Bianchi was astonished. “Can you drive a motorcycle, too? What a wonder.”
“I am sure I can—do not worry.” Giovanna hung up. Bianchi bit his lip, of course, everybody can drive a motorcycle, everybody except you, and went outside to attend to the pigs.
The two young men with the harpoon-jeep were still working on the stove-in back end into the early evening. Bianchi lent them a couple of wrenches, made a suggestion or two, and asked them, “Why are you hoping to kill the unicorns? Why would you not just take pictures, videos, with your cell phones, your fancy digital cameras, and let them be?”
The young men looked at him, and then at each other, in plain astonishment. They were not bad or vicious young men—Bianchi even knew the father of one of them, who was a doctor in Reggio. They replied by turns, but they might as well have been speaking in unison. “What would be the point of that? Without the horn, the skull, all mounted on the wall, what would it mean?” Bianchi said nothing more, but helped them make the jeep drivable—at least, to take them home—and stood looking after them for some time when they left.
Matteo Falcone, who had never before been to his house, came to visit the next morning, while Bianchi was repairing the damage caused by a reporter’s car to his onion field. Bianchi disliked Falcone as seriously as he bothered to dislike anyone, regarding him as a gangster little better than the ’Ndrangheta, taking advantage of his neighbors, who were compelled to sell him their produce at shamefully low prices because their trucks would probably break down on the way to a more profitable market in Reggio. He stood up slowly as Falcone came toward him. “What do you want?”
Falcone was a lean man, bent as a windbreak tree, with thinning hair and watery grayish eyes. He began with an equally watery smile, saying, “Amico Claudio—”
“Signor Bianchi to you, thief.” The last several weeks had done nothing for Bianchi’s civility.
“Bene, Signor Bianchi, then.” Falcone appeared to have a brief coughing fit before he could get the next words out. “I understand that you have recently had a . . .” More coughing. “Ah—a visitor . . .”
Does everybody in the whole world know everything about me? “So?”
Falcone’s long, pocked face seemed to change in an odd way, becoming somehow more defined, as his eyes focused on Bianchi’s eyes. He said, “I know those people. I have . . . had dealings with them.”
“I am sure you have. Get to the point and go, Falcone.”
Falcone’s face broke open, revealing a face that Bianchi had never seen before: truly broken, frightened beyond coherence, yet actually—incredibly—concerned for the safety of another person, one who was not even family. “Bianchi, you do not say no to those people. It is very brave of you—I admire it—I wish I could be as brave as you—”
“I am not brave,” Bianchi said. “I am stubborn and stupid, or I would not have kept on selling my vegetables to you all these years. But the day I get that Studebaker transmission fixed—”
“Bianchi, they will kill you! They will hurt you first, in all the ways they know, and then they will kill you, like swatting a fly. Like swatting a fly! You call me a thief, but I am trying to help you—”
Bianchi raised a hand, both to silence him, and in something approaching a peaceful gesture. “I know you are, Falcone, and I appreciate it.” It took a serious struggle to get the words out, but he went on. “It was . . . good of you. But they do not really want this porca miseria farm of mine. They want the unicorns they think are living on my land. When they finally realize that there are no unicorns—” he looked levelly into the gray eyes—“that there never were unicorns, that same moment they will lose all interest—”
“But they will not believe, and they will not wait! They are the ’Ndrangheta, Bianchi—they like to make examples of people who cross them! They may decide to kill you anyway, just because you will not sell them your farm. They may!” Falcone was very nearly in tears.
Bianchi put a hand on his bony shoulder. “Go home, my criminal friend. We all do what we must do—even unicorns, I suppose. I will be all right, one way or another. Go back to robbing poor farmers . . . and thank you. I thank you, Falcone.”
Watching the gaunt, stooped figure trudging back to his funereal Fiat—and we know who paid for that car, don’t we, old friend?—Bianchi felt loneliness descend upon him like an old coat he had owned in his youth: a blue woolen coat so often soaked by mountain rains that it never truly dried, even in the sun, and had no warmth in it to provide him. I am afraid. I am more frightened than Falcone, and what sort of thing is that for a grown man to admit? I wish Giovanna were here. No, I am glad she is not here—there is too much danger now, what am I thinking? I must order her not ever to come. I wish I did not wish she were here.
Whether due to the rumors of threats from the ’Ndrangheta, or simply to the boredom that Bianchi had so long predicted, the flood both of hunters and media commentators definitely dwindled in the ensuing days and weeks. The weather warmed; the big tourist hotels and resorts down at sea level were hiring, as were other people’s farms—Bianchi was known for almost never employing other hands than his own. There were far fewer television features and interviews, and almost no overflights by news helicopters or surveillance drones. Even the animal-rights people appeared less often on his doorstep with their loudspeakers and their lawyers. Bianchi was glad of this, and hoped that the monster and his fellows had taken notice.
But he knew better, and could not help but be glad of that as well. For La Signora and her son, strangely obdurate as himself, remained as clearly present as ever, if only during the twilight hours at dusk and dawn, and not always visibly, even to Bianchi. But at this point, he could feel their nearness, whether waking or dreaming, and sometimes thought that he could walk straight out of his house in the night, with his eyes closed, and find his way to them. Actually, I would probably fall into a hole and break my leg—but maybe not . . .
Giorgio Malatesta, the garage owner, also came to visit, on the same errand as Falcone, and so did Domenico Amendola, the butcher, who was called Pazzo by everyone, although he was not crazy at all. Bianchi berated the one for his shameless substitution of Albanian parts for good Italian ones, the other for the prices he charged for dubious rabbits and hens who could have remembered more prime ministers than he. He also thanked them, as graciously as he knew how, for risking the wrath of the ’Ndrangheta on his behalf, which sent them both scuttling home without even stopping for coffee. Bianchi was sourly amused by this; but he was touched, as well, as he had been with Matteo Falcone. They are old men, and they are who they are—it is wrong of me to expect them to be different, this late in their lives. I am old, too, and I don’t change either.
Yet that was wrong too: he had changed, and knew it, though more clearly than he could isolate the cause. Obstinate as he had been all his life, he would ordinarily never have dared, no more than Malatesta or Falcone, to defy the gangs who ran Calabria with more brutal thoroughness than today’s Mafia ran Sicily. What on earth got into me, in the name of God? Why did “Fuck you, with your fucking cowboy-movie cigars” come into my mind so naturally? Because of the unicorns? Because I helped a unicorn into this world, and that makes me responsible to them? To myself? Responsible to be a hero? God’s burning asshole, if I had known that!
Was it her?
Did I sign my own death warrant because of a woman far too young for me—practically a girl—who has funny golden specks down in her green eyes, and thinks she can drive a motorcycle, which will kill her as surely as the ’Ndrangheta? And who arches, all unknowing, like a cat if you touch the back of her neck? If that is so, I would surely be better off dead.
But I do wish she were here.
On those moments—always at night now—when La Signora chose to show herself to him, glowing on a hilltop like the rising moon, he sensed a restiveness in her, a disquiet that made him wonder if, as birds do in autumn or the earliest spring, she were not readying herself to fly. The black colt was not always with her; indeed, Bianchi had once or twice glimpsed him alone, casting about in different directions in short bursts of speed, then shaking his head and racing off on another path: a single slash of pure blackness against a blue-black night sky. The horn had not grown as much as he had; perhaps he will shed it every year, like antlers, and every spring it will be bigger, longer, sharper. Something else I will never know.
He wrote a poem about that, about not knowing so many things in a life. The poem was a failure, as far as he was ever concerned; he felt so about most of the poems he wrote during that time. Which was odd, when he thought much about it, because it was really a good time, taken all in all. Everything he had planted during the strange, rainy winter was coming up strong and healthy, despite the trampling invasions of the unicorn hunters. Giovanna had absolutely refused his warnings, and kept bringing him her warm, laughing presence—though hardly ever any mail—every Friday in the blue van.
And the monster, the Toscano-smoking ambassador of the ’Ndrangheta, had at least kept his word: there were no threatening telephone calls—no calls of any kind—and no further visits. He never allowed himself to grow less vigilant; but happiness is the old enemy of watchfulness, and Bianchi was practically happy. Growling contentment is not the same thing, but he hadn’t known.
The dinner that he cooked for Giovanna was the first meal he had ever cooked for anyone; working up to the invitation took him a good deal longer than the execution. He made ciambatta, which involves stewed eggplant, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and the matchless red onions of Calabria, and which was the only dish he trusted himself to make for company. There was ricci di donna pasta in tomato sauce, and a bottle of the red Cirò that he had taken in trade for helping Vittorio Bava to repair his son-in-law’s chimney. He put flowers in whatever vases and empty jars he had, and set them wherever they seemed to brighten the little farmhouse, and he swept the floor and put last night’s dishes away, and he forbade Garibaldi and all three cats entry for the night, telling them firmly, “The nights are warmer now, you can sleep perfectly well in the barn. You have become so spoiled!” But he petted them all, by way of apology, before he turned them outside.
Giovanna arrived riding pillion on her friend Silvana’s Vespa. She hopped off, kissed Silvana on both cheeks, and walked straight into Bianchi’s arms where he stood waiting at his door. Silvana, watching, waved with knowing cheerfulness as she drove away, but Giovanna did not turn her head.
Embracing her was somewhat awkward, due to the backpack slung from her shoulders. Bianchi asked, “How will you get home?”
“Silvana will come and get me in the morning. This is all very exciting for her.”
“Oh,” Bianchi said. “Well. I made dinner.”
“And I am sure it will be wonderful.” She took his hand and led him to his own bedroom, which, from that moment, seemed forever like someone else’s.
Staring at her as she tugged her woolen shirt off over her head, he said, “Child, I remember you when you were learning to walk—”
“Yes, I know, you keep telling me.” The sweet, shifting dance of her shoulders and collarbones made the skin of his face tingle. “And it is plain that if we delay any longer, you will simply crumble away, so we had better get to business, don’t you think?” Naked, she rose on her toes when she kissed him, which was flattering, but hardly necessary.
Later, her voice muffled against his chest, she murmured, “You must never call me child again. I will slap you if you do. Besides, you are only twenty-three-and-a-half years older than I am. Romano told me.”
“Romano. What will you tell him tomorrow?”
