Giovanna was lying on her side, her chin resting on one closed fist. “No, this has nothing to do with poetry.” She smiled at him: the particular burst of challenging mischief that he had seen, once in a while, on the reserved, serious face of the child he remembered. She said, “You must allow me to buy you a pair of pajamas.” Bianchi stared at her. “If you are going to continue offending people who will continue to drag you from your bed at all hours and . . . and attack you, then at least you must greet them wearing something more suitable than that horrible nightshirt. For the sake of your dignity.”
Bianchi gaped for a moment more, then began to laugh for what felt to him like the first time in a great many years. “So now I am not dressing for myself, not even for you. Now I am dressing for the ’Ndrangheta. Perhaps I should ask the cows for their opinion of my underwear. Or Cherubino, better; he ate some of it once, off the drying line. And Mezzanotte—he slept wrapped in that nightshirt when he was a kitten. Does he not deserve a vote, too?”
He saw the green eyes grow large, and quickly put his arms around her. “Giobella, I am sorry for making fun of you, please forgive me. But they are not going to attack me like that again. That was the first message—” he did not mention Third Cat—“the second one will be different. I do not really think I will need to dress for it.”
“The second could be a fire!” she cried out. “The second could be a bomb, dynamite, a single shot while you are milking your cows. What will you do then, Bianchi? What will I do?”
She was actually shaking him, with her hands painfully tight on his shoulders. He caught them, kissed them both, held them in one of his own large hands that had never been made for writing poetry. He said quietly, “You will have to finish milking the cows.”
They repaired the door together, picked up whatever had not been broken, and threw away the rest of the wreckage. Breakfast was caffe latte and toast, spread with the last of the preserves that had been a recent gift from Matteo Falcone, for the lean merchant’s own strange reasons. They ate in near-complete silence, and then Bianchi walked out with her to her brother’s motorcycle. It was parked precariously on damp, yielding earth, and he could see deep boot-heel marks where she had leaped to the ground and come charging to his aid like an avenging angel. He said in a mix of wonder and mild reproof, “You must have been carrying that tire iron in your hand all the way—there is no saddlebag big enough to hold it. That was very dangerous.”
“I left it on the bed for you.” She held him very tightly, and though her breathing was harsh and irregular, she was not crying. “Please do not get killed, you stubborn, foolish man. I am too young to be hurting for the rest of my life.”
“And I am too young and silly for you. But you will be my Giobella for the rest of my life. So be very, very careful going home, because you don’t know how to drive. And call me when you get there, capisci?” She promised.
Watching the motorcycle wobble out of sight down the dirt road—her friend Silvana took the curve much faster on her Vespa—he felt an absurdly wrenching urge to go after her in the old Studebaker, to make certain that she reached home safely. You cannot protect her from anything, Bianchi. Not from herself, not from the ’Ndrangheta—not from her stupid, idiotic, miraculous love for you. The best you can do for her is to try not to get killed. And hope she forgets about the pajamas.
He did call the police, keeping his own word, and weary Tenente Esposito came out to take a full report, drink two cups of coffee, and tell him, as they both knew he would, “Bianchi, what do you imagine we can do about the ’Ndrangheta that the police of five, six countries have not been able to do? I can send someone out a couple of times a week to sit and drink coffee with you, as I do, but beyond that . . .” He shrugged as expressively as only someone who has spent an entire life in southernmost Italy can do. “Of course, if you were to sell your farm, now, and move down into town . . .” Bianchi raised his eyebrows without replying, and Tenente Esposito did not bother to finish the sentence. “Well, you have friends in town—even you—and you have neighbors, everyone has neighbors. You could alert them, they could organize a patrol . . .”
“Aldo Frascati,” Bianchi said. “Yes, he would be thrilled to defend me from the ’Ndrangheta. I will start with him, and then I will enlist Madame Leonora. More coffee?” Tenente Esposito indicated that that would be very nice.
As a gesture, or as a sort of charm—both are taken quite seriously in Calabria—Bianchi began keeping Giovanna’s tire iron close to him at all times, even carrying it with him when he went out to work the farm. The shotgun meant nothing to him, nor he to it, but the tire iron had been brought for his protection by someone who loved him. He told Giovanna that he did this, because she believed devoutly in such things; but not that he slept with it cold by his side on nights when he was most lonely for his green-eyed girl. On some mornings he woke up gripping it tightly, as though preparing to face further attackers; but if he had been dreaming of the ’Ndrangheta, he never recalled the dreams. And the ’Ndrangheta did not come.
Neither did the unicorns, singly or together. Bianchi continued to believe strongly that he would have known if they were no longer present on his land: as he tried to explain to Giovanna, “The air would be different. When I think about them, I can feel the air ripple and shiver around me, and I understand that they are somewhere near. Does that sound foolish to you?”
Instead of answering the question directly, she asked him, “And when you think of me? What happens then?”
Very gravely, Bianchi responded, “When I think about you, sometimes I cannot breathe.” She looked up at him and hugged his arm, saying nothing at all.
On all evenings except Tuesdays, when she came on her friend’s motorscooter, he would sit still in the wicker chair, neither reading nor writing, but waiting to feel the unicorns, without expecting to see them. He would close his eyes, whisper “Vieni, vieni” into the warm appleblossom breezes, without caring whether or not they carried his plea to two pairs, white and black, of silken pointed ears, and listen for them with the skin of his face, which was where he most often felt their reality. Sometimes he fell asleep like that, and always woke up smiling.
During that time, he was regularly surprised by more visitors from town than he had ever been accustomed to receive. Rossi, Dallessandro, Falcone again, wheezy-voiced Frascati—even Madame Leonora, stately in the sidecar of young De Santis, her police-officer great-nephew. All brought gifts of one sort or another, according to their professions, and all came bearing equally varied warnings and advice. Bianchi should sell the farm to the ’Ndrangheta and move down into town . . . no, he should simply leave town altogether and emigrate to Canada or New Zealand . . . no, he should electrify his fences and mine his property so completely with grenades and dynamite that the first step any gangster took on it would be his last in this world . . . no, he should hire bodyguards, gangsters of his own, to patrol his farm night and day . . . Killer dogs were also mentioned.
To the cats he marveled, “I have never been so popular as now, in the hour of my doom. I must remember this. What a rare thing.”
On days when Romano delivered the mail, he spoke far less than usual, and seemed to regard Bianchi with a curious new mixture of admiration, puzzlement, and deep misgiving, the latter most often expressed in the corner of his eye. When Bianchi challenged him directly to say what was on his mind, Romano would only shrug, flap his arms vaguely, and go off shaking his head. Bianchi would stare after him, half-amused, half as bewildered as he.
Finally, one afternoon when an exasperated Bianchi had followed him to the mail van, pressing him sharply for an answer, Romano turned on him, red and white with anger by turns. “You are going to make my sister a widow before she is ever married. If you want to stretch your neck out on the block and wait for the ’Ndrangheta to chop your head off . . . well, that is your own stupid business—but at least have the decency to tell her not to love you so much. Order her not to love you, Bianchi—do that much, if you do nothing more.” There were no tears in his eyes, but he was trembling, and his nose was running. “No, don’t do that, of course not, she would never take orders from God and Santo Michele together. But if you love her, then stop sitting here with no gun, no friends, no police, writing your poems and feeding your pigs. Protect your woman, Bianchi, if you won’t protect yourself.”
He scrambled clumsily and angrily into the van, and was away without a wave or a backward glance.
“I think he wishes that he had never taught you to drive,” he said to Giovanna when the Vespa dropped her off that evening. “So much might have been avoided.”
“Oh, I would have learned,” she replied lightly. “And I already knew where you lived.” She chuckled against him, rubbing her head against his arm like a cat. “Silvana was going to teach me, and I was always watching my brothers.” She frowned then, thoughtfully enough that the dark brows became a straight bar. “Something is wrong with Silvana, I think. Perhaps a man, perhaps family—they are a little strange, her people. Silvana is the only one of them I could ever . . .” She shrugged abruptly and dropped the subject. “She doesn’t talk to me as much, and today she kept looking at me . . . oddly. I am probably imagining it.”
“She may be frightened for you,” Bianchi said quietly. “As your brother is—as I am. She may know something, and be afraid to speak. This is Calabria, after all.”
“She would not dare!” The eyebrows now seemed to melt into each other. “If she heard or saw something that might be dangerous to you, or even picked up the rumor of a rumor that someone had said something to someone else, and she did not tell me, she would be better off in the hands of the ’Ndrangheta.” She glared at him with comical ferocity. “So would you be, if you knew something and tried to spare me or shield me. I have a right to say that, Bianchi.”
“I will shield you from nothing,” he promised her. “Rather, I will hide behind you.” She continued to glare, suspecting that he was mocking her; then saw that he was not, and let her small face ease into soft laughter. Her laugh always sounded to Bianchi like green leaves rustling against each other.
On a Tuesday evening, while she was putting away the dinner dishes—never having cooked for anyone in his life, it was more exciting than he could ever explain to be preparing as simple a dish as baccalà al pomodoro for them to eat together—she said over her shoulder, “But they could have gone away, you know. How long has it been since you have seen them? Can you really be so certain?”
“It is not important what I believe,” Bianchi replied. “What the ’Ndrangheta believe—that is what matters.”
Giovanna turned from the dishes, and he shrugged. “I think perhaps whether the unicorns are still here or not does not matter so much to them anymore. La vendetta, now . . .”
Giovanna set down the dish towel, so gently and deliberately that the effect was more fierce than if she had hurled it across the kitchen. In a similarly quiet voice, she remarked, “I think you should know that when they shoot you down on your own doorstep, I will not wear mourning. I may not even go to your funeral.”
“Va bene,” Bianchi agreed amiably. “The Tenente has already assured me that he would come, and I am sure Malatesta would not miss it for a fortune. I may even get that thief Falcone, and if old Frascati’s arthritis is not bothering him too greatly—”
She was across the kitchen and at him before he could put up his hands to defend himself, beating at him with the same fury with which she had routed the ’Ndrangheta thugs. “You joke!” she gasped. “I can stand anything but this stupid, stupid joking!” A sudden explosion of helpless, furious tears rendered her almost speechless. “Bianchi, they really will kill you, they will burn this house over your head—”
Bianchi caught her flailing hands and held them to his cheek. “But not tonight,” he said. He put his arms around her. “Not tonight. Come.”
He led her outside, and they sat in the twilight, snuggled into the old wicker chair, each with a glass of white Ciro, and Bianchi’s worn brown jacket around Giovanna’s shoulders. After a time, she said softly, “See, now, this moment, we are just like ordinary people, people who are not afraid, not looking for unicorns, but only keeping each other warm on a spring evening. Nothing more, nothing less.”
Bianchi was silent for a little while before he answered her. “Do not make any mistake about me. This is very important—I do not ever want you to imagine that I am a fearless warrior, indifferent to death, because I am nothing of the kind. And yet—” he hesitated, plainly reaching for words that he had never spoken to her before. “She touched me, you know, Giobella—La Signora. With her horn . . . here. I told you that?” Giovanna nodded, her mouth set for whatever she might hear, but her green eyes wide and waiting. “I did. Yes. Well, it hurt me at the time—it hurt terribly, like a brand, the way we do with cattle, horses, so that everyone will know they are ours.”
He brought her hand to his left shoulder, and she pulled back, feeling the heat through the worn fabric. “Yes, just so,” he said again. “Ever since then . . . ever since then, I do not seem to care about being afraid. Somewhere in the background of my living, someone is very much afraid, but it does not appear to be me. Does that make any sense to you, my Giobella—my own girl?” He took hold of both her hands again, leaning close to stare into her eyes. “Because it makes no sense at all to me, and it does frighten me. It does.”
“No,” she said. “No, of course it makes no sense—how can you even ask me that?” Then she smiled, pressing her hands more firmly into his. “But nothing has made sense since the first time I drove Romano’s mail van up here and saw you with a pregnant unicorn. Since I fell in love like an idiot, forever in love with a man twice my age, who writes poetry and makes silly jokes, and has a goat named out of an opera.” The green eyes darkened, but they held his own eyes without tears. “Who will not lift a finger to save himself from the ’Ndrangheta, because the unicorn told him it would be all right. Bianchi, I meant what I said—I am not coming to your funeral.”
“Va bene, tesora,” Bianchi said again. “Then I certainly will not come, either.”
