A Very Italian Christmas by Giovanni Boccaccio

Author:Giovanni Boccaccio [Boccaccio, Giovanni]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781939931665
Publisher: New Vessel Press
Published: 2018-08-13T22:00:00+00:00

1991

THE GOLDEN CROSS

Grazia Deledda

It was nearly Christmas Eve, I was supposed to write a story for a foreign newspaper for the occasion, and I still hadn’t found my subject.

Then it occurred to me to go gathering folktales (I still lived in Sardinia at the time).

I knew an old man who had a good store of them: he was a sharecropper on one of our parcels in the valley. In summer and in fall he would walk uphill, bent over his cane, a saddlebag filled to bursting and slung over his back, his beard tucked into the saddlebag’s pocket. He almost always came late in the afternoon, as the stars smiled down on us children from the lilac sky at twilight. The old man seemed to us like one of the Magi who had lost his way and strayed from his companions. The saddlebag was filled with things more precious to us than gold and myrrh: fruits and children’s stories.

But in winter he didn’t come, or came only rarely, and these visits didn’t interest us, because he brought olives, and olives are bitter.

And I went down to find him: in the winter, the valley is pleasant, sheltered as it is. The clouds stretch out over it like a veil over a crib, the water recedes, and the cliffsides are dry. If the weather is fine, it feels like spring, and the almond trees blossom, in thrall like dreamers to the warmth, and the olives gleam amid the grasses like purple pearls.

The old man lived in a quaint hut built against an embankment, looking down on the olive grove, sheltered by brush and rock. He also had a primitive beehive, and the wild cats used to mount its hollow cork trunks, beautiful as miniature tigers.

There we were: the sun scorching the grounds, the olives silver, and the afternoon so luminous you could see rivulets glimmer on the mountainside and women picking up acorns in the grass.

The old man had laid out the olives to dry in the yard and was throwing out those that looked off. He didn’t feel like talking; solitude and silence had rusted his tongue.

But the servant had brought a good medicine to loosen the knotted words, and the old man took a drink and started to complain.

“What stories do you want me to tell you? I’m old, and nowadays should only talk with the earth, which is already calling me. If you want stories, best to look for them in books, you know how to read.”

“Drink a little more,” the servant said, bending over, like him, to sort through the olives, “and then tell us about the time you were supposed to get married!”

“That’s a true story, not some tall tale; yeah, I’ll tell you that one, because it was right around now, at Christmastime, when it happened.

“I was twenty at the time, I was engaged. I was a bit young to be taking a wife, but things were bad, I had lost my father, and my mother

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