The Horn and the Asparagus, or: On the Animals That Remember What We Have Forgotten

The knees go first. I notice this walking up Corso Vittorio Emanuele in the late morning, the pavement harder than it was yesterday, the body protesting each step as though gravity had been quietly recalibrated overnight and no one had informed the joints. The air is warm and close, almost maritime, carrying that particular Barese humidity that does not refresh but clings — to the neck, to the inside of the wrists, to the fabric between the shoulder blades where the shirt has darkened into a second skin I did not ask for. I sit on a bench near the teatro and spread the Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno across my thighs because the paper is cooler than my hands.

Two men gored by bulls in Puglia in fewer than fifteen days. The first in Crispiano, the second between Turi and Conversano. I read the accounts one after the other, and the repetition produces not shock but a low vertigo, as though the earth beneath this bench had begun to rotate on an axis slightly different from the one I was taught.

The man in Crispiano was eighty years old. He had gone to the countryside — alla campagna, the gazette says, and the preposition carries in it the entire Pugliese relationship to the land, which is not ownership but visitation, a going-to that implies a coming-back, except that this time there was no coming back. He was picking asparagus. Asparagi selvatici, the wild ones that push through the calcareous crust of the Murge in March like green needles stitching the soil shut after winter, and you must bend to take them, you must lower yourself to the earth, you must offer the back of your neck to the sky, and it was in this posture — the posture of the gleaner, the gatherer, the oldest human gesture after breathing — that the bull found him. Alle spalle. From behind. The horn entered the body that was bent toward the body of the earth, and the earth received him, and the asparagus he had gathered scattered.

He died in hospital after twenty-four hours. The article says shock emorragico with that medical frankness that Italian journalism reserves for provincial tragedies, as though precision of vocabulary could contain the fact of a man's blood leaving his body faster than it could be replaced. The bull may have escaped its enclosure. The Carabinieri are investigating. The enclosure remains.

Twelve days later — I count them on my fingers, which are stiff this morning, which do not bend the way I remember them bending — a thirty-nine-year-old near Conversano. An allevatore, a man who knows bulls, who lives among them, who presumably understood the grammar of their movement, the syntax of lowered head and shifted weight that means I am about to become a different thing. And yet. Multiple rib fractures, right pneumothorax, cranial trauma. Intubato. The body opened in several places at once by an animal that weighs six hundred kilograms and has been opening bodies since before the Peucetians carved their first tomb in the tufo of this plateau.

I fold the gazette. The bench is hot now. The sun has found me. I think of Taras — Τάρας (Tá-ras) — the mythical founder of Taranto, son of Poseidon, who arrived on the back of a dolphin. But before Taras there was the land, and on the land there were cattle, and the cattle were sacred, and to harm them was to insult the earth itself. In the tenth labor, Heracles drove the cattle of Geryon through southern Italy, through this very limestone, and when one bull escaped in the region the Romans would call Calabria — which then included what is now Puglia — the land where the bull ran became Italia, from ϝιταλός (witalós), the ancient word for bull-calf, so that the name of the country itself is the track of an escaped bull scored into geography. We are all living inside the perimeter of that animal's flight.

The Murge do not look like pastureland. They look like the surface of a bone left in the sun — white, fissured, hard. But between the cracks the grass grows, and between the grass the asparagus, and between the asparagus the old men bend, and above them the sky presses down with a weight I can feel on my own shoulders, sitting here, sixty kilometers from where the horn met the spine. The countryside between Conversano and Turi is a landscape of low stone walls — muretti a secco — each one built without mortar, each stone resting on the next through nothing but gravity and the mason's understanding of how weight distributes itself through irregular forms. A bull through a dry-stone wall makes no hole. The wall simply ceases, the stones fall where they will, and what was a boundary becomes rubble, and what was rubble was always the truth of it — the wall was only an agreement, and the bull has no part in human agreements.

There is something — I hesitate — something in the repetition that the body recognizes before the mind does. Twice in two weeks. Two men. Two bulls. The same gesture: a turning-away, a back exposed, and then the horn. As though the land were trying to say something it could only say through the bodies of its animals, as though the bulls were not escaping their enclosures but returning to a function they had held before enclosures existed. The ταυροβόλιον (tav-ro-bó-li-on), the ancient bath of bull-blood in which the initiate stood in a pit beneath a grating while the bull was slaughtered above and the blood fell through — this was practiced in the Roman provinces, possibly here, possibly on this very tufo, and the purpose was rebirth, the death of the old self in the warm rain of the animal's opening. But these men did not choose the pit. The pit chose them. The countryside, which looks so still from the lungomare, which appears on maps as a pale absence between coastal cities, is not still. It remembers. It sends its bulls.

My hands are shaking. I do not know why. Perhaps the espresso, perhaps the heat, perhaps the knowledge that the ground I walk on is the back of something immense and horned and patient that has been lying still for so long we have mistaken it for landscape. I fold the gazette into my pocket. I stand. The knees again. The city receives me back into its noise and I walk with my shoulders hunched, not against the cold — there is no cold — but against the feeling that something behind me is lowering its head.

— Claudius, il Selciarolo