A Tranquil Star: Unpublished Short Stories Page 2

  Ann Goldstein

  Alessandra Bastagli

  PART I

  EARLY STORIES

  The Death of Marinese

  No one was killed. Sante and Marinese were the only ones captured by the Germans. It made no sense, it was almost incredible, that, of us all, the two of them had been taken. But the older men in the group knew that it is always those who are captured of whom it is later said “Who would have guessed!” And they also knew why.

  When the two were taken away, the sky was gray and the road was covered with snow that had hardened into ice. The truck barreled downhill with the engine off: the chains on the wheels rattled around the bends and clanked rhythmically along the straight stretches. About thirty Germans were standing in the back of the truck, packed shoulder to shoulder, some of them hanging onto the frame of the canvas roof. The tarp had come loose, so that a thin sleet struck their faces and came to rest on the fabric of their uniforms.

  Sante was wounded; he sat mute and still on the rear bench of the truck, while Marinese was at the front, standing, with his back against the driver’s cab. Trembling with fever, Marinese felt himself slowly overcome by a growing drowsiness, so that, taking advantage of a bump in the road, he slid to the wet floor and remained sitting there, an inanimate object amid the muddy boots, his bare head wedged between the bony hips of two soldiers.

  The pursuit had been long and exhausting, and he wanted nothing more than this—for it all to be over, to remain sitting, to have no more decisions to make, to surrender to the heat of his fever and rest. He knew that he would be interrogated, probably beaten, and then almost certainly killed, and he knew, too, that soon all this would regain importance. But for now he felt strangely protected by a burning shield of fever and sleep, as if it were an insulation of cotton wool that separated him from the rest of the world, from the facts of the day and the things to come. Vacation, he thought, almost in a dream: how long had it been since he had had a vacation?

  With his eyes closed, he felt as if he were submerged in a long, narrow tunnel that had been dug into a soft, tepid substance, crimson like the light that penetrates closed eyelids. His feet and his head were cold, and he seemed to be moving with difficulty, as if pushed, toward the exit, which was far away, but which he would finally, inexorably, reach. The exit was barred by a swirl of snow and a tangle of hard, frozen metal.

  For Marinese a long time passed in this way, during which he made no attempt to break out of his cradle of fever. The truck reached the plain, and the Germans stopped to take off the chains. Then the drive resumed—faster, the jolts more violent.

  Perhaps nothing would have happened if the Germans hadn’t suddenly begun to sing. A voice, starting up in the cab, reached them muffled and indistinct. But once the first verse was over, a second burst forth like thunder from every chest, drowning out the rumble of the engine and the rush of the wind—even Marinese’s fever was overwhelmed. He found himself again able to act and therefore, in some way, obliged to take action—which was how it was for all of us at that time.

  The song was long; every verse ended abruptly, in the German manner, and the soldiers stamped twice on the wooden floor with their hobnailed boots. Marinese had opened his eyes and raised his head again, and every time they stamped their feet he perceived a light touch on his shoulder: he soon realized that it was the handle of a grenade, tucked diagonally into the belt of the man on his left. In that moment the idea took hold.

  It’s probable that, at least in the beginning, he hadn’t considered using the grenade to save himself, to open up a path with his own hands, even though, as we shall see, his final actions cannot be interpreted otherwise. It’s more likely that he was moved by hatred and rancor (feelings that had become habitual to us by then, almost an elementary reflex) toward those blond men in green, well nourished and well armed, who for many months had forced us to live in hiding. Perhaps more than that, he wanted to take revenge and yet at the same time cleanse himself of the shame of a final escape—the shame that weighed and still weighs on our souls. In fact, Marinese had a gentle soul, and none of us thought him capable of killing, except in self-defense, revenge, or anger.

  Without turning his head, Marinese carefully groped for the handle of the grenade (the type shaped like a stick, with a timer) and, bit by bit, he unscrewed the safety cap, using the jolts of the vehicle to conceal his movements. This operation was easy enough, but Marinese never would have thought that it would be so difficult to occupy and get through the last ten seconds of his life—he would have to fight hard, with all his will and with all his physical strength, so that everything would go according to plan. He dedicated his last few moments to this alone: not to self-pity, not to the thought of God, not to taking leave of the memory of those he loved.

  With the cord firmly in his grasp, Marinese tried to imagine, in an orderly fashion, what would happen in the ten seconds between the rip and the explosion. The Germans might not notice, might simply register his sudden movement, or might understand everything. The first option was the most favorable: the ten seconds would be his own, his time, to spend as he wished, perhaps to think of home, perhaps to think of how he would manage, taking shelter at the last minute behind the man on his right, but then he would have to count to ten and that thought was strangely worrisome. “Fool,” he thought suddenly. “Here I am racking my brains with the cord in my hand. I could have thought of it sooner, couldn’t I. Now the first son of a bitch who sees the cap missing… But no, I can always pull, no matter what happens.” He laughed to himself: “(Even a situation like this has its advantages!) Even if they hit me in the back of the neck? Even if they shoot me?”… But yes, thanks to some mental mechanism, evidently illusory and distorted by the imminence of the decision, Marinese felt sure he could pull the cord no matter what, even the very instant he lost consciousness, perhaps even the instant after.

  But unexpectedly, out of some unexplored depths, from some recess of his body—the animal, rebel body that has trouble deciding to die—something was born and grew beyond measure, something dark and primeval, and unfathomable, because its growth arrests and then replaces all the powers of knowledge and determination. It dawned on Marinese that this was fear, and he understood that, in a moment, it would be too late. He filled his lungs to prepare for battle and pulled the cord with all his might.

  Rage was unleashed. A paw struck his shoulder, followed by an avalanche of bodies. But Marinese was able to tear the bomb away from the belt and roll up like a hedgehog, face down, his knees drawn up against his chest, the grenade wedged between his knees, his arms tight around them. The fierce blows of fists, musket butts, and heels rained down on his back; hard hands tried to violate the stronghold of his contracted limbs. But all in vain: it was not enough to overcome the insensitivity to pain and the primordial strength that, for just a few moments, nature grants us in a time of dire need.

  For three or four seconds Marinese lay under a pile of bodies writhing in violent battle, every fiber of his being contracted. Then he heard the squeal of the brakes, the truck stopping, and the rushed thuds of men jumping to the ground. At that instant he sensed that the time had come. In a final, perhaps involuntary extension of all his powers, he tried, too late, to free himself of the grenade.

  The explosion ripped apart the bodies of four Germans, and his own. Sante was executed by the Germans on the spot. The truck was abandoned, and we captured it the following night.

  Bear Meat

  Evenings spent in a mountain hut are among the most sublime and intense that life holds. I mean a real hut, the kind where you seek shelter after a four-, five-, or six-hour climb and where you find few so-called comforts.

  Not that chairlifts and cable cars and such comforts are to be looked down on: they are, on the contrary, logical achievements of our society, which is what it is, and must be either accepted or rejected in its totality—and those who are able to reject it are few. But the advent of the chairlift puts an end to a valua
ble process of natural selection, by which those who reach the hut are sure to find, in its pure state, a small sample of a little-known human subspecies.

  Its members are people who don’t speak much and of whom others don’t speak at all, so there is no mention of them in the literature of most countries, and they should not be confused with other, vaguely similar types, who do speak, and of whom others speak: hot shots, extreme climbers, members of famous international expeditions, professionals, etc. All worthy people, but this story is not about them.

  I ARRIVED at the hut at sunset, and I was very tired. I stayed outside, on the wooden porch, to consider the frozen mystery of the seracs at my feet until everything had vanished behind silent ghosts of fog, and then I went in.

  Inside it was almost dark. By the glow of a small carbide lamp one could distinguish a dozen human figures gathered around three or four tables. I sat down at a table and opened my backpack. Across from me was a tall, large man, middle-aged, with whom I exchanged a few words about the weather and our plans for the following day. This is a standard conversation, like the classic opening moves of a chess game, where what matters, much more than what one says (which is brief and obvious), is the tone in which one says it.

  We found ourselves in agreement on the fact that the weather was uncertain (it always is in the mountains; when it isn’t, it is nonetheless declared to be so, for obvious magical reasons), and on the forecast for the following day. A little later, two lanky men in their twenties entered, with long beards and ravenous eyes. They had arrived from another valley and were attempting an intricate series of crossings. They sat down at our table.

  After we had eaten, we started to drink. Wine is a more complex substance than one might think, and, above two thousand meters, and at close to zero degrees centigrade, it displays interesting behavioral anomalies. It changes flavor, loses the bite of alcohol, and regains the mildness of the grape from which it comes. One can take it in heavy doses without any undesired effects. In fact, it eliminates fatigue, loosens and warms the limbs, and leads to a fanciful mood. It is no longer a luxury or a vice but a metabolic necessity, like water on the plains. It is a well-known fact that vines grow better on a slope: could there be a connection?

  Once we started drinking, the conversation at our table became much less impersonal. Each of us spoke of our initiation, and we established with some surprise that we had all begun our mountaineering careers with an extremely foolish act.

  As it turned out, the best of these foolish acts, and the best told, was the one recounted by the tall, large man.

  “I WAS fifteen. A friend of mine, Saverio, was also fifteen. Another, Luigi, was seventeen. We had gone out a number of times together, to fifteen hundred, two thousand meters, without a plan or a destination; I should say, without a conscious destination, but, in essence, impelled by a subtle desire to get ourselves in trouble and then get ourselves out of it. Nothing easier: it’s enough to go straight up the mountain following your nose, in any direction, by the steepest slope, then struggle for a quarter of an hour across the mountainside, and then try to get back down. Of course, one also learns a few things in this process: that pine trees, when they’re available, make safe and friendly supports, especially during the descent, and that scree is hard to climb but easy to descend by. One learns different types of grasses, those peculiar terraced slopes, and the art of losing the trail and finding it again. Above all, one learns the limits, both quantitative and qualitative, of one’s own strength: when the breath, the legs, and the heart give out, and when, so to speak, it’s psychosomatic. It’s a great school—I wish I had attended it longer.

  “September came and we felt like lions. Luigi said, ‘The G. Pass is twenty-four hundred meters high—eleven hundred vertical meters from here. According to the guidebooks, it should be a three-hour climb, but it’ll take us barely two. There’s nothing difficult, just scree and small rocks—no snow this time of year. On the other side, there’s a six-hundred-meter descent, one hour, and we arrive at the border-patrol hut; you can see it clearly here on the map. Then an easy return along the road. We’ll leave at two today; at four we’re at the top, at five at the hut, and home in time for dinner.’

  “That was Luigi. We met at his house at two, with our good boots on our feet, but no backpacks, no rope (about whose use none of us had any real notion anyway; but we knew— having studied the Alpine Club guidebook—the theory of the double rope, the respective merits of hemp and manila, the technique for rescuing someone from a crevasse, and other fine points), a hundred grams of chocolate in our pockets, and (may God forgive us!) wearing shorts.

  “We progressed well uphill. First, through a pine forest, spurning the mule trail and the shortcuts, and sampling the blueberries; then through an alluvial cone, wasting precious energy. It was the first time we had set off without grownups getting on our nerves with their advice, without uncles, without experts. We were drunk on our freedom, and because of this we delighted in the dirtiest high-school slang, accompanied with lofty quotations from the classics, for example:

  “It is another path that you must take…

  if you would leave this savage wilderness”;

  Or:

  That was no path for those with cloaks of lead;

  for he and I—he, light; I, with support—

  could hardly make it up from spur to spur.

  And also:

  … he’d see another spur,

  saying: “That is the one you will grip next,

  but try it first to see if it is firm.”

  “Forgive me if I get a little carried away. You see, I’m not a Dante expert, and yet, believe me, one of these days an honest man will come along and prove that Dante couldn’t have just invented these founding principles of rock climbing—he must have been here or in a similar place. And when he says:

  Remember, reader, if you’ve ever been

  caught in the mountains by a mist through which

  you only saw as moles see through their skin—

  I congratulate him! I, for one, never doubted that he was a professional.

  “At any rate, we were climbing at a brisk pace, saying and doing foolish things. And so it happened that we reached the pass at six, not at four, near collapse, and with a certain trembling in our knees that wasn’t just from exhaustion. Saverio was the worst off. Luigi and I were already at the top and saw him struggling among the loose rocks fifty meters below us. ‘“Now you must cast aside your laziness!”’ Luigi had the gall to shout to him. At which the poor boy paused to catch his breath, looked upward like Christ on the Cross, then clambered up to us and breathed out, in a faint voice, the implausible yet utterly correct reply: ‘“Go on, for I am strong and confident.”’

  “When all three of us were at the pass, two unhappy truths became clear. One, that night was falling; and I swear on this bottle that I have never since then (and many years have passed) seen darkness fall in the mountains without feeling an emptiness here in the pit of my stomach. The other truth was that we were trapped.

  “From the pass, there was no logical descent to the hut. There was a gentle, rocky valley, with no human trace, and beyond it a terrifying precipice, not vertical, no, but of broken rock and gullies of crumbling earth—one of those places no one ever wants to go because you’ll break your neck without glory or satisfaction.

  “With the last light, we pushed on all the way to the edge: you could see the big dark leap of the valley and, if you stuck your nose out, even the light in the hut, almost beneath you. But as for getting down there on our own, we couldn’t even consider it; we sat there and started shouting. We took turns. Saverio shouted and prayed. Luigi shouted and cursed. I just shouted. We shouted until we were hoarse.

  “Toward midnight, the light in the hut split into two lights, and one of the two blinked three times. It was a signal: we shouted three times in response. At that, a faraway voice called, ‘We’re coming,’ and we replied with a cacophony of shouts. The vo
ice asked,‘Where are you?,’ and we three, without a single match among us, blurted out confused and irrelevant information, all at the same time.

  “Our rescuers, poor devils, cursed as they climbed, and stopped now and then to sing, drink, and laugh loudly. They weren’t very enthusiastic. Many years later, I also happened to be part of a rescue party, so I know exactly how they felt. These expeditions are tedious and dangerous affairs, and in most cases they can only lead to trouble, because no one wants to pay for the emergency supplies—least of all the rescued, who are rarely solvent.

  “They reached us at around two in the morning; and here I must tell you that, on top of everything else, they were members of the border patrol. Once they’d found us, a signal was sent to the valley with a flashlight.‘Who are they?’ a voice asked from below. ‘It’s just three whiny gagnô’ was the fierce reply, in dialect. Then, turning to us, ‘Is this what they teach you in school?’

  “After that, they tied us up like salami and lowered us down to the valley without talking to us but stopping often to drink, and curse, and guffaw among themselves. ‘Pass me the bottle, please.’”

  “I passed him the bottle and asked him what a gagnô was.”

  “‘Gagnô,’” he said, “‘means child, but it’s a word loaded with mockery. Second-grade kids say it to first graders.’

  “That’s how I started. It’s not a story to be proud of, you might say. And I’m not. But I’m sure that even this foolish adventure was useful to me later. These are things that make your back broad, which isn’t something Nature gives everyone. I read somewhere—and the person who wrote this was not a mountaineer but a sailor—that the sea’s only gifts are harsh blows and, occasionally, the opportunity to feel strong. Now, I don’t know much about the sea, but I do know that that’s the way it is here. And I also know how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong, to measure yourself at least once, to find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions, facing blind, deaf stone alone, with nothing to help you but your own hands and your own head.… But, excuse me, that’s another story. The one I told you ends like this. They called me ‘whiny gagnô’ for years. Some people still do and, I assure you, I don’t mind at all.”