The Janare of Benevento

The story

In Benevento, the people of long ago knew it: there are nights when it is better not to sleep with the window open.

They were windy nights, with a black, low sky, when the roof tiles rattle and the doors tremble by themselves. They are the nights of the janare, the witches of Benevento.

By day you could not recognise them. They were women like the others: the neighbour who brings you bread, the old woman spinning on her doorstep, the girl washing at the river. They said hello, they smiled, they went to Mass. It was only said that at the midnight Mass of Christmas the janara was the last to leave, the one who lingered at the door as if she did not want to leave the church. But who ever had the courage to look at who came out last?

Then darkness fell.

When the whole house was asleep, the janara got up slowly, without making the bed creak. She went to the bread chest, took out a little jar that nobody had ever seen, and rubbed her armpits and chest with a dark ointment that smelled of earth and smoke. Then she whispered an ancient formula, always the same, which the grandmothers of Benevento repeated in a low voice, hoping never to have heard it properly:

"Ointment, ointment, carry me to the walnut tree of Benevento, over the water and over the wind, and over every bad weather."

And her body became light as smoke.

She went out through the window, or the chimney, or else, said the oldest people, she passed under the closed door, thin as a breath of air. She climbed on a broom of sorghum straw and launched herself into the dark, over the roofs, over the fields, towards the river Sabato.

There, on the bank, stood the walnut tree.

An enormous tree, black, with branches like arms twisting in the wind. Around it, on every stormy night, the witches arrived: from Benevento, from the Sannio, from Irpinia, from all the South. They arrived by the dozen, by the hundred. They took each other by the hand and circled the trunk, faster and faster, until their cries merged with the howl of the wind. It was said that spirits and demons danced with them, sometimes in the form of black cats, sometimes of red-eyed goats.

No Christian, no honest man, should have seen what happened down there.

And yet, someone had seen it.

It is told of a woodcutter who, coming back late through the wood near the river, heard voices. He hid behind a bush and looked. He saw the walnut tree, and the women around the walnut tree, and he saw at the top of the branches a great black dog, sitting as on a throne, watching everything with eyes like embers. He saw things nobody should ever have seen, and understood that it was better not to breathe.

He ran home. He threw himself on the bed, trembling, and told his wife. He told everything, from the first detail to the last.

His wife listened in silence, without a word. Then she smiled at him.

The next morning they found him dead, with his eyes wide open.

But the janare did harm not only to those who spied on them. They harmed those who slept.

They entered bedrooms and sat on the chests of people in their sleep. You woke up with an enormous weight on you, unable to breathe, unable to cry out, while a dark shape stared at you from the darkness. They entered the stables, at night, and took the horses. In the morning you found them sweating, trembling, with their manes knotted into plaits so tight that nobody could undo them. Those plaits were no joke: they were knots of magic.

And in houses where there were newborns, the mothers never slept. It was said that the janare could carry them away from the cradles, from the very arms of their sleeping mothers, only for a while, only for fun. And then they brought them back, silent, to their place. But the baby was no longer the same. It cried for no reason, fell ill, faded away. The grandmothers knew why and did not say.

For this reason, in Benevento, every evening, before going to bed, people did one thing.

They put a broom of sorghum straw behind the door. Or else a little bag of salt on the threshold.

Because the janare had a rule, a rule they could not break: before a broom, they had to count all the bristles. Before salt, all the grains. One by one. Without a mistake. And if they made a mistake, they began again from the start.

And so the janara stayed out there, in the dark, bent over the threshold, counting. One, two, three, four. Her long thin fingers brushing the straw. Her lips moving softly. Fifty-seven, fifty-eight. She knew that every bristle brought her closer to morning. She knew that at dawn the sun would wipe her away like ash. But she could not stop, she could not go in, she could not leave until she had finished.

And inside the house, someone, in bed, heard that thin murmur, that endless counting behind the door. Eighty-nine. Ninety. And did not dare to breathe.

Until, in the distance, a cock crowed.

The janara raised her head with a start. A flash of fear crossed her black eyes. Then she vanished, in a puff of wind, and in her place there remained only the broom, and a little print of cold on the threshold.

One day, they say, a holy bishop named Barbatus, tired of those nights, went straight to the walnut tree on the river. He looked at it straight on, without fear. And with his own hands he cut it down, tore its roots from the earth and threw it on the fire.

For a while, in Benevento, everyone slept in peace.

But the old people say that a tree like that never really dies. That the roots, deep in the earth, had stayed alive. That one day, at a spot near the river, another walnut tree sprang up, black and twisted, identical to the first.

And that even today, on windy nights, when the roof tiles rattle and the doors tremble by themselves, there are those who get out of bed, go to the door, and check that the broom is in its place.

Because you never know.

Because somewhere out there, someone is counting.