Bianchi looked back at her without speaking, his eyes stunned and helpless beyond appeal. Giovanna said, “Someone would have found out, sooner or later. Probably my brother.”
The unicorn had not fled, but had halted a little way beyond Bianchi, regarding Giovanna with a curious, wary thoughtfulness. Bianchi said accusingly, “You drive softer than he does. You sneaked up on me.” But he half-laughed before he was finished, realizing the absurdity of the charge. “No, I was careless. Usually I wait until he has been and gone. But ever since . . .” He gestured, not so much toward the unicorn as toward the hollow that she had arranged to receive her newborn when the time came. “I cannot tell when it might happen—it is not like with a cow—and I need to be here. I was thinking that tonight perhaps I might sleep . . .”
“Then you would catch a cold to no purpose,” Giovanna interrupted him. “I am no farmer, but I can look at her and know that she will not give birth for some weeks yet—at least three, maybe more. Men!” and she shook her head in a certain resigned annoyance that her brother would have recognized. She stepped past Bianchi, holding out her hand to the unicorn, who stayed where she was. She asked, “No one else knows?”
“No one has seen her.” Bianchi smiled crookedly. “It is something to have a reputation for being a bad-tempered hermit.” But his expression remained anxious.
Giovanna hooked her thumbs into her belt and leaned back on her heels, much in the manner of Romano, which it would have infuriated her to realize. “Stop looking at me like that. Of course I will tell no one—what sort of person do you think I am? But there are conditions attached.”
“There would be. Are you not a Muscari?” But there was no spite or mockery in Bianchi’s voice—nothing but relief. “Name these conditions, then.”
“First—” Giovanna ticked the clauses off briskly on her fingers—“you will give me your telephone number, so that I can call you every evening to inquire about her health and her . . . progress. Second—”
She was interrupted by one of Bianchi’s explosive snorts. “As though you could be any sort of help if she were in any sort of trouble. You know less about her than I do, and I know nothing.”
Giovanna nodded, tapping a second finger on her palm. “Just so. So you and I must trust her to have this little one by herself, without getting in her way. Do not make yourself ill spending your nights out here with her; do not concern yourself with feeding her, not as long as she is on her feet. After that . . . after that, I think she will tell you what she needs. Yes, I am quite sure she will let you know.”
Surprisingly, Bianchi uttered a slow, rusty chuckle. “Because you are sure that she is just like you, and you would never hesitate to let anyone know if you needed something. Very well, I agree to that. And the third condition?”
Giovanna was a long time in answering him. She looked away across the hollow at the watchful unicorn, and it seemed to Bianchi that something soundless passed between them in which he had no part. When Giovanna turned back to him, her manner was that of the small, shy, dark girl tagging silently behind her brother, clutching her stuffed monkey. She said, “Would you read me one of your poems about her?”
The request—so clearly not a condition—caught Bianchi amidships, leaving him literally wordless, though he spluttered a good deal. Even Romano, with all his sly prodding about the poetry, had never really asked to see any of it. Giovanna’s voice was nearly inaudible, but her eyes met his directly, and she doesn’t do that twisting thing with her hair she used to do when she was nervous. How do I remember that? Giovanna said, “My brother makes jokes all the time about you writing poems. When I saw her, I wanted to write a poem, and I have never done such a thing in my whole life. So, when I see you with her . . .”
Her voice trailed away, and she did not attempt to finish the sentence. Bianchi had no idea of what to say to her, so what came out of his mouth had no thought at all behind it. “I will tell you the first one. Maybe it is the one you wanted to write.”
Giovanna frowned uncertainly. Bianchi scratched his head and closed his eyes. “Listen.”
It took him a long time, not because of the poem’s length, nor because he had forgotten so much as a word, but rather because having a listener disconcerted him. Giovanna’s attentive eyes and the way she clasped her hands in front of her made him at times cough and stammer, or lose his place and have to start a line over. He often thought that it might still be the best poem he had yet written about the unicorn; but Giovanna’s presence made him increasingly unsure of this, and he disliked the feeling greatly. Nevertheless, he repeated it all the way to the end, and then turned abruptly away, saying over his shoulder, “I have work to do. So do you.”
Giovanna caught up with him within a few strides, catching hold of his coatsleeve and pulling him to face her. “Yes. Yes, that is just the way I felt when I first saw her. If I could write a poem, I would have written exactly that. Thank you. Here is your mail.”
Speechless for a second time in a matter of minutes, Bianchi finally managed to grunt, “Welcome.” Giovanna said nothing further, and they walked in silence to the blue mail van. As she stepped into the cab, she reminded him, “I will call tonight. Just to ask about her.”
Bianchi nodded. He handed the three envelopes back to her, raising his eyebrows slightly. Giovanna said, “I will throw them away for you.”
Watching the van careen away down the steep road, he surprised and irritated himself by calling after her, “Be careful!” The child does not have a license, I am sure of it. Who would give such a little girl a driver’s license? Yet he stood where he was for a time, until he heard the cows calling to be brought into the barn and milked. I hope Romano has warned her about the curve near old Frascati’s farm. It can be dangerous going downhill, and she drives too fast.
Giovanna did telephone him that night, as she had said she would do. He told her shortly that there was nothing to tell her: the unicorn had not gone into labor, or anything like it, but had grazed periodically—most often in the company of Cherubino and one or two of the cats—and seemingly dozed in the hollow at times, but never for long. “I am not sure that she ever sleeps, not truly. It is all very strange, her being here. Writing the poems does not make it any less strange.”
“Romano has found a book at the library. There is a lot about unicorns in it. I will read it tonight. I am to drive the mail van on Fridays, so I will see you then.”
“I will look for you,” Bianchi said, but she had already hung up.
In the weeks that followed, the unicorn’s pregnancy became more evident—even someone who was not a farmer, like Romano, would have noticed the change—but her behavior altered not at all. She did spend more time resting in the hollow, nearly invisible in the shadow of the earthen overhang, but still capable of being up and gone in a soundless swirl of cloven hooves. Bianchi would watch her for long minutes and hours, immobile himself, and sometimes ask her aloud, “What can you be thinking? What do you remember, so graceful, so serene, gazing so far away, so far beyond my tired fields? What dreams come to you as you lie there open-eyed?” for she never closed them entirely while he was near. “Do you dream about the one who is coming—do you wonder about . . .” and he would invariably stop at that point, even in the poems. Even the poems never pursued that last question.
That urgency was left to Giovanna, who asked it early, and with increasing intensity as the days passed. “Where is the father, do you suppose? Where can he be, her mate?”
She was sitting on the ground close to the unicorn, closer than Bianchi himself was ever permitted, which always annoyed him. “Why do you ask me? What should I know about fathers?”
“Bianchi, a unicorn is not a cat, to go around mounting every female in season—if unicorns have seasons, the book is not clear. I am sure that her mate, her stallion, whatever you want to call him, knows, knows, that this child is to be born, and he is looking everywhere for her, to be there when it comes.” She had rarely spoken this much in any one burst, and she literally ran out of breath and suffered a small coughing fit. Bianchi patted her back gingerly until it stopped.
“No book will tell us what we want to know, Romano’s sister,” he told her. “It was only a little while ago that I could not imagine that there could be such a wonder in the world as what we look on together in this moment, you and I. Perhaps her mate will come for her and the child, and perhaps not—it will all be according to the ways of unicorns.”
He paused, uncomfortably aware of Giovanna’s green, listening eyes. There was a small heart-shaped birthmark at the corner of the left one. “But this much I do know. This I will tell you. Seeing her even one time would have changed the poetry forever, just as it happened to Dante, who saw Beatrice only once, at a May Day party when she was eight years old. I have seen her every day now for months—a magic, an enchantment, walking around my farm, eating weeds with my goat—and it has made me different. I cannot even say how different, different in what ways—only that I am.” He blinked rapidly, though Giovanna saw no tears in his eyes. He said, “When she is gone, then perhaps I will know.”
When Romano asked whether she had detected any signs of a woman appearing in Claudio Bianchi’s life, Giovanna would shrug with practiced disdain. “I am never in his house, what can I tell you? I do what you do—I drop off the mail and I go, punto e basta. As far as I can tell, he lives alone, as he has always done.” Sometimes, merely for the pleasure of teasing her brother, she might add, “Of course, he might have a friend who comes to visit now and again. That does happen, you know.”
Romano disapproved of the possibility. “He is an old man. He needs someone there, someone who will take care of him.”
Giovanna would most often shrug again. “Perhaps so. Me, I ask him no questions. Go away, I have studying to do.” Once or twice, to plague him further, she remarked lightly, “He is not quite as old as all that, you know.”
Spring comes earlier in Calabria than to anywhere else in Italy. The sunrise howling of the tramontane winds gradually decreases, and is most often followed by the warm, wet southwesterly flow of the sirocco that can bring flowers out of the ground before the weather is quite ready for them. Bianchi himself often felt a childlike desire to run around warning the new poppies and blossoming bergamot trees, “Not yet, not so soon, it is a trick! The cold rains will return and beat you back into the earth—stay down, stay down a while longer!” But this year there seemed no danger of such a betrayal: the days warmed steadily, the soft young grass was welcomed eagerly by cows grown weary of stale hay, the three cats roamed more widely, and even Garibaldi stayed outside on some nights without whining to be let in. Bianchi saw black storks going over, and heard the cries of northbound geese in the night.
The unicorn grew heavier and somewhat slower afoot, eating little, but drowsing often in the returning sun. The life within her was visibly more active, most often in the afternoon, and Giovanna made a point of timing her Friday mail deliveries accordingly. She never offered to take Romano’s route more than one day a week. “Because he will become suspicious, immediately. He is not nearly as stupid as he acts.”
Bianchi looked puzzled. Giovanna felt oddly embarrassed, and annoyed with herself for feeling so. “He will think I have a lover.”
“Oh,” Bianchi said. “Well, you don’t.” After a moment he added, “Do you?”
Giovanna raised one black eyebrow before she answered. “No fear. They are all too much like Romano around here, nervous if you roam too far away from the stove and the bed. I certainly hope his Tessa can cook for him when I graduate and run off with his mail van.”
Bianchi said nothing, not always being entirely certain when Giovanna was joking. They were standing together, watching the unicorn grazing alone in his vineyard, where he had first seen her. Neither spoke for some while—Giovanna was proving an almost distressingly comfortable person to be silent with—until she finally said, “It will be soon. The new one wants to be born.” She never referred to the coming infant in any other way.
“It will happen in the middle of the night,” Bianchi grumbled. “It always happens so with the pigs, always.”
