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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Serie: Soul of the Border
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
The epic second novel in an internationally acclaimed trilogy, set in the rugged mountains of the VenetoWinter 1868. On the rugged, breathtaking mountains of the Veneto, the De Boer family are holding on to their tobacco farm, scratching out a lonely existence. But when tragedy arrives, and their precious tobacco-smuggling gold is stolen by bandits, twenty-year-old Jole De Boer must face the disaster alone, armed with only her father's old rifle.During the chase, Jole traverses snow-covered forests and deserted villages on a journey that will force her to go further than she ever imagined. For she soon learns that the border between good and evil is often indistinguishable, and that her own survival depends on uncovering the truth.This is the second novel in the internationally acclaimed Soul of the Border trilogy.Matteo Righetto is an award-winning author and professor of literature who lives between Padua and the Dolomites. Many of his works take place in beautiful mountain landscapes that he knows deeply, having visited them since childhood backpacking with his father. The Last Homeland is the second title in his internationally acclaimed trilogy. The first title in the trilogy, Soul of the Border, was published by Pushkin Press in 2018, and the final volume, The Promised Land, is forthcoming, also from Pushkin Press.
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To those whose homeland is the wind, the forests, the clouds and the water in the rivers.
To those whose homeland is the dawn, the sunset and the starry sky.
To those whose homeland is justice and loyalty.
7
The moon was rushing through the clouds; now nothing seemed to exist any more but laments.
mario rigoni stern, The Sergeant in the Snow
Then it come to me clean as spring rain. Life is just what it is, and it ain’t fair at all.
joe r. lansdale, The Thicket8
CONTENTS
PART ONE
10
1
Stealthily, the two men lay down on the ground, chilled to the bone but silent as lurking snakes, careful not to be seen or heard. They lay still for a few minutes, while the tops of the spruces around them slowly swayed.
From the edge of the woods, surrounded by bushes of withered raspberries and big scattered leaves of meadow dock, they watched him as, without a care in the world, he explained to his son how to shoe a horse.
Augusto De Boer, little Sergio and Samson were twenty or thirty metres further down, windward of them. The two men watched Augusto, then turned to each other like two excited predators and exchanged conspiratorial sniggers.
At this point Augusto’s wife came out, soon followed by his elder daughter.
The two men lying there did not bat an eyelid.
Walking as quickly as ever, Agnese went over to the woodpile and picked up some ten or so beech logs, then said something to her husband and son, who both answered her.
The two men in the woods did not catch this dialogue, even though the wind was blowing in their direction.
Jole bent and picked an autumn crocus, put it over her left ear and went up to her father and little brother. She stroked Samson and kissed him on the brow. She said something 12and the three of them smiled, although immediately after that she said something to her father that seemed like a reprimand.
She was more beautiful than ever, her long flowing hair as bright as hay gathered from the meadows, her skin burnished by the late summer sun. Just from the look in her eyes, it would seem that the future was on her side and had made an everlasting pact with her, like the pact between time and the beauty of the surrounding woods and mountains, both rugged and sublime.
The thinner of the two men, half his face deformed by a severe burn, slowly took off his felt hat and whispered:
“Four.”
“Huh?”
“There are four of them left. The other daughter hasn’t been there for a while.”
“One less,” murmured the other, fatter man, who had a scar on his right cheek, bloodshot eyes and eyebrows like a wild bramble bush that could have served as a vipers’ nest.
“Yes. Now we need to find out where he hides the stuff. We’ll have to be patient.”
They smiled and waited quite calmly for all the De Boers to go back inside the house. Only then did they slowly get up and return to the woods behind them. After about a hundred metres they came to a small secluded clearing amid a dense, tangled thicket of downy oaks and a few felled and already decaying conifers. Using big knives, they cut some hornbeam boughs and, weaving them with chestnut branches, erected a refuge that looked like nothing so much as a fox’s lair.13
They went inside it and sat down, bathed in sweat. The thin man took a bottle of grappa from his knapsack, knocked back a swig and passed it to the other man.
“We have to be patient,” he repeated.
The fat man drank and said nothing. The patch of early November sky visible above them was clear. The air was cold, dry and thin, imbued with the scent of resin.
The thin man searched again in his bag and finally took out some pieces of aged and smoked rabbit meat. He ate one and gave another to his accomplice.
A strange noise suddenly rose above the rustle of the woods. Repeated calls, a series of harsh, muted clicks.
Teck… teck… teck… tock…
The two men stopped chewing and looked around.
Teeek… tock… tock…
A shadow flew low over them. The grouse hovered for a moment then disappeared beyond the felled trees, perhaps in search of its mate.
Suddenly, after a few seconds, there was a strong and unexpected gust of wind from the north that rustled the leaves of the trees. The wind blew the felt hat off the thin man’s head and sent it rolling along the ground.
The other man laughed. Then the wind died down. The thin man recovered his hat and the two men resumed eating.
2
Two summers had passed since Jole had crossed the border, found her missing father and returned home with him.
Two years may be a long or a short time, depending on a host of things, starting with the place where we live.
By the autumn of 1898, the De Boers were the only family still left in Nevada, that tiny village in the grim mountains between the Asiago Plateau and the Brenta Valley, the only family to have determinedly resisted the idea of leaving their own land and emigrating because of hunger.
For some years now, a genuine exodus had been under way. From the Dolomites and from every corner of the Venetian Prealps, the peasants were abandoning their houses and pouring down into the valley like streams in the May thaw. Masses of the poor, forsaking their country in search of a better place.
In ten years more than a hundred thousand people had left the Veneto. There was almost nobody left up in the mountains. That spring alone, three hundred and forty-three people had departed from the Brenta Valley, all of them ending up on the other side of the world. The emigration agents promised good times and full bellies, emphasizing that those who arrived at their destinations first would get better accommodation.15
And this had happened in Nevada, too. In the last ten months, first the Zests and then the Battistas had gone, leaving the De Boer family alone and more isolated than ever.
Augusto, despite the temptations held out to him by the “promisers” – the name given in these parts to the emigration agents who climbed all the way up here promising new paradises – had chosen to stay where he was born and had grown up, convinced that better times for everyone would come sooner or later. On the few occasions on which he talked about it, his arguments were weak and half-hearted. Every now and again, Agnese would wonder if her husband was really convinced of what he said, seeing that things were going from bad to worse. Even Jole disagreed with him, but was forced to accept his stubborn will.
The life of the De Boers had continued, but with struggles and sacrifices that were sometimes unbearable, especially since Augusto had decided to stop smuggling his tobacco over the border. For quite some time now he had been selling only small quantities down in the valley, as almost everyone had done until just a few months earlier. He had decided to put an end to the difficult, dangerous journeys, which may have allowed him to glean some precious metals, but only by risking his own life and that of his eldest child.
The days and the seasons succeeded one another, never changing, measured out mostly in the laborious rituals and rhythms of tobacco cultivation and the traditional simple life of the poor. And as if the injustices perpetrated by the Tobacco Company were not enough, taking away the crop every year and paying almost nothing for it, in mid-August 16two terrible storms had destroyed a large part of the planted area, battering it with violent winds and hailstones as big as chestnuts. Larvae and parasites had done the rest, nibbling away at the last surviving tobacco leaves. At about the same time, Judith, their one remaining cow, had died of tetanus, as had Mos’s black horse, which Jole had brought home from the journey across the border, but which she had never wanted to give a name. The horse’s muscles had started to contract and within a few hours the increasingly frequent spasms had risen all the way to its neck. It had found chewing difficult and its nostrils had become increasingly dilated. Less than a week after the appearance of the first symptoms, it had bowed its head and died. The same fate had befallen Judith only two days later.
Fortunately, at the first signs of that fatal illness, Augusto had made the decision to isolate both animals in order to prevent Samson’s becoming infected.
Once they were safely dead, he had dug a big hole a few hundred metres from the house, thrown the bodies in and burnt them.
Sergio had been very fond of Judith: it was he who fed her and generally took care of her under his father’s watchful gaze. When he had seen her in the hole he had been unable to hold back his tears.
Jole had drawn him to her and hugged him, all the while watching the black horse burn inexorably in the flames, the last witness to a time and an adventure that had largely remained a deep, unfathomable secret. She had watched it burn with eyes full of compassion, but without feeling any nostalgia, as 17we watch an ugly memory fade away for ever, carrying with it the stench of our most unpleasant experiences.
Augusto had filled the hole and within a short time buttercups and clovers had grown over that patch of ground, yellow and green as the colours of the most beautiful of seasons.
3
Desp ite his strength and his proverbial solidity, even Augusto, surrounded by all these terrible difficulties and burdened with responsibility for his family, had begun to show the first signs of decline. Since returning home with his daughter he had aged rapidly. He was only forty-six, and yet the thick moustache he wore proudly had turned almost completely white. His back had become slightly stooped, and the skin on his face and arms, although as hard as the bark of a larch, had grown dry and furrowed.
Over the last fourteen months, he had been forced to draw on the little treasure he had amassed from his former illicit trade with Austria-Hungary. In order to survive with dignity and to support his nearest and dearest, he would go down to Bassano to barter a few ingots of silver and copper in exchange for provisions.
And so it was that, by early November 1898, only the last eight ingots, four of silver and four of copper, remained in his secret hiding places beneath the meadows near the house. Although Augusto had always hoped that one day they might serve as Jole’s dowry, deep down he knew that soon, perhaps as early as the following spring, he would have to dispose of them, too.
Jole had turned twenty a few months earlier. She was a woman now, and was growing ever more beautiful in spite of 19her isolation from the world and the sacrifices and difficulties that life up there imposed on her.
She was as tall and strong as a birch, and like a birch she rose in search of as much light as possible, constantly trying to silence the past and find a little peace. It wasn’t easy, and lately she had become increasingly nervous, apathetic and unmanageable. She worked hard on the masiere and in the vegetable garden with her father and mother, but as soon as she could she would get away and walk barefoot in the woods or roam with Samson in the pastures of Rendale, blending into the nature around her, feeling part of it. Riding through forests and across meadows calmed her, gave her a sense of joy that she had not felt within the walls of her house for some time. She needed to be alone, and often found fault with what her mother and father said. She clashed with both, but especially with Augusto. Was there really no other way to get by? she would argue. There must be something they could think of that would allow them to live with more dignity. Whenever they argued, Sergio said that they were like two stags locking horns. Sometimes, when her father refused to listen to her any more, Jole would escape to a meadow, lie down on the grass and look up at the clouds racing across the sky above her, changing form and aspect. She would remember the past and wonder if everything she had lived through had really happened. But when images of her adventure came back into her mind her doubts vanished, and a kind of anger would begin to throb in her soul, a wild force ready to burst out, like a rocky crag that breaks loose from a mountain face and crashes down to the valley in all its destructive power.20
Galloping on Samson or walking barefoot on the soft moss or in the icy water of a stream, she felt happy. Yet she would have been ready to do anything, even use force, to fight the abuses and injustices that oppressed the weak. Not so much because her father had taught her this as because she had been taught by life itself, and her adventure two years earlier. An adventure that had stamped itself into the furthest recesses of her consciousness.
4
Jole’s young sister, Antonia, who loved to create pendants by embedding insects and flowers in resin, had left them more than a year earlier, in the spring of 1897.
Increasingly influenced by and imbued with her mother’s religious faith, she had undergone a spiritual conversion as strong as it was remarkable, and had soon decided to devote herself to God. Everything had begun gradually, when she had started spending ever more time in her room, kneeling beneath the image of the Virgin. Then, as the weeks passed, her devotion had manifested itself more intensely, until it occupied most hours of the day. Antonia had stopped spending her free time in the woods or playing with her little brother and had dedicated herself entirely to prayer and contemplation. She had started going on frequent pilgrimage to the little church of San Francesco in Foza. Augusto had been a little upset at first, but in the hope that his daughter’s spiritual inclinations might somehow reach the ears of God, he had silently accepted the change.
Agnese was as happy as a mother can be to see one of her own wishes coming true in her child. As far as she was concerned, what was happening to Antonia was the will of God, and she saw her sincere conversion as a kind of blessing. Jole, too, had seen a true light in her sister’s eyes and had 22been quite shocked by it in a way, because she herself did not feel that light inside her at all and was even somewhat alarmed by Antonia’s behaviour. Sergio, for his part, was losing a playmate and a friend, someone with whom to enjoy carefree diversions on the rare occasions when they managed to put aside their work.
The day Antonia told her father and mother that she had decided to enter a convent and asked them to go with her to Bassano was one of the most important and moving moments in the life of the De Boers.
It happened one evening in late spring. The hours of daylight had already increased considerably and the sun’s orange and gold rays entering through the kitchen windows remained until the dinner hour, when the family gathered around the old walnut table. They had just finished saying grace over a bowl of cabbage soup.
“Amen,” they concluded in unison.
After a few moments’ silence, Antonia, her head bowed, said in a timid voice:
“Papà, Mamma – I want to become a nun.”
Augusto fell silent and continued eating, as if he had heard nothing.
Agnese, holding her breath, turned abruptly to her husband, then looked at Antonia and again at Augusto.
Jole heaved a deep sigh, entranced by the golden rays of the sunset.
Sergio ran his hands through his hair and asked in astonishment, “So you want to go away?”
In truth, they had all been expecting it. Each of them 23knew that sooner or later this moment, these words would come, but they had not known when. Now the moment had come.
For a minute or two nobody said a word. Agnese was the first to speak.
“Are you sure?” she asked in an anxious voice.
“Yes, Mamma.”
Augusto finished eating his soup before looking at her. “My girl—” he began, but was interrupted.
“Papà!” Antonia cried.
“Don’t say a word,” he said, his voice firm but calm. “If you’re really sure, we’ll go down to Bassano tomorrow and see if we can talk to someone.”
Antonia made the sign of the cross, leapt from her chair and ran to hug her father.
“God bless you, my daughter,” Agnese said with tears in her eyes.
Hard as it was for her to understand her sister’s choice, Jole appreciated the great sincerity, the ardour with which she had come to that decision. She herself envied her certainty, her unshakeable conviction. It was only now that she realized how much Antonia had changed, what a different person she was from the playmate she had been. But it was also yet more proof that her father, who had become increasingly severe and irritable towards Jole, was always lenient and understanding towards her sister and her brother. And she did not understand why. Why did he never listen to her? And yet now, in the twilight of the day, behind the hard and apparently impenetrable shell of his character, he had shown himself capable of understanding her 24sister’s heart. Jole had learnt in her life that really being able to listen to someone else is one of the most precious talents that can be found in a person.
And Augusto had that talent. But not with her.
5
“He’s only afraid of losing you, my daughter, don’t you see that?” her mother said to her one evening while the others were all outside, smoothing her long blonde hair by candlelight with a comb made from a roebuck bone. Jole had asked her mother if she could talk to her.
“Afraid of losing me?”
“Oh, my dear, you’ve grown. You don’t know what it means to be the father of a girl like you.”
“Well, you don’t know what it means to be the father of a girl like me either.”
They laughed. Agnese gently turned her daughter’s head and looked her in the eyes, stroking her hair and gazing at her with all the gentleness of which a mother is capable. It was as if they were in another world at this moment, in a dimension without time, without pains, without problems, and there were no such things as hunger, hard toil, backs broken by work in the fields, humiliation from the Tobacco Company’s collectors, uncertainty about the future. None of that. Only the two of them, love, tenderness and hope conveyed through the eyes. And the more they looked at each other, the more they recognized themselves in each other’s faces, as in a kind of journey through time. In this almost magical moment, past and future disappeared, merged in an eternal, happy present concealed 26in Jole’s constellation of freckles and in her mother’s fingers as they moved delicately to outline her face.
“One day you, too, will learn what it means to be with a man,” Agnese said.
“Yes, but who knows when?”
“It’ll come, Jole, the time will come,” Agnese said, once again combing her daughter’s long hair, which was just the way hers had been when she was young. “And don’t provoke your father,” she went on. “You’re the child he’s most attached to. It happens, you know.”
Jole closed her eyes and snorted.
“The thing is, he’s as stubborn as a mule,” her mother said by way of conclusion, lightly kissing her on the head.
6
Jole had known love the previous year, although obviously she had not told anyone.
The experience had overwhelmed and confused her sensitive yet vibrant, combative, fiery, lynx-like spirit.
His name was Sebastiano, and she had seen him for the first time while roaming the woods in spring. He was a tall young man with black hair and large eyes. She had ridden past him on Samson, passing within ten metres of him, and he had turned to look at her, removed his cap and given her a big smile. Jole had turned red, but the next day she had gone back the same way at the same time just so she could enjoy another smile like that, all for her. And that was what had happened. On the third day he had greeted her in a beautiful, confident voice, and she had dismounted.
“My name’s Sebastiano. What’s yours?” he had said.
“Jole.”
He was the same age as her, belonged to a family of Cimbrian origin and came from Rotzo. He worked as a seasonal pechér for a landowner in Asiago. His task was to bark a few thousand black pines to extract coarse resin. He would cut a V on the best trunks and with great care, patience and skill gather the péch oozing out, the resin from which his employer would make turpentine and rosin to sell to merchants down in the plains.28
Since that day, the two young people had encountered one another several times in the woods, but Jole had never again had the courage to stop and talk to him. Once, though, she had brought him some blueberries she had gathered during the ride and in return he had given her some péch to chew: he had put a little resin on a warm metal plate and tilted it so that the resin ran down slowly and became purified as it did so. The result was a kind of scented rubber, which was nice to chew. That was the day he embraced and kissed her beneath a larch.
For days, Jole had felt confused and unsettled, yet happy. Then, two weeks after that first kiss, he had told her he would be leaving, as so many of his contemporaries were doing.
“I’m going to America,” he had said in a low voice, his eyes fixed on the ground. “My whole family are moving there.”
After these words he had tried to embrace her but she had broken away and looked at him, her eyes watery with disappointment and resentment.
She had been unable to say anything, even though she would have liked to scream in his face how much she despised him for having treated her like this, as if she were nobody, without even asking her opinion of his plan to leave for America.
She had got back on Samson and galloped home, cursing the resin, the péch, and all the pechérs in the world, who mortally wounded trees to exploit their precious scented tears.
7
One morning at dawn, with Jole, Sergio and Agnese starting work in the masiere, Augusto had tied Samson to the cart and gone down to Bassano with Antonia to visit the city’s convents.
In the evening, soon after sunset, they had returned home tired but satisfied. They had visited all six convents in Bassano and Antonia had immediately opted for the Augustinian nuns in the old convent of San Girolamo, where she would enter as a postulant and then become a novice.
The following week, after more days of prayer and reflection, they had made ready to go down again to Bassano, this time to fulfil her vocation and have her accepted once and for all by the community of nuns. Agnese had gone with them, so happy and so moved that by the time Augusto had yanked on Samson’s reins to get moving, her eyes were brimming with tears. Antonia would not be so far away, and she would be making a dream come true, her dream. Jole and Sergio, though, had no desire to be separated from her and see her go. They had said goodbye outside the house. Because when it came down to it, this really was goodbye.
8
It was early afternoon on a day in mid-November 1898.
Jole had only just come back up from the River Brenta, where she had helped her mother to wash clothes, while Sergio and his father had been on the tobacco terraces since dawn, trying to complete the work before the winter break. At this period, it was necessary to get rid of the stalks of those plants that had remained in the masiere after that year’s wretched and disastrous harvest. The work required a lot of time, because it was necessary to gather the stalks one by one, cut them and pile them in big bundles or sheaves, to be burnt the following year.
High, thin clouds drifted across the sky, white but tinged with all the colours of the rainbow, depending on how the sun was reflected in them. Jole left the house and walked past the shed, on the roof of which grew a wild blackthorn, full now of blackbirds, fieldfares and song thrushes. She crossed the vegetable garden and headed for the spruce wood to the south, the only patch of green in the autumnal palette of broad-leaved and deciduous trees. A few paces from the first trunks, she stopped to breathe in the solid scent of wood, fungi and moss issuing from the forest like the exhalation of some ancestral spirit.
She plunged into the forest with the respect every worshipper observes entering her own church, and a few paces further on sat down on the huge tangled roots of an imposing spruce. 31She stopped to listen to the calls of a great tit, a wheatear, a skylark and a yellowhammer.
She smiled, got up again and walked further into the forest.
She had always loved being here, walking the paths, venturing into hidden corners, thinking, reflecting; but ever since she had made that epic journey two years earlier, it really was as if breathing in these smells and this silence had become a kind of necessity, a daily ritual without which she could not be at rest.
She thought about her sister. Since she had shut herself up in the convent, Jole had been able to see her only twice, for a few hours. The first time had been at Easter, when the mother superior had allowed Antonia to spend a few hours with her family, and the second time on the Day of the Dead.
After a while, Jole gave a kind of start, and a strange vibration went through her body, from the tips of her toes to the top of her head. She came to an abrupt halt and looked around. Her survival instinct, akin to that of a wild animal, put her on her guard. It was as if there were something mysterious around her. But even concentrating all her senses, she did not see or feel anything strange.
A few dozen metres away, motionless and well hidden behind the felled trunks and the leaves of meadow dock, the two men watched her, careful not to move a single leaf, almost holding their breaths.
Jole stood there on the alert for a long time, like a wary doe, sure that her presentiment had not led her astray.
Then she picked up a pine cone half-peeled by a schirata, the red squirrel common in that place, and slowly retraced her steps.32
“Pretty girl,” murmured the man with the burn and the felt hat.
“Huh?”
“Fine figure of a woman!”
“Oh, sure, fine figure of a woman!” the fat one exclaimed with a smile. “But I reckon she’s more poisonous than a viper.”
“Well, I eat vipers raw!” The first man laughed triumphantly.
When she left the wood, Jole looked again at the sky, which was slightly duller now. The sun was dimming and in a short time its rays had become softer and more oblique.
Hundreds of starlings spun about in mid-air, performing acrobatics and abrupt pirouettes, describing incredible figures that Jole amused herself interpreting, just as she had interpreted the clouds in summer when she was a little girl.
9
That evening, putting the polenta on the table, Jole asked if they too had seen the starlings in the sky.
“They were making incredible patterns!” she exclaimed. “I’ve never seen so many before!”
Agnese and Sergio had not noticed them, but Augusto had. Nothing ever escaped him.
He sighed, his thick white moustache moving as he bit into speck rinds with some dried-out puccia bread. “I saw them,” he said wryly. “And I also cursed them.”
Jole looked at him incredulously, waiting for him to explain his words.
“It’s like when there are too many wasps in summer. It’s not good,” he went on, still chewing and looking down at the plate in front of him. “It’s not good,” he repeated.
