Heavy at the Beginning

by Cristoforo Landino, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

I. Porta alla Croce

The bell weighed six hundred and twelve pounds, Florentine weight, and Maestro Andrea del Brocco had weighed it twice: once on the great beam in the yard of his foundry behind Sant'Ambrogio, and once again, because the Prior of the Hermitage of Camaldoli had paid by the pound and the Prior's steward had sent a letter asking to know it exactly. The second weighing gave six hundred and twelve, as the first had. Maestro Andrea wrote the figure on the crate in charcoal, and under it, in a better hand, the words Sacrum Eremum, so that whoever unloaded it at the top would know it had come to the right place.

Nanni di Lapo came for it with his two oxen an hour before the gates opened. He was paid four lire for the carriage, two in the yard and two to be counted out at the top by the hermits' cellarer, and for that he would take the bell up to the Eremo and bring the cart back empty. He had carried millstones, wine in the cask, a font of Carrara marble for a church in Mugello, and once the body of a wool merchant who had died at Bibbiena and wished to be buried in Santa Croce. He had never carried a bell. He walked twice round the crate and asked how it was packed.

"Straw," said Maestro Andrea. "Rye straw, close, a hand's breadth on every side. If it rides loose it will knock against the boards, and a bell that knocks against boards for four days will crack at the lip, and then I have to break it up and cast it again, and I will not pay you for the first journey."

"It will not ride loose."

"And the clapper goes separately." The founder turned and called into the shed, and a boy came out carrying a long bundle of sacking against his chest the way one carries a sleeping child. "Meo goes with you. He carries the clapper, and he hangs the bell when it gets there, and he does not set the clapper down on the cart, not once, not for any reason, because iron on bronze is the same as boards on bronze, only quicker."

Meo was seventeen. He had been with the foundry four years, and he had a burn on the back of his left hand the shape of a coin, which he said he had got at the casting of this very bell, though Maestro Andrea, overhearing, said he had got it from a frying pan. They loaded the crate with the yard's shear-legs and a winch, and the cart settled on its axle with a sound Nanni listened to carefully, his head on one side. Then they went out by Porta alla Croce as the gate was unbarred, the oxen first, Nanni at their heads with his goad laid across his shoulder, and Meo behind with the clapper in his arms.

The road ran east along the river. It was the third week of October in the year 1489; the vintage was in, and the carts they met coming into the city were wine carts, empty barrels going out and full ones coming in, so that for the first hour the road smelled of must and of the oxen of other men. Nanni did not talk. Meo talked for a while about the casting, about the pit dug in the yard and the clay mould baked inside it for two days and the metal running in like a red river, and when Nanni said nothing to any of it he was quiet for a mile. Then, because the morning was fine and the road was level and he was seventeen, he began to recite.

He had the first canticle of Dante by heart, or most of it, and some of the second. He had learned it on feast days at the public lectures, where the city paid a man from the Studio to read the poem to anyone who would come and listen, and after the lecture had been read the lecturer explained it, verse by verse, at a length Meo did not attempt to reproduce. Meo gave the verses only. Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita. He said them walking, in time with his feet, and the oxen's ears went back and forth at the sound and settled.

"That's the one about the wood," said Nanni, when he had been going some time.

"The dark wood. Yes."

"There's a wood like that above Diacceto. You'll see it tomorrow."

II. Consuma

They slept the first night at Pontassieve, in the straw of an inn's stable, with the cart drawn up across the stable door so that nobody could get at the crate without first moving a ton and a half of oxen. In the morning the road left the river and began to climb.

It climbed for the whole of that day. The road to the Consuma pass went up through vines and then olives and then chestnut woods, with the stone of the road showing through its earth wherever the rain had washed it, and at each turn there was another turn above. Nanni walked at the near ox's head and spoke to the pair by name, Bianco and Moro, in a low voice, saying very little: on, on, go on, good, on. Every half mile he stopped them and set a chock behind the off wheel and let them stand and blow. The cart did not go faster than a man would walk with a stick. Meo, who had expected to be at the top by noon, kept going ahead and coming back.

Above Diacceto the chestnuts gave way to beech, and then it rained. It was a cold rain from the north, out of a sky that had been clear an hour before, and it turned the road to a slope of red mud over stone. The near wheel went down to the hub in a soft place below a spring and stopped. The oxen leaned and could not move it.

Nanni walked round the cart once. He sent Meo to cut brushwood, and he himself took the spade from under the cart and dug the mud out from in front of the wheel, down to the stone, and laid in the trench the brushwood Meo brought, and more on top of it, and stamped it. Then he took the oxen by the horns, one in each hand, and spoke to them, and they put their heads down and leaned again, and the wheel climbed out onto the brushwood with a sucking noise and went on. The whole thing took perhaps an hour. Meo did his part with one arm, because the other was round the clapper, and when he slipped in the mud he went down on his back so as to keep the bundle in the air.

They stood afterwards under a beech while the oxen stood in the rain.

"There's a canto about this," said Meo. He was soaked, and still pleased with himself for not having dropped the clapper. "In the second part. They're on the mountain, the poet and Virgil, and it's so steep they have to go on hands and knees, and the poet asks how much further. And Virgil says"—he shut his eyes—"Questa montagna è tale, che sempre al cominciar di sotto è grave; e quant'om più va sù, e men fa male."

Nanni waited.

"This mountain is such that it is always heavy at the beginning, at the bottom. And the higher a man goes, the less it hurts."

Nanni looked up the road, to the next turn, where the rain was coming down the slope toward them in a sheet.

"Whoever wrote that," he said, "never drove oxen."

"He didn't mean a mountain."

"He said a mountain."

"The lecturer said it meant the soul. That the first part of any good thing is the hardest, because you are still carrying everything from below, and as you go up you put things down, and it gets lighter."

Nanni considered this. He looked at the crate on the cart, six hundred and twelve pounds, which had not been put down and would not be until the top.

"At the bottom," he said, "the oxen are fresh. At the top they are tired, and the road is worse, and there is no farrier. If your poet had carried anything up a mountain he would know it is lightest at the bottom and heaviest at the top." He knocked the chock out from behind the wheel with his heel. "On, Moro. On."

They reached the pass in the last of the light, in fog. There was a rest-house there, and a chapel, and a stone trough where Nanni let the oxen drink. Then he did a thing Meo had not expected: he did not stay. He looked at the sky, which was clearing from the west, and at the road going down into the Casentino on the other side, and he said they would go down a mile before dark, because the road down was worse than the road up and he wanted to take it with oxen that had rested in the night, not oxen that had climbed all day, and there were men he knew a mile down who would give them a fire.

III. The Burners

Going down was the work of the brake. Nanni passed a chain through the spokes of the near wheel and locked it, so that the wheel did not turn but dragged, and the oxen held the cart back with their necks against the yoke and their haunches low, and the bell pushed at them from behind like a man shouldering through a crowd. Nanni walked backward in front of them with his hand up. Meo walked behind the cart, which Nanni had told him never to do on a slope, and was sent round to the side.

The men Nanni knew were charcoal burners. They had a clearing in the beechwood a little below the road, and in it two stacks were burning: great domes of cut wood laid on end and covered over with turf and earth, each the height of a man and a half, with smoke coming out of them low down at a dozen places and creeping along the ground. There were three burners, a man and his two grown sons, and they were black. Their faces, their hands, their shirts, the rims of their eyes were black, and the hut they lived in was built of the same turf as the stacks and smelled the same. They would be there until the snow, the father said, and then go down to Pratovecchio and sell what they had burned.

They had no fire to offer, it turned out, because they had two, and could not leave either of them; but they had the heat of the stacks, which was considerable, and a pot of chestnuts, and a place in the lee of the hut where the cart could stand. The father would not sleep that night. A stack burning down has to be watched, he said, in case the fire breaks through the skin of earth, because if the air gets in, the whole thing flares and burns to ash, and a fortnight of work goes up in an hour, and then you have nothing to sell but the smell. He walked round the stacks all night with a shovel and a basket of earth, and wherever a vent glowed red he closed it.

Meo could not sleep either. He sat with his back against the warm side of the hut with the clapper across his knees, and watched the old man go round in the dark: a black shape against a red glow, stooping, shovelling, moving on. Once the man came and sat down beside him to rest and they shared the last of the wine from Pontassieve.

"What's in the box?"

"A bell. For the hermits."

"The hermits." The burner drank. "They come down sometimes. Not the hermits. The lay brothers. They buy charcoal off us for the forge up there and they don't talk while they do it, they hold up fingers. Three sacks. Four." He showed them, black fingers in the red light. "A bell, though. What's it sound like?"

"It can't sound. The clapper's here." Meo patted the bundle. "It doesn't go in till it's hung."

The burner got up and went to the cart. He felt along the crate in the dark till he found a gap between two boards, and put his arm in through the straw to the shoulder, and then Meo heard him knock, twice, with a knuckle.

There was hardly a sound. It was less a sound than a feeling in the ground: a long low hum that came up through the cart and the wheels and the earth, and through the wall of the hut at Meo's back, and went on for longer than seemed possible, and stopped. One of the oxen lifted its head.

"Well," said the burner. He took his arm out of the crate, and went back to his stacks.

IV. The Firs

The next day they went down to Pratovecchio, where the Arno is a stream a boy could throw a stone across, and over the bridge, and up again. That climb was gentler, through fields and then woods, past the village of Moggiona, and they came in the late afternoon to the monastery of Camaldoli in its valley. The monks there were in white, and kind, and gave them supper and a stall for the oxen. But the bell was not for them. It was for the Eremo, the hermitage, which stood above the monastery in the forest, two miles further on and a thousand feet higher, and the road up to it was the worst of the whole journey.

Nanni went up on foot in the evening to look at it while there was still light, and came back and said nothing, and checked the oxen's hooves one by one with a lantern.

In the morning they started at first light. The road went up through firs. The hermits had planted and tended them for hundreds of years, and cut them only by rule, so that the hill was dark with them, tall and straight and close, and the light came down between their trunks in bars. The road between them was steep from the first turn and steeper after, a track of stones set on edge and roots and needles, with a gully on one side, and the oxen took it a few yards at a time. The wheels had to be chocked at every halt now. Twice the cart slid back the width of a hand before the chock caught, and both times Nanni had his shoulder against the tailboard before Meo had seen it move. By the second hour Moro was trembling at every stop and Bianco had begun to blow foam.

Nanni stopped them in a place where the road was a little wider, and stood looking at them, and at the road above. Meo did not ask how much further.

They had not seen anyone come down. But when they had stood there for some time there were four lay brothers on the road above them, in brown, with two long ropes coiled over their shoulders, as though they had been sent for. None of them spoke. They tied one rope to each side of the cart's front, to the iron of the axle-tree, Nanni showing them where by pointing, and took the ropes up the hill to the next turn, where there was a fir thicker than the others, and passed them round it, and laid hold. Then one of them raised his hand to Nanni.

Nanni spoke to the oxen. The oxen leaned. The four brothers above leaned back on the ropes, against the tree, and the cart moved, and kept moving. When it reached the fir they untied the ropes and took them up to the next turn, and the next tree, and did it again. It was slower than walking, and it was faster than anything they had done that morning; and after the third turn Moro had stopped trembling, and after the fifth Nanni no longer chocked the wheel at every halt, because the ropes held it.

Meo walked beside the cart with the clapper. Somewhere about the sixth turn he looked across the oxen's backs at Nanni and opened his mouth.

"They had a rope," said Nanni.

They came out of the firs into the open ground before the Eremo gate in the middle of the morning. There was a wall, and a church above it, and inside the wall, Meo could see through the gate, the hermits' cells in rows: small houses each with its own roof and its own small walled garden, all alike, and not one of them with a person in sight. A bell-frame of new oak stood ready beside the church, smelling of the adze. The lay brothers, still without a word, brought shear-legs and a tackle, and Meo took charge, red to the ears, and showed them where the hooks went; and the bell came out of its straw for the first time since Florence, green-gold and dull, with the founder's name round its shoulder in raised letters, and went up on the tackle turning slowly, and was set in the frame and made fast. Then Meo unwrapped the clapper, which he had carried for four days, and climbed up and hung it, and climbed down again, and did not seem to know what to do with his arms.

The cellarer counted two lire into Nanni's hand on the step of the gate. He did it in silence, the coins one by one, and Nanni counted them after him, also in silence, and put them in his shirt. Meo was to stay the night and hear the bell rung through the hours, in case the clapper needed adjusting, and walk down in the morning; it was what Maestro Andrea had told him to do. He said goodbye to Nanni at the gate. He looked as though he had prepared something to say and had lost it on the way up.

"It's lighter now," he said.

"It's empty," said Nanni. "Mind the clapper."

He turned the oxen in the open ground, which took some time, and started down. With no load, the cart ran at the oxen's heels, and he chained the wheel and walked backward in front of them as he had at the Consuma, with his hand up. The firs closed over the road. He went down past the fir with the rope marks on its bark, and the next, and the next, and he was perhaps a quarter of the way down, in the dark of the trees, when the bell rang above him for noon.

It rang slowly, three strokes and then three more, and the sound came down through the firs and filled the whole valley, and went on after the last stroke for longer than it seemed it could. The oxen stopped. Nanni did not tell them to go on. He stood with his hand on the near ox's neck and waited until the last of it was gone, and then a little longer.

Then he walked round to the back of the cart. The straw was still in the crate, the boards still nailed, and in the straw, pressed deep and smooth and exact, was the shape the bell had left there over four days: a hollow, wide at the mouth, round at the crown, holding nothing. He looked at it for a while. Then he put his hand flat into it, as far as it would go, and took his hand out, and went back to the oxen's heads.

"On," he said. "On, Moro."

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ā Christophorō Landīnō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Cristoforo Landino, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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