Chapter 19 - The Fable
Angela got to the writers circle a little late. The usual gaggle of failed Tuscan writers and poets gathered in the back room of one of the smarter café’s. This time Angela was relieved to see that Michael Sullivan, the tall English writer, was reading. He was the only one who had any semblance of success. He had a string of books published in both England and further a field. Michael traveled a lot, so he rarely showed up to the writers circle. He had moved to Girotondo only a few years before, some time after his wife had passed away. He bought one of the smaller houses on Piazza Rimazza and now spoke Italian fluently.
They all sat silently as Michael commenced. They knew they were sitting with an expert and their silence marked their respect. And Michael didn’t disappoint them. He told them a story of a young, beautiful girl who lived in Andalusia. She lived in the hills between Cordoba and Granada and her father was a shepherd. They were extremely poor. But they had somehow managed to educate their daughter in their spare time and she had even won a scholarship to the best local school. The problem was that the shepherds daughter only ever wanted to become a shepherd. She cared little for any other career. But she knew that would make her father and her mother mad. But one day she raised the subject, on her sixteenth birthday. Her father went into an instant rage and sent her to her room for the rest of the evening. He threatened to send her away to school, to somewhere where she would not be surrounded by sheep. He told her that she could never help him tend their flock again.
The shepherds daughter could not have been more devastated. She sat in her bedroom and looked out of her window at the fields above. She looked off into the distance. She felt free staring off into the horizon, where the grassy fields met the hills and mountains beyond, and then blended off into the sky dotted with pink puffy clouds. She yearned more than ever to be with her fathers flock up in those hills off into the horizon and in her own world. She yearned for it more than anything.
And so as the weeks proceeded she would spend her summer evenings sneaking out to walk those hills, away from her father and away from their flock. One day, as she was walking home from school, she took the long way back over a large hill a few miles from their house. On the way she came across a sheep lying on the ground with two lambs next to her. The ewe didn’t look well. The shepherd’s daughter quickly looked around her and then smothered the lambs into her arms and ran.
For two years the Shepherds daughter nursed the little lambs. Always in secret. Somehow she managed to keep them from both her father and the shepherd that they belonged to. She moved her lambs from wood to wood , tethering them so they could never stray. When it rained she hid them in abandoned barns. And no one never knew.
On her eighteen birthday, when the two lambs had grown up, the Shepherds daughter fled. She was blessed with both a ewe and a ram, so she had all the start she needed in life. But she knew that she would have to leave her parents for good and go to another part of Andalusia to grow and tend her flock in peace and to live her life. So the very night of her eighteenth birthday, after she had finished her school, she disappeared.
Over the next few years the shepherds daughter had many adventures and many perils beset her. But somehow she managed to find a parcel of open land where she could grow her flock and find a life. One afternoon the shepherds daughter decided to go to the nearby town and buy a new outfit. It would be the first outfit she had ever bought herself. And after she shopped she went to a restaurant for a bight to eat. There she met a wonderful young shepherd. She fell in love. She returned to her flock late that night, too late, for a pack of wolves had descended on her sheep. By the time she got to them there was only one left alive. It was the ram that she had stolen when she was sixteen. He died in her arms staring up at her.
The young shepherds daughter was heart broken and utterly alone. She had lost everything and she now had no one to go to for help. She knew she could never go back to her parents. That was the bitter price of her freedom. So for the next few years she traveled around Andalusia and worked in bars. She hated her life. But she was trapped. She had only ever learnt to be a shepherd. So she worked in bars and she slept with men to keep her company and then she would move to another bar when she couldn’t stand the men any longer.
One night while bartending, the young shepherd that she had fallen in love walked back into her life. And she remembered that fateful night and she remembered them drinking and laughing for too long and she remembered losing her flock and losing everything. As he walked up to the bar she hoped he wouldn’t recognize her. She hoped he would have forgotten her. After all she was so different, so destitute, so miserable and so ugly. But he did remember her and she was beautiful to him. They fell in love and got married. She moved into his hut on the hill surrounded by their sheep. She was happy.
When she grew older and they had a little girl, she decided that she should take a trip. A trip back to visit her parents. They would surely forgive her now she was married and had a daughter. And married to a successful shepherd. So she took the bus back to her parents village. As she got off the bus she looked up the hill to her parents home. She imagined them in the fields and she cried. She cried tears of sadness and she cried tears of remorse and she cried for her parents and their broken hearts. She felt the anxiety deep down in her stomach as she walked up the hill.
At the top of the hill she noticed a shepherd in their fields. It was not her father. It was the same shepherd that she had stolen the two lambs from such a long time before. As she nervously approached him he looked on her sadly. Then he told her that her parents had died a few years before. Her father had asked him to tend the flock and look after his land and home in the hope that she might one day return. They always wanted her to have their place and their flock, when she was older, to do with it as she wished.
So she stayed that night in her parents little old house and she cried. She scolded herself for leaving them and for lying to them for so long.
The next morning she went and visited the shepherd who had tended their home and their fields and she brought him two of the finest sheep in the flock. She told him that she had stolen two of his lambs when she was sixteen and that she had hidden them from him and her parents and before she left to go back to her husband and her home she wanted to repay him. He chuckled and told her that her father had repaid him many years before. They both knew she had taken the lambs. But her father made him promise that they would never let on. He hoped that the hardship she would face in rearing the two lambs in secret would put her off becoming a shepherd.
Then he told her that one evening, just before her eighteenth birthday, her father and he were out walking and they came across her two sheep hidden in a wood. Her father looked on these two fabulous young sheep and sniggered. He then exclaimed that his test had failed, for she was an even better shepherd than he. Both of them laughed that night away.
Then the shepherd gave her a gift. He gave her a young sheep dog he had been training and he told her that she would need him if she was to take her fathers flock home. She laughed and thanked him. The next morning she set off with her flock and her daughter and her new sheep dog. As she stood at the top of that hill on that horizon of hers and looked back at her parents little house and at her bedroom window she smiled. She smiled a broader smile than she had ever smiled.
As Michael finished his story and looked over at Angela he saw her smiling too. And as she read her beautiful tale he smiled at her.
When the reading circle ended Michael moved over to Angela and told Angela how much he loved her story. He knew it was her own. And it was so full of her courage and beauty. He even told her that he could help her get published for her tales of women and courage and independence needed to be told. She was so happy and so surprised that she told him of her other works and she even told him where she hid them. And as she spoke and told him far too much she never even realized that they were standing in her favorite spot overlooking Monte Amiato, with the full moon hanging low over their heads. With that old mountain looking faithfully down at her as he always did.
And when Angela finally remembered that she was late for dinner with Giuseppe and her parents he somehow kissed her on the cheek. And she found a new step in her stride as she skipped to her parents. And at dinner they even saw a new woman, one full of happiness and hope. And they all smiled more and laughed with each other, particularly Giuseppe.
So the next morning Angela met her father at the church as promised. This time she wasn’t dressed in black and she wasn’t carrying an over night bag. And this time they didn’t talk of her leaving. They talked of how he could help her stay.
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