Hunting Season: A Novel (10 page)

“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 dear 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.

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

T
he 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 off 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.”