on our land before us. They weren’t Christians like us. They had their own gods, customs and traditions, and they carved them on their tombstones, which not long ago the river disgorged. An entire graveyard opened up right here among our houses, yawning graves filled with grey bones in our kitchen gardens and fields, and we had no idea whose bones they were or what all those symbols and images could mean that were chiselled into the stone – oh, they must have lived very well, lacking nothing, to make such tombstones. But what about us? How can we sleep peacefully and be fruitful and multiply on top of an ancient graveyard, which is probably haunted, too? Because there are no crosses on these graves. One of the stones has strange spirals carved on it, while others have weird horses with long fishtails, and fish, too, which maybe are not really fish but dolphins, as we were told by some merchants from Trieste who have been living in our province – they used to watch them through the window, in the Gulf of Trieste, leaping in unison out of the water, and their faces were so adorable, like some sort of merfolk.
‘So,’ the populace asks themselves, ‘are these the same mermaids that galley slaves talk about, who show themselves to sailors, sing to them and drive them wild with their firm breasts when they lift themselves above the surface of the water, although from the waist down they’re no different from cold, scaly fish?’
‘No, no, no,’ the Triestine merchants reply. ‘Dolphins are wonderful, good creatures, who often circle around castaways and swim with them all the way to land. They are such incredibly magical animals that the ancient peoples would depict them on tombstones as guides who lead the departed to the realms on the other side, along with hippocamps – those horses with the fishtails.’
Such things are terribly confusing for us. We’ve been here forever, well, almost forever, and as natives we enjoy certain rights that foreigners don’t have. But then the river floods or a ploughman digs too deep and the ploughshare gets bent when it strikes a stone, which turns out to be a tombstone from some past people we know nothing about except what the Triestine merchants tell us.
So would it be a good idea, we ask ourselves, if we collected all those bones scattered in our gardens and washed and buried them? And, if so, then where and how? Since they weren’t Christians, we can’t bury them in our churchyard, and to bury them just anywhere doesn’t seem right. Because maybe these graves are from before Jesus was born. And we’re not sure if Jesus, by dying and rising again from the dead, saved people who lived before him or if people who follow a different religion also go to heaven after they die. We’re terrified that these disinterred dead people will start haunting us out of anger, that they’ll wreck our barns and ruin the crops in our fields and kitchen gardens, that they’ll infect us with ancient diseases which lingered on after they died, and that they’ll turn up in our bedrooms and come out of our bureaus and chests and grab us with their skeleton arms.
‘But the world didn’t begin with you, or with Jesus, or even with the people who came before you. The world has been around – oh my goodness! – a long, long time. It says that right in the Bible,’ the Triestine merchants tell us.
‘Oh, really?’ We look at them and remember that they are
foreigners, and odd ones at that. ‘You should be careful, you Triestine merchants. How do you know so much about these old tombstones? We find that rather suspicious.’
‘We have lots of these stones on the coast, as many as you could want – stones from the pagan Romans,’ they reply.
‘What do you mean, pagan Romans? Rome is where the pope lives!’
‘Well, there wasn’t always a pope in Rome. And there was Rome before there was a pope; it’s where the pagan Romans lived, and they only gradually became Christians, sometimes by force.’
And then we look at the stones and at the bones scattered around. We look at the old walls, and the strange spirals and circles, and the old ironwork, spears and jewellery – which our women would gladly wear around their necks if they weren’t afraid it might hold some ancient spell. And it’s all terribly frightening and makes us sad, too. Because what if something horrible did happen to us, and our entire village suddenly disappeared? What would be left of us? Our houses, which are mostly wood, would sooner or later rot away, same as us, and that goes for our crosses, too, since we don’t have money for
chiselled tombstones that last forever. Everything we have, even our own life, is temporary and fragile. So will the people who come after us, those foreigners, be as confused as we are? Will they wonder what they should do with our bones if, by chance, the river disgorges them? ‘Who were these people?’ they’ll ask. ‘What were they like?’ Sure, we’ll be up in heaven with the blessed, but what about our bones? Nobody will know anything about our customs or how we lived.
‘And, more to the point, what about you, Triestine merchants? Where do you bury your dead? That time when one of your sons unexpectedly died, you didn’t bury him in the village churchyard or even a little further away by the prayer hall. Instead, very quickly, the day after he died, you took him over there, to the remains of those other graves, where nobody has buried their dead for decades – that graveyard without crosses, where nobody ever brought flowers either; all they did in the old days was put little stones on the graves.’
‘We mean you no harm,’ the Triestine merchants tell us. ‘We’ve even reduced our interest rates for you – it’s disgraceful how low we made them. And with the edicts on trade routes for wine and other goods, you wouldn’t be able to sell your crops and products to Gorizia and Trieste, let alone farther into Italy, without us. And you couldn’t get goods by other routes, from west or east, or, if you did, they would be a lot more expensive.’
‘That may be true, but we’re warning you all the same: don’t you dare try to confiscate our houses if our business dealings go belly up and we can’t pay our debts on time, and with interest. Don’t even think about it, you … merchants, whoever you are and wherever you’re from.’
But that’s not all that nags and gnaws at us. We’re also very worried about the lack of order in our community. We’re worried about women who first turn wanton and then try to conceal their expectant condition from everyone else, even from their own husbands, their lords and masters. If they’re not able to beforehand, then right after the birth they do away with the child in secret. An honest man has no idea what women are capable of doing. Supposedly, in the olden days in our country, if it seemed like a family couldn’t feed another child or if a child was born weak and sickly, they’d get rid of it. But such times are long past. We don’t put an end to newborns; much less do we let the women who bring them into the world make decisions about the child’s life. And they’re not alone in their secretive doings. It’s well known that midwives have ways of making sure the birth never takes place. What things don’t you find in their cupboards? All sorts of potions and creams and different implements, which they use to prevent the child from happening. Of course, we never summon the physician when a woman is giving birth – we can’t afford him – or even the barber, who is a man and knows more about straightening bones than delivering babies. And some young married women, despite their strong and healthy appearance, are simply not able to bring a baby into the world, no matter how much everyone wants it. In such cases, it’s good to make sure there isn’t some midwife involved whose little tricks are helping the woman deny offspring to her husband, the man with whom she is obliged to lie down in bed and do, or let be done, what is expected of a wife.
So a wife still in her youth might wait patiently for her husband to slip on the ice one winter’s day and crack his head, which then becomes hopelessly inflamed, or for some illness to come and claim his life while leaving hers untouched, or for mushrooms to start sprouting one August day, the kind of mushrooms you have to know how to recognize, how to pick, prepare and serve them, all without forgetting which plate is whose.
This last possibility, the populace speculated, is what most likely befell the miller. Not only was the widow left with a small bit of land and the mill, but, in addition to the mill hands and maidservants, she began employing young men who at home had never displayed any joy in work but now, on her property, picked up their tools with such zeal that the very sight of it was suspicious. They never complained about the weather and