EXCERPT

A long time ago, there was a simple fellow, but wise. He had a dog that could blush…

*

Pino preferred dogs that ran along with their noses to the ground. We are talking about quick dogs, hounds with lots of leg. These dogs that pass hundreds of small skiffs, whether they are working or not. They organize the world by categorizing the suggestions of creatures have just passed by, only a minute or an hour ago. It’s impossible to train a dog to run like this at all times, with the nose an inch from the ground. An inch-off-the-ground-dog only comes along once in a long time. You can train a dog like that to narrow down on one scent, and follow a ghost. It’s quite possible, you know. Some dogs are better at this job than others. You don’t know what they’re going to be until they grow up. Sometimes you get a good dog, with a nose. Other times, you get a dog that is just a dog. And this was a popular subject back then, among mushroom and tartufo hunters. They used these dogs for the “silent hunt,” and they liked to talk about which of their dogs had the best nose, and so on.

Men are vain creatures. They are thrilled when they manage to see a rabbit before their own dogs have picked up the scent. They are happy to outwit the dog, and discover a truffle that their dogs have missed. It makes them tremendously happy, but that is fine. It’s good not to be serious! This game helps them to pass the time on their silent hunt.

In this place, the hunters particularly liked to talk about Rosa, a long-haired hound that Pino had bought from a gypsy for a ridiculous price. Against everyone’s advice, Pino had paid the gypsies a small fortune the dog. Rosa had only one skill, it seemed. She could—after a string of compliments—be made to blush.

Now, Pino, who came eventually to work on the Foti estate, was a cheerful sort. He collected the gossip about everyone in town. He lived alone, and he could not read. He relied on the others to tell him what was happening in the world. If he found a newspaper to examine, Pino would tuck the news inside his coat. He felt vaguely conspiratorial, as if he could walk taller on top of those words. When he got home he studied the lines, the letters, the curlicues and the ropes. He followed the words with his finger, side to side, like the fly that moves across a window. If there were pictures, he stared at the copper plate illustrations and sometimes the words opened up to him. He thought so.

He kept all of this important correspondence inside a clay urn, at his home, behind three chimney bricks, next to a wine cask, and he had a kitchen glass nearby. In the light of day, he looked at the papers and he added a little wine to his coffee. When it was time to work, he finished his glass of coffee, and then climbed the hill to join the others.

His dog, Rosa, ran ahead. She followed an invisible map up the road and then the hillside. She stopped to smell the earth along the trail of canine advertisements that could only be read this way: “Vote for Fido!” or “Vote for Princeppe.” Each dog had gone through the trees, the tall grass, left an olfactory marker, then carried on through a banquet of experience, or a deli of happenings. This deli, each invisible item she smelled, followed or found, was usually a mystery to him.

On top of Fido’s marker, there was another: “No! Vote for Benvolio!”

Near the top of the orchard, a wall bent to the left, then right, and Pino followed Rosa into a forest of trees, dusty sage and over the wild grass.

“Oh, oh!” he said. “Benemerita,” the Meritorious, the Reputable. He gave the dog her first compliments of the evening, but she did not blush.

“What have you found there?”

Rosa snorted out the ghost in her nostrils, and carried on into the tall grass. He watched her jump up, above the weeds, then she disappeared and he watched the grasses twitch or bend, left and right, depending on the zigzagare of her trail. He came up to the spot that had interested her, the place where she’d sneezed, where she’d blasted the air from her nostrils to clear her senses, and that’s where he saw the tail of a green snake in the grass. The snake had been cut with a blade, or a shovel, but the head was nowhere to be found, which made him jump. Pino crossed himself, then shook off the thought, and followed his dog.

Pino and Rosa walked up the mountain to meet the others. They walked the same direction that the others had travelled, from Pellaro into the hills, but where the others had walked and told stories about dogs, Pino had watched the ground for nettles, for spirits, for murmuring waters that disclosed the future, for the shadows of wild women in the trees that haunted the oak trees, for the fairy rings that spirits left in the winter grass, and even though the roads were the same, Pino’s road was quite different from where the others had walked.

When he reached the others, the Dottore was already there, with his son and two others. The fire pit was lit, the charcoal was glowing inside, and the men were sitting on stumps next to their axes and shovels. Pino looked at the shovels to see which one was crusted with blood, but it was too difficult for him to see clearly in the smoky light. He looked over at the others and said, Salute!

*

These unlikely friends had become close over the years. The doctor’s name was Carlo Zuchera, and he became the first mayor of Pellaro and the first person to cultivate the land that became the Foti estate. His great-granddaughter married in to the Foti family. He was a Carbonai, and he carried the family secret that they were Liberals. Before joining the Garibaldini, the guerilla followers of General Giuseppe Garibaldi, who fought to unify Italy in the mid-1800s, Carlo Zuchera met fellow conspirators at night. They formed secret societies that met in storage barns, or they fed scarazzi, domes of earth and wood burned to make charcoal in the bush, and they talked about a united Italy, a mythical place where all men were equal, where there were no Kings or Serfs or Masters. They called themselves Carbonai: charcoal burners.

Dottore Carlo Zuchera was a liberal, a man with revolutionary ideas, and his head was full of the cleric and scholar’s Vincenzo Gioberti’s contraband books about the glories of Italian history and culture. This was a difficult thing for him to admit without an exclamation, but it was much safer for him to say, simply, that he was on his way up into the hills to look for mushrooms, or dry out the wood.

His books were a private revolution, within him. He counted three in particular that he carried, over many months, next to his heart, and they had rubbed against him and changed him forever. First: he carried writer Silvio Pellico’s prison journal, produced after his arrest for releasing revolutionary publications in favor of Italian unification. Inset, on the first page, there was an etching of Pellico’s delicate face, which seemed to contradict the writer’s hard adventure. Second, he held Giosuè Carducci’s wild, barbarian poems, which won him a Nobel Prize in 1906. Carducci was Sicilian—we can forgive him! He had a wide face that hinted at his sturdy character. And finally, he had scholar Vincenzo Gioberti, a model for morality and beauty. Gioberti’s ponderous forehead had a muscle that could furrow one of his eyebrows behind his oval spectacles. These three were giants: three brave writers who stood up to all the ignorant crap they’d been fed in this world. The Dottore believed that despite every ignoble dish they’d eaten, their hearts were full. They lived in this hard world and somehow the world had not changed them. They were human.

Carlo Zuchera didn’t want a king. He was a liberal! There, he’d admitted what was obvious to everyone. Any time there was a liberal speaker who passed through Reggio, a policeman appeared at the Zuchera house and stood guard to protect the streets of Pellaro from Carlo’s revolutionary ideas. It seemed that he’d ordered too many books. An imperial decree excluded from small collections any books that were published after 1789, or any that had the word “republic” printed within, so the local post office put him on a list. Carlo Zuchera’s liberal passion had become an open secret. He was not worried by this news. As a doctor, he enjoyed a certain amount of security within the community, so he assured the postmaster that he did not have a small collection of books: his collection was actually quite large. Furthermore, it did not bother him if he was watched, or if he was trusted or not.