Gaudenzia, Pride of the Palio Read online

  Frightened into submission, the farmer did as he was told while the doctor began furiously rubbing the foal’s sides. The perfect little head was thrust back, mouth agape. The doctor stopped a moment, placed his hands against her chest, but there were still no signs of breathing. He pulled an old towel from his satchel, doused it in the watering trough, and slapped the colt. “Wake up!” he cried. “Get courage, little one! Breathe! Ahead lies the world!”

  Still no response. The gray lump hung from the farmer’s hands like a carcass in a butcher shop.

  “What we do now?” the farmer asked.

  “Lay her down!” the doctor shouted, unwilling to give up. “Fetch the wheelbarrow.”

  Puzzled, the farmer hurried out to the lean-to beside the barn.

  The doctor crouched on his knees and with slow, forceful motions pressed the tiny squeeze-box of the colt’s ribs. “Breathe! Breathe! Breathe!” he panted as he tried to pump air into her lungs.

  The mare all this while had been lying exhausted. She lifted her head now and let out a cry that was half squeal, half whinny. As if in answer, there was a gasp from her foal. Then a shallow cough, followed by a whimper.

  When the farmer came rattling in with the wheelbarrow, he stopped in awe. “She does not go under!” he exclaimed. Then he laughed in relief. “The wheelbarrow—you don’t need now?”

  “Now I do!” Cheeks flushed in triumph, the doctor kept on pumping air into the filly’s lungs and at the same time barking out directions: “Be quick! Fill a gunny sack with straw! Lay it flat on the wheelbarrow!”

  The gasps were coming closer together. They were stronger. And stronger.

  The doctor stopped pumping. He listened through his stethoscope and heaved a deep sigh. “Is greatest thing I ever see! The mare, she helped me just in time.” Proudly, he lifted the newborn on top of the stuffed gunny sack. “We take her now into your kitchen and dry her by your fire.”

  “But why?” the farmer asked, more puzzled than before. “Why, when already she breathes?”

  “Please to remember this, my friend. For eleven months she is living in a very warm place. Today is windly, and it blows cool into the barn.”

  Nodding, the farmer trundled the little creature past the stalls of cows and bullocks and through the door that led into the kitchen.

  “Maria!” he called to his wife as he lifted the foal from the wheelbarrow and placed her beside the fire. “See what it is we bring!”

  The farmer’s wife, a plump, pleasant woman with eyes as shiny as olives, came running from another room. Politely she greeted the doctor, set out a bottle of her best wine and a glass on the table for him. Then in an instant she was on her knees cooing, “Ah, poor little one, poor dear one!” Without thinking, she had taken off her homespun apron and was rubbing the filly as if its ribs were a washboard.

  “Brava! Brava!” cried the doctor between sips of the golden wine. “Your wife,” he remarked to the farmer, “is a nurse most competent. Guard well you do not burn the little one so close to the fire. Rub the legs and the body until nice and dry. Then take her back to her dam.” He knelt down and put a finger in the filly’s mouth. “See? Already she sucks! By herself she will find the mare’s milk faucets. And now I must leave. Arrivederci, my good people.”

  The doctor’s happy laughter rang out behind him as he walked across the dooryard to the hitching post.

  In the warm kitchen a second miracle was taking place. The foal, yawning, looking about with her purple-brown eyes, was stretching her forelegs, learning so soon that legs were for standing!

  The farmer slowly shook his head as if now he saw her for the first time, her frailty, her pipestem legs.

  “Already I have a name for her,” he said dully.

  “So? How will you call her?”

  “Farfalla. Butterfly.”

  “Is so beautiful,” Maria sighed.

  “Beauty, bah! Is not enough.” In the farmer’s eyes was a look almost of hatred. “A stout horse the Prince of Lombardy wanted. Nice strong legs to race over the cobble streets of Siena. With a colt by Sans Souci he hoped to win a Palio. Better that horse doctor never came!”

  With a flirt of her tail, the foal tried a step, and fell down in a fuzzy heap.

  The farmer winced, almost as if he heard a leg snap and break. “Spindle legs have no place in Palio,” he snorted. “And for sure I cannot use such a skinny beast in farm work. Better the hand of death had taken her. Farfalla,” he laughed bitterly. “She will live only the short and useless life of the butterfly.”

  The Prince of Lombardy did not come to see the colt for several days. He was a busy man—an art collector and a sportsman who raced his horses not only in Italy but in France and Spain. His burning desire, however, was to win a Palio. This, he knew, required a special kind of horse, one not too finely wrought.

  He knew too that the marshy land of the Maremma made an excellent breeding ground, developing horses with strong, heavy bone. And so he let the farmers of the Maremma bring their mares to his Arabian stallion to be bred. Then if the mating brought forth a strong, rugged colt, he would agree to buy it at weaning time.

  When he finally arrived at Magliano Toscano late one afternoon, the farmer broke into a nervous sweat. Maybe, he thought to himself, the Prince will buy the little one, not for the Palio but for racing on dirt tracks.

  The mare and colt were out in a field at the time, wallowing in a sea of grass. The farmer whistled them in, and as they approached, he turned to the Prince. “Here comes Farfalla!” He trumpeted the words as if they could make the filly as big as the shout. “She will lighten in color, Signore, and become pure white, like Sans Souci. No?”

  A quizzical expression crossed the Prince’s face. He watched the foal dance and curvet in front of him. His eyes went over her, inch by inch, studying her legs, her hindquarters. After a seeming eternity, he repeated her name. “Farfalla,” he mused. “The name suits her well. She appears capricious, nervous; not what I had hoped. She has none of the bulk and brawn of the dam. But nonetheless I will pay the cost of the veterinarian, and it is my hope you will find some use for her.”

  Waving his gauntlets in good-bye, he stepped into his open-top car and roared off into the twilight.

  Chapter V

  THE FLYING CENTAUR

  The filly grew—skittish and frivolous as her name. Every time the farmer let her out of her stall she bolted past him, and snorting like a steam engine, she flew down the aisle, sending goats and geese scuttling out of her way. Then at the end stall she slowed just long enough to sink her teeth into the buttocks of the black bullock. In the split second before he could kick back, she was out in the sunlight, squeaking a high hello to the world.

  “It is a painful thing for the bullock,” the farmer told his wife one day. “But if he is not there, the rascal nips me in the pants instead.”

  The wife burst into a fit of laughter. She threw her apron over her face to stifle her merriment.

  “Bah!” the farmer stormed. “Women and fillies, they think alike! For them biting is a funny joke.” And he stomped out of the kitchen, slamming the door behind him.

  Away in Monticello, young Giorgio Terni inquired of travelers and tradesmen about the daughter of Sans Souci. He learned only that she was fiery and mischievous, unlike her work-horse mother. But he dreamed often that she had taken the place of his blind mare. In his dreaming she was an Arabian all the way—an Arabian whose ancestors had raced swiftly across the sun-scorched desert. She would be steel-gray, of course, with her muzzle nearly black, and her fine legs black from knees and hocks to hoof, and her eyes enormous and dark. As for size, he thought of her as big enough.

  He longed to see her, but Magliano Toscano was many kilometers away, and now was the season of the grape harvest.

  Each morning before daybreak, the whole family piled into the donkey cart and drove off to their vineyard. Up and down the rows they snipped the purple bunches, dew-drenched in the morning, shiny warm in th
e glare of noon. They filled basket after basket to roundness, and emptied them into big tubs. It was Giorgio who lugged them, two at a time, to the wine shed, dumping the grapes, stems and all, into a huge vat. Then at dusk after the animals had been fed, he clambered up the wall of the vat, grasped the pole across the open top, swung himself inside, and with his bare feet pushed down the slippery seeds and skins that had risen to the surface.

  One evening when the family, dusty and weary, was returning home by starlight, Giorgio spoke shyly to his mother. “Some day I would go to Magliano to see the filly of Sans Souci . . . if only I had the time.”

  “Maybe on Sunday after the mass,” the mother suggested.

  “I will go!” he cried, and the weariness of the long day suddenly melted.

  But Giorgio did not go. On the next Sunday he was chosen watchkeeper of the church. And now the Sundays stretched out longer than all the other days. He had to scrub the floor inside the church and sweep the earth outside. He had to dust the altars. He had to arrange the benches and chairs. He had to play the bells, calling the people from houses and barns. He had to help serve mass. And when the services were over, he remained on watch. Alone in the deep hush, he listened to the wind moaning in the cypress trees, reminding him that each tree in the churchyard stood for a soldier dead. He tried to close his ears to the dismal sound, but the trees kept on whispering, and the mourning doves added their plaintive lament.

  There was reward, however, in being watchkeeper. It meant that the people of Monticello considered him more man than boy. His voice was changing, too, and now when he sang in the choir it cracked, sliding far off key.

  “Tsk, tsk!” the father remarked one Sunday. “Our Giorgio is getting a voice most strange. More howl than human. Sometimes,” he laughed, “I look up quick to see, is he growing flap ears like basset hound, or great furred ones, like Pippa? Because he knows how animals think, must he sing like them, too?”

  The family was seated around the table eating their Sunday supper of fritto misto, a mixed fry of little fish from the River Orcia.

  Emilio put down his fork in great seriousness. “Maybe some day my big brother will be saint of the animals, like Saint Francis of Assisi,” he said proudly. “Then, Babbo, you will not laugh.”

  Giorgio’s eyes glanced up from his plate and found the Palio horse he had made, standing big-chested on a shelf. He saw that the spennacchiera had fallen off, and he got up to press it back in place.

  The mother watched him cross the room. “There are many ways,” she said softly, “for a boy to bring honor to Monticello.”

  Her eyes and Giorgio’s met and held for a brief instant.

  • • •

  It was late in November when the farm work lessened and the fun began. Hard by the village of Monticello were horse-rearing farms, and often in the afternoons the older boys who helped in the barns challenged Giorgio to a race. He was quick to accept each time, but he seldom rode the same horse twice. “Never do I want to love one so much,” he explained to his father, “the way it was with Bianca, the blind one.”

  Always he rode bareback, no matter how rough the horse’s gaits, and always he used only his left hand on the reins. Some of the horses in the Palio, he had heard, were no better bred than those his father bought and sold. And if they had to be ridden bareback, with the right hand free for the nerbo, he must practice now.

  The other boys were older, taller, and they rode by gripping hard with their legs. But Giorgio had to work for balance, leaning always with his mount, thinking with him, flying together like one streamer in the wind.

  The boys soon recognized that Giorgio had a special way with horses. Even the poor ones ran well when he was their fantino, and when he had a good one, he was almost never defeated.

  In time the races developed into hard-fought contests held on the winding mountain road. Giorgio’s heart sang a high tune as he flew around the curves, his face lashed by his horse’s mane. He was in Siena! Riding in the Palio! This curve was San Martino, this the Casato. The rippling of his horse’s muscles against his thighs made him feel like a man-horse, a centaur! He was no longer an earthling; he flew.

  With each race the make-believe intensified. The boys pretended they were in the Palio, each riding for his contrada.

  “I race for the Eagle!” one would shout.

  “I race for the Panther!”

  “I for the Wolf!”

  “I for the Porcupine!”

  It was fun at first, but for Giorgio the make-believe did not last. He saw it for what it was, a pitiful imitation. None of the horses wore spennacchiera in their headstalls. Nor did the fantinos fight with oxhide nerbos. It was no battle at all!

  Chapter VI

  GIORGIO MEETS A SNAIL

  As Giorgio rode to one victory after another, more and more people came to watch. Word of his skill began to travel. It trickled like a wind with a growing strength, first to the little towns on the fringe of the Maremma, then to the foothills of Mount Amiata, and finally it sifted through the mountain passes to the ancient walled city of Siena.

  There, at the bottom of a steep, winding street known as Fontebranda, lived a horseman belonging to the Contrada of the Snail. He was owner of some rental properties, farms and homes, and he lived comfortably on the rents they brought in. But what he really lived on was an intangible thing, a pride in his daughter, Anna. For her he would have plucked the moon and the stars. But since she shared his love of horses, he settled for a fine stable. He kept four horses, sometimes five, and he made sure they were burnished like copper, trained by the most skilled, and ridden by men with sensitive hands.

  His name was Signor Ramalli. He had never won a Palio, but he never gave up trying. One day in the spring of the year he made an excursion to the Maremma for the express purpose of seeking out a certain horseboy. He did not leave Siena until after his noon meal, and he stopped here and there in villages along the road to buy a bottle of olive oil, a jug of wine, and a brisket of veal; so it was nearing nightfall when he reached the hilltop village of Monticello. He inquired of a cobbler the way to Giorgio’s house. The man poked his head into Signor Ramalli’s automobile and with a breath rich in garlic directed him up the steep, tortuous lane to a flight of steps flanked by potted geraniums.

  When the Signore found the house, there was scarce room enough to park his car nearby, but he managed to wedge it in a crook of space made by several lanes coming together. Then with a smile for the curious children who gathered around, he walked up the worn steps and knocked on the door.

  Giorgio’s small brother opened it. “Buona sera,” he said politely. “I am Emilio. And I have a sister Teria who bosses me, and a big brother who is watchkeeper of the church.” All in the same breath he added, “Your vest is nice; it looks like our newborn calf.”

  “Newborn calf it is!” The man laughed in amusement.

  Emilio’s mother came hurrying out of the bedroom, tying a fresh apron over her black dress. She saw at a glance that the stranger was a city man from over the mountain.

  “Buona sera,” she said. “Please to excuse our little Emilio. He chatters like the wren.”

  Signor Ramalli bowed and removed his hat. “You have an elder son, Giorgio?” he asked.

  “Si,” the mother replied anxiously. “Has something happened to him?”

  “No, no, Signora. Everything is most right.”

  “Then will you please to come in and have a coffee while you wait? At this moment Giorgio should be in the barn, bedding our donkey. Soon he comes.”

  “Thank you kindly, but I will go to find him; that is, if you will be so good as to direct me.”

  The mother stepped out onto the porch. “You go only a little downhill,” she said, “just beyond the public fountain. As you go, it is on your right hand. My little Emilio here can take you, but he must hurry back.”

  Emilio, flushed with importance, took the stranger’s hand and led him the short distance to the stable. “Giorgio!” he
called out. “Here is a Signore who wants to see you!” Then reluctantly he turned and headed for home, glancing back at every step.

  Giorgio was leading Pippa out between the shafts of the cart. “You come to see me?” he asked of the strange man.

  Signor Ramalli stepped up and shook hands briskly. “Go on working, Giorgio, while I talk. From the fragrant smells at your house I believe a good bean soup is simmering, and I must not delay you.”

  Giorgio pulled the cart to the far end of the stable and tilted the shafts against the wall. The donkey, freed, trotted to an empty manger and in a raucous bray demanded her supper.

  Signor Ramalli sized up the boy as he watched him pour out a measure of grain. He could not help thinking how small Giorgio appeared in the bigness of the barn, but he was not going to change his mind now. The boy might be little, yet he was wiry, had good muscle, straight, sturdy legs, and he worked quickly and with purpose. The man laughed softly to himself; he was analyzing the boy as he would a horse!

  “I am Ramalli of Siena,” he explained. “I am a Snail.”

  Giorgio spun around. “You are what?” He took in the man’s features, and saw on his forehead a wen bigger than the bulb on a snail’s antenna. Is that why, he wondered, the man calls himself a snail?

  “I belong to the Contrada of the Snail.”

  “Oh?” The word contrada sparked a lightning chain of thought direct to the Palio.

  “My main activity is horses and racing.”

  Giorgio stopped his work. He bowed to the man as if he were a king or a cardinal. Then in his excitement he began scratching the donkey, kneading down the dark stripe along her back. He took a breath, listening.

  “I have heard of your skill in racing, and . . .” Signor Ramalli paused to let the full weight of his words take meaning. “I propose that you ride for me.”