A Newborn
The daughter of Sans Souci was already foaled when the farmer and the
horse doctor arrived in Magliano Toscano. She was already dropped on
the bed of straw, and there she lay, flat and wet, like a rug left out
in the rain. Her eyes were closed and her nostrils not even fluttering.
The doctor, a sharp-eyed, determined little man, hastily pulled out
his stethoscope, and falling to his knees in the straw, held it to the
foal's side, listening. The farmer stood looking on, pale and helpless.
No less a person than Sans Souci's owner, the Prince of Lombardy,
wanted to buy the foal, but only if it were sound and sturdy. He had
even agreed to pay the horse doctor's fee. Would he, if she died? She
must not die!
"The heart?" the farmer whispered anxiously. "It beats? No?"
"Only faint," the doctor replied, "like butterfly wings." Straightening
up, he snapped out his orders. "You got to help. Lift her up! No! No!
Not like that. By her hind legs, hang her upside down. The blood, it's
_got_ to flow to the brain."
Frightened into submission, the farmer did as he was told while the
doctor began furiously rubbing the foal's sides. The perfect little
head was thrust back, mouth agape. The doctor stopped a moment,
placed his hands against her chest, but there were still no signs
of breathing. He pulled an old towel from his satchel, doused it in
the watering trough, and slapped the colt. "Wake up!" he cried. "Get
courage, little one! Breathe! Ahead lies the world!"
Still no response. The gray lump hung from the farmer's hands like a
carcass in a butcher shop.
"What we do now?" the farmer asked.
"Lay her down!" the doctor shouted, unwilling to give up. "Fetch the
wheelbarrow."
Puzzled, the farmer hurried out to the lean-to beside the barn.
The doctor crouched on his knees and with slow, forceful motions
pressed the tiny squeeze-box of the colt's ribs. "Breathe! Breathe!
Breathe!" he panted as he tried to pump air into her lungs.
The mare all this while had been lying exhausted. She lifted her head
now and let out a cry that was half squeal, half whinny. As if in
answer, there was a gasp from her foal. Then a shallow cough, followed
by a whimper.
When the farmer came rattling in with the wheelbarrow, he stopped in
awe. "She does not go under!" he exclaimed. Then he laughed in relief.
"The wheelbarrow--you don't need now?"
"Now I do!" Cheeks flushed in triumph, the doctor kept on pumping air
into the filly's lungs and at the same time barking out directions: "Be
quick! Fill a gunny sack with straw! Lay it flat on the wheelbarrow!"
The gasps were coming closer together. They were stronger. And stronger.
The doctor stopped pumping. He listened through his stethoscope and
heaved a deep sigh. "Is greatest thing I ever see! The mare, she helped
me just in time." Proudly, he lifted the newborn on top of the stuffed
gunny sack. "We take her now into your kitchen and dry her by your
fire."
"But why?" the farmer asked, more puzzled than before. "Why, when
already she breathes?"
"Please to remember this, my friend. For eleven months she is living in
a very warm place. Today is windly, and it blows cool into the barn."
Nodding, the farmer trundled the little creature past the stalls of
cows and bullocks and through the door that led into the kitchen.
"Maria!" he called to his wife as he lifted the foal from the
wheelbarrow and placed her beside the fire. "See what it is we bring!"
The farmer's wife, a plump, pleasant woman with eyes as shiny as
olives, came running from another room. Politely she greeted the
doctor, set out a bottle of her best wine and a glass on the table for
him. Then in an instant she was on her knees cooing, "Ah, poor little
one, poor dear one!" Without thinking, she had taken off her homespun
apron and was rubbing the filly as if its ribs were a washboard.
"_Brava! Brava!_" cried the doctor between sips of the golden wine.
"Your wife," he remarked to the farmer, "is a nurse most competent.
Guard well you do not burn the little one so close to the fire. Rub the
legs and the body until nice and dry. Then take her back to her dam."
He knelt down and put a finger in the filly's mouth. "See? Already she
sucks! By herself she will find the mare's milk faucets. And now I must
leave. _Arrivederci_, my good people."
The doctor's happy laughter rang out behind him as he walked across the
dooryard to the hitching post.
In the warm kitchen a second miracle was taking place. The foal,
yawning, looking about with her purple-brown eyes, was stretching her
forelegs, learning so soon that legs were for standing!
The farmer slowly shook his head as if now he saw her for the first
time, her frailty, her pipestem legs.
"Already I have a name for her," he said dully.
"So? How will you call her?"
"_Farfalla._ Butterfly."
"Is so beautiful," Maria sighed.
"Beauty, bah! Is not enough." In the farmer's eyes was a look almost
of hatred. "A _stout_ horse the Prince of Lombardy wanted. Nice strong
legs to race over the cobble streets of Siena. With a colt by Sans
Souci he hoped to win a Palio. Better that horse doctor never came!"
With a flirt of her tail, the foal tried a step, and fell down in a
fuzzy heap.
The farmer winced, almost as if he heard a leg snap and break. "Spindle
legs have no place in Palio," he snorted. "And for sure I cannot use
such a skinny beast in farm work. Better the hand of death had taken
her. Farfalla," he laughed bitterly. "She will live only the short and
useless life of the butterfly."
The Prince of Lombardy did not come to see the colt for several days.
He was a busy man--an art collector and a sportsman who raced his
horses not only in Italy but in France and Spain. His burning desire,
however, was to win a Palio. This, he knew, required a special kind of
horse, one not too finely wrought.
He knew too that the marshy land of the Maremma made an excellent
breeding ground, developing horses with strong, heavy bone. And so
he let the farmers of the Maremma bring their mares to his Arabian
stallion to be bred. Then if the mating brought forth a strong, rugged
colt, he would agree to buy it at weaning time.
When he finally arrived at Magliano Toscano late one afternoon, the
farmer broke into a nervous sweat. Maybe, he thought to himself, the
Prince will buy the little one, not for the Palio but for racing on
dirt tracks.
The mare and colt were out in a field at the time, wallowing in a sea
of grass. The farmer whistled them in, and as they approached, he
turned to the Prince. "Here comes Farfalla!" He trumpeted the words as
if they could make the filly as big as the shout. "She will lighten in
color, Signore, and become pure white, like Sans Souci. No?"
A quizzical expression crossed the Prince's face. He watched the foal
dance and curvet in front of him. His eyes went over her, inch by inch,
studying her legs, her hindquarters. After a seeming eternity, he
repeated her name. "Farfalla," he mused. "The name suits her well. She
appears capricious, nervous; not what I had hoped. She has none of the
bulk and brawn of the dam. But nonetheless I will pay the cost of the
veterinarian, and it is my hope you will find some use for her."
Waving his gauntlets in good-bye, he stepped into his open-top car and
roared off into the twilight.