Enchantment Read online

  PIETRO GROSSI

  ENCHANTMENT

  Translated from the Italian by

  Howard Curtis

  PUSHKIN PRESS

  LONDON

  Contents

  Title Page

  ONE: Rocky Road

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  TWO: Initiation

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  THREE: Doubt

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Apologies and Acknowledgements

  Also Available from Pushkin Press

  About the Publisher

  Copyright

  ENCHANTMENT

  SO HERE I WAS AT LAST, standing in a daze with the receiver of my parents’ old grey telephone in my hand, those damned words echoing in my head like the first rumblings of an earthquake, and the most lucid part of me immediately sensed that the tremor would leave behind it nothing but debris.

  If anyone had asked me, even a short while earlier, I would have declared with a touch of naïve pride that the walls of what I persisted in calling “my life”, which had taken me so much effort to build, were quite solid. And yet now, it was as if overnight I had detected some alarming cracks, and was gradually starting to suspect that someone had mixed the mortar in the wrong proportions. Now, as everything started to shake and I was forced to admit that pieces of plaster were coming loose from the walls, I felt an overwhelming need to discover the exact moment when it all started.

  A few hours later, lying staring at the ceiling, I managed to pin down the moment of time when the tectonic plates that were now shifting had given the first signs of drift. When it had happened, nobody had realized that the ground was moving, and even if we had noticed that the landscape was tilting slightly, the view in front of our eyes had been anything but unpleasant.

  And yet the exact moment when that cosmic roar invaded my universe was the imperceptible fraction of a second during which a small area of skin struck the shiny surface of my window. That had been my Big Bang: the muted rapping of knuckles on a window pane in the dead of night.

  ONE

  Rocky Road

  1

  MY HEART AND LUNGS trapped in a vortex of terror, I instinctively pulled the blankets over my head. My breath warmed the sheets, draining the oxygen from my body. More sinister knocking. My heart thumped in my chest. After a few seconds I turned down the blankets slightly and took a look.

  A dark figure was curled up outside the window. I huddled under the blankets again, trying to convince myself I was still asleep and this was only a nightmare. In a moment I would calm down and wake up properly: the figure would be gone and I would laugh and fall asleep again and have something to tell my friends the next day.

  But the figure was still there, still tapping at the window pane and waving at me, motioning for me to approach. With the blankets still up to my nose, I squinted, trying to see better, then dropped my head back on the pillow and cursed. I immediately lifted my head again and took another look. For a moment, I concentrated on catching my breath and listening to my heartbeat slowly getting back to normal. I threw off the sheets and blankets, sat up on the edge of the bed, glanced at the window another couple of times, then got up and walked to it. I quietly opened one shutter, closing the other and trying not to make a noise.

  Outside, squatting on the roof of the back porch beneath the window, was Biagio. He was chewing a long piece of wood and looking at me as if everything was perfectly normal.

  “Are you mad?”

  “Get dressed. There’s something you have to see.”

  “What time is it?”

  “I don’t know. Get dressed.”

  I again looked down and around. The moonlight glinted on the lawn in front of the house.

  “How did you get up here?”

  Biagio gestured with his head, behind him and to his left. Beyond the roof on which he was squatting, down the corner of the main wall of the house, ran an old copper pipe, blackened with age, which I seemed to be seeing for the first time.

  “All right, I’ll put something on. In the meantime, go to the shed behind the house and find Enzo’s ladder. I’m not going down that pipe.”

  “You big cissy,” Biagio said with a smile as he turned away.

  Once I had climbed down the ladder and crossed the garden as silently as possible, we headed left and out of the village.

  It was one of those nights at the end of May when the air, although still crisp, starts to smell of summer. I tried to ask Biagio where we were going, but he simply told me to wait and not to worry. When we got to the end of the street, we turned right, and when we came level with the old school buildings Biagio started down the stone steps that led to the washhouses. I had never seen anybody there, but my dad always said he could remember the women washing the clothes, singing and beating the linen on the edges of the tubs. As children we had sometimes bathed there, and in summer, when they were overrun with tadpoles, we would fish out frogs using the heads of daisies.

  For some reason Biagio was always going out for walks by himself at night. The first time his mother had discovered it, he was nine. She had woken up in the middle of the night and, on her way to the kitchen to get herself a glass of water, she had half opened the door of the boys’ room and glanced in. Biagio’s brother, Graziano, was sleeping like a stunned animal. Of Biagio, though, there was no trace: his bed, which was opposite Graziano’s, was unmade and empty. Betta took the length of the tiny corridor in a single step and looked in the bathroom, and again in the kitchen. Then she went back into her sons’ bedroom and shook Graziano. He snored and turned over.

  “Graziano!” she cried, shaking him more violently.

  A grunt rose at last from that mass of limp flesh.

  “Biagio. Where is he?”

  Graziano raised his big square head and looked at the empty bed opposite. “How should I know?” he muttered.

  “Haven’t you seen him?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Graziano turned, gave his mother an angry look, grunted again, and went back to sleep.

  Betta got the keys from the kitchen and went outside. She first checked the yard, then walked up and down the road for a few hundred metres, and finally went behind the house, over towards the farms, softly calling her son’s name. The only response was a flutter of wings in the hen house and a dog barking in the distance. Before going back inside, Betta knocked at her sister’s window—her sister lived in the house opposite—and asked her if by any chance she had seen Biagio. She hadn’t.

  “He’ll be back soon,” her sister said, already closing the window again and disappearing inside.

  So Betta went back home and sat down in the kitchen with a cup of hot milk. At the first light of dawn, by which time she had already decided to go and see the Marshal with her husband, she saw Biagio pop up at the kitchen window, which was fixed from the outside with a piece of cardboard. Biagio had jumped up and and laid his stomach on the window still, but once he saw his mum he froze. For a moment or two, they were both quite still, staring at each other, Biagio wondering what was the best thing to do, whether to keep going in or retreat, his mother trying with all her might to hold back her tears. But the next moment, Betta leapt to her feet and Biagio, his eyes wide, hesitated for an instant, then tried to jump back out. But big as she was, Betta was too quick for him. Darting forward, she grabbed Biagio by the sweater and pulled him in. Then, when he was on the kitchen floor, Betta began raining slaps down on his head. Shielding himself with his hands as best he could, Biagio tried to c
rawl to his bedroom. Betta’s big hands, as hard as pieces of wood, still managed to land sharp blows on his head, which in the silence of the dawn must have rung out like thwacks of a stick. I remember those hands well: they were as tough as leather and it didn’t take much for Betta to raise them. One day she had caught us throwing firecrackers in the hen house behind the house. I can still feel those sharp shovel blows on our heads as she screamed at us that the hens would stop laying eggs if we did that.

  In the end, Biagio managed to get to his bed and Betta stopped in the doorway.

  “We’ll talk about it over breakfast,” she said, closing the door.

  A couple of hours later, as Betta was heating the milk and coffee on the stove, Biagio sat down at the little pink formica table in the kitchen.

  “Where were you?” Betta asked without even turning round.

  “Walking around.”

  “Around where?”

  “Just around.”

  Betta turned with the saucepan of hot milk in her hand and slammed it down in front of Biagio on a small wooden plate covered with burn marks. “If you do it again I’ll lock you indoors until you’re twenty.”

  In the following five or six months, Biagio was caught a few more times and there were more slaps and more threats. And whenever his mum or dad asked him where he went, he would simply say, “Just for a walk.” They even tried barring the doors and windows, but the only result was to find Biagio in a dejected mood in the morning, as white as a sheet and with two deep black pits under his eyes. He even had a fever. In the end, his parents reconciled themselves to the fact that every morning Biagio calmly came back to his bed, and that wherever he went on those walks of his, it couldn’t be doing him any harm. So they decided to postpone their anxiety for two or three hours, until dawn, and then start worrying if they had to. They never had to.

  At the time, I myself often wondered where exactly Biagio went, and I liked to see that place, wherever it was, in a heroic, adventurous light. Now, though, I can’t help imagining him simply walking around, looking at the mounds of snow in winter, listening to the crickets in the fields in summer. And I wonder if, when you come down to it, that was all he ever asked.

  Biagio led me through the Sardinian’s rapeseed field and beyond the old river bed and up again through Ninno’s dad’s olive grove. And every time I asked him where the hell we were going he would tell me to keep quiet and follow him. Then all at once we found ourselves on the edge of that big field under the cliff, where we’d stolen sunflower seeds the previous summer.

  “Close your eyes,” Biagio said.

  “And then?”

  “And then follow me.”

  “Are you mad?”

  “Don’t start crying. I’ll lead you. Close your eyes.”

  I stared at him for a moment and sighed. “What a drag.”

  Biagio got into position behind me, grabbed my belt and started guiding me like a puppet. If I close my eyes I can still smell the scent of the night and hear the cry of an owl in the distance and feel the ears of corn caressing my trousers.

  “Wait,” Biagio said after a while, stopping.

  “What is it?”

  “The cliff.”

  “Can I open my eyes?”

  “No.”

  “Come on, Biagio, what do I do?”

  “I’ll jump and pull you up.”

  I’d have liked to complain, to say that it was night and I was sleepy and had no desire to be there in the middle of the countryside with my eyes closed. It was quite cold. Biagio’s feet slipped on the loose earth. Then I thought I heard him steady himself.

  “Give me your hand,” Biagio said, from somewhere a bit higher up.

  “Where?”

  “Here.”

  I reached up my right hand like a blind man, and Biagio grabbed me. As I climbed I felt him also going up a few steps, pieces of wood and branches cracking under his feet.

  “There, relax now,” Biagio said as I touched the ground with my other hand to steady myself and pulled my right foot out from under a root.

  Suddenly I couldn’t find any ground to touch and my right foot landed on what felt like grass. There was a strange, bitter odour of tar, which jarred with the fresh smell of the countryside, an odour I didn’t want to recognize at the time, but which, when I think about it now, was unmistakable.

  “Are you there?” Biagio asked.

  I braced myself, as if expecting a sudden gust of wind. “Yes. I think so.”

  “Go on then, open your eyes.”

  All this drama made me smile suddenly, and I slowly opened my eyes. I stood there motionless, turning my head first to the left, then a long way to the right.

  “Jesus.”

  Biagio was also looking right and left and nodding with a smile.

  We were standing on the weed-strewn verge of the Rocky Road. The Rocky Road, as we had dubbed it several years earlier, was a stretch of more than three kilometres, part of the old road that joined San Filippo and Posta, twisting and turning between fields and hollows and low hills. The road had been in use for more than two hundred years, until the mayor and the leader of the local council had suddenly turned ambitious and decided to improve the provincial highway and build approach roads, roundabouts and fast lanes. Of the old winding road that had joined the two villages—the scene, so it was said, of bloody battles that were probably more like tavern brawls—all that survived were three sections, bordered on one side by the modified version of the provincial highway and on the other by a big new road which was always deserted, and which bypassed Posta and then led downhill.

  The part of the old road that led to San Filippo had become the semi-private access road to a new complex of detached houses, where even Mauro, the butcher’s son, had ended up. Mauro hadn’t much liked the new arrangement and had suddenly disappeared, one day at the end of March. The boys said he was somewhere in South America, or travelling the oceans on a merchant ship, but the old men said only that he was a rotten fruit and the spring had replaced him. What he had been replaced with, the old men were always vague about.

  Towards Posta, the old road had simply become an ordinary stretch leading from the roundabout to the cinema and the centre of the village. The leader of the council had been very pleased with that roundabout and, in his euphoria, had used words in his inaugural speech which at the time, as I listened, holding my dad’s hand, seemed filled with wonders: Europe, progress, the new millennium. Apparently the idea had indeed been his, and it had come to him after a holiday in France with his wife, just before discovering that she was carrying on with a detergent salesman from Rome. The roundabout had been the poor councillor’s attempt at redemption, which was why it would for ever after be called the Horn.

  In the middle stretch there were still those three kilometres and more of bare, now useless road, at the mercy of brambles and brushwood and blocked on both sides by the barriers of the new roads. When we were smaller, we had often gone there on our bikes, or to try out an older brother’s moped, but gradually the branches had taken away half the fun, and the blackthorn scratches and potholes were no longer worth those few metres of free road. It was at that time that we started to call it the Rocky Road. First, for just a few weeks, carried away by our innocent desire for a more glittering world, we had tried calling it the Runway, but the title didn’t fit it well, and as well as creating new potholes, a few showers soon did away with that name.

  And now there it was in front of me like a cobra, all black and clean, all covered and coated and polished: who had done it, and why, would long remain a mystery, and would also secretly eat away at our studied cynicism.

  I shook my head and squatted on the ground. The asphalt glittered with millions of diamonds beneath the almost full moon. I moved my hand over it, and it was as if I could hear the roar of the engines, and the tyres clinging like claws at the rough surface. I picked up a handful of black powder from the edge: it seemed to have fallen straight from the sky, and to be made o
f the same material as the night.

  Biagio was still standing there, looking at me and smiling.

  “When did this happen?”

  “I don’t know. I was here last week and everything was exactly the same as before.”

  “Jesus,” I said again, looking at that black snake disappearing into the countryside.

  Later, as we walked home in silence, with our hands in our pockets, we felt like two mountaineers returning to base camp. Maybe, when you come down to it, all that separates men capable of amazing feats from everyone else is a single moment: the moment when—consciously or not—you smell the universe and realize that everything is possible. A man may ride the waves, understand the laws of electromagnetism or build a skyscraper, but sooner or later he is overwhelmed by the insidious, shattering intuition that the limits of his body and of the world are not as solid as he had always imagined. I wonder if that wasn’t my moment: the moment when the palm of my hand brushed against the mystery of the fresh asphalt on the Rocky Road.

  2

  THE RUMOUR bounced around the walls of the school like a clandestine murmur. It spread so quickly that in the space of barely three quarters of an hour, after break, it came back to me from the side opposite to where I had myself launched it.

  After almost two hours of lessons, as Signor Torello was trying in vain in his Calabrian accent to draw our attention to the wonders of the Renaissance, I couldn’t resist any more: I leant slightly to my right and, while still pretending to listen, simply whispered, “They’ve tarred the Rocky Road.”

  Antonio, known as Tonino, the always neat and tidy son of a lawyer who had once resolved a spot of bother my dad had got into because of an accident, looked up from the exercise book in which he was making notes and frowned.