Gaudenzia, Pride of the Palio Read online

  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.

  Chapter IX

  THE CART HORSE OF CASALINO

  The Sunday train inched its way along toward the Maremma. Instead of Accelerato it should be called the tortoise, Giorgio thought. He paced up and down the aisle. He leaned out the window, waving at peasants working in the fields even on a Sunday. He ate his lunch—thick slices of ham with white bread, and an orange. He took off his jacket and shadowboxed with a fat little boy.

  At Sant’ Angelo he changed to an autobus and finally, toward noon, arrived at the crossroads of Casalino.

  It was one of those freakish days in late spring when the air seems to belong to July. The sun brassy hot, the wind at a standstill. No one was anywhere in sight except a carter, a big loutish fellow with an ear trumpet hanging on a string around his neck.

  “Hey, boy,” the man called out. “For two hundred lire I carry you . . . wherever.”

  Giorgio felt for the two hundred lire in his pocket. Did the man sitting in that rickety old cart have X-ray eyes to make up for his bad ears?

  “No, no, thank you,” Giorgio replied. “Only a few kilometers I must walk.” He started to explain where he was going, and perhaps if the driver seemed friendly he might even confide that the two hundred lire had been saved for a special sugar bowl in a special cupboard in a special house in Monticello. But he stopped short as his eye fell upon the mare hitched to the cart. She had something of the look of his Imperiale, only finer-boned and more Arab. She was a gray, flecked with brown, but too thin by far and her coat dry and harsh.

  He wondered if it was the way she jibbed her head and nervously pawed the earth, or just the general look of her that put him in mind of Imperiale. Or was it the wide-set eyes, so dark and smoldering?

  “Excuse,” he said, stepping up close to the man and mouthing his words slowly, “but the mare—is she by Sans Souci?”

  “Eh?” The driver adjusted his ear trumpet, cocking his head in puzzlement. “Eh?”

  “I say, is she by Sans Souci?”

  “Si, si. She for sale.”

  “I don’t want to buy her. I only ask . . .”

  “Nobody want to buy her. She spring like cat, kick like kangaroo, chip wood like woodpecker.” He started to goad her with the whip; then, as her ears laced back, he changed his mind. He turned to the boy abruptly. “Who are you?” he asked.

  “I am Giorgio Terni.”

  The slit mouth widened in a grin. “O-o-oh, you’re Tullio Terni’s boy, the little runt of Monticello. For you I cut my price; for one hundred lire I carry you to door of house.”

  Giorgio smiled his thanks and turned away. He set off down the road, twice looking over his shoulder at the fine Arab head with the small ears pricked against the sky. He thought he heard a nervous whinny, but it might have been the breeze in the poplars.


  He strode to Monticello as if there were springs inside him. Along the way people welcomed him, called him by name. “Hi, Giorgio, how is it being a city fellow?”

  But the real welcome came within the encompassing walls of home. To his family he was already a hero. They fluttered about him, taking off his jacket, pouring him coffee, peppering him with questions.

  “How do they treat you? Do you get nice white bread with your meals, and is the spaghetti cooked done? Do you get used to those noisy streets?” This was Mamma talking.

  “Do you like Anna more than me?” This was Teria.

  “Did you bring me something? A calf vest, maybe? Is the bump still on Signor Ramalli’s forehead?” This was Emilio.

  And at long last, from Babbo, the question Giorgio wanted first: “How do you get along with the training of the horses? Tell us all about.”

  “We-ll-ll,” Giorgio answered importantly, “I have four horses in my stable. I get along pretty well. Of course, there are some difficulties. First I have Ambra. She is fine, but has strong dislike for bridling. Then I have Lubiana, who is fine too, but sometimes stubborn like mule. And Dorina, she is awkward in changing gaits.”

  He saved the best until last. “And I have Imperiale. He is Arab, and he flies!” He turned his chair to face his father. “Now it is I who ask. Babbo! I saw today at Casalino a mare, gray and lightly specked with brown. She is poor and thin, and she pulls a miserable cart with traces and harness held together by rope. But she looks to be one of San Souci’s get.”

  “She is!” exclaimed the father.

  Giorgio’s heart was a hammer. He could hardly wait to tell Signor Ramalli that now he was a real horseman. His questions came fast.

  “How old is she?

  “From where does she come?

  “Why is she not racing instead of pulling the cart?

  “Has she colts?”

  The father scraped his chair away from the table. He reached for the stool in front of the cupboard and propped his stockinged feet on it. He loosened his belt and gave a happy grunt. It was good to have man-talk in the house again!

  “That poor mare,” he began, folding his hands across his stomach, “is sold for convenience from one to the other. She has the nervous tic, so that forever she is biting—on wood, on anything. And her throat . . .”

  “I know, Babbo. It makes the throat swell.” The father nodded, proud of his son’s knowledge. “Men beat her, thinking it will stop the biting, but it only gets worse. Now she is good just for carting things from here to there.”

  Teria interrupted to place before Giorgio a slice of ham and an onion, and the mother brought out a whole loaf of white bread, newly baked and still warm.

  “Do you want the crust, Giorgio, or just a thin slice?”

  “The crust as always, Mamma, if you please.”

  “Emilio!” commanded the father. “Your brother cannot eat without a good glass of wine.”

  Fearful of missing a word, Emilio flew to the grotto of a cellar behind the front steps and returned breathless with a dusty old flask.

  Giorgio was busy scooping out a little hollow in the crust with the point of his knife.

  “What you doing, Giorgio?” asked the father. “You not eating the ham?”

  “No, thank you,” he said, noticing how little was left. “I am just hungry to taste again our onions cut up in the crust with vinegar and salt, and maybe some capers, if we have . . .”

  The capers appeared as if by magic from Teria’s hand.

  Between bites, Giorgio interrupted the silence which surrounded him. “But why,” he asked of Babbo, “do they sell that mare from one to the other? Is it the nervous tic?”

  The father pursed his lips, thinking.

  “That can be controlled,” Giorgio added quickly. “The great Sans Souci had it, and my Imperiale has it, too. Is it only because of that?”

  “No.” The father paused.

  “What, then?”

  “Well, you can’t believe it, but ill luck trails her like smoke from fire. Already she has four colts of no account.”

  “Four!”

  The father nodded. “The first time she got twins, but they died before lifting their heads above the straw.”

  “And then?”

  “Next time her colt is crippled in foaling and has to be put down.”

  Giorgio stopped eating and sat silent. After a moment he said, “And the fourth colt? Dead, too?”

  “No. Not him. He will make big stout plow horse when he is grown. He is no more like Farfalla than bull is like deer.”

  The mother, who had been listening all this while, now plucked at Giorgio’s sleeve. “Farfalla is the one . . .” she whispered softly. “She is the one born in Magliano Toscano on the day Bianca . . .”

  Giorgio felt the hairs on his skin prickle. So this Arab mare, fastened with ropes to the traces of a shabby cart, was Bianca’s successor! He nodded and smiled wistfully in remembrance.

  • • •

  The next morning Giorgio was back at work in Siena, happier and more content there. And for the first time he felt encouraged that Dorina and Imperiale might be ready for the July Palio. As he schooled the well-bred gelding, teaching him to make smaller and ever smaller turns, his mind flew back to the cart horse of Casalino. Clear as a vignette he saw her jibbing her head against the sky.

  “It would be a miracle from God,” he thought to himself, “to harness that wildness, to calm the frightened soul.”

  Chapter X

  A BUYER OF OX SKINS

  It was on the day Giorgio returned to Siena that Farfalla was sold again. A buyer of ox skins, Signor Busisi by name, was making one of his regular trips to the Maremma. He was a big-framed, bushy-browed man with a shock of white hair. As he drove along in his shiny new Fiat, he was sorting skins in his mind—all sizes, all qualities. He was not even thinking about horses. And he was trying very hard not to notice his nagging indigestion.

  Signor Busisi was from Siena, and therefore he was first of all a strong contrada man with a passion for the Palio. Besides, he was a canny judge of horseflesh. In years past his horses had won no less than five Palio banners, a record few owners could match! And when he had no entry for the Palio, he sat as a judge of the trials, helping to choose the ten horses that would run, out of the twenty or more presented. His fellow judges held him in great respect, often waiting for him to nod the decisive “yes” or “no.”

  Of course, being an honest man and a realistic one, Signor Busisi admitted to himself that over the years he had purchased some weedy horses with faults too numerous and embarrassing to think about. And so he did not think about them. Besides, he was getting on in years, trying to ignore the pains around his heart and the frequent attacks of indigestion. “I’ve got a lot of age on me,” he told himself. “No time for regrets; for me the spring flowers will bloom only a few times more. Better it is to look ahead.” And so in the years remaining he was determined to live each day as if it were the last to shine upon him.

  On this morning of April the Maremma country was the color of clear emeralds, the birds singing, and nothing between earth and sky except, coming over the hill ahead, a tall, airy-striding cart horse.

  The Signore slowed down and pulled off to the edge of the road. He got out and unbuckled his belt a notch. The pangs of indigestion were sharpening. Perhaps walking around a bit, exchanging the time of day with a country carter, might ease the pain.

  Before he greeted the man, he unconsciously took stock of the mare. To himself he said, “She must be well over sixteen hands high. Good legs and feet. Fine bone beneath the rough coat. Barrel too thin, head and throttle excellent. Eyes dominant.”

  The carter meanwhile was sizing up the automobile and the owner. “Is new—the car. Is old—the man. And rich. I wonder, will he permit that I haul goods for him from here to there?”

  “Buon giorno,” Signor Busisi said in a loud voice, noticing the ear trumpet.

  The carter b
owed until his chin touched his grease-stained shirt.

  “Your mare,” the Signore began, “how is she called?”

  “Si, si. She for sale.”

  “Not so quick, my good man,” the Signore bellowed. “I only ask how you call her.”

  The carter was unabashed. He grinned, showing yellow, horselike teeth. “She has the name Farfalla. She is daughter from Maremma mare and Sans Souci.”

  “Incredible!” the Signore exclaimed. “That accounts for the quality look.”

  “Eh?” the driver asked, holding up his trumpet.

  “Incredible!”

  The grin widened. “How long you stay in Maremma?”

  “Today only.”

  The carter scratched his nose thoughtfully. Money jingling in his pocket and wine on the table would be better than a no-good mare. “Signore,” he said in a nasal, wheedling voice, “you like buy my mare?”

  Signor Busisi made no answer. At close range he saw that she was no longer young. “What age has she?” he asked.

  “Eh?”

  “How many years has she?”

  “Oh, she very young. She has only four years,” the man boasted, smiling at his deception.

  Signor Busisi ignored the answer. There was that certain something about her—perhaps it was the arch of the neck and the high-flowing tail, perhaps it was the enormousness of the eyes. But somehow, in spite of her rough coat and her shoes too big and the ramshackle cart, in spite of everything, she had dignity and nobility. The Signore felt that the carter and he, himself, suffered by comparison.

  All at once his indigestion was gone! Excitement caught hold of him. He did not want another horse for his own; he felt himself too old. But he was not too old to place her, to give her a chance. She could be good, even great. “Who knows without the trial?” he asked himself.