The Hours Before
Late on the night of the banquet, while Giorgio lay sleeping, the captains of the contradas were meeting in secret. Some were strengthening old alliances, and some were negotiating new ones. If one contrada, for example, had drawn a poor horse, it would swear to help its ally by every strategy of war.
The results of these meetings were of little concern to Giorgio, for no one, he had been told, would exact any promises from him. And so, exhausted from his speech, he had crawled into bed, and before his bodyguards had stopped joking and smoking he was asleep.
But it was not a peaceful sleep; it was shot through with a frightful dream. In writing down the name "Giorgio Terni" in the archives, the clerk broke his pen on the letter G, and the point flew up, stabbing the man in the throat. Immediately, terrifying things happened. The statue of the she-wolf atop the Palazzo came alive, came howling and hurtling down the column and put a horrible end to the clerk. Then she fell upon Giorgio, slashing him with her fangs and claws until he was unfit to race.
To the shock of crashing thunder Giorgio awoke. He jumped up, leaped over the sprawling figures of his guards, and ran to the window. He stood there, shivering, watching the storm rage. He had a strange sense that the fire-ball lightning was full of shooting stars, and they seemed to be spelling out the word—"O-f-f-i-c-i-a-l!" He stood there a long time, letting the wind and the rain wash away his dream. At last, chilled to the bone, he went back to bed. Sleep was slow in coming, and brief. At six in the morning the church bells startled him into consciousness. The first summons to the Palio!
His bodyguards, yawning and stretching, looked out in surprise at the rain-soaked land.
"How is it?" Giorgio exclaimed. "If I only turn the door-knob to my room or make tiny tiptoe steps, you hear! But crashing thunder? No!"
The guards laughed. As they dressed, they watched Giorgio fumble with the ties on his fantino uniform. "Could our boy be nervous?" they teased. "And him a veteran of two Palios!"
The bells were still playing when, minutes later, they climbed the steps of Siena's great cathedral. In the shadowy interior, with the candles winking and the faint light coming through the stained-glass windows, Giorgio and the other fantinos knelt at the altar. He glanced at Ivan-the-Terrible on his left, who was riding for the Ram, and at Veleno on his right, fantino for the Giraffe. They were like friendly schoolfellows. Could they, by evening, become enemy warriors? Would the three of them now kneeling prayerfully and peacefully side by side soon be striking each other with their nerbos?
Both fantinos were moving their lips. Giorgio wondered if they were praying to be accepted by their contradas, or praying to win. He looked up at the painting above the altar and read the inscription beneath the Virgin's feet. "O Holy Mother, be thou the fount of peace for Siena, and be thou life for Duccio because he has painted you."
It was hard not to pray for yourself. If Duccio, the great painter, could pray thus....
"O Holy Mother," Giorgio whispered, "be thou life for Gaudenzia." He did not realize it was the mare he was praying for, and not himself, so closely were they tuned.
Nine o'clock came. Time for the last Prova, the final rehearsal before the Palio. The day was windless, the sky gray and cloudy, the track still slippery from last night's rain. Giorgio resolved to take no chances. From the start to the finish he held Gaudenzia almost to a parade canter; he must save every tendon and muscle of her legs. She finished in last place.
As he returned to his room, he wondered if he had done the right thing. Had he been over cautious? Would the Onda approve? Or would they think him lily-livered, not knowing how to ride?
Torn by gnawing anxiety he washed and combed while the guards stood by waiting. In unaccustomed soberness they placed over his arm the blue-and-white jacket of Onda, the very one he would wear in today's Palio, and in his hand the steel helmet. Then as a body they marched him to the Palazzo Pubblico, not into the vast courtyard where the horses are gathered before the race, but into the formal and forbidding Hall of the Magistrates. Here they vanished, and Captain Tortorelli arose out of the gloom and indicated a chair for Giorgio beside him. Other fantinos were already there, seated about a long table, jackets over their arms, helmets in hand. And beside each was his captain.
The city officials now entered the solemnity of the room. The Mayor, in gray-suited dignity, sat down at the head of the table, the starter on his right, then the veterinarian and the Deputy of the Festival. A lean-faced clerk with a pen behind his ear took his place on the Mayor's left. He unrolled a great sheet of paper and laid it out before him. The sheet was empty, except for a margin of tiny colored emblems of all the contradas, and beside them, hair-thin lines waiting to be filled in.
With a dry cough the clerk took the pen from behind his ear and held it poised in midair like a hummingbird before it daggers into a flower.
Giorgio's heart quailed. He tried to stop the racing jumble of his thoughts: last year's death of Turbolento, last night's dream. The hoarfrost voice of the scribe cut off his thinking. Slowly the man called the roll. Each fantino stood up as his contrada was called. Carefully he held up his jacket with both hands so the emblem would plainly show, and waited for his captain to confirm him. This done, the clerk recorded the fantino's name in the big registry, writing with long, even strokes and a flourish of his pen at the end.
When it was Giorgio's turn, his foot caught in the rung of his chair, and it seemed an eternity before he could wrench free. To make matters worse, his hands were shaking so violently that when he held up his jacket the dolphin seemed mockingly alive, undulating through the blue waves of the Onda.
It brought a faint titter from the other fantinos before Captain Tortorelli broke in: "I hereby declare ..." he paused to clear his throat. "I declare," he repeated, "Giorgio Terni, fantino for the Onda."
Never to Giorgio had a man's gruff voice or the scratchy squeak of a pen sounded so sweet. When it was all over, he went out into the vastness of the Piazza. The pigeons were putting on an aerial spectacle, spiralling into the deep sky. Giorgio felt his spirits rise with them.
The Chief-of-the-Guards came up alongside. "I can see from your face," he smiled, "that all is now official."
Giorgio nodded.
"So you and your guards come rest at my house," the Chief said. "For you my wife makes her special zucchini omelette. It sits light in your stomach, and so you sit light on my Gaudenzia! You have now until four o'clock to eat and rest and sip the sweet wine of anticipation."
Giorgio had not visited the eagle's-nest-of-a-house for a whole month, not since the night of his arrival with Gaudenzia. Then, there had been a yellow moon-path on the hillside. Now a watery sun was breaking through the clouds, drawing moisture up in a thick curtain of mist. Only a month, he thought, but leading up to it a whole calendar of months from October to June. And before that, years of training for Signor Ramalli; and before that, Bianca, the Blind One; and before that, way in the beginning, a dusty little Umbrella Man sitting crosslegged by the fountain, reciting the deep mystery of the Palio.
"Come inside! Come inside!" the Chief-of-the-Guards laughed. "Stop gawping. Grapevines and olive groves you have seen before. Now we eat."
Giorgio was glad that no one expected him to eat much, or to talk at all. After the meal Pinotto, Carlo, Enzio, and Nello took their siestas in chairs and on the sofa. But Giorgio and the Chief paced—from balcony to dining room to kitchen and back again.
The afternoon wore slowly on. From the distance came the murmur of Tuscans and tourists pouring through the city's gates. The swelling noise rolled into the house through doors and windows.
An hour is very long on Palio day, and Giorgio was never good at waiting. The tick and the tock of the clock on the wall dawdled in maddening slowness, the hands barely moving. Every few minutes he went to the door to check the position of the sun, as if he could not trust the clock. When at last the bodyguards stirred to life, relief flooded through him. The waiting was over! It was time to dress for the pageant.
As Giorgio pulled on the blue-and-white striped stockings, the blue buskins, the quilted velvet tunic with its plaited sleeves, and the flowing wig, a curious thing happened to him. He was no longer Giorgio Terni, the peasant boy of Monticello; he was a warrior, risen full-clad from some ancient grave, ready and eager for battle.
When he arrived at the church of the Onda he saw that a change had come over Gaudenzia, too. She appeared more dazzlingly white, taller, and more elegant. She wore a spennacchiera of plumes in her headstall, and she too was adorned in medieval splendor—a blue velvet bodycloth with the dolphin embroidered almost life size in gold.
Before the arch of San Guiseppe the people stood aside. There was no talk or whispering of any kind. Solemnly they made a corridor for her and Giorgio to enter together. The mare must be blessed within the church, for is not the Palio a religious celebration in honor of the Visitation of the Virgin? Is not the blessing of the horse an age-old custom? Then, open wide the doors! Throw out the carpet. Let her enter!
In the perfect stillness, Gaudenzia's hoofbeats are the measured beat of time. Slowly she and Giorgio proceed up the aisle while the congregation breathes a collective sigh at her beauty.
Book in hand, the priest greets them at the altar. "Almighty and everlasting God," his resonant words roll out, "let this animal, Gaudenzia, receive Thy blessing, whereby it may be preserved in body, and freed from every harm by the intercession of the blessed Saint Anthony, through Christ our Lord. Amen."
Whispered "Amens" ripple through the crowd like muffled drums as the priest sprinkles holy water on Gaudenzia's head. The ceremony is over! And all at once the silence explodes in a deafening burst of joy. The clamoring rises to delirium.
Out in the street again, a tumultuous wave of humanity surrounds Gaudenzia. People from all walks of life want to touch her, or even the embroidery of her bodycloth. A man still wearing his shepherd's smock wedges himself in close to Giorgio. His face breaks into a grin, showing the dark hole where two of his teeth are missing. He points his shepherd's crook at Gaudenzia. "Magnifica!" he laughs in rapture.
And the crowd takes up the cry. "Magnifica!"
