Giacomo’s Seasons by Mario Rigoni Stern

translated by Elizabeth Harris Behling

editor’s note: Le stagioni di Giacomo (Giacomo’s Seasons) won the 1996 Grinzane Cavour Prize and has been translated into French; it was also adapted as a play in Italy. An earlier excerpt of this novel, also translated by Elizabeth Harris Behling, appeared in issue 14.

15.

Autumn came early. The insistent rain that always marked the woodcocks’ leaving kept the recuperanti, the men who salvaged scrap weaponry, from going out much. One Sunday afternoon in November, four friends were huddled under Piero Ghella’rs cantilever roof. Hands in their pockets, shivering, they watched the sadness blowing gently over the piazza and the streets. A short while before, they’d added up their pocket change.

“Four of us!” one of them burst out. “And we can’t even come up with four lire to go to a movie; we don’t even have one lira to get ourselves a half-liter of wine at the tavern! What kind of life is that!”

“I’m joining the fascists. Then maybe I can get into the border guard.”

“You’d be better off trying for the forestry militia,” the first one said.

“It’s harder to get in,” another answered. “You’ve got to have good recommendations. And there’s no telling when those jobs will be posted, either.”

“Tomorrow,” the first one said, “I’m going to the town hall to see if there’s some jobs listed–any job. I can’t stay around here anymore. Maybe I’ll sneak into Switzerland and find some work, way up in the mountains. Like Toni Ballot did.”

“I think I saw a job posted over by the public bathhouse. Let’s take a look.”

It was a notice to sign up for two years in the royal carabinieri with reenlistment into regular service. The one who’d said he was anxious to leave slowly read the notice out loud. Then he said, “Tomorrow morning, I’m going to the Registry Office to get the forms. I’ll sell the recupero in my shed to get my papers stamped.”

“Not me,” another one said. “I’m not going into the carabinieri. I’m waiting for the forestry to be posted. And I’m joining the Fascist Party, too–and I sure hope my pink card doesn’t come in the meantime.”

That pink card was your draft notice ordering you to present yourself for military service that also served as a pass from home to your designated barracks.

The four men watched as Albino Vu made his way slowly up the street. They greeted him and asked if he was going to the movies.

“The movies!–what for?–life’s one big movie! Last night I was out drinking some and I wound up spending the night at the carabinieri’s. Good people, them carabinieri. So now I’m sober, and I’m headed back to Boscosecco.” He stopped and took a deep breath. He hadn’t talked that much in a long while. But he’d watched these four grow up, had known them since they were kids out hunting with their shotguns.

“There’s a good movie playing,” said the one who wanted to go into the forestry militia. “It stars a beautiful actress, Greta Garbo. She plays the queen of Sweden.”

“I don’t care if they’re beautiful or Garbo–don’t you listen to women’s garble.” Vu shuffled off again, his recupero sack over his shoulder.

People said Albino Vu acted that way because of what he’d discovered after he came home from the war: while he was off in the trenches, his girl was fooling around with his friend who’d been rejected by the army. After that, Vu left town, his house, everything. He headed into the mountains where he’d fought and he’d lost so many real friends–and he stayed up there, even in wintertime, in some pasture, or holed up in a bunker, waiting for spring. He didn’t need much to live on, almost nothing. He found quality recupero, not quantity, and always small stuff. Dried gun powder for the hunters that he traded for shoes or old clothes. Copper he’d sell to Seber to buy himself just enough food to hold him a time, and never more than that. The rest he’d spend on wine at Pozza’s or Toni della Pesa’s where he’d sit and have philosophical debates with Motorcycle Gigi. The four friends watched as Vu walked off, singing a song that cheered up the street.

The recuperanti had a crisis on their hands. The lira had been revalued, so metal prices dropped. Even worse–the forestry militiamen and the local woodsmen were saying the recuperanti’s digging was destroying the topsoil in the pastures and damaging the seedlings so the woods couldn’t grow back. Someone informed the authorities, and they threatened the recuperanti with fines, even prison.

One day–it was nearly summer of that year, 1931–we found out the National Fascist Party was planning to set up an enormous camp, right here by us, for the children of Italians in the Fascists Abroad Organization. They picked a spot in the fertile meadows around the Rendola River, and the hay was cut and gathered early.

“So,” the recuperanti said, “you get fined for digging up rocks in the mountains. But destroy our best meadows, and you’re a hero.”

Giacomo’s father went down to the Rendola one afternoon to get a look at this famous camp for himself. They were marking the spots for the tents, setting up the kitchens, and digging the latrines. Two commune workers were there and some folks he didn’t know who must have come up from the valleys. Maybe they were in the Volunteer Militia For National Security.

“Hey, you!” A man wearing shorts and no shirt was calling to him. “You wanna work?”

“Yeah, but not for free.”

“Get your jacket off and come here.”

So that’s how Giacomo’s father found work for almost two months. The first thing was arranging the tents in a row according to the blue prints. The entrance to the camp, down a lane off the local road, was framed by two enormous pennants with the tri-colored flag and the Savoy coat of arms. All along this lane were still more pennants with flags leading up the gentle slope to the top of the hill, and finally, to a huge portrait of Mussolini with his bald head. The clearing around this portrait would be for camp gatherings, for raising and lowering the flag. One tent could hold maybe twenty kids; there were enough metal-frame bunk beds for a thousand teenaged-fascist Avanguardisti. To carry water from the town aqueduct, the men had to build an above-ground piping system fitted to dozens of washtub taps. In other words, quite a job.

Right away you could tell Giacomo’s father knew what he was doing. He always went home at night with something in his jacket pockets: bread, bologna, quince fruit bars wrapped in tissue paper. They gave him a big noon meal and a snack at five–a real waste of food–so he brought the leftovers home for dinner.

He’d been working fifteen days when the province fascist party secretary and the fascist mayor, the podestà , arrived along with other officials up from Rome, all of them there to see how Camp Mussolini was coming along. Chauffeurs and aides were bouncing around like grasshoppers.

“You’re behind!” the party secretary said. “Get going! Get those pine branches up on the arches–and the fasces, too–get those axe blades and sticks tied together! And how about the sentry boxes? The truck will be here tomorrow with the muskets. Have you set up the gun racks? Hop to! Hop to!”

To speed things up (seeing how the volunteer militiamen liked to slip into the tents farthest out for a little nap after eating), Giacomo’s father told the director he ought to hire some other workers: “I know a couple of good men. Men who know how to work and to work hard.”

“Maybe you’re right,” the director said. “Bring them along tomorrow and we’ll see how they do.”

The next day Giovanni showed up with Moro and Moleta, two recuperanti. Between Moro Soll’s shouting and Moleta’s quieter approach, they got the workers moving.

The Avanguardisti started to arrive by cablecar. “Our fine boys from the Italians Abroad have heard Mother Italy’s great voice calling, and they answer with affection. They are coming to the Altipiano from all over the world. From scorching hot Africa and the wintry North. From the distant Americas to our neighbor nations of the Alps. Here in Camp Mussolini, Dante’s words beat a path into every heart. Our Mother Tongue, sweet vehicle of faith and solid fortress of our nation, stands proud among so many exotic languages, enchanting all with her sweet song. As these boys wander our mountains, they will grow to appreciate the beautiful, heroic stories of their fathers, those brave men who volunteered to fight for their country, who told their stories in a distant land, among a foreign people. Now, in our mountains, these fine boys will understand the silent eloquence of their fathers’ memories and they will be filled with a greater, ever more vital pride in being sons of Italy.” And so on.

One day the camp director (who was really a marshal on loan from the light infantry) asked Giacomo’s father if he knew how to cook, too. Giovanni automatically said yes. And that’s how he wound up a cook’s helper, along with Moro Soll.

The last of the Avanguardisti were there now. The days went by with the bugle call: reveille, breakfast, fall-in, flag-raising, prayers for the king, for Il Duce, for the country, for the far-off families. Choir practice: “Rising Sun,” “Youth.” Then gymnastics, close-order drill with muskets, group games for “instilling discipline and order, physical excellence, quick decision-making and reaction time, and for improving all bodily systems.” There were also group hikes in the sacred mountains of the motherland, everyone marching and singing:

We are Fascists from abroad
Marching fast and proud
With Mussolini at our side
We know how to fight
We know how to die.
If the reds dare show their snouts
Smash’em!
Give’em our heels and fists
Smash’em!
Then to show what we’re about
Smash’em!
We’ll finish ‘em off with a club
finish ‘em off with a club!

At that song, Giovanni and Moro shook their heads. “Poor Italy,” they muttered.

After evening rations, lowering the flag, and changing the guard at the camp entrance, the Avanguardisti were off-duty. They went out in groups in their snappy uniforms, wandering through town, looking to strike up a conversation with some girls, trying to impress them by speaking another language, but they always swore in Italian. Mario and Nino met a few Avanguardisti from Casablanca and Salonica, and they and the girls would all wind up playing together on Via Mount Ortigara.

One morning the local officials and the podestà were inspecting the camp and saw Giacomo’s father at work in the kitchen, and they protested because “he was a suspicious element–not an official party member.” Old Sharpshooter (that’s what everyone was calling the technical director of Camp Mussolini by now) told these officials that it was fine by him, that he couldn’t care less if Giovanni was a white shirt, a black shirt, a red shirt, or a yellow shirt. Then came the night, after evening rations, when Giacomo’s father went off to the Villa Rossi grove with the leftovers from the kettle and almost got himself fired. Once again Old Sharpshooter came to his defense, this time against Padre Salsa, the hero-chaplain who had three rows of medals over the red cross on his chest. The padre had joined the camp to carry Faith and Country to these fine lads of the Fascists Abroad.

Giovanni had arranged things with Giacomo and the other local children to make sure any pasta or minestrone left over after rations got back to their homes. The children, crouching in a trench with their pots, would wait for him every afternoon and evening. Padre Salsa surprised him just as he was scooping some pasta out from the kettle.

“What’s this?–caught you, you thief!–you swindler!”

“Padre, sir, this was extra food. Leftovers. They were just going to throw it away.”

“Scraps should be saved for the farmer’s pigs!”

“But this is still good. Giving it to hogs–that’s such a pity. And these children going hungry.”

“These children are lazy, raggedy beggars! They’re never to show their faces around Camp Mussolini again! They’re a disgrace to Italy! Now–out!–out of here! Scat!”

The children fled, nearly crying, with what little pasta Giacomo’s father had been able to give them. Padre Salsa ordered the kettle knocked over; the rest of the pasta spilled into the dirt. He went straight to Old Sharpshooter. “This has got to stop–our boys from abroad mustn’t see them! Shameful! That man should be kicked out of here!”

“He’s worth more than five soldiers. I’ll see to it this doesn’t happen again.”

That night, after Giovanni and Moro Soll cleaned up the kitchen and prepared for the next day’s caffellatte and cocoa, they went home and decided on a plan. Every evening at the same time Padre Salsa ate at the Croce Bianca Inn. Moro would keep watch and at just the right moment, he’d whistle for the children hiding deep in the bushes. Old Sharpshooter pretended not to notice; so all that month the local children enjoyed Camp Mussolini’s delicious pasta and minestrone–and they weren’t the only ones. Things went the same the following year.

In the spring of 1932, work started on the ossario or “bone” monument. It was going up on the Laiten Hills, east of town, where the bombed-out houses had been left unrepaired. The boys from town, and their fathers before them, used to climb those hills to play.

In the spring, kites would rise in the sky. “Dragons,” they called them. Vittorini from the pharmacy could make the very best dragons out of wax paper, bamboo slats, and glue. He’d also come up with a type of wooden reel with iron pins that let out or wound the string, depending on what the dragon needed as he soared up above, higher than the larks, the crows, the circling hawks.

Summers, even though the owners didn’t like their meadows trampled, boys and girls went up and gathered armfuls of red lilies (“archpriests”) before the grass was cut.

In the fall, the Piazza boys and the Uptown boys used to have wars at the very top of the Laitens, on all the rocks from the cannon volleys, which had been piled in one big heap. Sometimes they’d have sling-shot battles with lead pellets for ammunition. Lucky for them, their helmets were Austrian, not Italian.

Winters, they set up a ski-jump on those hills where everyone had first learned how to ski. And that’s how Mario broke his arm one February afternoon, making a jump.

It was a summer day when the engineers and surveyors went up the hills escorted by the podestà and the fascist party secretary. With their range finders, their tape measures, their theodolites, the technicians got to work surveying, measuring, scribbling. And so, after numerous proposals, offers, conferences, tests, and on-the-spot investigations, the Roman authorities decided that a great monument was to be built and that this great monument holding the remains of our heroes who’d died on the Altipiano (for the country’s salvation) would go right here, on our hills of play. To make room for the imperial-style arch, all the quiet cemeteries in the meadows and woods were leveled. Hundreds of workers started in with picks and shovels, digging up the rocks, preparing the foundation, the cement and marble burial niches. Everything dug up was loaded onto Decauville handcarts, then brought down to the meadows near town and dumped, for future road construction.

17.

They were waiting on the spring thaw like they’d never waited before. The larks had returned to the sunny river banks, but since it still froze up here at night, the birds–or so the older people claimed–would fly back down to the plains at dusk. Everyone was waiting, too, for the jobs to start up again and for the time when they could start spreading manure on the potato fields. The Grass family was already hauling manure in panniers, early in the morning, step by step up a path, over icy snow and patches of bare ground: over “harnust and happar” as they used to say in the ancient tongue. The Grasses were getting a head start on all the field work, making sure everything was done at home in case jobs opened up on the huge ossario monument (the bone monument) or on some community road project.

And when the late-morning sun was high enough to warm the communal fields, Giacomo and his father would go up with picks and shovels and work their small plot of ground by the woods. Both Giacomo’s father and his grandmother thought this plot would be good for lentils, maybe even potatoes the year after that. Twenty kilos of lentils in the house by November meant good minestrone all winter.

They would borrow five kilos of seed lentils from the Zais, who’d had an excellent crop the year before with their big field on Poltrecche. If they couldn’t pay the Zai family back in lentils, they’d do it selling recupero.

And they weren’t the only ones clearing the communal fields by the woods, out past the private properties. With winter coming to an end, smoke rose from the burning brush and turf in the sunniest spots on the hilltop. Glacial moraine and rocks were gathered to make dry support walls for reducing the slope. The rocks and gravel piled up from the digging were placed below these walls. If there wasn’t enough manure to spread, beech leaves and red-spruce shavings would do. By the time the cuckoo returned in April, the finished plots would be so neat and orderly, so harmoniously sculpted from the landscape, so breath-taking as seen from Petareitle Hill, that they’d be called “The Gardens.”

With the noon bell, the neighbors gathered together to eat, to talk a little about life and smoke a pipeful in peace. Gigio Rizzo, the municipal guard, would pass by once in a while to check on their work and to make sure everything was going according to the unwritten laws: no damaging the woods, no trespassing. He also had the job of figuring out the total area tilled by each family for the annual municipal tax on their permanent lease.
Gigio Rizzo was stern but fair, a man of a few, choice words. Always dignified in his forestry uniform and well-oiled boots, carrying that cornel-wood cane with the curved handle, walking with that fast, sure stride. You always felt his presence, even when he wasn’t there. He didn’t wear a sidearm and if he sometimes heard subversive talk, well, he certainly wasn’t reporting anything back to the podestà . Like that day Giacomo’s father blew up about all the misery and how Il Duce’s revaluing the lira and decreasing wages was helping out the capitalists, not the proletarians.

With snow creeping back toward the heights, the men started going out for recupero again, leaving the women to plant and tend the plowed fields.

And work started up again on the ossario monument. The touchy inspector from the public works office was incredibly stubborn about the big white blocks from our few Altipiano quarries–the slightest defect and the marble was rejected. Sometimes the quarry workers tried filling in a chip or flaw with marble dust and putty, but nothing got by the inspector. He’d smash the block with a sledge hammer so it couldn’t even be used on some less important job.

The blocks, from quarries sometimes as far as two hours away, were dragged up the Laiten Hills on horse- or mule-drawn carts. The stonecutters would finish the marble up there according to the designs: each block had its number and assigned place in the monument. With levers, rollers, jacks, and tackle, the workers hauled the blocks up to the masons, who set them in place. The construction site was one big swarming, organized ant hill. The foremen paid attention to every last detail. The engineers from Ferlini & Roncato Contractors were afraid of the touchy inspector–he’d pop up silently, bark out a few words, and with a single wave of his hand have whole sections knocked down–they’d been carelessly done–or a block already up there had to be replaced.

One hot, muggy June day, a foreman spotted a worker whose shirt wasn’t soaked in sweat.

“You! Yeah, you! Come here. Why aren’t you sweating? What have you been up to?–lying around in the shade?”

“I never sweat, Boss. I just naturally don’t sweat.”

“Bull. Don’t give me that. Everybody sweats here. We don’t want any wise guys working on our hero monument.”

“It’s not my fault I don’t sweat. My comrades’ll tell you. Ask anybody.”

“Doesn’t matter–you’re fired. And remember: ‘buddies,’ not ‘comrades.’ Come back Saturday for the rest of your pay.”

Maybe this foreman was in such a rotten mood because he’d gone into the workyard latrine that morning and seen “Death to Il Duce” scratched in charcoal on the planks. As a model for the workers, he pointed out the innocent giant who’d just been discharged from the mountain artillery and who, rumor had it, used to present arms with a 75/13 howitzer barrel. He was strong as a horse, with the spirit of a child. Using levers and rollers, he moved solid blocks of marble around like they were pumice stone.

At noon, the workers would find some shade in a ditch or by one of the monument walls under construction. They’d make a fire from carpenters’ shavings and set a mess kit on the embers, warming up their soup and polenta brought from home. During this hour break, some of the town boys would climb up the Laitens, maybe to see what their play-hills were going through, but also just curious about all the work. The boys started to know these laborers by name, these men from nearby towns. Some were young, almost boys themselves. Others were old and gray-haired. Many had been in the Great War, but they didn’t seem all that moved to be building this enormous monument for the bones of their comrades.

Mario climbed the hills almost every day. A number of the men knew his family, and one day a group asked if he’d bring them a bottle of wine. There were eight of them, sitting around a fire, toasting some polenta on the coals, and with thirty centesimi each, they came up with the two lire and forty centesimi needed for a bottle of local wine. Mario raced down to his family’s shop, bought the wine, and raced up the hills again, knowing the men had to get back to work. This way, they could at least have a couple of mugs of wine in peace.

Later at supper, Mario’s grandfather said, “You should go up there every day at ten-to-twelve with six bottles in a couple of baskets. I bet you can sell every last one.”

And so at the foreman’s whistle, Mario would make sure he was up on the Laitens with his baskets and his six bottles of wine. He’d work his way through the groups as the men put their money together for the two lire and forty centesimi. Sometimes when payday was far off, they’d ask for a bottle on credit and Mario, just like his grandfather taught him, always agreed without drawing up a note. The poor don’t cheat. When the wine was all sold, he’d sit and listen to the men’s stories.

One in particular stayed with him. Nando dell’Ecchele told them how he’d sold his recupero one night, then stopped at Margherita’s for a glass with Vu. Afterwards, going home, when he was just outside town by the cross, there was this silent line of soldiers on the road right in front of him. The full moon kept slipping through the clouds–it was bright out just then, so he got a good look. The soldiers were pale, silent, walking without a sound–except their sighing. The long line of soldiers was coming from the mountains to the south, marching through the hollow between the hills, and up again, through the Nos Valley, toward the higher mountains.

Other scattered groups of soldiers in single file trickled down from the mountains into the valley. You couldn’t see a beginning to them, or an end. Nando just stood there, absolutely still, until the dawn grew light, and the moon went down, and they all disappeared.

“The dead soldiers’ spirits,” said an old worker who’d been a driver in the war.

“Sure,” another said, “but were they Italian or Austrian?”

“I can’t remember,” Nando answered. “Maybe both.”

“You ask me,” another man said, “you had one glass too many with Vu. Who knows what that glass was telling you.”

“I barely had a drop. A half-liter’s nothing split two ways.”

“And now,” said the one who’d spoken first, “here we are, building a monument for the soldiers’ bones. And their spirits, out wandering the mountains.”

They stayed quiet until the foreman’s whistle called them back. Mario, unsettled, went straight home, not stopping in the meadows, and up in his room he sat at his desk and wrote a poem, long gone now. Just three lines are left:

In the cold moonlight
they walk the mountains together–
the living and the dead.

Mario Rigoni Stern is from Asiago, Italy, in the Veneto. He is one of the most prestigious writers of northern Italy and has published fifteen works of prose with Giulio Einaudi Editore and Il Melngolo. His Il sergente nella neve (1953), The Sergeant in the Snow, is considered one of the great novels about the Italians at the Russian front during World War II. His works have been translated into twelve languages, and he has won numerous awards, including the 1978 Campiello Prize for the novel, Storia di Tonle (The Story of Tonle) and the 1999 Pen Club Prize for the short story collection Sentieri sotto la neve (Paths Beneath the Snow). Le stagioni di Giacomo (Giacomo’s Seasons) won the 1996 Grinzane Cavour Prize and has been translated into French; it was also adapted as a play in Italy.

Elizabeth Harris Behling grew up in Arizona and Kentucky and now teaches creative writing at the University of North Dakota. For her translations, she has won several awards, including the Dudley Fitts Award and the Gary Wilson Award. Her stories and translations of Italian prose and poetry have been accepted in Other Voices, Denver Quarterly, Florida Review, Northwest Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and other magazines. She has had fiction-residency fellowships at the Blue Mountain Center and the Ragdale Foundation.

The image: This poster was created by Luigi Martinati in 1935.