For hours there’s nothing but the swing of blades, the crunch of the cut stalks as they fall and are gathered up. High above their heads black kites ride the hot air, circling; curious about the smell and movement of the working men. From a distance it looks as though the harvest will be good: field after field of golden grain, rolling in the scorching altina wind from the south. But up close the men see that the stalks are sparser than they should be, shorter, with too few grains on each ear and too much space between them. The yield will be less than hoped for, and their wages to match. At midday the sun is debilitating; it crushes the men, it weighs them down like chains. The corporal’s horses wilt, hanging their heads and letting their eyelids droop, too fagged to even shake the flies away. The overseer calls a halt and the men rest and have another drink of water, just enough to wet their parched throats. As soon as their shadows have crept two hand spans to one side the overseer checks his watch, rouses them, and work continues.
Pino and Ettore pass each other, working within earshot for a short while as their lines coincide.
‘Luna is trying to buy beans today,’ says Pino, conversationally.
‘I wish her luck. I hope the grocer doesn’t rob her.’
‘She’s smart, my Luna. I think she will get some, and then we’ll have a fine dinner.’ Pino does this a lot – talks about food. Fantasises about food. It seems to help him beat his hunger, but it does the opposite to Ettore, whose stomach writhes and mutters at the thought of fava beans boiled with bay leaves, and maybe some garlic and pepper, and mashed up with strong olive oil. He swallows.
‘Don’t talk about food, Pino,’ he pleads.
‘Sorry, Ettore. I can’t help it. That’s all I dream about: food, and Luna.’
‘Then dream quietly, for fuck’s sake,’ says the man working behind Ettore.
‘I don’t mind if he talks about his wife as long as he doesn’t spare us the details.’ This is from a lad no more than fourteen, who grins lopsidedly at Pino.
‘If I catch you dreaming about my wife, I’ll cut your prick off,’ Pino tells him, angling his scythe towards the boy, lifting its wicked tip; but he isn’t serious, and the boy grins wider, showing them his broken front teeth.
The altina picks up, smelling of some distant desert, humming over the grey stone walls of the field and through the leathery leaves of a fig tree in one corner. The ground is dust-dry, the wheat parched, the sky mercilessly clear. The men lick their lips but can’t keep them from cracking. Flies buzz brazenly around their heads and necks, biting, knowing that the men won’t spare the effort to swat them away. Ettore works and tries not to think. He comes across a patch of wild rocket leaves, bitter and mean. He picks all he can find and eats them when nobody is looking, feeling his throat clog with saliva and the hot taste of them. The guards are extra vigilant at this end of the day – eyes sharp for signs of the men slowing down, of surreptitious rests being taken, of the scythe being leant upon, not swung. The man gathering the wheat Ettore cuts has dropped far behind – he keeps straightening up, pressing his fingers into his spine and wincing. The overseer has a long leather whip, coiled at his hip. His hand strays to it, time and again, as though he’d love to use it. Ettore’s stomach clenches even tighter after the snack of rocket leaves; his head starts to feel light, strange, as it often does towards day’s end. His body keeps working, regardless; shoulders swinging the weight of the scythe, back muscles tensing to stop its momentum, twisting him from the waist, hands gripped tight. He can feel every tendon as it rubs over bone, but his thoughts drift away from him, away from the heat and the toil and the suffocating wind.
He has heard about a hole in the ground at a town called Castellana, twenty-five kilometres from Gioia, towards the sea. This hole in the ground is wide and nothing that goes into it ever comes out, except bats – streaming millions of bats, like smoke. Sometimes it belches up shreds of a chilly white mist, which are said to be the ghosts of people who have gone too near and fallen in. It is the mouth of hell, the locals say; it plummets right down into the core of the earth, into a blackness so heavy it would crush you. Ettore thinks about this hole as his body keeps going, and his back burns like there’s a knife stuck in it, and his guts cramp from the leaves he ate. He thinks about jumping into it and falling through white mist and then cool, clammy darkness; he thinks about curling up in the ancient black depths, in the world’s stony heart where no man belongs, and waiting there. Not waiting for anything, just waiting; where it is cold and still and silent.
He’s suddenly aware that his name has been spoken. Ettore blinks and sees Pino off to one side, his face wide with concern. He realises that his scythe is still, that he has straightened up and let it come to rest on his boot. He can’t seem to make his hands tighten on the shaft. Behind Pino, he sees two guards exchange a word and a nod, sees them kick their sluggish horses to life and set out towards him. He can’t seem to make his thoughts come back from that hole in the ground and his sudden yearning for it. With all the will he can find, he grips the scythe and lifts it, turning his body to the right, angling the tip of the blade to catch the right number of wheat stalks. But he is too far from the edge of the crop, and the weight of it throws him off balance. His body uncoils, the way it must. It has moved this way thousands of times, on thousands of days; he can no more stop it than he can stop his heart beating. But he will fall if he doesn’t correct his stance, and though falling would be better than the alternative, he has no choice in this either. His body drives itself, is its own master; it keeps its own counsel, as he has trained it to do. Ettore teeters, and lurches forwards. His left leg lands in the path of the scythe as it swings, and he can do nothing to stop what will happen, though he sees it clearly enough. The metal bites easily, cleanly. He feels it hit the bone and lodge there. Pino shouts, and so does the man behind him. A bright spray of blood splatters the wheat stalks, looking too glossy and red to be real, and then Ettore falls.
Chapter Five – Clare
Gioia del Colle is quiet. Low sunlight pools in the street corners, reflecting from smooth stone slabs and streaked walls. Though they pass along avenues of elegant villas, four storeys high, with painted render and symmetrical shuttered windows, the road is crusted with manure – the fresh and fly-struck scattered over the old and dry. There are women out walking with huge urns or baskets on their heads and shoulders, but they do not speak. The only car is the one they’re riding in; it creeps along slowly behind a dray cart loaded with barrels. Clare sees almost no men, and when she points this out to Boyd, he shrugs.
‘They’re all out working on the harvest, darling,’ he says.
‘So early in the year?’ she says, but then remembers all the teams she saw from the train, their scythes moving with the steady rhythm of metronomes. She opens her mouth to say something about the lack of tractors, or harvesting machines, but shuts it again. The south is poor, she has been told. Everywhere is poor after the war, but the south was poor to begin with. They have gone from destitute to something less than that.