Marcovaldo or The Seasons in the City

SUMMER
10. A journey with the cows

The city noises that on summer nights come through the open windows into the rooms of those who are made sleepless by the heat, the true noises of the night-time city, are audible at a certain hour, when the anonymous din of motors dies away and is silent, and from the silence, discreet, distinct, graduated according to the distance, emerge the step of a noctambulant, the rustle of a night watchman's bike, a remote muddled brawl, and a snoring from the upper floors, the groan of a sick man, the continued striking of an old clock every hour. Until, at dawn, the orchestra of alarm clocks in the working-class houses tunes up, and a tram goes by on its tracks.

And so, one night, between his wife and the children all sweating in their sleep, Marcovaldo lay with his eyes closed, to listen to as much of this powdering of frail sounds as filtered from the pavement down through the low windows into his half-basement. He heard the swift, cheerful heel of a woman who was late, the patched sole of the man who stopped irregularly to collect cigarette butts, the whistle of someone who felt alone, and every now and then a broken clash of words in a dialog between friends, enough to suggest they were talking about sports or money. But in the hot night those sounds lost all relief, they dissolved as if dampened by the sultry heat that crammed the void of the streets, and yet they seemed to want to impose themselves, to assert their dominion over that uninhabited realm. In every human presence Marcovaldo recognized sadly a brother, stuck like him, even in vacation time, to that oven of cooked and dusty cement, by debts, by the burden of the family, by the meagerness of his wages.

And as if the impossible thought of vacation had suddenly opened the gates of a dream to him, he seemed to hear a distant clank of bells, and a dog's bark, and also a brief lowing. But his eyes were open, he wasn't dreaming: and, pricking up his ears, he sought to regain a grip on those vague impressions, or a denial of them; and he actually did hear a sound as of hundreds and hundreds of steps, slow, scattered, hollow, which came closer and drowned out all other sounds, except, indeed, that rusty clanking.

Marcovaldo got up, slipped on his shirt and trousers.

"Where are you going?" asked his wife, who slept with one eye open.

"There's a herd of cattle passing in the street. I'm going to see it."

"Me, too! Me, too!" cried the children, who knew how to wake up at the right moment.

It was the sort of herd that used to cross the city at night, in early summer, going towards the mountains for the alpine pasture. Climbing into the street with their eyes still half-closed in sleep, the children saw the stream of dun or piebald withers which invaded the sidewalk, brushed against the walls covered with bills, the lowered shutters, the stakes of no-parking signs, the gasoline pumps. Cautiously extending their hoofs from the step at the intersections, their muzzles never betraying a jolt of curiosity, pressed against the loins of those ahead of them, the cows brought with them the odor of dung, wild flowers, milk and the languid sound of their bells, and the city seemed not to touch them, already absorbed as they were into their world of damp meadows, mountain mists and the fords of streams.

Impatient, on the contrary, as if made nervous by the looming city, the cowherds wore themselves out in brief, futile dashes along the side of the line, raising their sticks and bursting out in broken, guttural cries. The dogs, to whom nothing human is alien, made a display of nonchalance, proceeding with noses erect, little bells tinkling, intent on their job; but clearly they too were uneasy and restless, otherwise they would have allowed themselves to be distracted and would have begun sniffing corners, lamp posts, stains on the pavement, as is every city dog's first thought.

"Papà," the children said. "Are cows like trams? Do they have stops? Where's the beginning of the cows' line?"

"There's no connection between them and trams," Marcovaldo explained. "They're going to the mountains."

"Can they wear skis?" Pietruccio asked.

"They're going to pasture, to eat grass."

"Don't they get fined if they trample the lawns?"

The only one not asking questions was Michelino, who, older than the others, already had his own ideas about cows, and was now intent simply on checking them, observing the mild horns, the withers, and variegated coats. And so he followed the herd, trotting along at its side like the sheep dogs.

When the last group had passed, Marcovaldo took the children's hands to go back to sleep, but he couldn't see Michelino. He went down into the room and asked his wife: "Has Michelino already come home?"

"Michelino? Wasn't he with you?"

"He started following the herd, and God only knows where he's got to," Marcovaldo thought, and ran back to the street. The herd had already crossed the square, and Marcovaldo had to look for the street it had turned into. But that night, it seemed, various herds were crossing the city, each along a different street, each heading for its own valley. Marcovaldo tracked down and overtook one herd, then realized it wasn't his; at an intersection he saw, four streets farther on, another herd proceeding along a parallel, and he ran that way; there, the cowherds told him they had met another heading in the opposite direction. And so, until the last sound of a cow-bell had died away in the dawn light, Marcovaldo went on combing the city in vain.

The captain to whom he went to report his son's disappearance said: "Followed a herd of cows? He's probably gone off to the mountains, for a summer holiday, lucky kid. Don't worry: he'll come back all tanned and fattened up."

The captain's opinion was confirmed a few days later by a clerk in the place where Marcovaldo worked who had returned from his first-shift holiday. At a mountain pass he had encountered the boy: he was with the herd, he sent greetings to his father, and he was fine.

In the dusty city heat Marcovaldo kept thinking of his lucky son, who now was surely spending his hours in a fir tree's shade, whistling with a wisp of grass in his mouth, looking down at the cows moving slowly over the meadow, and listening to a murmur of waters in the shadows of the valley.

His Mamma, on the contrary, couldn't wait for him to return: "Will he come back by train? By bus? It's been a week… It's been a month… The weather must be bad…" And she could find no peace, even though having one fewer at table every day was in itself a relief.

"Lucky kid, up in the cool, stuffing himself with butter and cheese," Marcovaldo said, and every time, at the end of the street, there appeared, in a light haze, the jagged white and gray of the mountains, he felt as if he had sunk into a well, in whose light, up at the top, he seemed to see maple and chestnut fronds glinting, and to hear wild bees buzzing, and Michelino up there, lazy and happy, amid milk and honey and blackberry thickets.

But he too was expecting his son's return evening after evening, though, unlike the boy's mother, he wasn't thinking of the schedules of trains and buses: he was listening at night to the footsteps on the street as if the little window of the room were the mouth of a seashell, re-echoing, when you put your ear to it, the sounds of the mountain.

One night he sat abruptly up in bed: it wasn't an illusion; he heard approaching on the cobbles that unmistakable trample of cloven hoofs, mixed with the tinkling of bells.

They ran to the street, he and the whole family. The herd was returning, slow and grave. And in the midst of the herd, astride a cow's back, his hands clutching its collar, his head bobbing at every step, was Michelino, half asleep.

They lifted him down, a dead weight; they hugged and kissed him. He was dazed.

"How are you? Was it beautiful?"

"Oh… yes…"

"Were you homesick?"

"Yes…"

"Is it beautiful in the mountains?"

He was standing, facing them, his brows knit, his gaze hard.

"I worked like a mule," he said, and spat on the ground. He now had a man's face. "Carrying the buckets to the milkers every evening, from one cow to the next, and then emptying them into the cans, in a hurry, always in a worse hurry, until late. And then early in the morning, rolling the cans down to the trucks that take them to the city. And counting… always counting: the cows, the cans, and if you made a mistake there was trouble…"

"But weren't you in the meadows? When the cows were grazing?"

"There was never enough time. Always something to be done. The milk, the bedding, the dung. And all for what? With the excuse that I didn't have a work-contract, what did they pay me? Practically nothing. But if you think I'm going to hand it over to you now, you're wrong. Come on, let's go to sleep; I'm dead tired."

He shrugged, blew his nose, and went into the house. The herd was still moving away along the street, carrying with it the lying, languid odor of hay and the sound of bells.