, and one of them was the De Boers.

  Augusto was the head of the family. He was born in 1852, when his land was under Austrian rule, in the same house he would live in all his life and to which he would bring his wife Agnese, the daughter of peasants from a place called Stoner: four houses clinging to the Asiago Plateau. With her he would have three children, two girls and a boy, all born in Nevada, in that very same house.

  Augusto was not a tall man, nor was he bulky, but he was endowed with surprising, inexhaustible strength. With five blows of an axe, he was capable of felling a spruce twice his age. He had a thick black moustache that concealed his mouth, which was often busy chewing tobacco. He spoke so little that often he was silent for days on end. Whenever his lips moved, all conversation around him ceased. His words were as final as tombstones.

  He had grown up in poverty, narrowly avoiding pellagra, and had seen dozens of men and women, including his father and mother, survive the hunger and famine that had beset the mountain dwellers over the years.

  That might have been why Augusto De Boer felt the burden of responsibility on his shoulders and lived every day in the full awareness that the fate of his family, for good or ill, was linked to his, like the branches of an oak to the trunk.

  That was why he thanked God twice a day, in his way. He did it when he got out of bed with the first song of the thrushes and set off to work on the masiere and when he returned in the evening, bones aching with fatigue. Then he would eat a chunk of polenta and little else, arrange the firewood in the stove and go to bed.

  Lying in bed with his eyes closed, he would listen to the song of the nightingales out there in the woods and feel a burning pain in his back from the day’s labours.

  3

  AGNESE WAS THREE YEARS younger than him and had never been back to Stoner since leaving. Her hands were stubby, the skin red and chapped on the back, the palms covered in little cracks. She always walked fast, as if in a hurry, with her head down. Few people had seen her hair: once black, it had turned white suddenly, and she wore it swept back into a bun and hidden under a dark kerchief tied under her chin.

  She prayed a lot, even when she worked in the fields or stirred the lumpy, ochre-coloured polenta in the pot. She prayed above all to the Virgin Mary. Some summer days, she would return home from the masiere so tired that she did not even have the strength to eat, and so she would make dinner for the others and sit down by the stove or else on the steps outside the door, and there she would rest, moving her lips in a long prayer. She was a sensitive soul and, despite the strain of living at these heights, she was amazed and enchanted every day by the beauty of nature’s little things: a dandelion, a hazelnut, a jay’s multicoloured feather. She had never received any gifts, and she wished for nothing, except to see her children grow up healthy and good Christians.

  4

  AUGUSTO AND AGNESE had three children. Jole was born in 1878, Antonia in 1883 and Sergio in 1886.

  Physically and emotionally, Jole was just like her mother, which was probably why she loved her father above all. She almost always tied her blonde hair in a long plait that fell between her shoulder blades. She was thin and had large, bright eyes of indeterminate colour: at times they seemed as green as a larch grove in summer, at others as grey as a wolf’s winter coat, at others still as blue-green as an Alpine lake in spring.

  More than anything else, Jole loved horses and even as a little girl walked barefoot through woods and down impracticable paths just to see them. To satisfy her passion, especially in summer, she was capable of leaving in the morning and not returning until just before sunset. There were two places where she could see them: to the north, on the pastures of Rendale, where there were many nags that followed the shepherds and their Foza sheep, and to the south, on the ridges of Sasso, where a large number of carthorses were used to transport marble from the quarries.

  She liked all horses, whether they were light-footed stallions or heavy farm animals. As a child she would look at them in awe, her big eyes open as if to capture a dream, a piece of magic.

  Her sister Antonia liked to wear her hair short, and Agnese cut it for her twice a year with old iron scissors, taking care not to prick her because tetanus was less forgiving than hunger. Antonia would help her mother in the house, and she liked making things to eat with what little there was. She, too, was often in the woods during the summer. She went there to listen to the cries of the wild animals and smell the pleasant aromas of the trees.

  She would gather in an old tin can the resin secreted from the bark of the spruces and take it to her father, who would knead and mould i
t into hard little balls, useful for lighting the fire in the stove. Augusto, though, would always leave a little for Antonia, who used it to protect flowers or particularly beautiful insects from the ravages of time, thus adding them to her collection.

  But Antonia did not only gather resin. She also gathered wild strawberries, raspberries and elderflowers, with which her mother made an excellent, refreshing juice, mixing it with water from the river.

  It was the big river down in the valley that was the favourite spot of the youngest of the De Boers. Often Sergio would walk through the wood that stretched to the east of Nevada and sit down on the edge of the cliff over the Brenta Valley, and from there look down and listen to the sound of the river as it descended towards Bassano del Grappa and then, further still, on to the Venetian plain. Sergio was skinny and fair-haired. He was never still. Of all of them he spoke the most and was never quiet for a second. As a joke, his mother and his sisters always said he spoke double the amount because as well as his own voice he had also assumed his father’s.

  All three children, though, apart from living their days with the ardour, the dreams, the blessed unawareness of every little girl or boy of their age, worked hard in the tobacco fields alongside their parents: it was a fate that nobody was allowed to avoid.

  5

  THE DE BOERS lived as best they could—in other words, they survived, like any mountain dweller in those years, or indeed at any time.

  In the last few decades, both down in the Brenta Valley and on the vertical slopes of the plateau on one side and Mount Grappa on the other, hundreds of families had abandoned the land to seek their fortune, some going as far as the other side of the world.

  The De Boers, though, had remained there, growing tobacco for one king or another, struggling bravely with a life of poverty and sacrifice. Nostrano tobacco from the Brenta was highly regarded, grown both for snuff and for smoking in several varieties: Cuchetto, Avanetta, Avanone and Campesano. But to obtain a good product required a great deal of work. It was a long and delicate process: a single mistake could compromise the entire year’s crop—and that, for peasants, meant starvation.

  The work began at the end of February, once the harsh winter was over, with the preparation of the ground for digging. Armed with hoes, Agnese, Jole, Antonia and Sergio removed the rega—the weeds—lining it up in bundles, and spread the manure. At the beginning of March, they set about digging furrows, moving the clods further uphill to prevent the earth, because of the slope of the terraces, from bearing down on the lower masiere and risking a landslide. The digging both eliminated the rega and improved the structure of the soil.

  By the end of this first task the furrows ran through the plots like railway tracks. The real digging began towards the middle of May, and this was a rapid operation. It was a task that fell to Augusto and, of all the tasks, was the hardest. As it was impossible to use the plough on these steep, narrow fields, the ground had to be prepared by hand. The spade turned over the clods of earth and smoothed them with great skill, guided by Augusto’s toil and sweat.

  Thus levelled, the ground was ready to welcome the little shoots of tobacco. Then Agnese and her children began sowing them in the vanede—the small beds specially prepared in a place sheltered from the wind and exposed to the sun—while Augusto made the ground ready. It was at this time every year that the representative of the Royal Tobacco Company came to Nevada to deliver to the De Boers the fifteen thousand seeds necessary to equip the seedbed. To calculate the number, he would use a measuring cup no bigger than a thimble.

  On Maundy Thursday, Agnese would go down to the river and wash her face as a sign of penitence and purification, then come back up to Nevada with two buckets full of water and give a few drops to each new shoot of tobacco. In the first days of June, the transplanting began. Augusto would trace crosses, and in the middle of these Agnese and the children would place the shoots, already ten fingers high, and moisten them with a little of the water brought from the Brenta. When the plants were three hands high, Agnese and Sergio would fertilize them with sludge from the lavatories and remove the weeds and the worms. Those that had gone to rack and ruin were replaced by others, known as rimesse: plants that if they were not used had to be uprooted and destroyed in front of the emissary from the Tobacco Company.

  But there was still a lot of work to do.

  When the plants reached Augusto’s waist, they were trimmed. It was Jole who took care of this: she would carefully prune the tops, so as to aid the development of the lower leaves. After this operation, Jole would keep a close watch on them: within a few days the buds would sprout and were immediately removed. It was boring work, which Augusto was happy to delegate to her and Antonia. Then the lowest leaves, which were of little value, were removed before the king’s inspectors came to check. Finally, they would wait for September, when the leaves would begin to ripen. At the right time, the whole family would gather them and put them to soak so that they would turn yellow. Augusto and Agnese would place them very carefully in the shed, with their tips turned upwards and their ribs towards the outside.

  Of all the family, only Augusto could judge when the leaves were yellow enough. He would examine them one by one, putting aside those not yet ready and sorting the others according to size. He often had to check the correct degree of soaking in order to prevent them from going bad or rotting. The air in the shed at such times was heavy, and it was already clear from the expression in Augusto’s eyes whether the quality was good or the year’s crop had to be discarded. For days, the De Boer family lived in expectation of a sign from Augusto. When it came, they would all carry the leaves into the loft and lay them on the smussi, the wooden planks on which the leaves would dry. After a couple of weeks Augusto would turn the leaves over and lay more planks over them.

  The last part of the work was the most prosaic. By now, Augusto would already know whether the tobacco was of good quality, and he would take a few days’ rest. He would supervise his family as they sorted the leaves according to size and quality and gathered them into bundles of fifty and tied them with string or, sometimes, with lime-tree bark. Within a few days, the bundles were ready for the Tobacco Company. The final operation, in the open air, was performed by little Sergio and consisted of removing the stalks that had remained on the terraces after the harvest. Once this was done he would beat them together to get rid of the earth and pile them in little sheaves ready to be burnt the following spring.

  6

  AFTER THE TOIL of the fine season, family life took on a calmer, slower pace during the months of cold. With the approach of winter, movements and sounds and noises both inside and outside the house gradually abated until they disappeared, sometimes for days on end. The life of the De Boers was filled with idle moments, moments of intimacy and boredom. From December to February, it seemed as if the cold and the short days would never pass. They lived a more secluded, almost meditative life, marked out with domestic matters and the obligations that the peasant world and poverty dictated as rigid, irrevocable rules.

  One morning just before Christmas 1888, Jole and little Antonia were in the kitchen, where there was a pleasant smell of vegetable and boiled cereals. Augusto was in the shed tending to the animals, and with him was Sergio, who was then not much more than two. Agnese, meanwhile, was outside, shovelling the snow that had already started falling the previous night. To warm herself a little, Antonia settled for a few minutes next to the cast-iron stove. Then she went and stood under the window which looked out on the yard and finally climbed onto a chair and sat in the window recess to watch her mother through the rough, steamed-up pane.

  Agnese was not still for a moment. Although the snowfall seemed stronger than a thousand shovels, she continued undeterred to clear both the path in front of the house and the lane that led to the shed, the barn and the vegetable garden, even though in this season there was no longer anything to gather in the vegetable garden.

  The surrounding landscape, or at least w
hat could still be glimpsed of it beneath the heavy blanket of low white clouds, was completely covered in snow, and over everything there hung not only a sense of peace but also a sense of being adrift.

  “Come on, Antonia, come here!” Jole said to her little sister, taking two eggs and a bowl of milk from the lopsided shelf on the wall. “Give me a hand, the menestra de orz is nearly ready!”

  With the agility of a cat, Antonia got down from the window recess and then from the chair and bounded over to her sister.

  “What shall I do?” she asked.

  “I’ll beat the eggs and the milk, you keep stirring the soup.”

  Jole had been watching the pot for more than three hours, regularly shifting it about on the surface of the cast-iron hot-plate to make sure it remained at a constant heat and endlessly cramming the stove with medium-sized beechwood logs. Since morning, when her mother had gone out with the shovel in her hand, she had had the task of preparing the barley soup which the De Boers would eat for lunch and dinner over the next two days. Agnese had pre-soaked the cereals the previous evening, when the air was already promising snow but flakes had not yet started to drop from the sky, and in the morning her elder daughter—still only ten but already able to manage in the kitchen—had had to take over.

  So, early that morning, Jole had first chopped the vegetables that Augusto had kept cool in the giazèra—an icebox dug in the earth—since the summer, then put them to boil on a slow flame along with the barley. Because they were in Advent, which for Agnese was a period of fasting and abstinence, she had not added even a small piece of pork rind.

  “It smells good!” Antonia exclaimed, taking the lid off the pot with her eyes closed and sticking her nose in the steam that rose to the ceiling.

  Jole smiled and continued to mix the eggs and milk in a wooden dish until she had produced a slightly doughy, whitish mixture.