Cristiano Parafioriti - Invictus

“I’m not interested in Lia, and if you talk any more, you will go to the trough on your own!”

“No? Too bad...”

“Too bad, why?”

“Because Lia likes you!”

“Concetta, stop it! I don’t have time to be engaged now and don’t put ideas in our cousin’s head. Indeed tell her that your brother Ture doesn’t want her, so she’ll make her peace!”

“Then you can tell it to her if we find her at the trough.”

“I don’t have to tell her anything! That’s a lie you put in your head. Or maybe mum and dad want me to settle down with Lia? Tell me the truth!”

Ture, worried that his parents wanted to arrange a marriage with his cousin, stopped suddenly, put down the pottery pitchers, and waited anxiously for his sister’s reply. He had a debt of honour and gratitude to his father for the military service issue, but he did not want to settle it that way.

“Brother, calm down! Nobody knows anything. Lia confided in me, and that’s why I told you. If it’s not your will, then nothing will be done about it,” his sister said, resuming her walk.

Ture took up the pitchers again and started walking towards the trough. His sister’s reply had relieved him, and, with a slight grin, he continued the conversation: “And you, how is it that at eighteen you are already a matchmaker? If you want, I can find a suitor for you, sister dear!”

“Stop it, you moron, I can look after myself all right, and when I get engaged, no one will know! One evening I would take him home suddenly, and the next morning I get married!”

They burst into roaring laughter, and as they were close to the trough, they attracted the women’s attention, who were also intent on collecting water in their pitchers.

There was Lia, who seemed to have been waiting for that moment all her life. Concetta’s face was enough to dispel any illusion.

They spent some time apart, and Ture’s sister confessed that her cousin was not interested in her.

Then Lia, feeling rejected, was filled with rage faster than the pitchers being filled. Then she began to taunt Ture, always on the story of the war, of the exemption, of Zi Peppe Pileri’s recommendation.

Ture didn’t answer. He knew very well that these provocations came from a young woman whose pride was wounded, and he waited patiently for that trickle of water, now made feeble by the August heat, to fill the pitcher without uttering a word.

Suddenly, a young, witty voice broke the irritating blabber of Lia.

“Shut up, lizard !” On the other side of the big trough, Lia’s younger sister, Rosa, blurted out to the older one with such a scowl that Ture himself, who had not noticed her at first, was intrigued.

Lia suddenly became quiet. Although she was the eldest, she felt like those vain horses that suddenly, for nothing, become agitated and to which the master, to calm them, gives them a single well-aimed blow of the whip. She pulled a sheet out of the big straw basket and resumed her washing without looking at the onlookers.

Ture, on the other hand, had not ceased to stare at Rosa during all those brief moments of silence following her heated intervention, and when their eyes finally met, the young woman almost blushed with shame, and he nodded his head briefly in thanks.

Concetta exchanged a few more unclear words with poor Lia, who was venting her lingering anger on the sheet, now whiter than snow. Then she waved for her brother to start off for home, for the evening was already approaching.

“ Lizard !” Concetta said when the trough was far away. “From where did Rosa pull that?”

“It was a polite way of not saying snake to her,” her brother retorted. “But is it acceptable that she addresses me like that – just for a no as an answer –, to talk bullshit she’d heard around? Forked lizard !”

“And what kind of animal is Rosa? Let's hear it…”

In a different mood and tone, Ture said: “Rosa is a little dove!”

“Hahaha! A little dove sharp-tongued, though!” Concetta retorted, with a smile on her lips. “And if I didn't shake you, you’d still be there, at her until dark! You see, Rosa isn’t one of those little doves you can get your hand on!”

Ture had the peculiar ability to imitate the dove sounds so well that those birds approached him without fear. Now and then, in quiet moments in the country, he would sit among the branches and attract the lovebirds with his cry.

“You always know everything, Concettina, don’t you? You feel like the sage of the house, the schoolteacher!”

“I don’t know anything, but I saw you staring at the little dove!”

“Only because I hadn’t seen her for a long time. She’s grown, that’s all…”

“The little dove is not easy to catch, dear brother! She doesn’t fall under your lures.”

“Why not? What do you know about it?”

“Ture, are you nuts? Because she is a rogue little dove, and if you try to catch her…”

“She flies...” his brother continued. “I know very well that, if you get too close, she gets scared, opens her wings... and flies.”

Ture carried the story of the little dove with him for days to come. He kept thinking about Rosa, how she had reprimanded her sister, and how she had shyly lowered her gaze in front of her cousin’s awe-struck eyes. This last image was upsetting his soul.

At the sweet thought of his cousin, suddenly, everything else paled in comparison: the anxiety about the war, the rumours in the village, the uncertainty about his future. How many times had he seen her? At least ten thousand, if he had bothered to count. But a few nights ago, at the river fountain, for the first time, he had looked at her with different eyes.

Without realising it, Ture Pileri was falling in love.

Throughout August, he had only seen Rosa a few more times and only briefly. However, since that day at the trough, he lost focus. His hands were always sweaty, and his hoe would almost slip from his grasp. If he was tending the herds, and some goats would escape down the slope, he did not even notice them, so much engrossed in thoughts of that young girl who had stunned his soul.

All this without Rosa ever saying a word to him.

For another two months, no one was seen there, in San Giorgio. The war seemed to have forgotten him, but Ture, on those autumn nights of 1941, thought only of Rosa’s voice, because in his head reverberated that shut up, lizard shot in her sister’s face; he dreamed of sweet words in a time without hunger or need. Then, at dawn, he would wake up again in his world: the air was already beginning to get cold and sharp, half a bowl of milk and a piece of hard bread to dip in, and then work, the fields, the goats in the afternoon and nothing more.

In the moments of solitude, Ture’s twenty years of age all appeared before him.

What had he been up to all that time? He had served his family, had listened to his father’s advice, had gone, and still went to work under a master. He thought that, deep down, he had never done a thing on his own, never stepped out of line, never said a word more, and even the times he had gotten into fisticuffs, it had only been to defend himself.

It was All Souls’ Day, when Ture, looking after the goats in Santa Nicola, met his uncle, Zi Nunzio, Lia and Rosa’s father, whom everyone in San Basilio called Zi Duca.

A pleasant sun kissed the spring-like morning and warmed bones numb from the dreary season.

“God bless you, Zi Duca. What are you doing here?”

“We are picking some asparagus. Your cousin Rosa is close by.”

“And Lia isn’t here?” Ture asked.

“No, she’s been in a foul mood lately and stayed at home. If you go down the road, and you’ll find her under the brick wall.”