“Bianchi, a unicorn is not a pig, any more than she is a cat. It will happen, I think, when she decides that it is time.” After a long, thoughtful moment, she added, “Perhaps it has to be born on your farm, for some reason we will never know. Chi lo sa? Perhaps she came from some other century, all the way across the ages, just so her child could take its first breath right here.”
She tugged at her hair, something she did only in moments of anxiety. “What troubles me is that I will not be here for the birth. Unless it is on a Friday.”
Bianchi was silent for a long time before he surprised himself by blurting out, “Then I hope it does happen on a Friday.” Giovanna turned her head to look at him. He said, “I would feel . . . better if you were here.”
After some while, Giovanna said, “Yes.”
They went on staring straight ahead, watching the unicorn nibbling on fallen grape leaves. Bianchi said presently, “I call her La Signora sometimes. Not for her to answer to, but just for me, inside.” Giovanna nodded without answering.
The birth did not come on a Friday, but on a Thursday, and it came on such a night of wind and rain as had not been seen for a month. The sirocco has no specific season, but blows as and where it chooses, at times almost as fiercely as the tramontane. Yet it was not the wind that awakened Bianchi, but Cherubino on his hind legs, butting at the bedroom’s single window with nose and horns. One look at the goat’s demonic, desperate face, and Bianchi was out of the house, barefoot, a raincoat thrown over his old-fashioned flannel nightshirt, stumbling toward the hollow where the unicorn lay on her side. Her eyes were open and clear, and she was breathing calmly, but Cherubino knew, and so did Bianchi. Without thinking, he crouched beside her—far closer than he had ever dared approach—and put his hand on her neck where it joined her body. He felt the immortal heartbeat against his palm, and for a moment he shut his eyes. He moved his hand to her belly and listened.
“The child is coming the wrong way, Signora,” he said, raising his voice against the wind. “I know what to do, but you will have to trust that I know.” The unicorn lay still under his hands. “Well, then. So.” Salt, soft against my eyes . . . the Doctor’s Wind, blowing home from the sea—that must surely be a good sign, surely . . .
The rain began as he was trying to find a courteous manner to keep the unicorn’s tail out of the way. She lay half-sheltered by the overhang of the hollow, with most of her body exposed to the increasing downpour. Bianchi grunted with distant annoyance, pulling off the ancient raincoat to throw over her. He held up his hands to the pounding rain—at least they would be as clean as possible—and went on talking to the unicorn, telling her and himself, “It will go well, we will go well, do not be afraid . . .” I must not let her be afraid—her or the little one. “It will go well, Signora—my beauty, my sweetheart . . .”
It did not go well, not in the beginning. The colt—as he had finally determined to think of it—was almost impossible to turn, and Bianchi could feel its terror all along his arm, no matter how comfortingly he spoke to it. Throwing all his strength into the effort, if I can get hold of that foreleg, the one folded up so tightly, but what if it breaks? he pushed blindly but what if it breaks? what if the little one is strangling in the cord right now just the way don’t think about it the same way don’t ever think about it . . . Then suddenly the small body began to come almost too easily, so that he was first alarmed at the possibility of the sharp tiny hooves hurting the mother—though La Signora remained as placid as he could have wished—and then of the colt having died before it had ever lived. O God, God, what will I do then, what will I say? Yet he kept sensing its living fear in his own body, that has to be a good sign, and tried to imagine what it would be like to see Giovanna running to the hollow in the morning.
Then a surge—a rush of watery blood—and the little head was free: damp, wild-eyed, gasping its first breath in the rain. The unicorn raised her own head, twisting her neck for a first sight of the newborn, but Bianchi said sharply, “Aspetta, Signora—wait, wait, lie still!” To his amazement—not then, but afterward—the unicorn obeyed, as he bit the cord in the oldest of ways, and slowly guided her child, slick and wriggly as a tadpole, into the screaming world, trying to shield it from the storm with his body. The horn is just a tiny bud, of course, it would hurt her otherwise. In a vague way, he noticed that the newborn’s coat shone as black, even through the rain, as its mother’s shone white. Like her hair . . .
When he brought the baby’s mouth to a distended nipple, the unicorn made the river-sound that he had heard before, so softly that he barely heard it under the wind. Soaked and frozen himself, strengthless, he huddled as close to her as her child did, and it seemed to him then that she provided sheltering warmth for the three of them. It seemed also that he heard, in his exhausted sleep, the weeping of the black-haired woman like broken glass in my heart her tears, and he buried his face against the unicorn’s belly until he could not hear the weeping anymore.
That was how Giovanna found them when she managed at last to coax and command the blue van up the hill road, spongy with rain and doubly treacherous even with the storm blown over and the sun shining. The black newborn was already trying to stand on shaky legs too long to manage, but the unicorn lay as patiently still as ever while Bianchi slept like the dead across her body. Indeed, Giovanna thought, for one heart-numbing moment, that he really might be dead, so motionless he lay. She had to kneel close before she heard him snoring gently; if she thanked God, she was quiet about it. One moment to disbelieve the wonder of a unicorn’s breath in her palm; then she was hauling Bianchi to his bare, muddy feet, tugging his arm across her shoulder, coaxing him. “Vieni . . . vieni, amico . . . come on, come on, my friend. Time to go home . . .”
Lurching the first few steps with him, she almost stumbled into what she took at first for a shallow depression, and then realized as a hoofprint, cloven as precisely as La Signora’s, but distinctly deeper and broader than those. When she turned her head, she could see them circling the hollow until they vanished—whether among a stand of olive trees or into the bright new sky, she could not tell, and there was no time to study them further.
Somehow she half-dragged Bianchi all the way back to his house, pulled his nightshirt off over his head, rubbed him dry unashamedly—Romano was not her only brother—then wrestled him into his bed, and poured coffee, liberally infused with grappa, into him until he coughed and waved it away. With his eyes closed, he said, “It was turned around . . . the little one . . . it did not know the way.” His voice was hoarse and slow. “I tried so hard . . . I am sorry . . .”
Giovanna stared at him. Bianchi put his hands over his face. He whispered a name that she did not catch. “I am sorry . . . I am so sorry . . .”
“Bianchi, they are both well,” Giovanna said. “The little one is almost standing. Do you hear me, Bianchi?” He did not answer her. She said, “Sleep. She can take care of it now.”
At the door, without turning, she said, “I was afraid for you.” She left without hearing Bianchi’s reply, which he missed himself, being asleep at the time.
“. . . wished you there.”
He slept late into the afternoon. On waking, he dressed himself, drank a great deal of water, and foraged absently in the refrigerator for a few remains of last evening’s dinner. He let the cows out, and then walked slowly to the hollow, accompanied by Cherubino and all three of the cats. The unicorns—mother and son, white and black—appeared to be waiting for him there, the colt notably firmer on its legs than he would have expected, La Signora as calmly elegant as though Bianchi had never had an entire hairy arm inside her, groping blindly in her darkness for her child.
For a moment she put her head lightly on Bianchi’s shoulder, and, as he had never done, he touched the horn. It felt smooth and harsh to his fingers at the same time: there were hard, slightly raised rings at regular intervals under the sleek spiral surface, ascending to the tip, as far as he could judge, having no mind to chance the gleaming tip. La Signora is a dangerous animal. La Signora is very dangerous.
“You must be careful,” he said to her. “You did well to choose this place when you knew he was coming, because so few people ever visit me, and your folk know everything about living unseen. But he changes things.” Bianchi could not tell whether or not the colt understood him as La Signora did, but the little one was watching him just as intently, out of the same deeply dark eyes. Simply by the way in which he braced his new legs, standing beside his mother, Bianchi would have known him for a male of any species.
“He changes things. You will not be able to travel until he can keep up with you, and meanwhile you are more visible together, even here. Children are—” he hesitated painfully, what can I know about children? I only know kittens, calves, poems—“children are curious, Signora, children want to go and see. You must make him understand . . .”
Here he stopped, this time for good, because the ludicrousness of admonishing an immortal creature to be careful was a little more than his sense of the absurd could tolerate. He reached out a hand to the colt, which promptly skittered away from him, as though they had not been intimately involved mere hours before; the gesture ended awkwardly on the cheek of La Signora. She regarded him out of a dark kindness that made his eyes ache, and he was the one who stepped back and lowered his gaze. “I will keep you safe. You and him.”
He had not been back in the house for ten minutes before Giovanna called him. She was crying.
“Forgive me . . . I didn’t mean . . .” It took Bianchi a few moments to recognize the nearly hysterical voice as hers, and longer to comprehend what she was telling him. “I didn’t mean to . . . but seeing her, seeing her and the little one, I came home on wings, on wings, and Romano . . . Romano took one look at me and he saw, and he asked, and he kept on, he kept asking . . . and I was, I was so happy, and so . . . forgive me, Claudio . . .”
He was too bewildered, and increasingly alarmed, to take in the fact that she had called him by his name for the first time. “I didn’t mean, it was just . . . I was so happy . . .”
“What?” he demanded. “Stop crying! What are you saying?” But he already knew.
“I told him!” Giovanna wailed. “It just came out—your Signora and her baby . . . everything, everything. And he will be driving up to see them the first thing tomorrow, even though it is not a mail day. I feel like dying—I am so ashamed . . .”
“Basta! Stop that bawling, woman!” He shouted it the second time, as harshly as he could, and was rewarded with startled silence, punctuated by sniffles. More quietly, he said, “It is my fault as much as yours. More—if I had been paying attention the first time you came, you would never have seen her, never known. Stop blubbering now, you are not someone who blubbers.” This provoked a startled, slightly hysterical giggle, equally as disquieting to Bianchi as her tears. “Listen to me. What happens now will be by her choice—in the end everything is by her choice, always has been. If she does not want Romano to see her—see them—then he will not see her, that is all there is to it. Wash your face and have your dinner, and go to bed. Buona notte.”
He was about to hang up the phone when she asked shakily, “And if she chooses to be seen? What then?”
“It has happened before. How else would we know there are such things, if no one ever saw them? Go to bed.”
He wrote part of a poem that night: not about La Signora and her child, but about Giovanna’s grief at the thought of her uncontrollable joy having betrayed the unicorn’s presence. It was a new sort of poem for him, and slow in coming, and he dozed off at his kitchen table, waking only at the sound of the blue mail van chugging up the road. As he had ordered Giovanna to do, he splashed water on his face, ran a hand over his sleep-bristled hair, and went outside to meet Romano.
The sun was just up, glittering off the leaves of the beech tree a little way from the house, where the unicorn was standing, letting her child nurse. The black colt looked up when the van heaved itself around the last bend, but his mother paid no heed, even when Romano jumped down from the cab, and immediately had to scramble back up, having forgotten to set the handbrake. He did not take so much as a step toward the unicorn, nor toward Bianchi, but stood rigid, gaping, until, for all his own anxiety, it was impossible for Bianchi not to be amused. He said, “Well, I do not think I looked quite that stupid when I first saw her—but maybe I did. It is hard to know, of course.”
Romano’s eyes were almost as wild as those of a strange colt struggling through a storm to be born. He whispered, “Giovanna . . . don’t be angry at her—she tried to stop me. But I had to see . . .”
“Well,” Bianchi said. “Now you have seen. Close your mouth.”
La Signora raised her head, looking directly at Romano. The dawn light turned the dark-gold horn to a fiery flower, and Romano backed a little toward the van. He said, “I’ll bet she could be over here in half a second.”
Bianchi nodded. Romano said with some earnestness, “Tell her I do not want to hurt her, or the little one. Tell her I just wanted to look.”
“She knows that. Otherwise she would be somewhere else in half a second. I am afraid for her, not for you.”
Romano looked puzzled for a moment; then his eyes widened, and he touched his fingers, first to his lips and then to his heart. “Never! What do you think I am? I would never tell anyone!” Bianchi looked at him. “I would not! I swear on my parents’ graves! Giovanna will swear, too.”
