Invictus

It was past midnight, but Zi Peppe could not sleep. He heard everything: the barking of Zi Dimonio’s dogs, the creaking gate of Zi Natale Sponzio’s henhouse, and, almost, even the river slowly flowing downstream. Above all, the words of Mena were still in his mind. Maybe the woman had never forgiven him for having survived her husband, who had also been on the Karst during the First World War. He turned towards Nunzia, seeking comfort from her body beside him. But in the pitch dark, even his wife’s eyes shone like stars.

That night, the Pileri could not sleep.

II

Zi Peppe Pileri often repeated that he had already lived two lives. About his first life, he told little and reluctantly. He referred to his harsh childhood, the troubles of his adolescence, and the subsequent tumultuous events that had involved him.

Of all of them, the memory that troubled him most was when, as a conscript, he was on patrol at the Camaro Infantry Regiment on 28 December 1908.

At dawn on that day, Messina was destroyed by an earthquake and seaquake. He survived by a miracle. The barracks had imploded in a few moments, and the ammunition storage area had blown up. As luck would have it, he was on patrol along the outer perimeter and was thrown twenty metres by the shock wave. He had been deaf in one ear for fifteen days but could not benefit from any recovery because he was needed to shovel through the rubble of the devastated city.

After that event, he spent a month and a half among the corpses, and the memory of those few survivors being pulled out alive from the ruins of the massacre still made him flinch. At the time, the Command had taken care to send a dispatch only to the families of the dead soldiers; there was no news of the living. Moreover, Zi Peppe hadn’t heard anything about his family, whether the earthquake had affected the villages in the Nebrodi mountains.

Only in March 1909, when he had finished his military service, he returned to San Giorgio.

He had not even had time to rejoice at the safe return of his loved ones when hunger and the crisis forced his father to embark him for America in May of that year.

After 29 days spent between Messina, Naples, and the Atlantic Ocean, he arrived in New York on 26 June 1909.

He was 20 years old and, arrived in the New Continent, had been admitted to the quarantine area of the Ellis Island Immigrant Reception Centre for a month because of suspected bronchopneumonia.

During those long days as a prisoner-sick man, he had met some shady Sicilian emigrants, who had hired him for some ‘special commissions’.

A few revolver shots he had dodged, a few others he had fired, and he had thus created a ‘respectable reputation’ for himself, thanks to his charisma and cleverness in smuggling whisky.

After six years, he was called up as a soldier in Italy because of the Great War. If he had stayed in America, he would have been considered a deserter and couldn’t have returned to Sicily any more.

Therefore, he had decided to return home, and, soon, young Peppe, from the charming and dangerous New York, found himself in the Cavalry Regiment Savoia on the Isonzo front.

He saw more dead people killed in one day on the Karst than in six years in New York!

When he returned, he carried the signs of war with him, and, suddenly, the American dream had vanished completely. The mere thought of returning to the Wild West that was America in the early 1900s made him shudder.

The Messina earthquake, the American mafia, the war, too much blood, and the too many deaths in so few years had worn him out.

He chose the quiet life of a farmer and decided to stay in San Giorgio.

There he began his second life.

A year after the end of the Great War, he met Nunzia and got married. Slowly, they began to cultivate the land, raise animals, and have children.

In November 1921, his first son, Ture, was born.

Ture was now 20 years old.

He was a bright and solid young man. As the eldest of the large family, he was, by right and by duty, the right-hand man of Zi Peppe Pileri, who had brought him up on hoe and bread from an early age.

Young Ture was meek, but not a few times he came home red with rage and fisticuffs. He never offended anyone, he was respectful towards his elders, and he didn’t let anyone push him around.

His brothers were still little and only helped out on some occasions, such as during the harvest, the grape harvest, or the olive and hazelnut picking.

Ture, on the other hand, was already of an age to serve the family full-time. When he didn’t go with his father, because there wasn’t much work, he was hired by someone and walked home in the evening because there was only one mule in the family, used by Zi Peppe. If he had any luck, on the way back, there was a cart that would take him to San Basilio, and from there, he would continue along the mule track that connected the two villages. Sometimes, however, he had no luck and arrived in San Giorgio wet to the bone because, on the way, he had been caught in a gale and, in order to not remain in the dark, had walked without shelter under the pouring rain.

Since the beginning of the war, things had got worse for the family because the local farmers no longer hired Ture on a day-to-day basis. They seemed resentful because he had managed to be exempted from the military service, thanks to a recommendation his father had provided him with.

It was as if those men were complaining that Zi Peppe had not also recommended their sons. Strong arms were needed. The war was causing hunger and mourning for almost a year over those desolate lands of the Nebrodi mountains.

Zi Peppe knew well that some things were better done by himself and for himself, so he had pulled some strings only for his son Ture. Besides, he knew from experience that, if the situation were reversed, they would have provided only for their children so as not to lower the chance of saving them from the war.

He had succeeded, and he did not even feel guilty about it. He saw Ture working hard for his brothers and sisters and knew he had done the right thing.

Honest as he was, however, he did carry a little guilt inside: he had had to bow down to lord Marchiolo, a hardened fascist, who had rank and power at the Military District of Tortorici.

He had swallowed many bitter pills just for his son, to keep him with him in the fields and, above all, to save him from the horrors he had experienced on the Karst, and from almost certain death.

For this reason, when ‘Gnura Mena had cast the evil eye on him, he had felt it all over him! It was not just the words of a charlatan, but a common feeling that had crept into the souls and minds of the other villagers: why were their sons at war, while Ture, young and strong, was still serving his father?

The war had taken many strong arms from their families, and this was the major gripe.

People were starving, and hunger claimed more victims than war. And it took no prisoners.

III

At first, Ture wanted nothing to do with going to war, hearing his father’s gruesome tales. As soon as he was exempted from military duties, he went back to his village, and the next day he set off to work in the fields.

Summer arrived.

With time, however, this privilege began to take its toll on him, as he felt the eyes of everyone, especially the families who had soldiers at the front.

His behaviour began to be affected: he withdrew into himself. He became more and more quarrelsome and grumpy. Sometimes, when people asked him why he wasn’t at war, he would tell them stories he made up at the moment. He said he was waiting for being called to the front to some of them. Or that he was about to leave the following month. To others, that he was about to embark from Messina or that any more soldiers were needed. Time passed, and, at the end of July 1941, Ture was still in the fields harvesting with his father.

After a time, most people began to disbelieve these excuses, and many others, who learned the truth, accused him of being a coward, of bringing dishonour to their village. And even if they did not spit such contempt in his face for fear of getting a few punches in the jaw, they talked behind his back everywhere: at the mill, the haberdashery, the grain stores.

Ture would hear this chatter, and it would eat away at his pride, but when he got home in the evening, he would look his brothers and sisters in the eye, and the thought of these evil tongues soon disappeared. For this reason, he worked even harder. He felt that he owed to fate, then he busied himself with many more tasks than his father gave him daily.

August also arrived.

One evening, when he came back from the countryside a little earlier, he saw Concetta loaded down with some pitcher, intent on going to the trough near the river, and offered to help her.

“Why are you in a rush to help me?” His sister asked.

“Usually you nod your head and say thank you in these cases,” Ture replied.

“Are you coming to help your poor sister or to see your cousin Lia?”

Concetta’s question caught her brother off guard. Cousin Lia was nineteen years old. She was already shapely but not yet engaged. Ture had honestly never thought she could be anything more than a cousin.

“I’m not interested in Lia, and if you talk any more, you will go to the trough on your own!”

“No? Too bad...”

“Too bad, why?”

“Because Lia likes you!”

“Concetta, stop it! I don’t have time to be engaged now and don’t put ideas in our cousin’s head. Indeed tell her that your brother Ture doesn’t want her, so she’ll make her peace!”

“Then you can tell it to her if we find her at the trough.”

“I don’t have to tell her anything! That’s a lie you put in your head. Or maybe mum and dad want me to settle down with Lia? Tell me the truth!”

Ture, worried that his parents wanted to arrange a marriage with his cousin, stopped suddenly, put down the pottery pitchers, and waited anxiously for his sister’s reply. He had a debt of honour and gratitude to his father for the military service issue, but he did not want to settle it that way.

“Brother, calm down! Nobody knows anything. Lia confided in me, and that’s why I told you. If it’s not your will, then nothing will be done about it,” his sister said, resuming her walk.

Ture took up the pitchers again and started walking towards the trough. His sister’s reply had relieved him, and, with a slight grin, he continued the conversation: “And you, how is it that at eighteen you are already a matchmaker? If you want, I can find a suitor for you, sister dear!”

“Stop it, you moron, I can look after myself all right, and when I get engaged, no one will know! One evening I would take him home suddenly, and the next morning I get married!”

They burst into roaring laughter, and as they were close to the trough, they attracted the women’s attention, who were also intent on collecting water in their pitchers.

There was Lia, who seemed to have been waiting for that moment all her life. Concetta’s face was enough to dispel any illusion.

They spent some time apart, and Ture’s sister confessed that her cousin was not interested in her.

Then Lia, feeling rejected, was filled with rage faster than the pitchers being filled. Then she began to taunt Ture, always on the story of the war, of the exemption, of Zi Peppe Pileri’s recommendation.

Ture didn’t answer. He knew very well that these provocations came from a young woman whose pride was wounded, and he waited patiently for that trickle of water, now made feeble by the August heat, to fill the pitcher without uttering a word.

Suddenly, a young, witty voice broke the irritating blabber of Lia.

“Shut up, lizard!” On the other side of the big trough, Lia’s younger sister, Rosa, blurted out to the older one with such a scowl that Ture himself, who had not noticed her at first, was intrigued.

Lia suddenly became quiet. Although she was the eldest, she felt like those vain horses that suddenly, for nothing, become agitated and to which the master, to calm them, gives them a single well-aimed blow of the whip. She pulled a sheet out of the big straw basket and resumed her washing without looking at the onlookers.

Ture, on the other hand, had not ceased to stare at Rosa during all those brief moments of silence following her heated intervention, and when their eyes finally met, the young woman almost blushed with shame, and he nodded his head briefly in thanks.

Concetta exchanged a few more unclear words with poor Lia, who was venting her lingering anger on the sheet, now whiter than snow. Then she waved for her brother to start off for home, for the evening was already approaching.

“Lizard!” Concetta said when the trough was far away. “From where did Rosa pull that?”

“It was a polite way of not saying snake to her,” her brother retorted. “But is it acceptable that she addresses me like that – just for a no as an answer –, to talk bullshit she’d heard around? Forked lizard!”

“And what kind of animal is Rosa? Let's hear it…”

In a different mood and tone, Ture said: “Rosa is a little dove!”

“Hahaha! A little dove sharp-tongued, though!” Concetta retorted, with a smile on her lips. “And if I didn't shake you, you’d still be there, at her until dark! You see, Rosa isn’t one of those little doves you can get your hand on!”

Ture had the peculiar ability to imitate the dove sounds so well that those birds approached him without fear. Now and then, in quiet moments in the country, he would sit among the branches and attract the lovebirds with his cry.

“You always know everything, Concettina, don’t you? You feel like the sage of the house, the schoolteacher!”

“I don’t know anything, but I saw you staring at the little dove!”

“Only because I hadn’t seen her for a long time. She’s grown, that’s all…”

“The little dove is not easy to catch, dear brother! She doesn’t fall under your lures.”

“Why not? What do you know about it?”

“Ture, are you nuts? Because she is a rogue little dove, and if you try to catch her…”

“She flies...” his brother continued. “I know very well that, if you get too close, she gets scared, opens her wings... and flies.”

IV

Ture carried the story of the little dove with him for days to come. He kept thinking about Rosa, how she had reprimanded her sister, and how she had shyly lowered her gaze in front of her cousin’s awe-struck eyes. This last image was upsetting his soul.

At the sweet thought of his cousin, suddenly, everything else paled in comparison: the anxiety about the war, the rumours in the village, the uncertainty about his future. How many times had he seen her? At least ten thousand, if he had bothered to count. But a few nights ago, at the river fountain, for the first time, he had looked at her with different eyes.

Without realising it, Ture Pileri was falling in love.

Throughout August, he had only seen Rosa a few more times and only briefly. However, since that day at the trough, he lost focus. His hands were always sweaty, and his hoe would almost slip from his grasp. If he was tending the herds, and some goats would escape down the slope, he did not even notice them, so much engrossed in thoughts of that young girl who had stunned his soul.

All this without Rosa ever saying a word to him.

For another two months, no one was seen there, in San Giorgio. The war seemed to have forgotten him, but Ture, on those autumn nights of 1941, thought only of Rosa’s voice, because in his head reverberated that shut up, lizard shot in her sister’s face; he dreamed of sweet words in a time without hunger or need. Then, at dawn, he would wake up again in his world: the air was already beginning to get cold and sharp, half a bowl of milk and a piece of hard bread to dip in, and then work, the fields, the goats in the afternoon and nothing more.

In the moments of solitude, Ture’s twenty years of age all appeared before him.

What had he been up to all that time? He had served his family, had listened to his father’s advice, had gone, and still went to work under a master. He thought that, deep down, he had never done a thing on his own, never stepped out of line, never said a word more, and even the times he had gotten into fisticuffs, it had only been to defend himself.

It was All Souls’ Day, when Ture, looking after the goats in Santa Nicola, met his uncle, Zi Nunzio, Lia and Rosa’s father, whom everyone in San Basilio called Zi Duca.

A pleasant sun kissed the spring-like morning and warmed bones numb from the dreary season.

“God bless you, Zi Duca. What are you doing here?”

“We are picking some asparagus. Your cousin Rosa is close by.”

“And Lia isn’t here?” Ture asked.

“No, she’s been in a foul mood lately and stayed at home. If you go down the road, and you’ll find her under the brick wall.”

He didn’t even have time to make sense of Zi Duca’s answer when Rosa jumped out of a patch of broom.

In one hand, she was holding her apron full of wild asparagus, and in the other, an awl with which she was digging the earth. Her raven hair was in a braid, she wore a heavy pair of boots that were too big for her slender feet, and she had the dishevelled look of someone clinging to cliffs to tear up the precious vegetable with her bare hands.

She is beautiful!, Ture thought. Even more beautiful than that evening at the fountain.

Looking at her with different eyes now, he understood he had always loved her and was blind before. He figured out a way to get close to her and to talk to her without anxiety. He wanted to express this feeling without a shaking voice and sweating hands.

Ture Pileri had never been in love, and now, like a bolt of lightning, Rosa had arrived to change his thoughts and disrupt his days.

In the meantime, Zi Duca had picked up some shredded tobacco from his pocket and, while he chewed it, had settled down to rest.

Ture took the opportunity to trot over to Rosa, hoping to get a few moments alone with her. When he reached her, Rosa herself made the first move.

“Cousin, how are you? Have you forgiven my sister Lia? Sometimes she gets caught up in the heat of the moment!” “It’s been a lifetime since that evening, and I’ve already forgotten about it,” Ture replied. Then he let the most longspun moment of his life pass, drew a long breath, and declared: “I can’t forget you, Rosa!”

The young girl gasped, so much so that she knocked over most of the vegetables she had collected. She quickly picked it up again and slipped off in the direction of her father, dismissing Ture, who had remained motionless.

In the meantime, Zi Duca had fallen asleep in the shade of a mulberry tree. His daughter woke him up, shaking him so abruptly that he was startled.

“Father, stand up! Come on, don’t sleep!” “Damn hell! I had just fallen asleep!”

Zi Duca huffed repeatedly, rinsed his face with some water he had in his saddlebag, then, with the help of his nephew, he rose and was ready to set off again with his daughter.

“Females are a blessing and a curse, dear Ture!”

Rosa glared at him, then began to clean him up. “Father, I’d better wash these clothes tonight! That tobacco in your pocket has stained everything! I’ll go alone. I’m sure Lia doesn’t want to come.”

They said goodbye to Ture and started walking home. After a few steps, Rosa turned to her cousin and waved stealthily. She was doubtful that he had understood.

Ture was still surprised: did Rosa want to meet him at the fountain that evening, alone? He turned those words over and over in his head, yet he could not make any different sense of them.

Why not invite him earlier, when he had confessed to thinking of her all the time? Why run away like that and then throw that mysterious invitation at him instead?

He didn’t understand, but he wanted to believe that this was a clear signal that she wanted to meet him. Besides, what could poor Ture do? He had never had a woman, and so they were a completely unknown universe to him.

He could only wait for her to the fountain and hope to talk to her openly this time.

Ture arrived at the fountain early. He hid in the shade of a vine and watched the women passing by. When he saw Rosa emerge from the path, he was startled. He waited a moment, saw that she was alone, and realised that he had been right. From that moment on, every word could change his life, and his palms began to sweat again. To kick this off, he decided to take the situation head on and approached his cousin. He didn't even have time to say a word that the young woman shoved a pitcher into his hands.

Ture understood the meaning of this sudden gesture: in his frenzy to meet Rosa, he had not even thought of creating an alibi for himself in the eyes of the people who came to the fountain. Instead, that pitcher protected them. Although they were first cousins, as the children of two sisters, the situation could arouse suspicion.

It was Rosa who broke those initial moments of silence.

“I’ve been thinking about you since last year’s harvest, Ture Pileri! It’s been thirteen months!”

Ture’s eyes widened in astonishment, he went back in his mind to that harvest, but nothing came up, no particular memory of those days, nothing that would remind him of that little girl who was about to become a woman.

Ture was bewildered by this revelation, and he didn’t even realise to take the filling amphora out from under the spring. He did not realise that time had passed so suddenly that the water, gushing out, soaked his shirt up to his sleeves.

“And why did you wait all these months to tell me that, Rosa?” “To be honest, if you had chosen my sister, I would never have told you. I would have suffered, but I would have got over it. Lia likes you, but then that evening, right here, she understood that she was unrequited and, reluctantly, she is putting her soul at rest. At first, I didn’t want to tell you anything anyway. I didnt want to hurt my sister, but when you told me that today…”

“What I told you today at San Nicola is the truth! I want to be honest with you, and I’ve been honest with your sister. I’m not interested in her and, until that evening at the trough, I wasn’t interested in you either. Then, I don’t know, since your words that time you are in my head. I’m not good with words, you know, but that’s how I feel, and you can’t imagine how much I prayed that I wasn’t wrong today when you said that thing about the dirty shirt to your father and the trough.

Rosa, who had been rinsing and rinsing the clothes all the time, stopped for a moment, looked around, and, realising that they were alone, hugged Ture, who seemed taken aback by this gesture. She kissed him on the cheek.

An almost embarrassing smile formed on his lips, but he didn’t even have time to wrap his arms around her when she was already back on the washing line.

Ture thought back to the story of the little dove and his sister’s words – A little dove, if you try to catch it, flies away!

“My father loves you,” Rosa resumed. “You know, he has never believed what they say... I mean, in the story that you dodged from the war. He says that Zi Peppe Pileri did well and that he would have done the same thing for his son!

Ture did not want to change the subject and, focusing back up, asked: “Are you going to tell Lia?”

“I do not feel like it yet. Moreover, it’s too soon.”

“Are we engaged then?” Ture asked, lowering his gaze.

Rosa smiled. She was only sixteen, but she seemed much wiser than her cousin in matters of the heart. So she answered him with gentle eyes: “How naive you are, Ture Pileri! Tell me, are you always good at imitating the call of the doves?”

Her cousin smiled. Rosa’s last question had relieved him of his embarrassment. He put his hands over his mouth and began to imitate the cry of the birds.