Fedro Nuzzi's pen scratched on the paper, his neat and precise hand-writing a stark contrast to the alabaster white of the fine notebook, bought in far off Rome. Scritch-scratch, and another line emerged on the paper, as the man across from him watched him with weary eyes, the eyes of an old man whose soul had grown older still. Scritch-scratch. There was no clock, no ticking of time in this little hovel somewhere in Andalusia, nothing to mark the passage of the day beyond the sun and the moon.
"Estaban. Can you start from the beginning and tell me about yourself? Even if it seems unneeded, anything you can say is useful to me, useful for your people."
The old man did not respond at first, as he stared at the earthenware cup with a dark red wine in it, as dark as the night, with only the faintest traces of ruby coloration in it. He watched the wine rock in the cup, in little spirals as he swirled it, waves pushing up the side of the cup almost to its lip, then returning once more to their native milieu. He took a sip, his cracked lips, thin and creased, parting as he sipped the red liquid, then set down the goblet in front of himself. Old hands reached up to his face and brushed aside a droplet of the wine left on his upper lip, the gnarled hands with leathery old skin, covered with callouses and cracked with a lifetime of labor in the hot sun, in dryness, in hard labor. Peasant hands. They touched against the white beard, long and wavy, and his bristly mustache, white too, felt them briefly. His hands fell back to his lap, and his hazel eyes returned to Nuzzi's own, staring at him from old and haunted orbits, recessed and shrunken in on themselves. One of the eyes was traced with the white lines of cataracts, blind and unseeing.
"My name is Estaban Molina. I have seen 67 summers, and 66 winters. I have seen them all here, here in Benamahoma, where I have lived all my years. I have lived in this same house, at the end of the crooked road, next to the oaken tree, and I have tilled forever the same fields of olive and grain. What more do you want? My life is my life, I am not from your city of Rome, from your big cities with your cars and planes. Why do you interest yourself about my own life?"
The pen scratched constantly, and Nuzzi did not reply. Estaban stared at Nuzzi. "Do you understand me? You Italians don't always understand us, from what my son told me, when he met them in Barcelona."
Nuzzi nodded. "It is a hard accent for me, but I understand you. I hope you can say the same for me."
The peasant fell silent a few seconds, then nodded. "You are the first Italian I have ever met, and you have a strange sound in your voice." He stared off into space. "A trill, like a bird, something that I don't have. But I understand you". He shook his head once more. "Why do you care about my life? You care about death, not life."
The Italian journalist winced. What could he say, that he cared about the life of an Andulasian peasant, somebody who had done nothing more than farm the fields for the better part of a century? The man was right, he was here for death, not life. But he squared his shoulders, and looked into his eyes.
"Because I am here to learn a story. You are right, in that I came here for death, but no story is complete without both death and life, and to tell only why death has come to you would be to..." his mound blanked on the words in this Spanish language that he still struggled with sometime, so close to his own Italian but with the occasional word that caused him to stumble and fall, before the rest of the phrase came to his mind "abandon my duty as a journalist, to find truth wherever it may be".
Estaban stared back into his eyes. He shook his head, his white hair, curly and unkempt in loose locks, budging slightly against his scalp. "You Italians truly are a strange people".
A brief second of silence. A bird called somewhere, its cry coming through the open windows, these windows of greased paper that allowed light to enter while not allowing one to see through it like glass. A hawk perhaps? The cry was fierce, but distant, peaking into a screech. Perhaps it was circling somewhere above, as the cry came to them from the realm of the sky, perhaps it had already dove upon a creature upon the ground, to lift into the air a struggling rabbit or a quail, to bring it to the nest for its young.
Nuzzi cleared his throat. "Tell me about your wife."
Another wave of pain traversed the face of the old peasant, his eyes squinting, and his wrinkled face crinkling once again, like the expression of a man who had been physically burned. "It was the soldiers. She had gone into the town, to sell the textiles she had woven. The soldiers showed up, and that evening, they got drunk. Somebody had killed one of them out in the countryside, in an ambush, nobody knows how, for they didn't say." He drew a ragged breath. "Nobody knows why."
Pain traversed the eyes of the Spanish man. "Her name was Susana Navarro". His voice creaked with pain and suffering, some sort of horrible loss that nobody except one who had felt it could understand. "She was from the village of course. I still remember the wedding, her in her best clothes, myself in mine, as we had smiled at each other shyly, while they had danced and sang around us, after we had said our vows in the church. I'm told she wasn't beautiful, when some runt from the university had shown up for some sort of project, no idea what it was, and he had called her ugly. We had beat him up right proper after that, the brat. But she was always beautiful to me, beautiful since I had first set eyes on her when I was a child, beautiful at our wedding, beautiful the day she died."
A tear trickled down his face, from his eyes that seemed so dry, to wet the parchment of his skin.
Nuzzi was silent briefly, then spoke again. "What happened to her?" He felt internal turmoil, regret, to have to bring up such memories, to dredge them from this man's roiling interior, but he had a job, and he steeled himself - for the cause, for truth.
Another wave of pain traversed the man’s face, his eyes crinkling once more with lines appearing around them, lines in that already wrinkled face, and he turned in on himself, his mouth creasing and hunching over, as if he had been punched, or as if a burning rod had been applied to him. A few seconds more of silence, these interminable pauses that were the constant companions of this conversation, and then he opened once more his lips. “She wove”. The voice was flat and lifeless. “And would bring the clothes to town to sell them. It was some money, something. And she chose the wrong day. She chose when the militia were there, those animals that the government had let loose on us.”
A ragged sigh, ragged and pained. “And they were drunk that day, drunk as I said, drunk, on stolen wine. And they accused us, our village, of harboring the rebels. They said that they would select five people at random for one of their men who had been killed in the countryside, in that ambush”
Nuzzi stared in horror. “And your wife… she was one of them?”
Another heavy breath. “She was one of them, pulled from the crowd. They laughed, said that it was better to kill an old woman than a girl, at least young girls were useful to soldiers like them to warm their beds but that she was too old, too old, that she didn’t mean anything to them. And then they had shot her, shot her and the others.”
“Who had told you this, if you didn't see yourself?” Nuzzi couldn’t contain his morbid fascination, despite the creeping sense of guilt, as he violated this man’s peace to sell it to a newspaper in distant Italy. He reminded himself that he was doing it for him, doing it so the world would come to know about what had happened, so that they would realize the crimes of the Rep-, no the Kingdom - in distant Madrid, its butchery and barbarism to the population.
Sightless eyes, both the cataract-riven orb and the normal hazel, stared at him. “It was Maria. She sold clothes too. She had come running back, stoic and grim, and then she had told me. She told me what happened. I didn’t believe her, didn’t believe them when they showed me the grave, didn’t believe them when man after man had come up to me and tried to comfort me, when they had told me what happened. When they told me”.
He stared into the cup of black wine. “I still don’t believe, I still expect that every day she will walk in, that every day she will return.”
Nuzzi felt himself cowering in his seat. He tried to say something, but words didn’t come to his throat. A pained croak emerged, staring at the man in his agony. He reached out his hand, the young and pale flesh of a writer, laying it atop the old man’s hand, his soft palm on top of the leathery flesh. Silence returned, the deafening sound of silence, interrupted only by the whooshing of the wind, humming her eternal song. The sunlight streamed in through the windows, diffused into the house as it reflected on the surfaces, upon this poor dwelling with its rough table, with the low lying bed, with the storage places and the fireplace, this hovel that served as the center of this man’s existence.
Estaban shook himself. “Would you like a cup of wine?”
The word no was coming to his throat, but it caught there. He nodded his head. “Yes, if you please.”
The old man stood up, and busied himself at the counter, with a wineskin - a wineskin, Nuzzi marveled at this country sometime - and another earthenware cup. Nuzzi’s pen skimmed the paper, line after line, the sketches of his ideas and what the man had recounted to him. Estaban placed the cup in front of him, and sat down at his seat once more. The pen scratched once more. Nuzzi swirled the wine in its cup, watching the black liquid in its waves as it climbed nearly to the lip then settled back down, the little grains of sediment in it, then took a sip. Strong, without lightness or the hints of perfumes the the Italians gave to their wine, that they served in the fancy restaurants back in Rome where [i]I Tempi[/i] writers and executives had discussed their stories over the fine dishes of Roman chefs, swilling their delicate crystal glasses, amid the haze of blue-grey smoke that drifted aimlessly throughout the rooms. It was nothing like that that, this wine of the countryside, with its almost harsh taste, without the pretensions of the urban wines, this wine for peasants and not for writers.
He liked the taste. He put it down and started to write again.
“You will want to know about my children now.” It wasn’t a question, just a declaration, a statement, a fact, from the Spanish peasant, his eyes, the sightless one as well, resting on the paper as the pen continued to meander along its surface.
“Can you talk about them?” Nuzzi looked up from the paper to meet Estaban’s eyes.
“I must. For them.” He readied himself, like a man before he plunged into battle, drawing up his shoulders, steeling himself as his hands grasped the earthen container in front of him. A drink of wine, more than sip, as he perched it in his lips and downed it with a backward jet of his head.
“We never had much land. And we never had much in the way of children. There were only 5 that have been the product of my loins. One of them died at birth, a boy. Another one was a girl, and she died of the flu, when she was 4. Eliana.” He drew back into himself, remembering a distant time. “She was so young, with her giggle, learning how to speak, so full of energy. And then she died”. He shook himself. “Two boys, and one girl for the rest. Xavier, Miguel, and Susana.”
“Xavier was a strong boy, tall and handsome.” He gave a laugh, the first genuine one that Nuzzi had heard so far, with a trace of what once must have been a man whose face was wrinkled with laugh lines rather than wetted with tears. “He married Antonia, and he was here. There were strong hands on the farm, and children who were born. We laughed, we sang, we watched the seasons pass, and we never imagined that it would be different. I would die one day, and the farm would go to him, as it always has been and always should be.”
“And then the mobilization papers arrived, to fight the rebels. He told us he would be back soon. They sent the telegram a few weeks later, that the village priest read aloud to me. I still have it.” The peasant man stood up, and pulled a scrap of heavy, thick, official paper from their pantry, and handed it to Nuzzi.
[i]“I inform that your son, the private Xavier Martínez, from the 11th Andulasian Infantry Regiment, was killed in combat, on the morning of the 15th of November of The Year of Our Lord 1939. He died valiantly in action in the defense of Zaragoza, in action against rebel attacks. Your son died a hero’s death, may this be a consolation for your irreparable loss. His belongings will be returned to you at the soonest possible date, save for that equipment which belongs to the regiment.”
Second Captain Montreal,
Commander of the 3rd company
From the front, 18th November, 1939.[/i]
Nuzzi raised his eyes from the text, and looked at Estaban once more. “My condolences.” He felt an unforgivable shame well up inside himself, that he could not do more. “My condolences.” The words ran out of his mouth like a mantra.
There was no response. Estaban gazed at the table as he continued to speak. “And then there was Miguel. He was different. He saw that there wasn’t enough land for him, he dreamed, he wanted to go somewhere else. And then he did, he left, and went to Barcelona. He liked it there, he liked the factories and the work, according to the priest when he read the letters that he sent back. He was married too, and he had come home with her once - a pretty girl, tall and slim, with a ready smile. She didn’t like the farm, a city girl, and I had fought with my son about it. But he was right. He had a woman and they raised children together, there in Barcelona. I never visited the city, just saw the photos he had of it, or heard of the descriptions that the priest read.”
The face crumpled. “He sent letters once a month, always, without fail. When they didn’t come, we worried. Maybe it was the disruption of the war, maybe he was busy. When it finally came we were so happy, so happy to receive from him that he was alive. And then we read it, we read about how the government bombers had destroyed the factory he worked at, and how his widow hadn’t been able to recognize the body when they found it. But she had written to us to tell what had happened, and for that, I will always be thankful that at least we knew.”
“I always thought that the city would be the death of Miguel, and I was right”. A final, harsh, brutal laugh.
Nuzzi’s pen scribbled across the page, as he turned over the journal and filled another page of it with notes, little blocky black letters. Another letter, like those two which had destroyed the life of this man.
The tone of Estaban was flat. “Susana is all that is left, and she married a Eduardo. He’s a good man, and they have had their children. They invited me to return to live with them, when my wife was killed, when Xavier left for war. Antonia and the children took him up on the offer. But me and my wife wanted to stay, to tend the farm until Xavier came back. We wouldn’t be able to do it all, but it was our farm, and we would never let it go. We were planning to go to live with Susana. And then my wife died. They told me to leave, they told me to go. Go! But this is all I have left.” He gestured around him with a gaunt and aged hand, the flesh hanging off old bones. “All I have. All I have. She still brings food times, she still checks in on me. But I am alone, and that is how I wish to be, alone until I die.”
What do you say to a man who has lost everything? Nuzzi felt a terrible feeling of powerlessness inside him, as his pen continued to scratch over the surface of the paper, trying to commit something to the written word, something which would enable him to avoid looking Estaban in the eyes. During long silent minutes, only broken by the cry of a bird and the rushing of the wind, he said nothing, until he could avoid it no longer, and looked up.
“I am sorry. I am sorry to hear that which has befallen you, and I am sorry to have asked. There is nothing that I can do for you that will help you, but all I can say is that I seek justice for you, for what happened to you.”
Estaban nodded.
Nuzzi continued. “Can I reimburse you for your information?”
A grimace. “I don’t want money for having told the truth. Do they demand money in Italy for simply telling what happened?”
“For reporters, sometimes, yes.”
“You are a strange people, you Italians.” A softer note entered the man’s voice. “But thank you, thank you for listening. I hope that it does something. I will never have my wife, I will never have my sons, returned to me. But I hope for justice. You Italians, you are a powerful nation aren’t you?”
Nuzzi shrugged. “We are, I think, Enough to do something about something like this, if there are enough that learn about it”.
“Then I hope that they will. You may be a strange people, but if you bring me justice, then you will be my brothers.”
He left soon thereafter, shaking the hand of the peasant, who watched him as he left from the frame of the door, the silent eyes drilling into his back with the patience of the old. The farm was an old building itself, built in stone and weathered by the years, and the eye of a farmer could see that something was amiss with it - fields not sown, vines overrunning it, buildings left unpainted. This was no farm, it was a tomb, a tomb for a man whose time had come before he himself was dead.
Nuzzi kicked open the stand on his bicycle, placing his journal carefully into the little basket on the front, hopping onto it and peddling back through the afternoon air, warm in high autumn, refreshed by the breeze and the shade of trees along the route. It was hard going, even going downhill as a whole, for the path wavered, was narrow, thin, covered with little rocks and the gnarled branches of old trees, olive trees with their silvery-green leaves that sighed in the wind, sad to see a man pass by and to leave them so early, or larger trees - the great oak that Estaban had spoken of, or almond trees still in blossom with their beautiful pink leaves, richer than any cherry blossom, occasionally more humble willows, swaying in the breeze. He had to get off his bike several times, walk it through the rougher section of the trail, his boots sending up little puffs of dust every time he displaced his feet on the ground. Birds squawked above him, and he saw a kite circling in the sky, the little hawk, after a mouse or rabbit or some other prey.
He saw the village hove into view, Benamahoma, one of the famous white villages of Spain, with its limestone construction, looking like something from North Africa rather than a European city. Red roofs surmounted white buildings, with little windows jutting out into the air, open to the breeze that cooled the village, and doubtless when he got closer he would be able to hear it, to hear the cries of children who ran throughout, getting under the feet of women who went to do their washing or stood in the shade and gossiped, while men sat in chairs in the central square under the shade of trees, smoking and drinking their little cups of black wine, this tiny little village undisturbed by the sound of automobiles, with its babble of voices and only mechanical sound being the ringing of church be -
“Halt!” The voice echoed through the air, a loud and harsh command, as a squad of men - 8 - revealed themselves from the side of the road. Nuzzi stopped pedaling and put his hands up in the air, the bike underneath him as he put his feet on the ground.
“Who are you?”
Nuzzi gulped. “I am Alfredo Murillo” He prayed that his Italian accent wouldn’t give him away, that they would think he was Spanish.
His interrogator dashed his hopes, looking at him suspiciously. A thin, tall man, with glasses on a hooked nose, black hair peeking out from under a rounded military helmet, tanned from the sun, a rifle in his hands, pointed at Nuzzi. He scowled. “That isn’t a Spanish accent. I have visited enough of this country to know that. Tell me your real name.”
“Nuzzi gave up. “Fedro Nuzzi”.
“Italian?”
“Yes.”
“Why are you here?”
“Tourism, I wanted to see southern Andalusia.”
The soldier cursed and spit. “Nobody visits fucking Southern Andulasia for tourism, you bastard. Stop lying and tell us the truth.
Another gulp. Why did he have to get a hard-ass officer like this to interrogate him? Why? “I am a reporter, here to take note of the war.”
“A reporter, eh? More of the filth of your kind, here to spread lies about Spain. Tell me, what did you learn today?”
“I had talked to a peasant.”
The soldier looked at him, then grimaced. “Let me guess, Estaban?”
The color drained from Nuzzi’s face. “No, it was Leonardo.”
“You think I’m some stupid fucker from Madrid who doesn’t know this village? I hate this place, but I’ve been assigned here to deal with it, to make sure it is in order. You think I don’t know the names of the peasants, who has grievances? And I know Estaban, who lives ‘bout thatway”, he said with a gesture of the rifle, “and there sure as hell isn’t any goddamn Leonardo in this village.” He shook his head. “I know what Estabana told you, and I know that my superiors aren’t going to like hearing about that, because I do know how to read a newspaper, unlike half the stupid hicks here, and I don’t want the Social Research Department asking any questions about why there is an article in an Italian newspaper about some peasant whose senile old wife we dealt with to solve the partisan problem, or some sob story about his idiot sons who managed to get themselves killed. It was a mistake to led Estabana live, but I don’t like killing old men, but maybe I’ll have to reconsider if your kind are sniffing about him for a tale.”
Nuzzi was growing increasingly nervous to hear the rapid staccato of the dialogue, some words escaping him, but he understood enough to get what the man was saying. He started to back up nervously, looking over his shoulder.
The Spanish soldier pointed the rifle at him, and screamed “Stop moving!” in a drill sergeant’s voice. Then more softly. “And for what it is worth, I am sorry I have to do this, you are the first Italian I’ve met and I am sorry it has to end this way.”
Crack! A cloud of smoke emerged from the rifle, and Nuzzi felt a sense of disbelief, of horror, and looked own at his chest to see a dot of glistening red blood appear on it. He felt like a mannequin, disconnected from the world, without control over himself, seeing nothing, feeling nothing, as his body fell forwards, fell upon the front of the bike on the journal, and as his vision fell black forever. Nuzzi was dead before he ever hit the ground, a bullet through the heart.
The blood mixed with the ink, red and black, upon the white pages, until one of the soldiers picked it up, as the group of Spanish soldiers walked over to examine the body. He started to open it and flip through it idly, then grimaced. "Italian scribbling" he said with a laugh and look of disgust. His comrade laughed too. "Well, we all need something for the fire, don't we? I'd say it would be a damn lot more useful than whatever this guy wanted to do with it!" Another soldier picked off his watch, setting it on his wrist and admiring it in the sun, and another rifled through his pockets for money. They laughed at the death, the laughter of men who had seen too much death, who thought nothing of blood and death, who waited not even for the body to cool as it lay upon the dry soil of Andulasia before they took their share from it.
Their raucous laughs joined together in the quiet village air, and the sound of their conversation dimmed as they parted once more into the early evening, as the sun begin to fall from the sky and the shadows began to lengthen. Behind them, blood mixed with soil, and another soul joined the serried legions of those who had already left behind their life in the parched land of Spain, watered in those terrible years of 1940 more by the red blood of a dying and suffering humanity than by the blue life of rain. The furrows nurtured by a foreign blood: what was the crop that it was to bear? What fruit would the parched soil of Andulasia bear in the years to come, bear from this mixture of blood, of tears, of ink, unmixed with the life of water - what would it bear from these liquids of death that trickled over its fields?
The world would never hear of the tale of Estaban Martínez. Benamahoma guarded her secrets well.
Aucun commentaire:
Publier un commentaire