“Here we are,” said the boy at last, as they came to a sort of spur. He pointed a finger. Opposite them, on the other side of the valley, there had indeed been a huge fall of reddish earth. It must have been about nine hundred feet from the top of the break to the valley floor, where the largest boulders had piled up. But it was impossible to see how there could ever have been a village there, or even a small hamlet. There were also suspicious tufts of vegetation growing on the steep slopes.
“Look, sir, you see the bridge?” said the boy, pointing to the remains of some ruined building down in the valley, amid heaps of red boulders.
“And there’s no one there?” asked Giovanni in amazement, gazing around intently but still seeing no one. Only bare slopes, embedded rocks, spreading mountain streams, stone walls supporting small patches of cultivated land; it was all a gloomy rust color. The sky had slowly clouded over.
The boy looked at him, blankly. “But when did it happen?” Giovanni insisted. “Some days ago?”
“I dunno!” replied the boy. “Some say three hundred years ago, some as much as four hundred. But bits still go on falling.”
“Good God,” shrieked Giovanni, furious. “Couldn’t you have said so earlier?” The boy had brought him to see a landslide three hundred years old, a geological freak, mentioned in guidebooks for all he knew! And those ruins in the valley might be the remains of a Roman bridge! What an idiotic mistake; and meanwhile it was getting dark. But where, where was the landslide?
He ran back down the mule track, followed by the boy, who was almost in tears with the fear of having lost his tip. He was incredibly agitated: not understanding why Giovanni had lost his temper, he ran behind him beseechingly, hoping that appeasement was still possible.
“He’s looking for the landslide,” he said to everyone they met. “I don’t know, I thought he meant the one by the old bridge, but it’s not that one. Do you know where it is?” He questioned all the men and women in sight.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” said a little old woman who was engaged in some kind of activity on her doorstep. “Wait till I call my man!”
Soon afterward, preceded by the loud clattering of clogs, there appeared on the threshold a man who, though he couldn’t have been much over fifty, had a gloomy desiccated look about him. “Ah, so they’ve come to see!” he said when he saw Giovanni. “It’s not enough for the whole thing to collapse in front of my very eyes; now the gentlemen have to roll up and take a look! Certainly, come and see!” He appeared to be shouting at the journalist but it was evident that the outburst was directed at mankind in general rather than at him personally.
He seized Giovanni by an arm and led him up a mule track, rather like the other one but closed in by walls of rough stone. It was then that, bringing his left hand up to his chest to draw his coat around him, Giovanni happened to glance at his wristwatch. It was already five fifteen, it would soon be dark and he still had literally no information about the landslide, not even its location. If only this hateful peasant were to be leading him to the spot!
“Are you satisfied? Here it is, take a good look at your blasted landslide!” growled the peasant, stopping short; he indicated the hated phenomenon with his chin, to express loathing and contempt. Giovanni was standing on the edge of a small field, several square yards in area: an absolutely negligible piece of land except for the fact that it stood on the slope of a steep mountain, a man-made field, reclaimed effortfully inch by inch and supported by a stone wall. At least one-third of this space was now covered by crumbling earth and stones. The rains, the seasonal dampness, it might have been almost anything, had brought a small section of the hillside down on to the diminutive field.
“Take a good look—now are you satisfied?” roared the peasant, furious not so much with Giovanni of whose intentions he had not the slightest idea, but with this disaster which was going to cost him months and months of hard work. Dumbfounded, Giovanni looked at the landslide, a mere graze in the mountainside, an absolute nothing. It’s not this either, he said to himself miserably, there must be some mistake. Meanwhile time was passing and he must phone the paper before nightfall.
He left the peasant without a word, ran back to the square, anxiously questioned three laborers who were manhandling his tires: “Where’s the landslide?” he shrieked, as though they were responsible. The mountains were disappearing into the darkness.
A gangling but reasonably well-dressed type stood up from the church step where, until that moment, he had been sitting smoking, and came toward Giovanni: “Who told you? Who gave you the information?” he asked without further ado. “Who mentioned landslides?”
His tone was ambiguous, almost threatening, as though the whole subject was unpalatable to him. At this point a consoling thought crossed Giovanni’s mind: there must be something louche, criminal even, in this business. That was why they had all agreed to thwart inquiries, that was why the authorities hadn’t been called in and why no one was on the spot. If only, instead of an ordinary tale of woe, with its inevitable commonplaces, he had been destined to uncover some romantic plot, all the more extraordinary for being perpetrated in that godforsaken village!
“The landslide!” this character repeated scornfully, before Giovanni had had a chance to reply. “I’ve never heard such rubbish!
