Invictus. Cristiano Parafioriti

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СКАЧАТЬ not interested in her and, until that evening at the trough, I wasn’t interested in you either. Then, I don’t know, since your words that time you are in my head. I’m not good with words, you know, but that’s how I feel, and you can’t imagine how much I prayed that I wasn’t wrong today when you said that thing about the dirty shirt to your father and the trough.

      Rosa, who had been rinsing and rinsing the clothes all the time, stopped for a moment, looked around, and, realising that they were alone, hugged Ture, who seemed taken aback by this gesture. She kissed him on the cheek.

      An almost embarrassing smile formed on his lips, but he didn’t even have time to wrap his arms around her when she was already back on the washing line.

      Ture thought back to the story of the little dove and his sister’s words – A little dove, if you try to catch it, flies away!

      “My father loves you,” Rosa resumed. “You know, he has never believed what they say... I mean, in the story that you dodged from the war. He says that Zi Peppe Pileri did well and that he would have done the same thing for his son!

      Ture did not want to change the subject and, focusing back up, asked: “Are you going to tell Lia?”

      “I do not feel like it yet. Moreover, it’s too soon.”

      “Are we engaged then?” Ture asked, lowering his gaze.

      Rosa smiled. She was only sixteen, but she seemed much wiser than her cousin in matters of the heart. So she answered him with gentle eyes: “How naive you are, Ture Pileri! Tell me, are you always good at imitating the call of the doves?”

      Her cousin smiled. Rosa’s last question had relieved him of his embarrassment. He put his hands over his mouth and began to imitate the cry of the birds.

      It was time to go home, so Rosa put the wet clothes in the basket while Ture emptied and filled the pitcher for the last time and offered to accompany her to the first houses of San Basilio.

      There they said goodbye, and after he had kissed her on the cheek, his hand lingered on her face. He followed Rosa with his eyes until he saw her disappear down the street, then walked home.

      He returned to San Giorgio very excited, tempted whether or not to tell Concetta. He took off his boots and went inside. As soon as he closed the door behind him, however, he felt a strange tension. Everything was eerily quiet.

      Concetta hugged him, almost knocking the breath out of him.

      “What’s happened?” Ture asked, puzzled.

      “My son,” his mother answered, “they say a postcard has arrived for you in the village.”

      “Postcard? What postcard?”

      His mother, drawing all the strength she could from her heart, said: “The war, Ture. They called you to go to war!”

V

      Ture skipped dinner, dismissed his family with a brief wave of his hand, and had Concetta bring him a basin of cool water to wash his face.

      He was about to stand again when he saw that, in the meantime, he had been surrounded by Santo, Betta, Nino, and Calogero, his younger siblings, who tried to comfort him with their candid innocence.

      Ture dried his face, moved the basin of water aside, and held Calogero, who was not yet three years old, in his arms. He kissed him on the neck as he always did and then knelt and hugged the other three, trying to hide the tears that welled up in his heart.

      Concetta and Sina, his other two sisters who were already girls, made up the bed for him, so their brother, leaving the little ones, spread his arms and held them close to him. Then he got ready for bed.

      Hardly a half-hour passed before his mother joined him. Ture couldn’t sleep while his other brothers in the room had already fallen asleep, so the woman, under the light of a small candle, quietly approached her son’s bed and, in a quiet voice, tried to reassure him.

      “Your father says he will find a solution,” Nunzia said.

      “My dear mother, I want to be honest, when I did the medical examination in Tortorici, I felt in my soul that my time had not come. I don’t know why I had this feeling. It wasn’t only the fact that my father had found me the recommendation to be exempted. I was calm. I thought, If war is in my destiny when it comes, it comes. Then my time had not come, but now, I know that I must leave. I felt it somehow, but not right now, when…” Ture cleared his throat. As vulnerable as he was at that moment, he didn’t want to reveal to his mother what had happened only a few hours before with Rosa. Rosa! Those moments of happiness seemed so far away! Within that one day, things that would happen in a lifetime had happened.

      How could he tell her now? He was already struggling with words. How to look her in the face and say, “My beloved, I must go to war”?

      He thought about all these things, losing himself in his mother’s sad eyes. Then he caressed her gently.

      “It will be as God wishes, mother. Please, don’t worry!”

      A tear ran down the woman’s cheeks. She kissed her son on the forehead and let him rest for the night.

      When the dim light of the candle left the room with his mother, Ture felt the weight of the world on him.

      So much for ‘Gnura Mena!

      All the jinx of the world had hit him now that his heart had finally known love. Now that he had a reason to get out of bed every morning. Now that the future was beginning to look less bleak.

      The war, like a blow between his head and neck, threw him back into distress, numb. He would lose so much love! His little brothers, his parents, and Rosa.

      Would she, in the bloom of her youth, so beautiful and graceful, have waited for him? And for how long? In the end, it had only been a kiss on the cheek. Two words exchanged on an afternoon at the trough. It might have been just a fleeting moment and nothing more. How real could the love of a sixteen-year-old girl be? Although she told him she had had him in her heart for more than a year. But would she be willing to wait for him for who knows how much longer, staying away from so many other young men who would court her?

      These doubts gripped him. He felt that the fear of losing Rosa was heavier than his own life.

      He sensed his brothers’ quiet sleep floating in the dark, envied their age and blissful innocence.

      He loved them so much that the thought that he would also go to war to ensure their peaceful future comforted him.

      That night, Ture Pileri felt “atonement”: the recommendation, the nasty rumours of the other villagers, the jinx, the rejection given to Lia. Everything would be alright if he went off to war. The evil tongues would have been hushed up, the jinx would have been fulfilled, and even Lia would have breathed a sigh of relief for not having compromised herself with a soldier whose fate was completely uncertain.

      But that didn’t seem to work out well because a family would lose, perhaps forever, the love and the arms of a son. Then a young lover would be left, frozen like a rosebud after a night frost.

      There was no consolation in Ture’s soul, only the extreme desire to carry all these burdens upon СКАЧАТЬ