An Umbrian War by Romana Petri

Up in the town people said that Alcina was a strange one, partly because she drove her father's old truck, and partly because despite her age not only had she not married, she didn't even seem the slightest bit bothered about it.
This was true, but the reasons were different from the ones they imagined. If Alcina was reluctant to give certain emotions and feelings their full importance, it was because she was afraid of death. She felt it dogging her heels at every step, and she was convinced that death had decided to dare her, to put her to the test, saying "You want to get married? Just think about your mother who died giving birth, the same thing will probably happen to you." At first she had answered that question with an icy silence, turning her head in the direction of Monte Cetona and pretending to be deaf. Then, one night, she had heard that voice again, and she had jumped in her sleep. The voice said "Your life will not be much longer than it is already. You will die at the same age as your father, in the same way, and the only thing you'll have time for is realizing that your sight of the world is fading away. Your last words will be exactly the same as his, you'll still have your eyes open and you will say, I can't see anything any more." She had got out of bed and stood by the window barefoot, feeling the ice of the flagstones chilling the warm soles of her feet, and then creeping up, up to her knees. She had opened the shutters even though it was winter, and she had waited for dawn sitting on a chair wrapped in a shawl. As the first light of day appeared she had gone back to bed and stayed there, terrified, until Aliseo had knocked at her door to ask her if she was ill.
"Yes, I'm running a temperature," she had answered. "Leave me in peace."
She had gone downstairs as the sun was already setting, pale, her face hardened by the terrible fear, but anybody seeing her that day would have said her face was going through the changes brought about by a precocious old age. Aliseo looked up from the table where he was drawing a still life of a teapot, trying to soften the light and shade with his thumb.
"Alcina, what's happened? Your face doesn't look like you at all."
"Why, what's wrong with my face?"
"It's not as pretty."
"Have you eaten?"
"No, I was waiting for you."
"Why do you need to wait for me before you eat? Holy Jesus and Mary Mother of God, you've given me a brother with a pea-brain. I'd like to know what you've been doing all this time that you missed your lunch."
"I forgot about it, I was waiting for you. I've drawn this teapot, do you like it?"
"To hell with the teapot and all the drawings on this earth. Let's have dinner."
"Now? Alcina, it's not even five o'clock. I'm not hungry."
"Never mind hungry, if you miss lunch you can eat dinner at any time."
"What about your temperature?"
"It's gone. I'm not going to die this time."
"Why, were you going to die?"

A few days later Alcina had written a short letter.
Madam Death, I don't care about you. I'm afraid of you, but as my poor Papa used to say, fear is there to make you braver. I don't need any children because as you can see I have on my hands a brother who's twelve years younger than me and whose head is always up in the clouds. I'm like a mother to him and that's enough for me. As for how old my father was I've worked it out and I have at least thirty years to go still, and if we were to go and ask people what they thought, most of them would be quite content with my age and another thirty on top. I've got nothing else to say to you, from now on if you like we can keep each other company, but there will be no more words between us.

She had sealed up the letter in an envelope, jumped into the truck and started the engine.
"Alcina, where are you going?"
"To Lake Chiusi."
"What for?"
"To take a look at it."
And instead she had borrowed a boat from a fisherman and rowed out to the centre of the lake. There she had dropped the letter into the water and waited as she watched it sink gently, as if sucked down by the weeds. Before going back home she had stopped at the bar of a restaurant called 'The Golden Fish' for a coffee. A drunk was talking to the barman. "It's really dangerous, this lake," he was saying, gripping his elbow. "Did you know? Last week two people copped it, strangled by the weeds."
From that time on Alcina got into a habit which she continued the whole of her life, looking into the mirror to study the state of her health. Then she would go to Aliseo and ask, how does my face look? I don't know, Alcina, like yours. Take a good look at me, does it look like before or after? Somewhere between before and after. If you don't want to say it that means it's after. And then she would go out of the house slamming the door and start walking along the gravel path up to the gate; she walked with her arms folded and with a gaze that saw nothing but her own thoughts. It had become a sort of obsession, every day she had to establish whether her face looked the way it did before or after that invented fever.
Sometimes she had taken a close look at herself for a different reason, too, to decide if she were pretty or ugly, although she had never said this to anyone, not even to Aliseo. But for a while now she'd been wondering if she were starting to get old, and she methodically counted the lines which appeared on her face, trying to work out how much her appearance would change over the course of the years.
From the kitchen window she could see Jole's cottage, and in the evening she could hear her voice calling the hens back into the chicken-house: shoo shoo, shoo shoo. Jole had at least a thousand lines and wrinkles on her face, she was so old. She used to see her going back up the hill, bowed under the weight of the bundles of lucerne tied on her back for the rabbits, and as she made her way up she was already making that clucking sound to call back the chickens who had wandered off. Now and again one got as far as the pot-holed track down to Case Venie, its eye darting in fear, knowing it was lost, its step quick but random. Shoo, shouted Jole when she found them under her feet, just as she did with the cats, the ones she scornfully called the moorland moggies.
These were the sounds that Alcina heard while she examined the lines on her face as the sun went down, and she would think to herself, there's still time, I'll be old when I have as many wrinkles as Jole has chickens.
She often went over to Jole's place with Aliseo to sit up with her. That's what they called it, but in fact it meant that at half past seven they were all sitting round the table in front of the fire and everything would be all over by nine. Hand in hand, their limbs heavy with the glasses of wine, they slowly cut down through the wood to get back home. Aliseo, mind where you put your feet because if you fall over you'll make your nice clean trousers dirty! And when there were neither stars nor moon out to light their way, then Aliseo would whistle to bolster his courage while Alcina would tell him in a low voice what they would have for lunch the next day as if it were a story. There'll be soup with egg in it, and if I've got time, a pie with three slices of ham. I've ordered bread from Balucani. Do you know what the dough is doing right this very minute? And together they repeated three times: rising, rising, rising!