Soul of the Border Read online

  “Pour a little in my dish!” she said to her younger sister.

  “Why don’t you put the cream in the pot instead?”

  “Mamma says that way it becomes as lumpy as ricotta. You have to do it a little at a time.”

  That is what they did, after which Jole poured the contents of the dish into the pot and mixed it all together. In a few minutes, the soup was ready and the two girls tasted it with the ladle.

  “Oh, my, that’s good!” Jole said.

  “Very good!” Antonia exclaimed.

  They looked each other in the eyes and smiled with satisfaction, conscious that they had a new little secret between them. Then they laughed loudly, like two accomplices who know they have got away with something.

  Just then, Agnese came into the house, all sweaty despite being covered in snow from head to foot. She took the kerchief from her head and placed her hands on the side of the stube.

  “The first snow is good for some things,” she said. “The prints tell us if there are wolves around. But it’s best to clear it right away, or we might find we can’t get out through the door.”

  Jole nodded, removed the pot from the fire, put five bowls and a piece of old bread on the table and announced proudly, “It’s ready to eat, Mamma.”

  Agnese said nothing. Catching her breath, she looked at her two girls and a big smile lit up her purple face.

  “Oh, my, what a smell!” she said finally, with a look of surprise. “My dear little women. Congratulations, Jole. Congratulations, little Antonia. May God bless you both, my girls.”

  All three smiled.

  A few moments later, Augusto came into the house with Sergio on his back.

  Without saying anything, they sat down at the table, prayed and ate the barley soup with real pleasure, while outside the winter raged, the snow a bright, blinding white even though it was Santa Lucia, which the peasants said was the shortest day of the year.

  This was how the days were, and they would stay this way, more or less, until the following spring.

  Regular and repetitive, like the constant succession of saints on the calendar.

  7

  EVERY YEAR THEY WORKED HARD for little gain. The inspectors of the Tobacco Company came by one last time early in October to collect the leaves and pay off the De Boers with money barely sufficient to feed five mouths for an entire year.

  It was genuine exploitation, but there was nothing anyone could do about it. Consequently, in order to survive, you needed to think up something else, and this something had a specific name: smuggling.

  The limitations imposed by the Tobacco Company’s monopoly were experienced by all the peasants as an undue intrusion by the State into family life—robbery, if not a kind of slavery—and so breaking the law and defrauding the State was a kind of necessity.

  When you were a smuggler, you did not become rich, but at least you lived less poorly. It was like making grappa at home, poaching, slaughtering several pigs and declaring only one, killing a calf and selling it without paying the royal duty. Small ploys that enabled you to keep going with more dignity.

  In those years at the end of the nineteenth century, if a peasant was skilful and, above all, had guts, he could manage to hide a few kilos of tobacco every year.

  And Augusto was very skilful and had a lot of guts. There were three things in particular at which he was clever: growing and then hiding the rimesse, the plants used to replace those that had not taken root or had become spoilt for some reason; hiding the lower leaves before the visit of the inspectors; and drying part of the fior, the highest and most prized leaves, as quickly as possible. The quickest way to do this was to crush the manego, the central venation, with a stone roller or a small wooden hammer. Thus treated, the leaves were left to dry in the sun in inaccessible places hidden from visitors and from the binoculars of the customs officers exploring the cliffs on the right-hand side of the Brenta in search of illegal tobacco factories.

  Augusto would illicitly hide the tobacco he managed to extract in a number of secret places: natural refuges, animal lairs, sometimes holes dug with his own hands. In the fields and woods around Nevada, there were at least ten hiding places that Augusto had prepared over the last few years, that is, since hunger had begun to tighten its grip.

  Of course, Augusto was not the only one in those parts to smuggle tobacco. There were at least two or three men who transported it along paths and over sometimes impracticable passes known only to them, defying the vigilance of the customs officers. Occasionally they would lose the load, having to abandon it in order to avoid being shot at or thrown in prison. And in some cases, as they escaped, they would slip from a crag and lose not only the precious load but also their lives.

  In some families, smuggling amounted to a tradition. They had done it under the Austrians and continued to do it under the Italians. And Augusto did not like either.

  The Austrians because they had exploited and then abandoned the Veneto, the Italians because they had taken it and immediately placed it under the yoke of the House of Savoy, depriving the people of their freedom as well as their tobacco. But the main reason he did not like them was that, as far as he was concerned, any ruler was equal to any other and neither Cecco Beppe nor Vittorio Emanuele II had ever taken the trouble to fill the bellies of the mountain peasants. That was why he had always felt himself a stateless person.

  But with the passing of time, Augusto De Boer became different from the other smugglers. He was no longer prepared to risk his life to take a little tobacco down into the valley in exchange for flour. And so an idea came to him. Something much riskier but also much more lucrative.

  As a boy he had been to Primiero with his grandfather, who was a carter, and had seen with his own eyes that there were a large number of mines there: copper mines, iron mines, even silver mines. And, again accompanying his grandfather to festivals and country fairs, he had been to Bassano and down as far as Cittadella, where he had seen coppersmiths who were always in search of cheap copper with which to make and adorn fine pots and tools of all kinds.

  This was what Augusto De Boer thought of doing: smuggling tobacco across the Austrian border and taking it to the miners in Primiero. Tobacco in exchange for metals, especially silver and copper. He had realized that any man in the world would give anything for a handful of fine tobacco, and the miners more than anyone else. And then Augusto would go down into the plain with those metals and exchange them for food supplies and cattle.

  And so, at the end of summer 1889, he set off.

  He was thirty-seven years old and his children were eleven, six and three. This was the first time, and like all first times it did not prove at all easy. It was an extremely risky thing to cross that damned border and take your chances, defying danger and fate, defying the cholera and smallpox that often infested the valley with the breath of the devil, defying prison and, above all, death.

  But if you wanted to survive, the call of the border was stronger than anything else.

  8

  BY 1893, Augusto De Boer could boast that he had already made that journey five times, one each autumn. Not that the risks had diminished in any way. On the contrary: the king’s customs officers on the one side and the guards of the Zollwache on the other had reinforced their patrols, and crossing the border had become increasingly arduous and fraught with danger. Nevertheless, Augusto, who was only forty-one but had a face as forbidding and full of lines as the trunk of an old elm, had managed to plot new paths and devise new hiding places, like a lone wolf chased by hunters and forced to escape to save his skin. He felt strong and was conscious of having accrued a certain wild Alpine instinct, thanks to which he no longer felt any fear. In fact, he took a certain pleasure in challenging the unjust laws of the powerful, their guns and their borders, and in winning that challenge every time for love of his family.

  9

  “THIS YEAR JOLE is coming, too,” Augusto said one summer evening.

  He had just finishe
d eating a bowl of bean soup. He got up from the table and went and sat outside the front door, on the rough porphyry steps that looked out onto a meadow and the little vegetable garden and further still, across the masiere that spread eastwards as far as the eye could see, all the way to the peak of Mount Grappa beyond the Brenta Valley. The sun was setting on the opposite side, tinging the woods with soft tones of pink and orange that made those wild, rugged places seem welcoming and gentle. After uttering those words, as rough and dry as the bark of an old chestnut tree, Augusto took out a pinch of tobacco, stuck it in his mouth and began to chew it under his thick moustache, in which there were already a few white hairs, savouring it as a cow savours the flowers of a green pasture. His figure seemed small beside the big mountain ash his father had planted beside the house many years earlier, a mountain ash that produced orange-red berries and every year in September was assailed by myriads of robins and tits.

  He chewed the tobacco, still staring up at the mountain tops. Between these and his eyes there were a large number of terraces, a sea of inaccessible woods, dark forests, steep slopes and walls of rock. The first fireflies were just beginning to rise from the thickest grass. After sunset, they would become a second firmament, much to the delight of Sergio, who enjoyed capturing a few of them every evening with Antonia’s help. From the oak wood came the repeated cry of an eagle owl, followed by the distant howling of wolves.

  Then silence.

  10

  AGNESE AND THE CHILDREN had remained in the house. Agnese was nervous, and the wooden ladle she was using in the kitchen fell several times from her hand. The words uttered by her husband kept going round and round in her head, and she knew there was very little she could do to dissuade him. Antonia picked up the ladle from the floor and gave her mother an anxious, bitter smile, then helped her to rinse in the tub the wooden bowls from which they had eaten the soup. Sergio had heard nothing: when his father had uttered those words, he had been daydreaming, imagining he was flying over the Brenta Valley to see what shape the river was. He thought it must resemble a snake, maybe that long green whip snake his father had captured in the shed just three days earlier.

  “This year Jole is coming, too.” Augusto had said it just like that, without anyone expecting it and without anyone being able to answer back. Before those words he had been silent for a whole day, and after them it was anyone’s guess when he would open his mouth again.

  With a gesture of the hand, but also with a stern, frightened look, Agnese made it clear to Antonia that she should take Sergio and go with him to the bedroom. Once they were gone, Jole, too, stood up to leave the room, but her mother intervened.

  “Jole!” she cried, seizing her by the arm.

  Jole wriggled free of her strong grip but then stood there ready to listen, as a daughter should listen to her own mother.

  “If I spoke to him he wouldn’t listen,” Agnese said. “Just like it’s always the oldest stag that gives the orders in a herd of deer, in the same way he’s the one who decides. It’s the law of nature.”

  Jole felt her mother’s voice turn tremulous and did not dare look her straight in the eyes. She was afraid she might discover a tear on her face and did not want to embarrass her, or to embarrass herself. So she stood there and stared at the wall, but continued to listen.

  “I beg you, daughter, try and talk to him. Tell him you don’t want to go, that it’s too soon, that you’re still young. This is men’s business. Try and tell him that.”

  Jole summoned up the courage to turn to her mother, and in her clear eyes all the compassion and anxiety rising from her heart were visible.

  “Mamma,” she said softly, “the truth is, I…”

  “You?…”

  “I want to go, Mamma! I want to go with him!”

  “Oh, my daughter, what are you—”

  “I couldn’t wait for him to ask me, Mamma. I’m big now.”

  “But you’re only fifteen, you’re… you’re—”

  “I’m strong, that’s what I am. And besides, with my father I’ll be safe. He wouldn’t take me with him if he didn’t think we could do it and he could protect me. I trust him!”

  “Who doesn’t trust him? That’s not the point, Jole. The point is that… that…”

  Jole embraced her before she could finish the sentence. She clasped her tightly and said, “I’m going with him, Mamma.”

  At this point, Agnese realized that she had no hope of getting her to change her mind, and so there was nothing left for her to do but yield to that embrace. She clasped her daughter ever more tightly and let the tears stream down her face, knowing that nobody in the world would ever see them.

  11

  A FEW MINUTES LATER, Jole came out of the house and sat down on the steps next to her father. She smiled at him and clung tightly to his arm, as if it were a rope thrown to a woodman who has fallen from a cliff.

  “This year I’m coming, too, Papà.”

  Augusto closed his eyes to savour even more the tobacco he was moving ceaselessly between his tongue and teeth and palate, and at that moment the noise of the Brenta came to his ears from down in the valley.

  A feeble but constant sound that climbed all the way up here, to Nevada, thanks to the stones and rocks over which the water ran its course.

  12

  THREE MONTHS LATER, the long-awaited moment arrived. Jole was excited and, to ease the tension, spent the evening before the journey playing with Sergio. Equipped with penknives, they carved a spruce log into a dozen little wooden horses. While her brother thought about these horses, she thought of the adventure that awaited her. She could hardly contain her impatience. She realized that it would be risky, but was certain that since she was going to be with her father things would go well. The experience would probably turn out to be the most important of her life.

  In the previous weeks, Agnese had objected to Augusto’s decision and had tried several more times to dissuade her eldest child—and even her husband—but her words had been in vain.

  “Someone else has to learn,” he had replied curtly on a couple of occasions.

  And so the moment came to leave.

  In the week preceding their departure, Augusto had prepared every detail with care and attention. One thing at a time, calmly, leaving nothing to chance. He had collected just the right quantity of tobacco from the various hiding places, weighed it, obtained water, fitted and filled all the bags and cases in which the tobacco was to be hidden during the journey, let the mule rest and feed more than usual, wrapped pieces of cheese—Morlacco, Bastardo and mature Asiago—sopressa salami and smoked ham, put dried Lamon beans and Cimbrian potatoes in small jute sacks, taken a two-litre bottle of grappa, checked his and his daughter’s boots and dug out two large blankets, two rucksacks, a few ropes, a large wooden canteen, a rough hemp sheet, a lantern and a holy picture of St Martin.

  Last but not least, he went to the shed, opened an old oakwood chest and looked at the two Werndl-Holub rifles hidden in it, excellent Kraut rifles he called “St Peter” and “St Paul”, for which he had bartered a fair amount of silver in Bassano the previous year.

  13

  IT WAS THE DEAD OF NIGHT—more precisely two o’clock on the morning of Monday 29th September 1893—when Augusto De Boer and his daughter set off.

  Such was Jole’s emotion, she could feel her heart bursting. Her hands were cold and sweaty and moved in an awkward way.

  She had got out of bed barely half an hour before their departure, but in truth she had not slept a wink. She had lain awake all night listening out for wild animals, trying to imagine what awaited her in some unknown place at some unknown time, out there beyond the hills that had always marked the limits of her world.

  Her father was already up, waiting for her in the shed: four walls of rough stone and old planks of wood, the upper part of which, covered in grass and moss, served as a hayloft.

  A few years before, a small wild blackthorn had sprung up in a corner of the roof,
probably as the result of a kernel fallen from a redstart’s beak. Augusto had decided to leave it there because he liked the idea of having a fruit tree over the hayloft: offering food to the birds, he said, brought good luck. In April the branches filled with snow-white flowers, and in September they were laden with little round purple sloes of which the blackbirds and thrushes and tits were very fond. Augusto did not want his children to gather these fruits, since he considered them an offering to the birds of the wood, a kind of reward for these frail creatures, a mark of fraternal solidarity.

  Agnese and Antonia greeted Jole in the kitchen without lighting any candles: the customs officers might have spotted their nocturnal movements even from a distance. Sergio was unaware of anything and continued to sleep. Agnese gave Jole a cup filled with hot milk and she savoured it a little at a time, taking small sips, thinking about when she would again be able to taste anything like it.

  She knew that if everything went smoothly, according to the plans laid down by her father, she would be back home in three or four days at the most, but she knew that even a mere handful of days would seem to her infinitely longer than that.

  She donned heavy garments in which tobacco was concealed everywhere, put on her boots, tied her long hair with a length of thick hemp twine, loaded her rucksack on her back and left the house. At the door, her mother and sister embraced her in silence. She summoned up her courage and went to join her father in the shed.

  During those twenty steps that separated her from the shed, Jole took a deep breath. The sky was damp and cold, and a light haze brought with it the strong penetrating smells of early-autumn nights, leaving them hanging in mid-air: mist-soaked moss, moulting animals, sickly-sweet late-blooming flowers, shrivelled wild berries, withered mushrooms.