Fiction from The Literary Review

The Year of Mad Weather

Stefano Benni

The story that I am going to tell you is about my village called Madville, which is famous for two specialties: beets and liars.
     The old man of the village, Grandpa Celso, prophesied that year that the weather would be unpredictable. He said he could tell this by way of three signs:
     the coots that passed above our village every year had passed, but by train. The stationmaster had seen two rail cars full of them;
     the cherries were late to fruit: those that were on the trees were from the year before;
     the old folks' bones didn't ache. To make up for this, all the little boys suffered from gout, and the girls from rheumatism.
     Grandpa Celso said we would see all sorts of bizarre things.
     So, by February it was already spring. All the daisies came out in a single morning. There was a noise like someone opening a gigantic umbrella, and voilà! all of them in their places.
     The pollen began to fall in bunches from the trees. The entire village was sneezing, and an epidemic of strange allergies commenced: on some the nose swelled; a doorknob popped out on others. Fruit matured suddenly: you would fall asleep under a tree of unripe apples, and awake covered in jelly.
     Then it was the rain's turn to go haywire. It would rain for only one hour a day, but always over the same spot: the mayor's house. Then the large cloud would begin to stroll back and forth over the village. As soon as it spotted someone with a hat, zap! It struck it with a little bolt of lightning. Then a strange wind came, perfumed and aphrodisiacal. When it blew, people became aroused and ran into the thickets by twos, by threes, in groups. The priest was inconsolable. One day while he chased a couple whom he had surprised humping in the sacristy, he himself caught a gust in the face. They found him in the haystacks with one of the faithful, though perhaps not so faithful after all.
     In April, suddenly the summer. One-hundred-and-sixteen degrees. Corn ripened and was baked in two days. We had made two hundred quintals of bread. It was so hot eggs boiled not just on the tops of cars, but in the asses of the hens as well. The poor things made such a ruckus, and in the morning we would find omelettes in the henhouse hay. The pond dried up in a flash. Fish found refuge in bathtubs and there was no way to get them out, which forced us to take baths together with the trout. The catfish chased the mice. Everyone wore straw hats, but the sun set ablaze even those, so we began to wear zinc or laminated hats, which resulted in the army even coming to check us out because a reconnaissance plane had reported seeing an invasion of Martians in the village of Madville.
     Right after that, it began to hail. Each time, it started with three thunder claps. Then in the sky a loud voice boomed Here she comes! and loaf-sized hail would rain down. At Biolo, they got a block of hail the size of a round of Parmesan cheese. Inside of it was a crow perfectly preserved.
     Then it was hot again, an African heat. People slept on the road, or inside refrigerators with an extension cord. The ice-cream man worked twenty-four hours a day, and after that summer he bought himself a skyscraper in Montecarlo.
     In autumn the leaves finally fell. Two of them. One in the school playground and one in Rovasio. The others seemed to be stuck there with glue. There was no way to cut them loose, not even with shears. The grapes were ripe but salty, I swear, salty like herring. The wine that year was only good for seasoning the roasts. Later on, the temperature grew mild again, and in November, though late, the swallows returned. A swarm of nine million. Nobody left the house anymore. Not with the birds' ten-thousand decibel cry. The swallows left and the storks arrived. They released sixty Chinese babies, and left.
     Then there was the fog. You couldn't even see past your own nose. The only one who had no problems walking around was Aeneas, whose nose was a foot-and-a-half long. The rest of us walked around with fog lights on our heads. At nighttime many of us even mistook our own houses, which wasn't actually so bad since there were always surprises waiting in bed.
     The most dangerous part were the trucks that passed through the village at seventy-five miles an hour, because the truck drivers had no problem with the fog. We had to build bridges roof to roof, and underground passageways. In the end, we decided to build a nice big wall in the middle of the road. After that, no more truck drivers. Just some pieces of them.
     Then came winter. Right away it snowed twenty days in a row. Quickly the entire village was buried by our white visitor. Only our chimneys stuck out. But we didn't lose heart. In teams we went out to shovel snow: those of us from lower Madville shoveled it onto upper Madville and viceversa. In this way, the snow was always the same height but we kept ourselves warm.
     Hector the baker continued to work in his underwear, because bakers are impervious to temperature. Every morning he would pass by, tossing bread down each chimney. To exchange information we sent smoke signals and in the evening we told smoke jokes. The best smoke-joke teller was the fireman.
     We humans didn't fare so badly. We had bread and Madville cheese, three-thousand calories per slice. For the animals, though, it was tough. The cows didn't have any grass to eat and refused steak. We nourished them for days with onions and they had breath that would kill Baby Jesus in the manger. The birds got thinner, the foxes too. Weasels passed through the locks, and wolves descended into the valley, then into the village where we would find them in the dining room with slippers in their mouths, those bootlickers. Meanwhile, the white pain-in-the-ass kept coming down. Many villages were left isolated: it was said that in Mount Macco, twenty families had run out of food and were eating only beans. We became awfully frightened because in Mount Macco there was actually a family whose name was Beans, so we went up to take a look. The poor things were actually eating beans with a lower case b, and all fifty of them were living in the same house to save wood, and with that borlotta bean diet all the farting made the place sound like a war zone. Grandpa Beans caught the biggest ones with a fishing net and released them back into the pot so as not to waste anything.
     At the end of the year, the snow was twenty feet high, and the baker had used up all the flour. We asked the city for help and they sent us three helicopters, but they weren't that great to eat except maybe the seats. We were at wits' end when Grandpa Celso proclaimed that the only person who could save us was Ufizéina.
     Ufizéina was a mechanic who knew how to fix everything, from a huge hydraulic crane to a baby bottle. In all the collective memory of the inhabitants of Madville, there was nothing he couldn't repair. We explained the problem to him: that is, that what was broken was none other than the weather. Ufizéina thought about it a moment and then said: If it's broken, it can be fixed.
     He studied the situation, grabbed a jack, two pieces of rubber, some putty and a pump, and disappeared over the horizon.
     That evening he was already back. He explained that the problem was simple: the sun, coming up at sunrise from Mount Macco, had entangled itself in a tree splintered by lightning, and had been punctured. In fact he had found it still there, on the other side, so deflated you felt sorry for it. Ufizéina had vulcanized it and then hooked it up to the pump. In no time, he said, the sun would inflate again and regain its trajectory. In fact, little by little, the sun appeared, faint at first, then ever more rotund and resplendent, climbing up above Mount Macco, heating up everything.
     The snow melted and everything returned to normal, except us.

      Translated from the Italian
      by Chad Davidson and Marella Feltrin-Morris