Soul of the Border Read online

  Augusto had already harnessed Hector, as Jole had called their mule, loading him with everything, but above all with tobacco, in addition to the tobacco that father and daughter were keeping hidden in their clothes and shoes and ankle bandages. It was sealed within dozens of pockets, cavities, compartments and internal pouches, invisible to any possible search.

  That year the harvest had been good and Augusto had somehow managed to hide almost a hundred kilos, in various forms: pressed leaves, shag and powder. There was something for every taste and every vice.

  The two exchanged glances in the darkness of the shed, the whites of their eyes the only things that glowed in the dark. In the enclosure, the hens clucked drowsily, annoyed at being disturbed. Jole stroked the cow, Giuditta, one last time, then walked out and waited for her father to join her.

  Her hands were still cold, her movements still awkward. Her heart began beating even more loudly than before, and the persistent smell of manure penetrated her nostrils as if trying to cling to her breathing, to travel with her and be with her for the whole journey.

  “Let’s go,” Augusto whispered, slinging the rifle called St Peter, already loaded, over his shoulder, next to his rucksack, and so saying he closed the door of the shed. They slowly passed the vegetable garden and came close to the door of the house. There, Agnese and Antonia approached like two shadows to bestow their final farewell. Agnese embraced her husband, then put a red kerchief around her eldest child’s neck. Antonia kissed both of them.

  Nobody uttered a single word.

  The two of them set off. Augusto walked in front of the mule, holding the reins and leading the way, and Jole followed a few paces behind. They walked slowly, moving away from the house towards the steep path that slipped down into the woods beneath the walls of rock and led to the valley and the great river.

  Antonia ran back into the house, perhaps so as not to cry, whereas Agnese mustered the courage to follow them with her eyes until the last moment, until they were swallowed like ghosts, first by the night fog, then by the dark forest of broad-leaved trees.

  Her Jole was fifteen, Agnese thought, no longer a child but not yet a woman. She prayed to the Madonna for her and for her man. At that very moment, Jole took from a pocket a little wooden horse, one of those she had carved the previous day with her little brother.

  “I’m a real smuggler,” she whispered into its wooden ear.

  Then she hugged it to her chest and felt less afraid.

  14

  THE PATH WAS SLIGHTLY MUDDY, with a thin layer of dew, and the dampness of the night had softened the ground and made the backs of the stones slippery. Once they had moved into the heart of the woods, Jole and her father had to be careful not to slip and fall.

  All at once, she took a few steps forward and had to rest a hand on the mule’s back to avoid losing her balance.

  It is always strange to begin a journey downhill.

  She would have liked to say something, ask her father how long it was going to take them, but she remained silent.

  Over the preceding weeks, Augusto had told her that they should speak as little as possible during the journey. The customs men were hiding everywhere, you should never be too trusting, not even when you thought you were safe.

  Remembering these words, all Jole could do was think about what she would have liked to ask him and try to find the answers to her questions for herself.

  Augusto immediately set a gentle, steady pace, although the descent was gradually becoming more difficult and dangerous because of the steep drops that loomed suddenly at the sides of the trail.

  Soon the path contracted even more, until it was as narrow as the mule’s belly. With a glance, Augusto ordered Jole to return to her place. Although a blurred crescent moon emerged from the blanket of fog and cast a weak glow over the world, the inside of the forest was pitch black, and Augusto was advancing from memory rather than checking where he was putting his feet. Then again, he knew this trail like the back of his hand, he had been the first to open it up, and he had kept it open over the last few years, partly because he had knocked down a few trees and regularly cleared bushes and brambles, although every summer they reconquered space and ground.

  They were continually accompanied by disturbing noises and the cries of animals, almost as if they were being welcomed to a kingdom barred to human beings.

  As she walked, Jole shivered a little, thinking how different the woods were by day and by night. By night all woods are the same, she told herself, and all are frightening. She thought of the forest of broad-leaved trees she was going through, a forest she knew well but which seemed an unknown quantity to her in the dead of night. She recalled the hues of early autumn that had changed the colour of the woods in the last few days, the reds and yellows and ochres that, if it had been day, would have shone on maples, chestnuts, beeches, birches, oaks, alders and hornbeams. And she imagined the thousand scents those trees would have given off and the constant, infinite play of light that the sun would have set in motion as it filtered through their branches.

  But here and now, everything was dark, darker than a deep silence.

  God knows if the sunlight filtering through the branches has a name, Jole thought, listening to the rhythmic sound of her own boots. God knows what it’s called in the big cities.

  Augusto came to an abrupt halt.

  They both stood there motionless, Augusto even holding his breath as he looked around. At that moment, a weak ray of moonlight percolated through the mist and lit up his face and Jole was able to make out his attentive, vigilant, alert look, like the look of a roebuck that has sensed a dangerous presence. She concentrated on certain details of her father’s tense face, which seemed carved out of porphyry. It was barely visible, and yet in it, in the abrupt, cautious movements of his eyes, Jole glimpsed something mysterious, something bestial, which she found hard to understand, something that had taken shape with the passing of the minutes and the progress of their steps. She was even more moved.

  After a few moments, without saying anything, Augusto resumed the downhill path, and she immediately followed him, surrounded by these disturbing noises, these animal cries coming from every direction—screeching, howling, whistling, breathing and whimpering—which scared Hector, too, and actually slowed him down.

  15

  DURING THE DESCENT, Jole slipped several times and on a couple of occasions actually ended up on her backside. She got up again immediately, without her father’s help. Just over an hour after leaving home, the two De Boers, through provident changes of direction and sudden shortcuts, got to within no more than a hundred paces of the Brenta. Remaining well hidden amid the hazels, they stopped to catch their breath and listen to the water running smoothly and continuously over the rocks and stones that lay strewn on the riverbed, having been carried down by the flood three years earlier. In the meantime, the mist had started to clear, giving way to an ever clearer sky in which, apart from the moon, they even began to make out a handful of stars. Beyond the river, on the side opposite to where father and daughter now stood, they could make out the imposing wall of forest that rose all the way up to the slopes of Mount Grappa.

  Augusto observed the river, then examined the sky and finally looked at his daughter.

  “It was better when it was foggy,” he said in a low voice, “although there aren’t usually any customs men here.” Then he raised his right arm and pointed at something only he could see. “We have to ford the river at that point to get to the right bank. We’ll cross the valley, climb back up the mountain opposite and then go north-east, towards the border.”

  She nodded, and then immediately thought again of these words: in fifteen years she had never heard her father say so many together, one after the other.

  Augusto moved slowly, holding the mule’s reins tightly in his right hand, and Jole stuck close to the animal. Remaining deep in the brush, they descended for another thirty metres or so and at last came to the dry, stony bank of
the river. Without wasting any time, they headed straight for the water. Even though the noise was growing ever louder, they could hear the distant clangour from Tezze, upriver, where the Austro-Hungarians were finishing the railway that came down from Trento, made its way through the Sugana Valley and ended up on the border with the Kingdom of Italy a few kilometres further north. For a year now, work had been continuing day and night, thousands of soldiers of the emperor and workers coming and going between the river and the nearby stone quarries, in lines and in groups, as orderly as tireless ants, equipped with pickaxes and shovels and handcarts loaded with dynamite.

  To the north, towards Trento, teams of workers were digging and opening up tunnels beneath the mountains of the Sugana Valley, and further down other teams of workers were blowing up the quarries to extract the stones that they then would chisel down to size in order to lay them where other men would place sleepers of wood from Carinthia or the Fiemme Valley. Other workers were heating iron in kilns set up in open country and passing it on to teams who specialized in placing and fixing the rails. Controllers travelled about in handcars, checking the quality of the work, and everywhere there were iron bridges and subways and supporting walls built with cement from Kufstein. All this endless, colossal work in order to build the tracks on which one day a steam locomotive as black and shiny as an oil spill would run. And all this technical novelty, all this devilry, came from other countries, God alone knew how distant.

  Jole did not even know what a train was, nor was Augusto able to imagine one, even though one summer afternoon he had looked down from a height and seen a large number of soldiers busy laying these strange iron rails that followed the course of the Brenta.

  He had heard talk of them. There were those who said that the coming of the railways would eliminate borders and bring well-being, wealth and progress to everyone, but Augusto De Boer was not at all convinced. The way he saw it, the poor would remain poor for ever and borders, all kinds of borders, would never cease to exist. At most, they might continue to move a bit this way and a bit that way, as they had done ever since man had come into existence on the face of the earth.

  He and his daughter, though, saw nothing of all this turmoil, and they wisely kept their distance as they approached the river, at least three kilometres south of the borderline.

  16

  THEY ENTERED THE RIVER where the level of the water was significantly lower, close to a small natural weir of heaped rocks. Hector planted his forelegs and bent his head to drink, and father and daughter seized the opportunity, too: they took their respective canteens from their rucksacks and drank a little, then refilled them. After a few minutes they set off again, slowly, crossing the Brenta just below the natural weir, taking care to place their feet on the largest stones sticking up out of the water, stones polished smooth by the current. Augusto’s steps were sure and firm, but Jole’s were not: she kept losing her balance and ending up with her boots in the icy water.

  Having reached the opposite bank, father and daughter looked around and without delay headed for the mountain, quickly entering the woods, giving the towns and villages a wide berth.

  “Good!” Augusto said, beginning to climb the slope. He knew that, although the journey they had ahead of them would be long and tiring and the dangers countless, the fact that they had come down from Nevada and crossed the river unscathed was nevertheless positive and encouraging. So far, everything had gone well, apart from Jole’s soaked boots, which hardly counted.

  They advanced slowly, one behind the other: Augusto, Hector, Jole. Every now and then, father and daughter would stop to catch their breath, but these were just pauses of a few seconds and they would leave again immediately. The ascent was hard, and the woods so thick and rugged that apart from the effort of climbing they also had to take into account the difficulties of making their way between shrubs, branches, tangled undergrowth and brambles. They had now been travelling for two and a half hours, and they were halfway up.

  Jole began to stop every hundred paces, then every fifty, then every twenty. At a certain point, she stopped and did not move. Her father turned and saw that she was in difficulty. They remained silent for a few seconds, both panting.

  “Later, we’ll be at altitude most of the time,” he said softly, without moving his mouth or moustache, “at least until Mount Pavione and the border. Then we’ll have to do some more climbing.”

  She nodded, indicating that she was ready to leave again. They resumed their ascent, and she tried to ignore the exhaustion eating away at their ankles and thighs and calves, concentrating instead on the importance of their objective and the need that had driven them to undertake this journey.

  She thought about the gentleness and kindness her mother had always shown her and about her sister’s full, cheerful laughter, even when they had to suffer hunger and the injustices inflicted by the customs officers and the Tobacco Company. She thought about her brother, so intelligent and bright even though he was born up there, in a mountain place forgotten by all the saints in heaven. Last but not least, she thought about her father, and she watched him over the back of the mule as he walked ahead of her, advancing resolutely, fearlessly, towards a goal that meant the hope of a better life for his wife and children but was also a personal, irresistible call to freedom.

  She saw him as a rock, the pillar of her world. She could not imagine a future for her and her family without him, just as it is impossible to imagine the world without the sun. As she panted with the effort of the climb, her father’s strong smell reached her: his skin, his sweat. For a moment, she was overcome with emotion. She no longer recognized her father, but glimpsed in him a kind of ancestral spirit. At that instant, he seemed to her a kind of mazariòl, a spirit of the woods, a shaman, a being more wild than civilized, a wolf. As they climbed, she saw and recognized the lone wolf that dwelt in her father’s soul.

  In the dead of night and in the middle of this dark, tangled, dangerous forest, it seemed to her that her father had been transformed. She had never seen him like this: in every way like a wild beast. She felt her breath go from her. Then he came close to her and stroked her head and gestured to her that everything was all right. And Jole realized that she had never loved anyone as she loved her father.

  When they stopped, three and a half hours had passed since their departure. The air was cold and biting, but they were as hot and sweaty as if it were a summer’s day. They drank and peered through the branches of a spruce at the Brenta Valley below them. They could see that they were already at quite a height, and Augusto knew they had almost reached the promontory. “We’ll soon get to fresh water,” he said.

  There was no longer any trace of mist, and in the sky millions of stars glittered. The cries of the nocturnal animals were repeated and insistent, constant warnings of the presence of unknown human figures. Often, Augusto would stop for a few moments and prick up his ears and sniff the surrounding area, to hear or scent possible dangers, presences. Not of wild beasts, but of customs men.

  He did not fear wild beasts at all. He did not fear bears or lynxes or wolves. He did not love them and he did not hate them.

  He felt they were his brothers in a common destiny.

  “Five hundred paces and we’re there,” he said in a low voice, looking furtively around the area.

  They exchanged glances. Jole let her hair down and then tied it again, also rearranging the red kerchief her mother had tied around her neck.

  “Everything all right?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  She looked down from the crag and saw the river, silvery in the moonlight.

  She could not believe that just a little while earlier she had crossed that river. And if it had not been for her boots, which were still a little wet, she would have thought it had been a dream. She continued to stare at the Brenta, as if spellbound. She had never seen it from this bank, from the side opposite where her native village was. It struck her that she had never before been so far from home
. It seemed to her that she had been away for days, when in fact not even four hours had passed.

  “We have to get up there before dawn,” Augusto said.

  Jole took a deep breath, put her right hand on Hector’s back and said, “Go!”

  They set off again and before long became aware of the sound of a stream and the rumble of a little waterfall. They walked some more and finally came to within a short distance of a pool of green water, a couple of metres deep, into which the stream flowed.

  Hector breathed through his nostrils and pulled with all the strength he had in order to reach the stream and bury his muzzle in the water.

  Father and daughter filled their canteens again.

  17

  THEY REACHED THE TOP of the promontory in the first light of dawn and settled in a little hollow hidden and sheltered from the wind and from sight.

  Augusto hobbled Hector to the trunk of a chestnut tree and Jole lay down beneath an aier, the Alpine maple so common in these parts. She looked up at the clear, rosy sky. Her legs were worn out and her eyes were closing with sleep.

  From the grass around her emerged the vaporous breath of the nocturnal damp, warmed by the first rays of the sun. Thrushes, chaffinches, serins and bullfinches were singing at full tilt and bustling from branch to branch of the trees.

  Augusto took his rifle with him and reconnoitred the surrounding area. He noted animals tracks and waste matter in the grass, which was still quite thick around them.

  In the last few days, he observed, stags, roes, wild sheep, foxes and wolves had passed this way, but fortunately no human being. On his way back to the hollow where they had stopped to rest, Augusto found porcini mushrooms.

  Rejoining his daughter, he put down the rifle, sat down next to her and took from his rucksack a knife, a little old bread and some sopressa salami. He cut a little of the salami, sliced a mushroom and stuck it all together inside the hunk of bread.