“Oh, yes. Once I would not have, but since I have known you . . .” And then the name, and the words, did come, like a prison break from his caged heart. “Gio . . . Gio . . . I have lived all my life in this country. I know what I have, and what I can do without. I know what I will never have, and I know how to tell myself that I never wanted it anyway. But if something were to happen to you . . .” He stopped, because his mouth was very dry, and when he tried to breathe, nothing happened. “That I could not endure, if something bad happened to you. So you stay away, that’s all, è tutto. Gio—bella—stay away.”
He was about to hang up the phone before it dropped from his shaking hand, when he heard her say quietly, “Yes. I love you too, Claudio.”
“Giobella,” he said, when he could speak, “I think I will always call you that. No one else calls you Giobella, do they?”
“No—no one.” She said it laughingly, but there were tears in her voice. “No one but Claudio Bianchi.”
That afternoon, suddenly angry to find himself looking constantly around him with the quick, anxious twitches of a deer in his garden, he went searching for his father’s old shotgun in the attic. It took him some while: the Bianchis had never been much concerned with hunting, and their family feuds tended to be carried on verbally over decades. As his Uncle Vincenzo had often said, before he lost all interest in any conversation but with his chickens, “Dead people can’t hear what you’re yelling at them.”
He finally discovered the shotgun—doublebarreled, rusty around the breech, but apparently functional—half-hidden behind an old-fashioned clothespress, with a small bag of cartridges hanging from the trigger guard. Buckshot? Birdshot? What is a man who can’t tell the difference on sight doing with such a thing? Besides, it would most likely blow my head off before they do. His solitary laughter was kept from self-mocking melodrama only by a fit of sneezing. Beat the ’Ndrangheta off with your manure shovel, Bianchi. Better yet, an insulting poem—that should put them to flight. Giobella, your man—if that can really be what I am—is no better a guardian than my poor old toothless Garibaldi. Yet he has been brave as a bear in his time, defending his home, and so must I be now.
He set the shotgun back where he had found it, and went downstairs, where he discovered on his doorstep the body of Third Cat, the nameless feral one who had appeared, years ago, as strangely and suddenly as the unicorn, and stayed on to eat his food and avoid his touch. The blunt brindle head had been nearly cut off and the belly split open; the intestines were still steaming in the cooling air. In death the old cat had voided its bowels, and that also was so fresh that the murder must have occurred only moments before, while he had been up in the attic, playing with guns.
“Ay, cat,” he said softly, kneeling over the ruined body. “And you never told me your name.” He picked the dead animal up, regardless of blood and shit, and stood staring at the imprint of heavy shoes in the churned earth. “You fought them, didn’t you?” he asked the cat. “You left your mark on them.” A rage he had rarely known took hold of him then, and for longer than he ever remembered he cursed the footprints and the horizon they led back to, until his vision blurred and his voice gave out.
Then he found a spade and walked slowly—a one-man funeral cortege—to the nearby hollow where La Signora had chosen to give birth to her black colt. He buried Third Cat there, marking the grave with a small white stone.
None of the other animals had been harmed, though the cow Gianetta had developed a runny eye that warranted attention. Bianchi determinedly put in his usual afternoon of spading, wheeling, spreading, weeding, and loaming, despite a sudden new flurry of scholars, romantics, and venture capitalists—what else are the ’Ndrangheta, really?—as well as a return visit from a pair of television personalities who had plagued him for weeks since La Signora’s existence had first become rumored. Bianchi was more polite to them than he had been, having had more practice; but all the same, he was wearier when they left than a full day’s work should have made him.
With them gone, he called the cows in to be milked, put away his tools and put food out for the cats and Garibaldi, and sat down on the old wicker chair that Giovanna had urged him to bring up from the barn, “ just in case a friend might actually wish to stay and talk with you. You never know, Bianchi.” Personally, he felt that the chair offered much too open an invitation to interviewers; but he found himself doing it nevertheless, because she had asked.
The unicorns came to him in the slow, slanting light of late afternoon. He was too tired and downhearted to rise, even for unicorns, but sat motionless, watching them walk toward him, the white-golden and the black, shining with their own moonlight, even in the sun of the mezzogiorno, their cloven hooves making no sound. They came all the way to where he was and stood as still as he, and he put his hand on both their heads without fearing to alarm them. He said, “Third Cat is dead.”
La Signora looked into his eyes, as she had done before, but this time Bianchi looked back and lost himself in a bright wilderness: a forest filled with glowing, shifting shadows, where nothing threatened, but nothing he knew applied, nothing he recognized held its shape for long. He felt himself altering, amending, as he wandered there—for how long?—until he had to make himself return while there was still a himself to command. And that is why men hunt unicorns, and why they will always kill them when they capture them. Not the beauty, not the magic of the horn . . . because of what lives and waits in the eyes. Finally I understand.
“I have asked before why you stay on, for all the trouble, and the danger. Whatever you are waiting for, it must be very important to you. All I know to say to you now is that bad people will be coming here soon, looking for you. You do not know them. These people are different from the fools and clowns and silly children who have been hunting you over my land all this time. They are clever, they are organized, and once they have their hands on you, they will use you, use your existence, in every way they can. I cannot protect you, and I do not know how to advise you, so I can only beg you to go away now. As I have begged my . . . someone as important to me as any unicorn to stay away from me.”
La Signora did not move, nor did the black colt. A sudden wave of cold bitterness overtook Bianchi, and he stood up from the wicker chair and shouted, “Everyone I care about should just stay away from me! People—animals—everyone, all of you! Do what you want, but stay away!”
The unicorn did a strange thing then: she lowered her head and touched him with her horn, lightly, glancingly, on his left shoulder, almost as though she were making him a knight of some order whose sense and purpose he would never know. It hurt him, though the point of the horn never broke the skin, or even penetrated his frayed old workshirt; it hurt so that he cried aloud and thought that he must surely vomit from the pain. Then it stopped hurting.
Bianchi said, “Oh.” After that he said, “But I can’t.” He touched his shoulder. He said, “I have to.” He turned without saying anything more, walked into his house, sat down at the kitchen table, where we had our dinner at midnight, a life ago, and began to write a poem.
It was not about the unicorns; or if it was, he never knew it. Nor was it about Giovanna Muscari, though he meant it to be. Poems come as they will, and when; and this one insisted on being a calm farewell to Cherubino, and to Garibaldi, Sophia and Mezzanotte, and to Gianetta, Martina, and Lucia as well, and to the pigs. The poem asked them all to take care of one another as best they might be able—he worried especially about the cows not being milked, but Romano will know, Romano will surely hear them calling when he comes—and if they kept some memory of him at all, to remember that he had loved them.
He was very precise about it all, addressing everything that had shared his life, even in small ways. He urged his grapevines to guard themselves against crown gall, shoot necrosis, and spiral nematodes; reminded his apple orchard to keep cold, and the deer to keep their word and continue leaving his tomatoes and his vegetable beds alone. At the end, he wrote only two lines to Giovanna.
When he finished, he was sharply disappointed, seeing it as far more of a last will than a real poem. He considered destroying it, but then decided that since he did not have a will of any sort—nor any heir, no better than crazy Uncle Vincenzo—it should be left where it could be discovered after his death, for whatever use it might be to anyone. So he put it away in the desk with the poems, because Giovanna knew where he kept those.
He had become strangely calm, and wondered at it in a distant way. If this is happening because she touched me with her horn, that is a splendid and remarkable thing, of course, but I wish that she had made me bulletproof instead. That would be practical, at least. He completed his evening tasks later than usual, sat in the kitchen for a while with his pipe and the last of the red Ciro, and at last went to bed. Remembering when he was too sleepy to get up again that he had forgotten to call Giovanna. He smiled drowsily, thinking about her . . .
. . . and woke up just as the door crashed in with a splintering squeal of hinges, and he was on the floor, being kicked scientifically and enthusiastically by all the feet in the world. The work was actually being done by only three pairs, but he did not realize this until he had been hauled upright a couple of times, slammed against his bed, and knocked down again, so that the kicking could continue. Somewhere in the process, he struck out in the darkness, felt a nose give, heard a gasping obscenity, and doubled over from a hammer-blow to his stomach. He clung to his assailant with all his strength, clawing for a grip on arms and shoulders he could not see, fearing to go down again. None of them said a word—a message was simply being delivered—and all he could think, as much as he could think, was thank God she isn’t here . . . oh, thank God . . . thank God . . .
. . . and then the motorcycle—Romano, he bought that used muffler from Malatesta—and the beating stopped at the sound . . . and she was there, raging among them through the broken door, swinging a tire iron like a flaming sword and screaming like a maniac. The ’Ndrangheta had no time to prepare for such an attack; in the close quarters the iron got home with every swing, and Giovanna drove them from one wall to the other, round and round, until they blundered outside and fled, lurching and limping, to the car that Bianchi had never heard arrive. She did not pursue, but dropped the tire iron and ran to him, dropping to her knees to catch him as he sagged, cursing steadily and fluently, and crying through it all. In the end, it was Bianchi who had to hold her.
“I am all right,” he kept telling her. “Giobella, I am really all right, they did not injure me much.” But even as he said it, he retched thinly in her lap, and she had the light on and the nightshirt off, and was prowling around him, assessing his bruises. There was almost no blood, except from his mouth—the ’Ndrangheta know their business—but everything hurt, and would hurt worse the next day, and for many days after that. Giovanna went back to cursing as she heated water and found clean cloths to wash him thoroughly. She only started crying again after she got him into bed and climbed in beside him.
“How did you know?” he managed to ask her. “It isn’t Friday.”
“It is Wednesday night, or Thursday morning by now. And you did not call, and . . . non sono sicuro—something felt wrong . . .”
As I would feel it . . . “So you stole your brother’s motorcycle, which you do not know how to drive—”
“I did not steal it. Stealing is when you don’t bring it back. And I only fell once. Well, twice, but that one was the truck’s fault. No, that is just a small scrape, leave it alone. What matters is that I got here.”
“Yes,” he said. “Thank you, Giobella.” After a moment he added, still somewhat shy about it, “Giobella mia.”
She was silent for such a while that he thought she must have fallen asleep. But presently she said, “They will come back. You cannot be alone when they do.”
“It will be different this time. Perhaps they will send that man I first met, the one I told you about—”
“No, it will be worse! Ascoltame, Bianchi, listen! They have lost face tonight, they have been shamed—”
“That was your doing alone, not mine. God knows, it was not mine.”
“Which makes it worse, because now it is not simply a matter of business, not just about unicorns, land, papers they want you to sign. Now it is la vendetta!” The word hissed in the night, in the bed, like an angry snake. “I will not let you be alone up here.”
“And I will not let you . . .” It was quickly becoming painful to get words out through split, blood-encrusted lips “You have risked enough, woman, enough! They may already have been asking questions about you, about us—if they do not know tonight who it was on the motorcycle, they will tomorrow. No more. Not even on Fridays.”
In the end—and it took all the rest of the night—they came to an agreement which satisfied neither of them. For the sake of propriety, Giovanna would arrive with her friend Silvana on every Tuesday evening, and go home the same way in the morning, as she had done before, returning on Friday for her regular mail delivery. “It is not that Romano doesn’t know. He knew what was happening before I did—as I told you, sometimes he understands more than you would expect from a brother. But if he does not ever admit to me, or to you, that he knows, then he is not lying when he tells other people that he does not know. Men amaze me.”
But she agreed, or seemed to agree, that she would not come to his house on any whim or impulse, even if by some chance he did not phone her; nor would she stay any night but Tuesday. He, in his turn, promised faithfully to report the attack to the police—even though neither one expected any result but paperwork—but refused firmly to visit a doctor. “I have been hurt worse by donkeys, cows, my own tools. Nothing is broken, nothing is damaged inside. If something else starts hurting . . . bene, yes, then I will go. Will that content you?”
“No, that is just stupid. But we will let it alone—for now—on one condition. One condition only.” She paused, waiting for a response. “Do you not want to know what that condition is?”
“The poems I have been writing lately are not very good. I should tell you that.”
