Excerpt from Macaco

by Simone Torino

translated from the Italian by Antonella Lettieri

1.

Nice Carrots

I first met Banana and Tomb at the bar. I had an appointment with The Magnificent. When I got there, two blokes were drinking at the bar. They looked at me.

“You’re The Magnificent’s new guy,” said one of them.

“The Magnificent?”

I still didn’t know they called him that.

“Ever used a hoe before?”

“Yes.”

“Hands.”

I showed them my hands.

“Gloves?”

“Got ’em.”

He introduced himself, “I’m Banana. He’s Tomb.”

He explained where he lived and told me I should see his vegetable patch sometime.

A nod, and then they left.

Went back home, did some laundry, hung it, and then off to Banana’s place. He was already in the vegetable patch, a big rectangle inside a fence. He let me in.

As we traipsed about, he explained this and that, when to sow, how to weed. Wanting to be a know-it-all, I pointed at some fluffy green bunches.

“Nice carrots!” I said.

He looked at me. “It’s parsley.”

I shoved my hands in my pockets.

2.

Names

I’ve always turned over the soil with a spade or a hoe. By hand. I’m against tractors. And rotavators. Tractors crush the soil. Rotavators whisk it up. Spades and hoes, they don’t do that. The soil breathes, free.

Truth is, a spade is not a spade. Spades don’t exist, as such.

There’s a stick. A piece of metal. Some nails. The metal comes with a hole where the stick goes. You hammer in the nails. You let it soak in water overnight: the wood swells and the metal doesn’t come off.

The spade is wood and metal.

We call it a “spade” because a hoe, too, is wood and metal. And so is a hammer. We name things based on their differences. We name each other too. Out of convenience. Otherwise, people would have to call me, “Hey, you, you forty-something man with dark hair and a beard, of average height, with long arms and crooked legs, walking around as if you’re always going downhill!”

I’d already be gone.

Truth is, your name often isn’t even your name. Macaco isn’t my name, it’s the macaque’s name. But that’s what they call me. “Macaco.” And then I turn around. This is to say that I begin how I begin.

3.

Work

It’s half past six and it’s me, Banana, and Tomb in the bar. It’s a bit chilly outside. My gloves in my pocket, Tomb’s in his. Banana is wearing his. Having breakfast with his gloves on. The cup steams between his fingers, vanishing in his fist. Down it goes, in one gulp – down Banana’s gullet.

“Son of a banana, it burns!”

“Hot?” I ask.

He grimaces through his wheezing, “Very hot. In fact, too very hot, as my late grandfather used to say.”

And he hacks up a long string of phlegm.

“Why do you act like this?” I ask.

He blinks his watery eyes. He laughs. Tomb circles his teaspoon around his cup, waits, and blows.

We are due to go to Vercosa. To sow. We work for a man who’s not from around here. We call him The Magnificent. He’s an old man, a former banker. Never used a hoe in his whole life. Drops everything and decides to start a farm. In the mountains. Potatoes. As far as farmhands go, it’s all off the books, of course.

Off-the-books farmhands: that’s what we are.

We go up.

At every bend, Banana says, “The guardrail!”

Or, “The lamppost, you were this close to the lamppost!”

Or, “Wall, wall, wall!”

My driving is so-so.

Banana’s is better. Not too fast, not too slow. But who’s behind the wheel now? Me. When it comes to bottlenecks – there are two, one in Lillianes, another in Fontainemore – I just go for it. The van is big and can’t go backwards. But there’s always someone coming down at full speed: sees the van coming up but still goes for it. And so, here we are, stuck in between two houses. Millimetres away from their balconies.

In Vercosa, at seven in the morning, you can’t feel your fingers. If you’re cutting and you cut yourself, you don’t feel any pain. You don’t feel the blood. You don’t feel anything. Instead, you notice the streak on the ground. And you look, there’s your finger, open, red. You put it in your mouth and think, “Blood tastes of lampposts.”

A lamppost is rusty, salty, and a bit sweet. It’s a lamppost. Surely, you must have tasted a lamppost as a kid, maybe not the massive ones by the motorway, but at least a normal one – say, the one outside your house. That’s what blood tastes like.

We open the van: jute sacks full of potatoes, rakes, hoes, tubs, plastic crates, a pickaxe, a basket, and the Ibex.

“Son of a banana, the wheelbarrow!” Banana cries out.

“We’ll get it later,” I say.

The sacks weigh fifteen or twenty-five kilos apiece, and each has its label. The label says the type, size, if the seed is certified, and whether it’s been sprayed or not.

Banana scratches himself, grabs a twenty-five-kilo sack in each hand, and sets off. Tomb and I follow with the tools. This morning, focus on your hands: it only takes a moment to cut yourself with Tomb’s knife.

“You cut yourself,” says Banana.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, look.”

In the open sack, the yellow of the potatoes is spotted with red.

Lamppost-flavoured potatoes.

As workers, we’re effective.

Banana is round and swollen, ploughs better than the tractor, has a long hoe, and leaves behind a trail of yesterday’s wine. Tomb is tall and knotty, is a master of hand weeding, has a square hoe, and smells of cologne and cigarettes. I – I don’t know what I smell of, but I look like a pumpkin, squat, wide, with hard bumps. I know my way around the two-pronged pickaxe, that tool that looks like the horns of an ibex. Hence, Ibex.

“Holy bananas!”

With the tools and the sacks finally there, Banana slaps his arms. His jacket puffs out a cloud of soil. Tomb pulls out a hip flask, takes a drink from it, and then passes it around.

Genepy. At half past seven in the morning.

“Want some?” Banana asks.

“Okay,” I say.

The Vercosa field is a sodden slope. The soil won’t dry. Rocks, as if it were a quarry.

“Why is it still wet, with all these rocks? There’s not been a single cloud in the sky for two weeks,” I say.

You can see the lines from the rotary tiller. Before sowing, you need to soften the soil. The Magnificent has it all done by machine: ploughing, tilling, furrowing. All you have to do by hand is put the potato in and cover it.

But here in Vercosa, the field is steep and the tractor struggles.

“Did it go in deep enough?”

We look at Tomb, who was there when it was done. He shrugs, shakes his head, shows four fingers. Four fingers is nothing. But it’s not the tractor driver’s fault: it’s full of rocks. If you go in too deep, you wreck the machine.

“Look how much wood there was,” Banana says, then spits.

Before tilling, it was a proper jungle. “Wood” means tough weeds, the woody ones, like pigweed. The trimmer can’t cut through them. Tomb had to pull them out by hand.

One by one.

“But when were you here, Tomb?” I ask.

With a smile, he shows me his head torch and again raises four fingers.

There’s no light before five, so you need the torch. He came here at dawn, pulled the weeds, and helped the tiller. Then he came to the storehouse to give us a hand.

Tomb goes to sit down to prepare the seed. That is, he takes the potatoes out of the sacks, groups them by kind, and prepares the crates. Which is kind of like resting.

A well-deserved rest.

We lay the string, I on one side, Banana on the other.

“Who prepared this string, did you do it?” Banana asks, driving a stake into the ground at the edge of the field.

I drive in another at the other end. We lay the string. A couple of pipes have been attached to the sides of the main bit, helping it roll up again beautifully.

“Tomb did it,” I say.

“Just look at it, it’s great. So easy, with these thingies he put in. As neat as a loom,” he says and gives Tomb the thumbs up.

Tomb smiles and empties the last sack into the basket.

Then he puts his cigarette butt in his pocket and nods.

We can start.

4.

Prostates

Before starting work, Banana says, “I got to go.”

And he goes.

It’s not as if Tomb and I are hydrophobic – we also go – but Banana goes like clockwork: he just drops everything and looks for a tree.

“Son of a banana! Holding it in is no good for your prostate.”

So I, too, look for a tree.

I wonder why we go in the trees. Maybe to mark our territory, like animals. But that’s also not true – we often go even if there are no trees, walls, or anything at all: straight onto the tarmac.

All empty: Tomb also went, the string is well taut, and here we are, leaning on our hoes. We look at the field: there’s a problem. If the soil is wet, the tool gets stuck. You strike down with it and, when you lift it back up, it brings a massive clod with it. It’s impossible.

Tomb is smoking and passing around the genepy.

“Is it the Chinese, or the Japanese... No, it’s the Peruvians,” says Banana. “They don’t work with furrows but with holes.”

“What do you mean, holes?” I say.

“They make a hole, put the potato in. At a set distance. Every hole, a potato,” he says, accompanying his words with broad gestures.

Then Banana smiles and I notice that Tomb is gone.

What is there, instead, is the sound of something being hacked. We turn around. Billhook in hand, Tomb is limbing a tree.

“What’s he doing?” I ask.

“What do you think?” Banana says. “He’s making a tool for the holes.”

Tomb has cleared two branches, thick and straight. He measures them up against me and Banana, cuts them, carves out a handle, and attaches a little foothold at the bottom of each. Banana and I try them out, one to the left and the other to the right. As a tool, it’s fairly rough.

I press my boot onto the foothold and push down: it holds together.

“Mine is working. What about yours?”

“Mine too.”

We follow the string putting in a hole every forty centimetres or so. Tomb finishes his cigarette and nods. Then he gets going. He sticks a potato in each hole. Every hole, a potato. He’s fast, but there are two of us making the holes and none of us is waiting around.

It starts to get hot. Further up, the cows are grazing enclosed by the electric fence. You can hear the fountain by the side of the path. Every so often, the wind turns around and carries through a breath of the chicken coop; otherwise, the flowers win the day. It’s nice to have the flowers bossing our noses about.

With the Peruvian method, we make amazing progress. Not even the rocks bother us.

“Break,” says Banana.

We eat bread and salami in the meadow, under the birches. Banana looks at the rows and nods.

“If it doesn’t rain, we’ll be done by tomorrow. But it won’t rain. If it rains, I’ll throw around so many bananas that you won’t even believe it.”

Tomb smiles as he rolls a cigarette.

“You get through a fair bit of tobacco, Tomb, don’t you?” I say.

Tomb nods and lights up. The smoke rises, at times straight up, at times it swirls.

“Where did you get this salami?” I ask.

“Got it in Tuscany. It’s good, isn’t it?” Banana says.

“Yes, good.”

“How’s practice?”

“Fine.”

I play basketball for the village team.

“You? The wife?”

Banana shows me the finger with the ring. “Still going.”

Tomb is single so we don’t ask. He likes walking. Better if uphill. Better still if in the woods. He carries full rucksacks up crazy paths and sleeps under trees, on mountaintops, in meadows. Tomb is tall, thin, and made of steel.

Then it’s time for coffee. I go get it, since I’m the youngest.

“Tomb, any genepy left?” Banana asks.

Tomb pulls out his hip flask, shakes it, and puts it away. Then he pulls out another: grappa. With coffee, grappa will also do.

By evening, half the field is done. As we go down in the van with the windows open, the silence of working men envelops us. Vercosa is all steep, and when it’s steep you can really feel the toil.

All of a sudden, Banana says, “Come to mine for dinner.”

At Bar Oropa, for our aperitif, we move around like dummies: one leg, then the other, hold your back, try to loosen that muscle, forget about loosening it. We drink our beers at the bar, standing up. If you sit down, you’ll only need to stand up again.

At Banana’s, we sit down for dinner, our boots undone. The table is covered with a spread of charcuterie and cheese. Crisps, beer, wine. In the middle, a block of lard that must weigh a kilo. And butter in a tub. Romanesco salad. Romanesco is a type of broccoli. It has that pointy shape: if you look carefully, you can see that each point twists in on itself and, all together, they twist around as a whole. A work of art from nature.

And what does he do with this natural, healthy, unsprayed work of art? He cooks it in lard. With a pat of butter this big to boot. And a cascade of salt and oil for good measure. As it cooks, he stirs it now and again, adding more oil. And butter.

“A pinch of salt,” he says from time to time, and in goes a handful of coarse salt.

“Sorry,” I say. “But, with the lard, you’re also putting in oil and butter, too?”

“What? Are you on a diet all of a sudden? I did put in some garlic,” he says.

“For blood pressure,” I say.

At home, I brush my teeth. Ninín is on my shoulders. She sits there, purring, looking in the mirror. I spit in the sink and she looks at it. I sit on the toilet and she gets comfortable around my neck, nuzzling against it. She doesn’t get off even when I go to the sofa. Eventually, she climbs down with her claws and moves forward, settling where my legs make a bowl.

Spotta, instead, is sleeping at the end of the sofa, all stretched out.

I call her, “Spotta.”

Her eyes closed, she yawns. For cats, it’s always Sunday. For me, it’s Saturday, ten to nine. The stove on, I manage to take off my trousers and pull the woollen blanket over myself. Spotta wedges herself between my feet.

“I’ll sleep here,” I say to Ninín, touching her nose.

All black, her pink tongue licks around twice, and then stillness returns.

5.

Crazy Nights

My phone wakes me up. It’s on the windowsill. I let it ring; it stops. Then it starts again. Then it stops. Then again. So I slowly move the cats to one side, get up, and answer it. It’s Macchio, a friend of mine from Ivery.

“Let’s go out!” He says.

I look: nine o’clock.

“It’s nine,” I say.

“Let’s have a crazy night!”

“Is it going to be a late one?”

“Super late!”

“Like how late?”

“Eleven! You weren’t asleep, were you?”

“No, of course not.”

I put on my jumper, sweatpants, shoes, beanie.

I say bye to the cats. I go out.

Macchio is calling me a fool. For going up and down on foot.

“I see people going up and down all the time. Why am I the only fool?” I ask.

“In the daytime! Not at night!” He says.

“No one goes up and down at night. Just me.”

“There you go.”

“You just need to take it slow.”

“But why don’t you take your car?”

“Cars pollute. And mine needs insuring, servicing.”

“Which is it? Insuring or servicing?”

“Both.”

“So you came down on foot.”

“Yes.”

“In the dark.”

“I’ve got my torch.”

It’s not hard. Marine is a tiny village above Pont-Saint-Martin. If you head towards Perloz, you get to Plan de Brun, then Perloz itself, then you go up to Chamioux, and then further up to Marine. When you get to the Partisan Bell, you’re there. There’s even a sign: 824 metres. Population: nine. I know them all. Apart from two, that is.

It’s a good life.

In the bar, we learn that Pete found a job. He tells us about his first day, how it went. They show him around the office. A room meant for cubicles, but with no cubicles. His firm doesn’t believe in them. There is a desk, empty.

“Nothing on it,” he says. “Not even a pen.”

A moustachioed bloke asks him to sit down.

“‘Where?’ I ask. There’s no chair. ‘Take this one,’ he says, and pushes over a half-broken chair from another desk.”

Pete sits down. His boss walks in.

“I’ve been calling you for two hours! Why are you not picking up your phone?” He asks.

Pete looks at his phone.

“I don’t have any missed calls.”

“Not on your mobile, on the landline! The office phone!”

Pete points at the desk, empty.

“You don’t have a phone! I’m going to give them a piece of my mind!”

The boss goes to the other desk and picks up the handset. “The new guy doesn’t have a phone! Time is money!” Then he says to Pete, “They’ll bring you a phone right away. I’ll be in the other room. If the phone rings, it’s me trying to get hold of you!”

And he leaves.

The bloke from before comes back with a phone. On it, there’s a football sticker. Juventus.

“There you go,” he says as he plugs it in.

“In the meantime, I can hear laughter getting closer,” Pete carries on. “A guy wearing a shirt and a tie, his sleeves rolled up, and a young woman, grey dress and combat boots, sharp fringe, like a frame for her face.”

The story is paused: a girl has been mentioned, so we ask what she looks like and other specifics.

Pete acts the gentleman. “Focus!”

Shirt goes to the chairless desk, sees that the chair is missing, looks at Pete, realises that he’s sitting down, and stares at the chair he’s sitting in.

“That’s mine,” he says.

Pete stands up and returns it, saying that he got it from a man with a moustache.

Shirt says, “Sure.” Then he takes the chair to the desk and jumps back behind the computer, looking unhinged.

Pete spreads his arms and looks at the woman.

“Welcome to hell. Get comfortable,” she says with a laugh, then goes back to work.

Pete sits on his desk.

The phone rings. He picks up, says the name of the firm and his own name, then adds, “How may I help?”

On the other end, “Hello? Hello?”

“Hello,” says Pete and repeats the name of the firm, his own name, how may I help.

And on the other end, “It’s me. We just met. I’ve been calling you for ages, but you never pick up.”

It’s the boss.

“I didn’t have a phone, remember?”

“What about now?”

The woman glances at him.

“Now I do,” says Pete.

Without giving Pete time to add anything else, the boss says, “Time is money! Listen, welcome to the firm!”

And he hangs up.

“I hadn’t even put down the handset,” says Pete, “before I hear steps in the corridor – boom, boom, boom – and in walks a big guy in spectacles with a shaved head. He’s out of breath. He looks at me, looks at the phone, and points at the sticker. ‘That’s mine,’ he says. He unplugs it and takes it away. ‘Go Juve,’ I say. ‘Go fuck yourself,’ he says. Can you believe it?”

We spend the evening exchanging anecdotes – that’s what Pete calls stories, “anecdotes” – and teasing each other; we’re always teasing each other. I’m tired and the shutters of my eyes are broken. We leave at eleven, thank goodness. In the parking lot, they all worry.

“So, you’re going up now,” they say.

“I’m going up,” I say.

“You got your torch?”

I show them my torch.

It’s a crank torch. It’s called a crank torch because you crank the crank, it powers up, and there’s light. Then less light. Then less. Then just a glint, and it goes off. So you crank it a lot, fifty, sixty times: the brightest light. Then less. Then less still. So you crank like crazy and it shines brighter than the sun. The paths, the rocks with their long shadows that move around as you walk and go up in the woods, lonely: there’s no one around. Is there a murderer in the woods, at midnight? No, there isn’t. Is there a monster, as you pant up the slope? No, there isn’t. There are only owls and more owls. Too tired to be scared. Too sweaty. Then you come out on the road, the trees open up, you no longer need the torch, and the moon is out. All is bright. You can see your hands, your feet.

To reassure them, I say, “Look at the starry moon.”

“Do you want a ride?” Macchio asks.

“A ride?”

“Yes.”

“Home?”

“Yes, home.”

“In the car?”

“Yep.”

“The polluting car?” I ask.

“Do you want this ride or not?” He says.

“If you’re offering.”

6.

Sun, Sunday, Calm

I like the sun. I’m photovoltaic. And today the sun is out: it’s so nice.

I leave the window open and drink my coffee. I have two or three things I need to take care of, but it’s Sunday, it’s nice, yay. The temperature, too, is nice in Marine, not at all like Vercosa. Or Issime. Or Gressoney.

What are they made of, the people of Gressoney? Can’t they feel the cold?

They can’t.

In the morning, Ninín wants cuddles, and Spotta too. I finish my coffee and fuss over them a little, then get ready and go out. Around my house, it’s all mountains and the vegetable patches are small terraces. I need to clear out two and ready them for bedding out. And when it comes to clearing out, I do it by hand. I start by pulling out the weeds.

I don’t turn over the soil, just loosen it. The weeds come out, and the soil keeps all its layers. Water drains better.

But when you’re doing it by hand, you’re always bent down. If you stand up too quickly, everything goes black. Then purple. Then a few little sparks, like flies.

You don’t know where you are, in the dark.

So I feel for the wall and breathe in. The sparks spin around some more, then the sun is back. No, it’s not the sun, it’s me who’s back.

And so I say, “Here I am.”

And I keep going.

Sowing onions.

Weeding the garlic.

But it’s Sunday. “Sunday!” I say out loud.

Nice.

Onions, sown. About a thousand. I eat lots of onions. And garlic. I’m weeding it. I scratch with my hoe: the soil is soft and the weeds come out. My phone rings and I straighten up. Too quickly: my eyes flood with darkness. I have twelve numbers saved in my phone and no one ever calls me. When the phone rings, I worry. It’s Banana. Why didn’t he text?

“What?” I answer.

And Banana says, “The Magnificent.”

We need to finish Vercosa.

“Today?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“Do we have to?”

“Yes.”

“What time?”

“Ten.”

“But it’s Sunday,” I say.

Banana lets his tongue loose.

“I know it’s Sunday, you son of a banana, and The Magnificent knows it too, the blooming banana. I go to Mass on Sundays!”

We need to finish Vercosa.

But I still have one terrace to prepare. And the garlic to finish. To make it on time, I start working like crazy and when the bell tower tolls nine, I have one terrace left.

Ninín and Spotta look at me from the wall.

“I need to go,” I say. “I’ll see you later. You have a great Sunday.”

And I go.

7.

The Magnificent

When I get to Bar Oropa, Tomb and Banana have faces like an old wall, grey and collapsing.

“What?” I ask.

“Mh,” says Banana.

From time to time, The Magnificent – our employer, our boss, the owner of the firm, which is really a farm, but we call it a firm – comes to work with us. He’s obsessed: he wants to be with his workers.

We’re all equals – manual labourers, men of bygone times.

So he’s coming, which means two things: first, a job that would have taken one day will now take two or three, depending on how much helping he intends to do; and second, we now need to come up with something that we’ve crushed away and hidden somewhere under a rock – our manners.

“MAGNIFICENT MEN!”

Another thing: he’s always shouting.

It’s 11:48. The boss has been belting out that song about the water flea since ten past ten, whistling when he can’t remember the words. He can’t remember what the water flea stole and so he whistles. Then he stops.

“MAGNIFICENT!”

He breathes in, his fists on his hips, his foot on a rock. He looks like he’s posing. Red trousers with creases ironed in, brand new boots.

As he’s bald, he wears a goatee to look smart.

“MAGNIFICENT!” He says, pulling at his goatee.

Then he starts wandering around.

“LOOK, MAGNIFICENT COWS!”

He runs up to the fence, touches the electrified wire, shakes his hand, and laughs.

“BATTERIES! MAGNIFICENT INVENTION!”

He comes back to the field and bends down. “THIS SOIL!”

And he shows us a cowpat, which he’s kneading in his fist.

Tomb stares at Banana, who’s staring at me.

So I say, “That’s a pat.”

“PAT?”

“Yes. Shit.”

“UH?”

“Cow shit.”

He stands there for a moment, then clenches his fist tighter. “A MAGNIFICENT PAT!”

“Deer?” Banana asks, looking at the tracks.

He motions to Tomb, who nods. The Magnificent smells some herbs, tastes them, then spits them out, all the while laughing.

“If he keeps on helping us, it’ll take over a week,” I say.

“Mh,” Banana says.

Tomb, too, is looking so and so.

We grab our tools and lay the string. Tomb has screwed some iron bars to the sticks: they’re stronger now.

“A-HA! DIG HOLE, PLANT POTATO!”

The Magnificent follows Banana around.

“I TRY!” He says and makes Banana hand him the tool.

As he digs, he starts singing the song about the chimney sweeper.

In the song, a chimney sweeper goes to a lady’s house to sweep and she shows him the hole, the chimney hole. And it carries on like that: it’s all a showing of holes and a sweeping of holes: you look and you sweep, you look and you sweep, and nine months later a baby girl is born. And she’s the spitting image of the chimney sweeper.

In Marine, the lamppost is coming on with a hum. The smell of polenta is wafting out of next door’s. I close the gate, go inside, and shiver right away: I need to turn the stove on. I must bathe, but first I feed the cats. When I get out of the tub, I shove half a loaf and a piece of cheese in my mouth. I’m still chewing as I lie down on the sofa, my eyes already closing. I have an armour of planks under my skin. The planks are my muscles. How much can a plank flex? Very little. It does flex a tiny bit, but only just.

Two thingies get on the blanket, rubbing.

“You were in the barn,” I say.

After about an hour, The Magnificent left: he needed to take care of something or other. Thank goodness. We made quick progress and finished. Then Tomb grabbed two sticks and drove them into the ground at the bottom of the field, in a corner, crossed like for the dead.

“What’s he doing that for?” I asked.

“What, the cross?”

“Yes.”

What, didn’t I know that, when you finish a field, you need to take two sticks, arrange them in a cross, and drive it into the ground with a prayer? No, I didn’t know it. And did I know why you’re supposed to do it? No, why? Because of all the bananas you had to throw around to get it done.

“But what if you don’t believe?” I asked.

“If you don’t believe, then why are you even throwing bananas around?”