The storm in his body forced his mouth to open, and a voice came out of him that was not his voice. It rang and echoed through him, and made his headache worse, but he noticed in a detached way that it shook the trees.
The other voice said, “A unicorn has been born here. You trespass on sacred land.” The figures of the ’Ndrangheta, still unfocused in his sight, kept stuttering in and out of clarity, making him blink constantly, as the other voice grew harsher and more ominous. “Go away. Never come back. Never come back. If you come back, you will be cursed and die. A unicorn has been born here.”
They were already straggling away, wobbling windup toys close to running down. The voice in Bianchi’s mouth repeated, “Go away. Never come back. You trespass.”
Those who stumbled past the dry, unremarkable hollow where Bianchi had brought La Signora’s son out of her into a rainstorm, gaped over their shoulders at it, often covering their faces, lurching into one another. Bianchi felt his own knees go, and sank down very slowly.
He did not realize that he too had put his hands to his face until he felt the tears.
Dead people cannot cry. I am almost certain of that.
When he opened his eyes, the dislocated world had slipped back into place, though he never sensed any crack or click, as with a bone. Color and sound had returned—he clearly heard the cows lowing to be taken out, heard Garibaldi barking raggedly at an annoying magpie—and the angle of the just-risen sun made him aware that less than an hour had passed since a pistol muzzle had invaded his mustache. Engines were starting up, tires were hissing and spraying stones; harsh voices were shouting shakily back and forth in tremulous anger. Third Cat was gone.
And Giovanna was running toward him from the house, as he had imagined her running through the rain to see La Signora’s child being born. He got to his feet again and waited for her, feeling very old. When she leaped into his arms, he promptly toppled over; but instead of helping him up, she laughed and rolled in the damp morning grass with him, until Bianchi was forced to push her gently away, laughing himself for what felt like the first time since his childhood. He demanded, “What happened? Giobella, what happened?”
She stared. “Didn’t you see? You were . . . you were riding her! Why did you . . . what made you. . . ?” She ran out of words, and was reduced to flapping her arms helplessly, while trying simultaneously to hold him. “Bianchi, why are you asking me what happened to you?”
“Because I don’t know!” He lowered his voice, peering toward the house. “And who, cazzo di Bacco, is that?”
Giovanna turned her head briefly. “Oh, that is Paolo—you remember him. He would not let me come out to you, so I kicked him.” The ’Ndrangheta who had been sprawled across the doorstep was standing now, but movement was plainly uncomfortable for him. Giovanna called through cupped hands, “Hurry up, Paolo, your friends are all leaving! It will be a long walk home with your coglioni in a sling!”
Paolo shot her one weakly murderous glance, and limped away. Giovanna said quietly, “I heard the shots. Three, four, maybe five shots. I pushed Paolo aside, and I ran to the door. You were . . . Bianchi, you were disappearing! You were on her back—I just got a little glimpse of you, and you looked so frightened, my insides just . . .” She held him so hard against her breast that for a moment he could not distinguish her heartbeat from his own. “What were you doing, Bianchi? Claudio, Claudio, vita mio, what were you trying to do? I thought—I thought . . .” Bianchi could not make out the last words.
He said, “I don’t know.” Mezzanotte and the three-legged cat Sophia came to investigate them, while pretending immense unconcern. “I think I had some notion of riding her very far away from there, before those men could get at her with their ropes and their tranquilizers. It makes no sense, I know . . . but, Giobella, she would not run, she had no care for such people. She is so different from us, humans, so much better . . .” His voice thickened in his throat. “I think you were right. I think perhaps she was hunted here from some other time. Where they do not have tranquilizer guns.”
“They had other things then,” Giovanna pushed his head back to look into his face. It was Bianchi’s turn to stare back speechlessly. She said, “I saw him.”
Bianchi had been shaking his head for some time before he found words. “You can’t have seen him. I never really saw . . . they are not what we see here, down here . . .” He took hold of her hands and pressed their coolness against his closed eyes.
Giovanna whispered, “I saw night. The sun was rising, but I saw night and stars over you . . . terrible stars. I called out to you.”
“I called to you,” Bianchi said. “Then I fell, like the boy in that Greek story, Icarus. I thought I fell a long way—across the sky, maybe—but I don’t know now. Did you see me then?”
“No.” Giovanna’s body had gone strangely rigid, and her voice was shaking. “Bianchi, I have to ask—are you you?”
Bianchi did not reply. Giovanna said, “You rode a unicorn. That’s not for people to do—not people like us, never mind the old stories. Maybe you fell from the moon, maybe you fell out of a tree, I don’t care, I don’t care. But is it . . . is it still you I am holding?” The deep-green eyes seemed as swollen as ripe fruit, close to bursting with hope and sweetness and fear. “After where you’ve been . . . after what has—I don’t know—happened, are you still my cranky old Claudio Bianchi? Who . . . who warms my feet?”
Bianchi stood up, lifting her with him. “It’s me,” he said simply. “No better a man than I ever was, no wiser a soul—and certainly no deeper a poet. If you doubt it, listen.” And he recited the last two lines of the poem that had so disappointed him because it kept turning into a kind of testament.
Giovanna Muscari, sitting in the beautiful sun
of a long and beautiful life,
remember that someone called you ‘Giobella.’
When she had stopped crying, she said, “That is a terrible poem. I am sure the rest of it is just as bad. Only you would have written it.” Then she started crying again, and it took him some while to understand what she was whispering. “Bianchi, I saw . . . I saw you with that dead man, what you did . . . and then when you were walking, when you went toward those others . . . Bianchi, the sun was behind you, and your shadow . . . it wasn’t your shadow . . . there was the horn . . .”
Bianchi held her. “Sono io,” he said, over and over. “Sono io, it’s me. Whatever you saw, it’s only me now.”
Cherubino came lolloping up to nose at his pockets, and Garibaldi wriggled out from under the house. Bianchi pretended to wave them off, demanding, “And where were you, my brave defenders, when Giobella and I needed defending? Hah? You should be ashamed!”
Giovanna sniffled, and laughed shakily. “Do not scold them, Claudio. They were afraid of the guns.” She buried her face in his damp shoulder again.
The sky was as clear as Bianchi could recall seeing it, and as blue as the pines of the faraway Aspromontes. There were only three clouds to be seen from horizon to horizon. Two were dark, as though with rain; one was a translucent white-gold, as though lighted from within. They were moving away slowly, toward the sunrise.
“No,” he said, so softly that Giovanna never heard him. “No. It is over. Those are clouds.”
But inside he spoke to the sky, his mind so frayed by exhaustion that he could barely think coherently. Goodbye. I do not want to watch you leaving, but you believed that I was brave enough to bear your touch, and to see what you are. So now I am as brave as you needed me to be—though no braver than the rest of us who do as we can in this country, even that old thief Falcone—even our senile Madame Leonora. I am glad that you chose my home to have your child—though I must tell you that it has made my life much more complicated than I like. And I am proud that I could be whatever help I have been to you, and I thank you for your shining . . . and for the poems,
but he was looking at Giovanna as he thought the word. If I never see you again—and I never will—thank you for the poems. Goodbye, Signora.
Against him, still not looking up, Giovanna said, “And the ’Ndrangheta? Will your . . . your shadow keep them away?”
“No, I told you, I am only me, no black unicorn. But the land . . . the land will keep them out. It really is sacred now, you know. In a little time, I will be as peacefully alone here as I ever was.” He smiled into Giovanna’s hair. “More or less.”
“I will never come and live with you,” she promised. “Not until you ask me. And maybe not even then.”
Bianchi turned to look back toward the ravaged vineyard. “Ay, so much to do,” he muttered. “So much to replant, regrow . . . and how I get the smell of that piscio out of the house. . . ?” Then he said, “I wonder how long unicorns stay together.”
Giovanna stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“Well, not so many creatures mate for life. I have read about this. Birds, yes, and foxes, and some of the monkeys . . . and some kinds of mice, perhaps . . . and I think even some fish, oh, and maybe wolves. But my cats do not even want the males around, once they know—and DeLorenzo says his sheep—”
“Cats—fish—sheep! We are talking about unicorns!” She gripped his coat lapels, dragging him close. “They may be apart sometimes, they may come and go as they choose—what can love be like when you live forever?—but they wait for each other, they find each other, they are together always! You take your stupid fish and mice back, Claudio Bianchi! I would die if I did not think that they would always be together!”
Bianchi pried her hands from his coat and held them tightly with his own. “Even if they have brothers?” Giovanna blinked in surprise, and then nodded firmly. “Even if one of them is very much older than the other?”
The green eyes met his own steadily, and drew them into a different forest from La Signora’s eyes. “When you are going to live forever, what difference?”
