Over the Mountain
Babbo rose to his feet. In the darkening room his eyes gleamed in
pride. "I have goose flesh! I cannot believe it could be! Today a
letter is come. Tomorrow our Giorgio goes over the mountain. To please
Signor Ramalli," he declared, "he must arrive in Siena tomorrow."
Plans were quickly made. It was decided that in his new importance
Giorgio should not walk the long way to Casalino to catch the autobus
that would carry him to the train at Sant' Angelo, and thence to Siena.
Instead, the entire family would drive him in the donkey cart directly
to Sant' Angelo, where they could all bid him good-bye at the railway
station.
It happened just so. Even Pippa took part, giving out a steamwhistle
bray that nearly drowned the conductor's cry of "Ready!"
As the train pulled away, Giorgio leaned far out the window, waving
his satchel. Wistfully, he watched Mamma and Babbo, Teria and Emilio
climb into the donkey cart, and his eyes held them there together until
nothing was left, nothing but a tiny blur against the yellow of the
station. Then that, too, was gone.
Hands still clutching his satchel, he kept right on standing in the
aisle, staring out at the fast-moving landscape. And all at once the
hollow pain in his stomach left him, and he faced the bigness of his
adventure. It was as though the rushing wind and the chugging engine
were taking possession of him, lifting him out of himself, over the
mountain, and into a new world.
The cone of Mount Amiata loomed ahead with clouds toppling along its
ridges, and streams spilling whitely down its face and into the river
below. Still at the open window, he could feel the train laboring on
its long climb from the valley of the Orcia to the folded hills. He
saw with surprise that it was not just one valley, but a succession of
countless hills and vales. Like an earthworm the train wriggled through
them, and up through a wilderness of boulders broken only by tufts of
broom and brush.
He saw the kilns of charcoal burners, and a goat girl knitting as she
watched her flock, and he saw stunted sheep scrabbling upward toward
the mountain pastures. He was glad he was not a sheep, nibbling his
slow way to the top. And he was gladder still when the desert of rock
gave way to dark forests of chestnut trees, and then to beech, and then
to scrub pine. The little hills were ridges now, and as fast as the
train could make the turns it pushed on up steeper and steeper ascents
until it reached the summit, the bleak bare summit where the sharp wind
held a bitterness that made his eyes weep.
"Boy!" The voice of an old woman startled him. "Close that window, if
you please. My old bones shudder with the cold. Besides, your face
grows red and smudged."
Giorgio quickly closed the window, wiped his face on his new
handkerchief, and found a seat. He placed his satchel between his legs
and tirelessly scanned the horizon as the train began to roll down
out of the high country. Every frowning castle in the distance, every
bold fortress, every hamlet he mistook for the city of his dream. But
when at last he caught his first glimpse, he knew it for Siena, yet
was unprepared for its splendor. In the clearness of early evening the
jewel-like city rose up on the shoulders of three hills, its slender
towers jutting into the sky. They were like none he had ever seen. One
was shining white with stripings of black, like a zebra; the others
were pink and carmine, or was this rosy color a trick of the setting
sun?
His heart raced. He felt her ancientness at once. Here were
battlemented walls, and pinnacled domes, and steeples piled high and
higher--all jumbled, yet ordered.
Siena! Siena!
* * * * *
It was the hour of early evening when the train pulled into the
station. Giorgio was first to jump out. He hurried through the groups
of waiting people, impatient to find Signor Ramalli. Searching faces,
hoping to see one he dared ask directions, he threaded the network of
narrow streets. The people seemed different to him, like figures in a
painting. He wondered if they might even speak a different language!
Slight-built as he was, he kept clumsily bumping into the passers-by.
Each time he tried to work up his courage to ask, but no one took
notice of him. It was like walking in sleep until a deep-timbered voice
broke into it.
"Young lad! Come here!" The voice belonged to the
Chief-of-the-Town-Guards. He was an enormous man, handsome in a dark
blue uniform with gold epaulets. "Young lad, you will find better the
walking if you move with, not against, the promenaders. Now," he asked
solicitously, "can I help you?"
Giorgio felt a surge of relief. They spoke the same language! "Signor
Ramalli," he burst out, "his house I must find. If you please!"
The Chief-of-the-Guards looked down from his great height. "To find
Signor Ramalli's house," he said, "you have only to follow your nose."
"My nose?"
"Yes," he laughed, "your nose. You go down and down the Via
Fontebranda, and when your nose is stinging with the stench of animal
hides in brine, then you are there. Almost." He held onto Giorgio with
one white-gloved hand while with the other he stopped an autobus to let
by a team of scrawny horses drawing a load of wood.
"Feed the bony beasts," he cried to the portly driver, "instead of
yourself!"
Then he turned again to Giorgio. "Now, young man, after the smell from
the slaughterhouse you will run into a new smell of lye and bleach from
the public laundry. Then turn in at the next doorway, and there you
are!"
Giorgio hesitated. "But _my_ Signor Ramalli must have a stable."
"Yes, yes, I know," the Chief replied in friendly annoyance. "It is as
I said. Through the bad smells you must go until you come to the nice
fragrance of horses and hay. You see, lad, the house of the Ramallis is
at the end of the street, with magnificent vista of the valley beyond."
No directions were ever given more clearly. Down, down the Via
Fontebranda Giorgio hurried half-running, not to get past the cow hides
in brine, but because the descent was almost perpendicular.
Just as the Chief had said, the last door belonged to the Ramallis. The
family of three welcomed him as if he were a son come home. They were
in the dining room, and at once the mother and daughter arose to set an
extra place.
Signor Ramalli hooked his thumbs into his calf vest and smiled at
Giorgio. "After we eat, we give you choice of two rooms for your
sleeping quarters. One is in our home, and the other is the empty
storeroom over the stable where you can hear the slightest whinny in
the night. That room, though barer, is bigger and...."
"I would rather prefer the storeroom," Giorgio interrupted, "where I
can be closer to my horses."
It was, in fact, a tremendous room. It faced the east where the
first rays of the sun came slanting in, touching off the strings of
purple onions and garlic, and peppers, shiny red. Besides these gay
decorations there was a wide and comfortable brass bed, a trestle table
and chair, and an ancient sea chest that had been emptied for Giorgio's
clothes.
Comfortable as his room was, it was only a place to sleep. Sixteen
hours of the day he lived with his horses. There were three mares and
a gelding depending on him for all the creature comforts of food and
water, and new shoes, and warm blankets at night, and small friendly
talk.
But more, Signor Ramalli was depending on him to bring them all into
bloom for the July Palio. This was high challenge. Here he was, still a
boy in his teens, barely shoulder-high to his pupils; yet he was master
of their destiny! Ambra needed schooling in being mounted; a race could
be lost before it began. Lubiana was stubborn, always wanting her own
way. Dorina was awkward at maneuvering; she could lose the Palio at the
hairpin turns.
Imperiale, however, posed the most interesting problem. He was a
big-going fellow, part Arabian, sired by the famous Sans Souci. What he
needed was soothing words to quiet his nervous habit of biting on the
wood of his stall. He reminded Giorgio of a frightened child chewing
his fingernails.
Each day Signor Ramalli grew more pleased with Giorgio. The boy was
two persons in one--skilled trainer in the morning; stableboy in the
afternoon. He attacked the cleaning of the stalls, the oiling of the
bridle leathers, the currying and grooming with the same chin-thrust of
determination as he did the fine art of teaching.
And so, nothing was good enough for him. Morning and night, he ate at
table with the family, but this, instead of making him feel jolly,
stirred up the beginnings of homesickness. There was something about
Anna that reminded him not of his sister, Teria, but of Emilio--a kind
of puckish eagerness, wanting to know about the horses, wanting to
help, wanting to ride.
It was after supper, after darkness, that doubt and anguish and the
sharp pangs of homesickness set in in earnest. His dream of the Palio
seemed as far away as ever. "I am only an outsider," he thought as he
sat alone and forlorn on the sea chest. "I belong to no contrada, for I
am not born Sienese. There are seventeen contradas, yet no one of them
has asked me to ride. I have four horses, but I have none." He smiled
a crooked smile, recalling how he had longed to be in Siena, but now
that he was here something had gone wrong with the dream.
In humiliation and despair, his homesickness washed over him like
a wave, and he could see the Maremma where earth and sea and sky
come together, and the earth's humps that form Mount Amiata. And in
all that wild sweep the only man-made thing was the cross on the
mountain. In his loneness he closed his eyes, and there were the warm,
smoke-wreathed rooms at home, and in the smoke he saw the whole family,
clustered about a sausage hanging from the kitchen ceiling. Each in
turn was rubbing a slice of bread against it for flavor because the
meat itself had to be saved for supper. Yet in the poverty there was a
closeness and understanding he now missed. For moments he seemed unable
to breathe; it was the same tight, suffocating feeling he had known in
the cobbler's shop.
The only help was to run, run, run! Night after night this need took
possession of him. Like a colt spooked by an imaginary devil he bolted
out of his room, raced up through the canyon walls of Fontebranda,
across the busy Via di Città, down a flight of steps, and out onto the
vast and beautiful Piazza del Campo. Here he could look up above the
circle of turreted palaces and see a wide patch of sky and the same old
dipper that winked down on Monticello, and all at once he felt less
alone. Gulping and panting, he could squeeze the heaviness out of his
lungs, could breathe in cool fresh air.
Night after night he had to escape, always to the deep stillness of the
Piazza. It became his habit to stand first before the dazzling Fonte
Gaia, admiring the frieze of white marble statues in their white marble
niches, and the marble wolves spewing water into the marble pool. Then
he would face about and look across the broad shell of the amphitheater
to the Palazzo Pubblico, where the city officials worked, and his eyes
went up and up its soaring tower until he imagined he saw a bell ringer
away up there, no bigger than a spider.
He tried not to torture himself by studying the race course around the
empty shell, or wondering which contrada might some day choose him as
their fantino. Instead, his mind went back to the years before the
Palio, when men battled bulls in the square. If he half-closed his
eyes, he could array himself in coat of mail and he could see the blade
of his spear flashing silver in the moonlight as he thrust it into the
flesh of a charging bull. Then heavy with weariness, as if he had slain
a score of bulls, he trudged back to his room and slept.
But in sleep he could not wear the blinders. His dreams were always of
the Palio.
As the first month wore itself out, Signor Ramalli sensed a growing
restlessness in the boy. One day he recognized it openly.
"Tomorrow," he said to Giorgio, "is a Sunday. A quick journey to
Monticello is the best cure I know for ailments like homesickness. In
a day you will come back feeling more content here. Now then, in the
morning when I get out my car to take my wife and Anna to the early
mass, I will at the same time take you to the station. My wife will
prepare for you a little lunch to carry, and I will buy you a ticket,
both ways."
He held out his hand. Giorgio put his small calloused one inside the
great warmth of the Signore's and felt it close around his with a clasp
so strong it made him blink. Giorgio's heart leaped in joy.