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.
