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( Sergio Bissoli ITA – 63 RACCONTI SUPERNATURALI - tran. by G. M.)
Short stories on spiritism, witchcraft, the occult,
paganism, animism, the unusual and the mistery.
At 177 Scuderlando street in Verona there was, and perhaps there still is, a bewitched house.
After a few letters and telephone calls between my friend Rochefort and the proprietress, we arrive at the meeting-place on time in the afternoon of a Sunday of December.
“Napoleone. Napoleoneeee”.
A bare cat turns up and the old woman dressed in grey calls him standing in front of the door.
“There it is” says Rochefort pointing at the building.
A low little house, bleached and not set in a row with the other ones.
“It doesn’t just look like an odd house” I remark.
“It’s bewitched!” he whispers.
“You’ve come at last, Mr. Rochefort” says the old woman in a moaning voice, as she takes us to the kitchen through a small room. Dirt is all over the place : small plates containing leftovers for the cat, cobwebs, debris on the floor.
“My troubles have come as far as to here” she goes on pointing at her nose “and when there will be more of them, that will be the end for me...”.
A cold stinking draught suddenly breaks forth along with a strong smell of ether and mould which is not mould, though.
“Here it is. Can you smell it? It’s just this smell that has ruined my health. I went to many a doctor as first step, here are my lab tests already issued”. And she gets out a bundle of folders and hands them to Mr. Rochefort.
“... Red corpuscles above standard rate ... a murmur of the heart but it doesn’t give any pain... Underwent a ulcer operation some fifteen years ago ... There’s nothing accountable for any pathological states...”
“Even the doctors couldn’t diagnose; yet, I’m suffering from many a pain : I’m getting more and more run down, I feel something burning all the time at the bottom of my stomach, I just can’t lie down on either the sofa or on the bed; I’ve lost twenty kilos of late. I happened to feel vibrations in the house in the beginning; as if it were an electric current. I felt the current when touching metal things, the pots, for instance. I found bits of string, strips of fabric intertwined and full of knots. There were many of them everywhere... And pins sticking into the handkerchiefs, as well. Things moved, or they just were not any longer where I had left them. The glasses belonging to my old poor uncle who ended by committing suicide some fifteen years ago would continuously change their place. Then the thieves came and stole everything and all that they had not taken away was thoroughly ruined. But the locks were untouched indeed. I called the police, but they couldn’t do anything at all about it”.
Rochefort has begun to take notes on a note-book: “Go on.”
“The thieves have come back seven times...” She starts crying.
When she resumes talking, I begin realizing I have to deal with a case of unknown nature and only the presence of my friend Rochefort gives me the courage to keep staying.
“The flowers wither in here, the foodstuff goes bad, the water turns red, the wax black...”
Rochefort moves towards the sink of the kitchen and fills a glass up. The water at first comes down clear but then the glass little by little fills up with reddish particles.
“Can it be ferruginous water?” I intervene.
“It just could be so” Rochefort confirms.
Then the old woman stands up and takes us to the ice-cellar. Some mouldy food and some butter which is covered with a strange red mould, too.
“How long has this stuff been in here?”
“For as a short time as this morning! I just can’t keep anything in the house and I am compelled to go and eat outside, as though all the people actually sweats bood not to bump into me.”
Once back in the kitchen she points at some spots on the wall I had not noticed before. Here and there the wall seems to have become dark and porous as if it were due to too much damp. A centipede as big as I’d never seen drags itself along and then disappears under a crust of the wall.
“Look at those spots. And at those disgusting insects. They are in millions, you know? Rats, snails, beetles, scorpions are infesting the house. I sent for the social worker, the health officer, but no one could do anything about it. Neither could a priest who came and blessed the house. Then I resorted to a chiromancer and to a sorceress some time later.”
"What did the latter say?"
"In the beginning she wasn’t inclined to meet me, then she herself came here, did some exorcisms of hers, came back and did the same again, but she turned out to be of no use at all."
The next day our destination is, again, the bewitched house of the widow Bonnet.
I thought I would be able to examine the facts with objectivity this time but, on the contrary, few minutes later, the intoxicated atmosphere of the house and the woman’s hysterical bearing get the upper hand of my nerves.
"... During the night I’ve dreamed of being in the middle of deep holes and in the morning I’ve found pieces of liver in my urine. After a short time all the flowers have become withered".
In fact there are vases with geraniums, cactuses and other plants looking petrified.
"I’ve shown them to a soothsayer. I wanted to bring them to the priest, but I was forbidden to do so, I’m not allowed to get in the parsonage but only in the vestry. I’ve also shown this, too, to the soothsayer, look..."
It’s big bristles, comb teeth, feathers. They keep sticking to the mattresses as if there were some magnetism.
I just don’t feel like touching any of the things, but Rochefort tries to let the garbage off his hands many times over and the result is always the same, as if there really were a magnetic force.
"These foreign bodies have appeared for so long time in the quilts, in the mattresses. Soap pieces, candles, balls, feather wreaths. I’ve found many a foreign body, but I must now avoid these places", she’s pointing at the sofa and at the bed, "because they have become hostile to me. I sometimes happen to smell that horrible smell of rotten oil and I have a heartburn when I drink this water."
We often feel cold draughts, abrupt icy gusts assailing us. We have a look around, but both the doors and the windows are shut.
"I had new latches fixed of late and I changed the locks twice" the woman says in a depressed voice, "but all this turned out to be pointless".
The same evening we are invited again by the widow Bonnet who urges our help.
We rush to her house in no time and find her beside herself with fear repeating over and over again :
"In there, I’ve got in the lumber-room and I’ve seen ... seen..."
We find a doll with no arms, made of blue fabric, pierced through by nails, with feathers coming out of her genitals and her eyes, into a plate containing tainted water, pepper, hair and other ingredients.
A few days later the widow Bonnet dies, and neither her sister nor the doctors can account for the true cause of her death.
AUGUST 1982
The wind is blowing in the narrow, badly paved alley, and throws soot and smoke in my eyes from the chimney-pots.
I’m in a hurry and graze the walls of high, darkened, bent houses. The very last beams of the february twilight diffuses a yellowish faint light.
I’m walking on the pavement which is ruined in many a part and full of pools. Mangy cats creep round the corners of old houses from which a smell of urine comes out. N. 515... A barber’s shop, at Rossene’s. The sign is shaking in the sharp wind from the north. Old Kostia, the woman who washes the dead, lives some floors up. A bit further up a purple dress is hanging from the window.
The cold, windy night is falling upon the alley, the night of the very last day of carnival.
Beyond the corner of a buttress the little square window sparkling with light casts a golden rain upon the basalt stones of the pavement. Shadows of dancing people are visible indoors. The party of Mardi Gras held at my friend Livinus’s has already begun and there I am now in front of his door.
I push the door which is merely ajar and I’m at once captured by the atmosphere of merrymaking. Lights, warmness, giddiness... The air is impregnated with perfumes, many a streamer are hanging from the ceiling.
I take my coat off and go towards my friend Livinus of whom I have hardly been able to catch a glimpse; he’s with some friends of his and all of them are holding a glass in their hands. But before I can draw near him an ugly intruder wrapped up in a cloak bars my way. A handful of confetti forces me to blink repeatedly. The intruder moves away among the crowd together with a little, yet adult-breasted girl.
The lights are fading out. More confetti and streamers. A merry uproar and laughters.
A girl wearing a blue little mask approaches and looks at me insistently. She’s slender and has got long fair hair.
"Who are you?" I ask her.
"Ah ah..." She draws nearer and puts her hand upon my shoulder. I smell her sweet scent that makes my senses dull.
"You don’t recognize me... ah ah..."
The voice, though efficaciously counterfeit, isn’t at all new to me... A rude thrust and there I am suddenly pushed about in the middle of the waving crowd of new comers, so that I am prevented from still seeing the little masker.
I find the little girl again at mid-party, when the light is even fainter and the stramers form a cobweb over us. Her dress is a long veil and she’s keeping a border of it up before her mouth :
"Ah ah... Peter..."
"Is it you Chiara?"
She’s shaking her head.
"Is it you Stella?... But who are you...?"
"It might be your wife, Peter..." answers a friend of mine passing by.
"You don’t remember me any more, Peter?" she whispers in her silvery voice.
"Yes I do, I know you, but now..."
The window-panes are all tarnished and some strange breath-sketched figures appear on them, like in dreamland.
At midnight, when I thought I wouldn’t have been by then able to see her any more, I find the girl by my side, more and more attractive, more and more mysterious...
I feel I am so close to the unveiling of her secret, in fact she’s about to take off her little mask while softly restling upon my body and muttering something at me...
The light goes out. Popping bottles, tumblings, noises, great hubbub. Hot, dissonant music.
The light is on and off many times over. Where is, where is... my God! I’m leaning against a sofa and getting myself a drink.
The dawn sheds its morbid light through the window and makes the lamps grow dim.
Somebody has vomited down the alley. Noises of cans made butt at each other and dragged away. A table fork lacking one prong is on the pavement and I kick it away.
From the sewer a dark liquid gushes in front of the cobbler’s. Bitter cold and noise of footsteps going away.
I hurry along the alley in disgust. When I raise my eyes I see an adolescent girl drawing a heart on the tarnished pane of a window.
A few days later, I am forced to direct my steps down there once again. A catarrhal cough stresses the silence of the bright, albescent new day.
The chill of the night has made the piping break out at Livinus’s and the labourers are at work to replace it. They take the flooring off and underneath they find human bones and skeletons.
"I thought I was alone and I was on the contrary in someone’s company" Livinus comments.
DECEMBER 1982
"The devil’s hen! The devil’s hen..." the woman cries rushing in through the kitchen.
Her husband, the host, who’s standing behind the counter busy at filling up glasses with wine, tries to minimize the matter :
"Get along with the devil, don’t tell me that we must send for the priest now, solely because of a hen..."
But his wife, a stout, fat woman visibly upset and in a sweat, doesn’t give any sign of calming down :
"It’s possessed, I tell you, Alan, that one is not a hen like all the others; it has made our dog run away, I doubt it is a hen, that one..."
Her husband, who is also a fat guy and bald into the bargain, keeps grumbling in a low voice and tries to quiet her :
"What rubbish you come out with!; it’s nonsense, it’s absolutely foolishness... You and your odd nonsense words..."
The tavern is overcrowded with half-drunk people playing cards and talking about this and that, and nobody, I think, is lending an ear to this curious dialogue.
Not a long time has gone by since I’ve come to and entered this place with low ceiling and tarred by the smoke of oil-lamps and pipes. I elbow my way through a group of old customers and get to the large counter, the top of which is made of stone.
The woman is cooking quite a few sausages. The chimney has little suction because there’s a lot of steam spreading from the boiling water of the pots. A candle-holder, a little salt and a coffee-mill are on the mantelpiece.
"What’s wrong with this hen?" I begin to ask in a reassuring way.
The woman turns all of a sudden. She still feels the effect of her suffered fright, that is just what she’s betraying.
"Good gracious, sir, there’s the devil’s hen in our hen-house!"
"But what is it that makes this hen unlike all the other hens?" I keep asking her.
"Its eyes are as red as fire. It’s evil. It’s neither male nor female and attacks our frightened dog".
"Oh that’s really a good one! It doesn’t seem at all possible" I tell her just to make her talk more.
"I assure you, sir, that I’m telling the truth. There is the devil I tell you..."
And at my look full of curiosity mixed with puzzlement she goes on : "Better still, come and see, come and see yourself down there in the hen-house!"
We get to a semi-dark, damp back-kitchen which is crammed with big boxes and bottles.
After going beyond a space under the stairs we go downstairs and get to an old laundry. Hardly any light filters through the little window and the cold is biting inside that large room full of fissures and draughts. I nearly regret having going away from the smoky warmth of the tavern to come downstairs up to here. I move amidst the tanks along the threadbare stones and the stained rinsings.
The woman unbolts and opens wide the small door there at the end of the passage.
A gloomy court-yard appears illuminated by the ashy light of a January afternoon. It’s bitterly cold all around us.
"Look there, there it is" the woman tells me in her excited voice pointing at the hen.
In the little court-yard set between the bare vegetation and the old buildings, some plucked hens are scratching about and they all seem alike at first sight. I turn to look at the stretched arm of the woman and then I suddenly see it.
It’s quite different from the other ones, it is indeed.
All the other hens have gathered together within only a few steps from us, but that one on the the contrary keeps itself to itself, at the end of the court-yard. Differently from the other hens, this one behaves as if we didn’t exist at all, so I try to step further on in order to eye it better.
It hasn’t got a the common shape of a hen, it’s dumpier because of the feathers making its tail bifurcate downwards. On top of its head it has got a feathered, hardly outlined comb. And, furthemore, it’s ugly. With red eyes it keeps coming and going up and down the court-yard, with air of superiority, so to speak, utterly regardless of us.
I turn my sympathizing eyes towards the woman and with a little nodding of my head I make her understand I have seen enough of it.
Then, to my great relief, we get back to the tavern and she hastily shuts the little door that is strong enough to shelter us and to keep that devilish thing away.
DECEMBER 1982
As usual in the evening, I go along the streets in the old part of the town. An autumn wind is sweeping in gusts the semi-deserted streets and is bringing dust and yellowed leaves round.
Façades of silent houses, barred doors, walls full of protrusions I graze trying to avoid pools.
I’m threading through dark, wet porches in Antiquaries’ street, faintly illuminated by a lamp hanging from the worm-eaten beams of the vaulted roof. The mighty noise of the roaring river in flood sometimes comes as near as here.
I go past an ancient pagan sculpture jutting out of a building. Rare and hurried passers-by keep their collar well up, a woman endowed with a soft body leaves a scent of sweet violets behind her.
After going past the repository of broken glass I head for a narrow deserted alley lined by high walls beyond which leafy trees are rustling. The cold autumn wind brings a great deal of leaves all around whirled about and makes them whirl at street-corners.
The evening is lengthening out the shadows of a square gravelled among two rows of lamps still unlit. The gothic church raises its brick counterforts beside me, together with its toothed railings.
I am shivering with cold as I’m climbing a few steps. Some showerings signal the presence of water-closets.
A smell of stewed stockfish comes at times through the air. I raise my head before crossing the square and it’s then that I see the old little man again.
There’s a large shop-window with quite a few cuisine specialities on show. Vases full of snails, ham cooked all together with the bread, stewed mushrooms and the yellow sparkling of liquor bottles. The old little man doesn’t seem to be in his right place as he is bustling about the huge fireplace where a heap of wood is burning behind a vertical grating.
He’s an extremely decrepit old man, almost ridiculous in his white overall. He literally skips from one part to the other between the dishes and the fireplace. He turns the spits, adds oil, stirs up the firewood, adjusts the drawing... He’s unexpectedly quick despite his age, and he does smile a lot, too much. When the autumn evenings stretch out their veil of dampness, there he is standing by the fireplace like a busy elf.
There’s a little bar, too, in that old market square. As usual, I have a beer, seated at my table, and amuse myself by thinking while having a look outside.
The counters of the sellers, wrapped up in cloth sheets, are shaken by the raging wind. Everything is wet through and rotten owing to the heavy rain having been pouring down all week round. The plants allocated inside the big vases overturned by the wind, the fountain with dolphin statues full to the brim.
And that old man keeps on lighting the fire. Now I see the grating reddened by the incandescent embers in the middle of the golden shining of white heat. Blue flashing flames are rising, but all this doesn’t seem to be enough to him and he goes on putting more wood, he goes on lighting the fire...
Once in a while I cast a glance at him from where I am, and it’s apparent that the oven already irradiating an intense light must bring about a hellish heat all over the place, but the thing doesn’t seem by any means to worry the little old man.
At about midnight the clouds as dark as pitch are swept away by the wind and the white cold moon is silvering all the square with its ghastly light.
Now I hear footsteps upon the stones. Men wearing a tail-coat and a stick are walking arm-in-arm together with very beautiful women and disappear into the thin October fog. Ghosts. Profound silence broken by the water dripping down a gutter pipe.
The square is all a glittering of opalescences and veils, of crystals and silver laces. The shop has got its rolling shutters lowered down. Now the little old man has disappeared, like an elementary spirit, as if he had been literally sucked up the chimney.
JANUARY 1983
Warm and misty in this October afternoon. In the yellow light the fields are nothing but a vast extent of stubbles. Autumn tears pieces of soul off me.
In the clear sky the steam is coming out of the roofs of driers. And my mind is wandering through this white sky where my thoughts remain engraved.
The red berries of bitter-sweet shrubs form delicate filigrees along the ditch. A girl is leaning upon the bridge parapet and is looking at the flowing water.
The narrow road lined with high rows of thorny thistles runs down at a point. Strange herbs grow all over the place and an acid smell comes from the rotten, heaped up turnips. Haze softens outlines and lenghthens distances.
When I arrive at the village, this appears to be crouching down, unreal, half-hidden in the tangle of creepers. There’s frightnening, dead silence all around those ancient stones. The luxuriant vegetation comes up to the first floor at times.
It is rumoured that Satan’s worshippers used to meet in these parts.
I go beyond two kerbstones and step on a threshing-floor invaded by weed. Smashed, rotten vats are in a row along an old brick building full of iron gratings. I see the old school again, a high, crooked and azure-dyed building. And I also see the green-windowed house, where lives the little girl with pigtails and red socks.
I tread on rusty tin lids and then I get near Mr. Nadir’s house and call out :
"Ehi, Mr. Nadir, Mr. Nadir!"
Only the echo of the old houses answers me back. A shutter is banging near big wasps’ nests under the roof.
The reddish sun seems fuzzy and is disappearing behind the buildings. I make my way through the tangle of brambles hindering my movements.
A sudden noise from the grass startles me and a grey cat runs away onto the roofs of some shanties.
"Ehi, but isn’t there anybody here? Mr. Nadir! Has everybody gone away?"
From far away are the tolls of a bell brought up to here by a gentle breeze. After going beyond a rosery I find the closed well, the walled up windows, the ruinous and fallen in stables. Everything seems to have gone to rack and ruin, and it isn’t difficult to imagine that decay must have begun quite a great deal of time ago.
The coming evening increases my defeat as well as my despair and I head for home.
Among the old crooked apple-trees I meet with a woman wearing the colours of autumn.
1983
Old Peggy died in a foggy afternoon towards the end of December. She was minute and lame and in the people’s opinion she had practised witchcraft during all her lifetime.
That very day her house is gloomy and cold. Her few relatives who had come for her obsequies are now waiting and standing in the small kitchen.
I’m one of the very few people who chanced upon keeping vigil by the bedside of her dead body and witnessing the dreadful phenomena that took place.
At half past four in the afternoon a thick fog is fuming all along the street and obstructs the view even at a distance of few metres.
We close the shutters and bolt the door of the kitchen communicating on one side with the porch invaded by darkness and fog. The cold is irritating in spite of the dampness outside which makes the glasses opaque.
My cousin Jerome is busy at lighting a little iron stove while my uncle is at the same time rubbing his hands to warm them. We are not closely related and know each other very little. The ovals of the pictures hanging on the wall depict some moustached men and women of old times, all of whom must have died a great deal of time ago, so that nobody remembers them any longer.
A little warmth is diffusing at last.
Aunt Betty, the sister of a brother-in-law of the dead woman’s, must go away and asks my uncle to take her home, so my cousin and I remain. He is a man of forty wearing short moustache and a tie and is seated on a sofa in a rather stiff attitude.
A bit later we hear clanking noises from upstairs and decide to go and see. The wooden staircase is narrow and steep. The house has got three rooms : one on the ground floor and two on the first floor where the corpse has been laid.
The light of the lamp just over the head of the dead woman is at irregular intervals off and on by itself. I try to turn the switch but that proves pointless.
My cousin Jerome goes downstairs to the kitchen because the cold up there is awfully severe and I follow him. His face appears nervous and very pale.
Other noises, this time similar to opening doors or to dragged cupboards, compel me to climb the stairs again.
The veil covering the corpse is full of brown spots. An acid smell is stagnating in the air. The mouth of the dead woman lets teeth show.
I’m drinking in the kitchen from the little flask Jerome has taken with him. None of us is inclined to use glasses or other kitchenware there.
Two hours later my fellow has dropped asleep. I am getting more and more worried about the many hisses and moans I hear, and all this is accompanied by a quick coming and going of rats.
Suddenly a bottle breaks to pieces by itself causing the milk spilling on the floor. We try to clean with a rag we find in the sink. And the mirror of the kitchen that was until then unbroken appears now scratched with a crack.
Gurgling of boiling water upstairs. The cold is persisting and brown streaks of smoke become visible against the light.
The gurgling becomes noisier and a mass of sticky stuff is spreading all over the floor, particularly in the corners. Jerome and I don’t know what to do.
An abrupt crash comes from inside the wooden sideboard in front of us. A stinking smell like rotten eggs.
A second dreadful rumbling, upstairs this time, makes us jump. It happens as if the coffin had overturned. We look at each other pale with fear.
Now in the silence we hear heavy, clanging footsteps over our heads. The footsteps are making for the staircase and begin to get down.
A red boiling foam is dripping down the stairs.
We rush to the door to escape the darkness and the hell of the room behind us, and gain the exit. We leave the house at two in the morning.
During the funeral, in the church, a dark liquid oozing down the coffin moves forward to the catafalque.
On a sunny day, about a month later, there I am along the cemetery lane busy with driving out buzzing flies and other insects vexing me.
A stinking liquid filth is dripping down the niche where my aunt is buried. The coffin must have burst in there, and swarms of big blowflies are flying in the air to finally keep sticking to the wall.
1983
"Oh, baron Pedrotzky, good morning!"
This is how my friend had welcomed the man who was entering the small pipe shop.
The scene took place in July, the weather was unbearably hot and the window curtains were all let down. Flies were incessantly buzzing in the semi-darkness.
The glass door was right behind me, so I couldn’t see him immediately. I turned and my God!, never had I seen the like before.
Just not to betray my being surprised at his looks I begun touching the pipes I wanted to try. But that man, even the name had been properly given to him.
He did stand out for being a short, fat, lame and bald man.
When he went near the counter I noticed he wore the hearing-aid for deaf people and a couple of thick lenses framed in his spectacles.
Never seen the like of him, the devil! As he was talking to my friend, the tobacconist, who showed to know him quite well, I realized he also had the drawback of stammer, into the bargain.
I said good-bye to both of them and got quickly out of the place not to laugh in his face.
Some days later I went to my friend again to ask him who that person was.
"Why, don’t you know Mr. baron Pedrotzky?" he said.
I had never seen him before of course, and when I saw him for the second time I could but see his dead body.
He, fat and deformed as he was, was seated in a chair under a porch. It was stifling hot and he had flies buzzing on his lips and inside his nose. They had laid him down gently temporarily there, because he died while playing cards at the tavern.
When his relatives came, they slipped his watch and ring off. The undertaker’s men carried a provisional coffin and put him inside. But he was very heavy and while they were laying him down, his clothes creased and twisted round his back.
They got some sporting papers from a barber’s and put them under his head as a cushion, so that he could assume a more decorous air.
Later at the cemetery, I was there when the corpse arrived. The brand-new and light- brown coffin was shining in the sun. But the enterprise of placing him into his burial niche wasn’t little business at all.
The grave-diggers found fault with the joiner, but he laid the responsibility on the labourers. The coffin couldn’t be placed inside the niche but for very few centimetres.
They made an attempt crosswise, diagonally. The family tomb was narrow, its opening ill-positioned.
A labourer was sent for a hand-saw.
They sawed the four corners of the coffin just in front of his relatives’ puzzled and worried eyes, taking care not to touch the corpse.
It was literally pushed in by dint of snorts and a little wall was raised by using hardened mortar.
The pieces cut off the coffin were however left to him and put inside the niche.
1983
One August night I happen to pass through a country village.
Along the main street some people are seated in front of ancient houses. The night is damp and gloomy.
After walking to the huge, dark church sited in the outskirts, I am about to get back when I hear the soft notes of a barrel-organ. I keep walking as far as the lock-gates from where I can sight a shining, going round carousel in the middle of a cornfield and some people standing around it there.
I cross a small, round square hidden in the shade of the church. Up in the sky the summer constellations have moved more westwards.
Through an arch I get to a long hall leading to the bell-tower. The cemetery stretches on the left and a few big, broken tombstones set against the wall wait to be removed. In the middle of an open space the carousel fully embellished with sequins is going round to the accompaniment of a rather sad music.
On the grass below the coloured bulbs a nice little blonde breaks out with a wild dance. She wears a red, short dress and her face is ruddy. Now and then she allures the bystanders to get near her and play a strange game. Beyond the halo of lights of the carousel the night is as dark as a chimney-pot.
A boy among the grouping people draws near visibly excited while she, glamorous and provocative, gives a broad smile.
This is how the game is to be played : the boy has to mimic the very same gestures as the girl makes first.
They are face to face.
The girl slowly raises her arm and her beautiful face becomes grave and engrossed. She lays her hand upon his head and the boy also lays his hand upon her head.
Now the girl gently hangs down her hand and rests it upon his shoulders.
The boy at this point gives a nervous start and draws back. The bell-tower behind us strikes eleven resonant tolls.
The carousel goes round and round with only half of its seats occupied and the music fades away in the night.
The girl invites another boy. He’s unwilling at first, but then is convinced.
Her gestures are imitated again but what appears through is more strain and more suspense in the bystanders’ faces. Everybody follows the game in silence. It happens as if some prodigy should somehow be expected at any moment.
The hand on the head. Then on the right shoulder... On the left one...
But at this point he, too, draws back before the game ends.
“Who’s next?, who’s taking a step forward in his place?” the girl cries out. She steps to and fro and is completely naked under her red dress taken in round her waist. She’s absolutely charming and bewitching.
A new player pushed forward by his friends gets near her. Even if he’s wary he can’t hide his being rather curious about it.
In the same way as she has previously done, she stops smiling and after getting face to face with the boy she intensely looks him in the face. She ends by making a slow, lithe movement and finally resting her hand upon his head; it happens as if she were fulfilling a rite somehow...
The boy repeats her gestures. Now she lays her hand on his right shoulder... Her look is cunning and lustful. Slowly on his left shoulder... on his side...
A terror yell breaks out from all of us. The music dies out in a breathless note... The lights are swingling.
More cries and noise of footsteps running away. I am hurled to the ground and I can’t just tell how long I have remained like that in the dark.
When I rise on my feet again, I go blindly on because it’s pitch dark all around me. Now there’s but unbroken silence and only the faraway chorus of crickets can be heard. I try many a direction but am unable to get to the wall and it’s impossible to get out of the place.
In the fumes of dawn the countryside stretches unreal before me. The ground is soaking wet and my clothes are all muddy.
Nobody is any longer there, not even the carousel. On the trodden grass only a few sooty tracks of a burning are still visible.
1983
There is a narrow, sloping gravel-road, hidden by bloody dock bushes, forking from the main carriage-way leading to Anfin.
When I saw it for the first time, I didn’t just seem to be unfamiliar with it, as if I had gone along it during my previous lives.
In the evenings of the ending summer the sun is setting in a blood lake. In the farm-yards people are throwing up the maze with shovels to have it separated from chaff. Quick whirlwinds in the fields are carrying stubbles upwards.
Then the wind suddenly calms down. The sun opens its coffer of lights and casts its beams all over. Heavy, dark red curtains and hair-shaped clouds are stretching in the sky.
A flock of sheep and goats are moving accompanied by their jingling neckband bells. A shepard is leading the way, a very old, tall and bearded man who drags himself along by leaning on a stick.
"Good evening. Where does this road lead to?" I ask.
Without saying a word he points at a rusty sign with his stick : "Vignalon Place".
Little clouds of dust are wind-raised along the narrow meandering road lined by ditches. Here the country becomes so boundless that it overwhelms me in this beguiling evening. I go down the little road but at once regret having done it, though only for a short time.
There is the country again, in the immense evening. I arrive at a road-forking and turn at random to the right.
The road becomes so narrow, winding. Now everything is getting gloomy. After climbing a slope I come to a small bridge.
Everything is so strange in this evening. The river bends and meanders before flowing into the dark thick.
Over there, beyond a wide curve, a wet-haired woman is lying on the bank of the river and looking at the flowing stream.
It’s mere illusion, as I realize soon afterwards. It’s a crooked willow and a grave stone driven right into the bank ground. I stop to have a look at it; on the stone covered with lichens I see this hardly readable inscription : Sonya Greeder born 1844 - dead 1863.
I turn back and look at the brick bridge, at the poplar-grove. I continue to walk...
The road gets narrower and becomes a pathway.
The first houses that come in sight are big farms with no sign of life. Desolate farm-yards.
Noises and creakings make me turn suddenly. A bucket is rolling on an old brick threshing-floor.
Then the willow-trees begin. Or better they get thick with their torn open, decrepit trunks narrowing the path even more.
I meet with a gipsy carrying a violin and go past him without looking at him.
I see a congregation of witches wearing big, cone-shaped hats, who are gathered together in the open country. They sing, put spells, or raise their skirts to urinate at the willows.
The witches repeatedly intone their monotonous sing-song soon becoming a loud chorus, the very last words of which I unfailingly can’t grasp all the times : "For him who pours the slops out -- -- Ah Ah Ah. For him who sips the slops -- -- Ah Ah Ah".
A girl dressed in white is walking alone along the path. She’s beautiful and thin.
Even though I see her first, I seem to have already known her, indeed to have known her for a lifetime and to be threatened by an odd fate.
At that moment the witches burst out laughing all together and then resume singing.
The girl has emerald green eyes shedding an intense light. Her lips are thick, sensual and very red.
"What is your name?" I ask as I am drawing near her.
The girl gives a start and whispers some sweet-smelling words I can’t just grasp.
Now there’s a mist of light, a golden, green, crystal-like limpidity which illuminates the things with the whiteness of powder.
The witches have stopped singing. Now there’s but a profound silence all around us.
I remember I have something important to tell the girl, a very important thing, but what?
"In azure eyes there’s the sky..." I’m mumbling lost in reverie, "but in green eyes there’s the sea..."
She takes me by the hand and draws me towards a house.
There are giant nettles in an ugly court-yard. Some bats are coming out of a window of the house up there and long slanting cobwebs are sticking to the door.
The witches resume intoning their sing-song.
The first kiss is a descent to emptiness, a feeling of void... Never as in love, I suppose, is a man so close to death.
The witches are singing with the accompaniment of an out-of tune violin, their goal is perhaps to interweave a destiny; the darkness, her warmth and then the night.
1983
Copyright by Bissoli Sergio