It’s a strange conflict – one around which everyday life keeps moving like a river around rocks. It has to, because the men must eat, and to eat they must work. So life must go on, even when the rocks in question are things like the massacre at Masseria Girardi Natale, the summer before, when workers armed with only their tools and their anger were shot down by the proprietor and his mounted guards. Now the contracts all the proprietors signed are being ignored, and men who protest aren’t hired. There are rumours of a new type of brute squad: teams of thugs led by veteran officers – captains and lieutenants tainted by the madness of the trenches, who remember the peasants’ reluctance to fight, and despise them for it. The peasants are used to hired gangs – mazzieri, named after the mazza, the cudgels they carry – but these new ones are something else. They are being armed and abetted by the police, unofficially of course. And they have a new name – they are the fasci di combattimento. They are members of the new fascist party. And they have a single-mindedness that’s scaring the men.
Some nights Ettore goes to a bar and reads the newspapers out loud to the unlettered. He reads from the Corriere delle Puglie, and from La Conquista, and from Avanti!. He reads of attacks on syndicalist leaders, on chambers of labour, and on socialist town halls in other towns. In Gioia del Colle, the old way of recruiting has slowly crept back into the piazza, and the two sides stare at one another across this bitter divide – workers and employers. Each waiting to see who will blink first. In February there was a general strike in protest at the massing and arming of the new squads, and their brutality, and the breaking of the contracts. The strike held for three days but it was like a finger pressed to a widening crack in a dam; a dam behind which the tide is rising inexorably.
Ettore and Valerio push their way towards the overseer from Masseria Vallarta; a man well into his sixties with drooping white moustaches and an immobile expression, as solid and unreadable as the trunk of a tree. Pino is already there; he catches Ettore’s eye and jerks his chin to greet him. Giuseppe Bianco; Giuseppino; Pino for short. Pino and Ettore have lived shoulder to shoulder since they were in the cradle. They are the same age, have seen the same things, suffered the same hopes and hardships; they’ve had the same patchy, soon-curtailed education, and had wild times at Saint’s Day festivals more pagan than holy. They’ve been to war together. Pino has the face of a classical hero, with enormous soft eyes, warm and brown rather than the usual black. He has curved lips, the upper protruding slightly over the lower; curling hair and an open expression far out of place in the piazza. His heart is open too; he’s too good for this life. There’s only one thing the two men do not share, and it’s driven a wedge between them this year: Pino is married to his sweetheart, but Ettore has lost his. All the girls used to quarrel to catch Pino’s eye. They knew a soft touch when they saw one, and fancied waking up next to that face for the rest of their lives. Now that he’s wed some of them try just as hard, but Pino is faithful to Luna, his wife. Little Luna, with her buoyant breasts and her hair hanging right down to the broad spread of her buttocks. Pino is the only man Ettore knows who can find a real smile before dawn in the piazza.
He smiles now, and thumps Ettore’s upper arm companionably.
‘What’s new?’ he says.
‘Nothing at all.’ Ettore shrugs.
‘Luna has something for the baby. For Iacopo,’ says Pino, and looks proud. ‘She’s been sewing again – a shirt. She’s even stitched his initials into it for him.’ Luna works in fits and starts for a seamstress, and carefully collects whatever scraps of thread and fabric she can spirit away. There’s never enough to make clothes for adults, but Iacopo now has a vest, a hat and a pair of tiny slippers.
‘She should be setting such things by for when you have your own baby,’ says Ettore, and Pino grins. He longs for babies – a herd of them, a flock. How or whether they’ll all be fed is not something he lets worry him. He seems to think they’ll be self-sustaining, like hearth spirits or will-o’-the-wisps, like putti.
‘Iacopo will have outgrown them by then. I’m sure Paola will lend them back.’
‘Don’t be so sure.’
‘You mean she’ll want to keep them, to remember how little he was?’ says Pino. Ettore grunts. What he’d meant was that he’s not so certain Iacopo will outgrow the little things so soon. His nephew is reedy and too quiet. So many babies die. Ettore frets about him, frowns over him. Whenever Paola sees this she shoves him away, and curses. She thinks his anxiety will coalesce and bring some grim prophecy down on her son.
The man from Masseria Vallarta takes a sheaf of paper from his pocket, unfolds it. The waiting men focus their attention on him, watching with steady expectation. It’s a strange ritual – the farm has a harvest to bring in and the men all know it, but even so, they do not trust the man. They do not trust that they will have work until they are standing in the field, working. They do not trust that they will be paid until the bailiff puts the coins into their hands the Saturday after. The overseer catches Ettore’s eye and gives him a hard stare. Ettore stares right back at him. He is a union man, and the overseer knows it; knows his name, and his face. Some have led the strikes and the demonstrations while the others followed, and Ettore is one of the first kind. Or he was – in the six months since he lost Livia he’s done nothing, said nothing; he’s worked with a steady, mindless rhythm, ignoring his hunger and his exhaustion. In all that time, he has spared not a single thought for the revolution, for his brothers, for the starving workers or the ever-present injustices, but the overseers don’t seem to have noticed his change of heart. The absence of his heart.
So there’s a black mark by his name that nothing will shift, but he also works without pause, and attacks the ground with the heaviest mattock; he presents them with a conundrum: a troublemaker who works like a Trojan. The corporal with the white moustaches hires him with the merest nod of his head, marking down his name. Then he flicks his gnarled finger at the others he’s chosen, including Pino, and those men file away to begin the long walk to the farm. Valerio is not chosen. Years of wielding the mattock have shaped his spine, bending him like an overblown tree, and though he’s tried not to cough since they got to the piazza, you can see the effort of containing the spasms in the way his body clenches and shakes from time to time. He cut about half as much wheat as some of the other men yesterday, and the immovable overseer has an infallible memory for such things. Ettore grips his father’s shoulder in parting.
‘Go now to the shepherd, over there. Go now, before others take his lire,’ he says. Valerio nods.
‘Work hard, boy,’ he says, then gives in to his cough. Ettore doesn’t bother to reply. There is no other kind of work, after all.
The sun is rising in a gentle riot of colour by the time they reach the farm. Pino turns his face to it for a minute, shuts his eyes and takes a deep breath, as though, like a plant, the sun will give him the energy to work that day. When the sky is alight like this Ettore thinks of Livia, shielding her black eyes with one hand. When it rains, he thinks of Livia squinting up at the clouds, and smiling as the water hits her skin. When it gets dark he thinks of the times they met beneath the arches of Gioia’s oldest streets, when they would know each other by touch and smell alone, and she would take his questing hand and kiss his fingertips, and send thumps of desire straight to his groin. He knows that his thoughts of her show on his face, and he can tell from Pino’s expression that he sees it – that subtle sinking, a creeping mix of sorrow and frustration; he can see that his oldest friend doesn’t know what to say to him, as long as the moment lasts. They are each given a drink of water and a chunk of bread before work starts. The bread is fresh, which it normally isn’t, and the men tear into it like dogs. The water has the stone grit taste of the cistern. They start work straight afterwards, wriggling their fingers into the wooden hand-guards that are meant to protect them, but which the farmers really like because they extend a man’s grasp, and mean he can gather a bigger sheaf of wheat each time. One man wields the scythe – the taller, stronger ones, with the longest reach – and behind him comes another man, tying the cut stalks into sheaves.