A goose committed suicide by hanging last night. My second night on the farm. Its thin, elegant neck dangling from the low slung branches of a tree. Her eyes were squeezed tight as if she were wishing real hard. Perhaps to die, or maybe something lighter. Like the feel of the first gush of spring when the geese go home.
Marco and Mauro took it by its heels, its webbed toes hung limp, the color of rain slickers, of gloshes. Her throat was slit and the deep, rich blood trickled, matting the white feathers, running the length of her beak. The blood flowed to outline tiny nostrils and small sharp teeth. Teeth like edges of a seashell. The way her eyes were closed made it look like she was weeping blood tears. Marco strained her neck back, her dead flesh exposed to the bone, the blood taking its chance at freedom. It dampened the soil at his feet into a deep brown chocolate pudding. Once again her feet were hoisted into the air, fixed with rope and left to drain. Her body made slow rotations in the breeze as if in a straigt jacket hanging from a clothesline.
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I did not make the connection at first, but the farm I lived at in le Marche region of Italy in a small town called Cupramontana, goes by the name of The White Rabbit. Which would explain the two white wood rabbits nailed to sticks out at the end of the driveway that I saw when I first arrived. It would also explain the reason while Franz (who I will add here is the owner and founder of The White Rabbit permaculture project) likes to refer to the farm as "going down the rabbit hole" or soemthing to that affect. There were five people living there: Franz, Marco and Barbara and their three year old son Samuel, and Emmanuel. And me. Well for a short time at least. The idea behind the small farm (whose main crop is the regional Verdichio grapes and a small vegetable garden)is to be a self-sustained ecovillage of sorts where the food consumed is largely grown and the excess is sold at various markets in the area. The grape harvest serves as a large portion of the farm's funds for the year.
The Verdichio grape is perhaps the most beautiful grape I have seen. It looks vuluptous on the vine in a nonchalant way (being shapely but small)and when ripe produces the sweetest juice, as well as a prized Italian wine. At its best, the grape looks like a large fish egg, transluscent and rosy in color with a few embedded seeds resembling an embryo. The color is what I can not get enough of. Rosy salmon with a bit of orange splashed in places directly facing the sun. To pick them I wore gloves to keep my hands and fingers from getting sticky sweet and a blue faded jumpsuit to keep the brambles off my clothes. There was nothing, however, that I could do about them getting in my hair and wedging themselves in there like tacky chewing gum.
Cutting the base of the bunch with pliers, I gently grazed my fingers over the bursting flesh of the grape that nestled in colonies of hundreds. The sensation of just holding them, their beauty and the way the light settled on the skin, is breathtaking. They were so perfect I got a strong sensation to crush the bunch and feel the juice run down my wrists, the skins tattered in my palms. It was hard work, tedious work, meticulous work, hacking off the soiled grapes with pliers before dropping them in a bucket. The bucket that was constantly full and needed to be carried to the tractor to join the rest of the harvest. The weather was unpredictable and therefore we were constantly trying to beat the rain. When it came the grapes were covered so their perfectness could be protected and no mold could think of growing there.
The harvest took three days and we drank wine between the rows. By the third day I was sick of grapes. And white wine.
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Chinese food in Italy is not good. Yet people here go out of their way to get it. I have now eaten in two chinese food restaurants that have delivered the same cuisine. Small, shrivled portions, and greasy, nondescript flavors. On two occasions the six of us left the White Rabbit to dine, both times in my opinion being a great disappointment. Why must they call what should be Chow Mein but isn't really, Spagehtti? Clearly it is not speghetti nor will it ever be spagehtti. And if you were Italian at a chinese food restaurant in Italy, why would you want to order Chinese spaghetti? I asked myself these questions as I ate the Chinese spaghetti which was really just transluscent rice noodles in a flavorless brown sauce. But the atmposphere was nice, while Marco (ever the prankster) teased the three year old child at the neighboring table until the child was running around the room firing fake guns. The hot and sour soup was OK, but too hot and not enough sour. But in an odd way the break from Italian food was nice. In a way.
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Last night at dinner the mood was light. Everyone was laughing. Samuel and Barbara were joking with me and Samuel even took my hand and brought me outside to dance with a flashlight under the stars. The behavior is strange for him. Normally he is quite defiant towards me and, I think, threatened by my presence. Perhaps it is because I take away some of the attention from Barbara. That I am new, that so far in his young life, the people in it have fluctuated. But last night he just wanted to play with me and show me the stars. I felt, for the first time really, that I was an important part of this dynamic. A new and vital link. The five people I was living with felt like a family. And my mind made them out to be more familiar then they really were. But when nothing is familiar, you feel an urge to grasp the smallest resemblances that are.
The language barrier is hard at times, not speaking Italian Not that I can't communicate at all but it is extremely difficult , and very hard if not impossible to communicate complicated ideas. I especially miss this with Barabara whom I have really bonded with at the farm. We have both expressed in our own simplified ways, that we wish we spoke the same languageso we could communicate our thoughts. Intelligent, well constructed, or completely outrageous, haphazard thougths. I really will miss her. And that is just part of traveling. People come in your life, you bond with them. You leave them. Or they leave you. I wish I could see Barbara again, or guarantee that I would, but we both know that this life is only temporary for me, for her it is not. But I think, even more so then returning to the States, leaving this farm, the White Rabbit, will be a culture shock. I have learned to live in a different way. A less cluttered, chaotic exsistence, but rather an exsistene in which our very basic needs are at the forefront of our thoughts each day. Eat. Sleep. Dream.
