The Anguane

The story

That year, in Soraga, the earth had given almost nothing.

The summer had been dry, then the hail had come, and by September the granaries of the houses were emptier than an old shoe. The farmer of whom we speak was no worse than the others. But every morning he looked at his cellar, and from the cellar the cellar looked back at him: dark, cold, almost empty.

In the valleys, cellars are not just places where you keep food. They are the measure of winter. Full cellar, quiet winter. Empty cellar, long winter.

One morning, standing at the door with his hands in his pockets, he saw a girl on the path.

He had never seen her. She was walking alone, by day, in full sun, and that was the strange thing. Nobody walks alone all the way up there, for nothing, without a satchel, without a basket. She had a plain apron and a skirt that reached the ground, and did not lift even when she passed over the stones. She had the look of a good, modest girl, the kind who lowers her eyes when spoken to.

"Good morning," she said. "I am looking for work."

"Work? Here?" he laughed. "Here there is not even enough to eat for those who live here."

"I know," said the girl. "That is why I came."

The farmer looked at her more closely. He knew what was said in the woods: that there were women who arrived suddenly, from the water and the rocks, and that they were called by many names. Vivane, Aquane, Anguane, depending on the valley and on who was telling. That they helped those who were lost, that they went into the villages to lend a hand with the work, and that people thanked them by leaving food on a little window made for the purpose, in the shutters. They called them "portelle", little doors, and in some houses you could still see them.

But he knew the other side too: that you did not joke with them. That anyone who was rude, or sly, or discourteous, was left holding what he deserved.

"What can you do?" he asked, harder than he meant to.

"I can sweep the cellar," she said. "A broom is all I need."

"I have no broom." It was true, or so he believed. Then he looked to the back of the cellar, through the open door, and saw hanging from a beam the only bundle of barley ears he had left: the last one, the one he kept as a memento, or as a hope.

"That?" said the girl, following his gaze. "That will do too. Let me sweep with that."

It was then that suspicion came over the farmer. What use could it be to a girl to sweep an empty cellar with ears of barley that were no use to anyone any more? He thought of a joke, a theft, a trap. He thought of the tales of goblins and their tricks. He told himself that the wood gives nothing for free, and that the wisest thing was not to trust.

So he did what seemed clever. He did not give her the ears. He went behind the house, took from a fallen fir a bundle of prickly branches, all needles and resin, and put it in her hand.

"Here is your broom," he said. "Sweep with this."

The girl looked at the branches. Then she raised her eyes to the farmer, and he could not say what was in that look: not anger, perhaps an enormous, quiet disappointment.

"As you wish," she said softly.

She spoke a sentence he did not understand, neither then nor later. It was a formula, in a language older than his own: Es Tina vejon a Tanan a ti nia gran. Then she let the branches fall to the ground, turned towards the path, and between one step and the next she was gone. No noise, no shadow. The midday sun on the stones, and nothing more.

The farmer stood still for a moment, his heart beating hard. Then, without knowing why, he went into the cellar.

He stopped on the threshold.

The cellar was full. Full to knee height, to the shelves, to the beam. But not with barley. With fir needles, green and dry, that pricked and smelled of resin, and there was not a single grain, not one, in all that heap.

He fell to his knees and took up a handful. The needles slipped through his fingers.

Then he understood, or thought he understood, what might have been. A cellar brimming with grain, a winter without hunger, a year remembered as the lucky year. All he had to do was say yes. It would have been enough to give her that bundle of ears, and to trust, for once, someone who had asked for nothing.

That evening, and the evenings after, he left a piece of bread on the sill of the window, which had a shutter with a little opening. There was no answer, no bread eaten, no sign. The bread stayed there, in the moonlight, until morning.

I like to imagine that the Anguane do not come back twice to the same door. Or perhaps they watch from far away, and wait to see whether at least one person learns.

In any case, the farmer never forgot that girl. Every time someone knocked at his door, by day or by night, poor or foreign or unknown, he remembered a broom of fir branches, and he opened.