Rural humor and mystery in Sommo Lomellina: Gianalberto Marchetti, Ida, and the “euphoria-inducing substance” amid manure, animals, and entrepreneurial ambitions

Ironic mystery novel. The Recipe of the Pelican Farm. Chapter 5: The Manure-Pit Startup

In the morning, Count Gianalberto Marchetti woke up in a good mood. Not the timid, suspicious kind of good mood that lasts just long enough to remember who you are, but a full, rounded, steady good mood—as if the night before he hadn’t drunk Ida’s usual chamomile tea (with lemon and a spoon and a half of sugar, because one spoon “doesn’t do anything”), but the infamous happiness pill, the one that doesn’t exist yet that everyone, at least once, has secretly hoped to find on the bedside table.

He was upbeat.

Active.

And above all—an extremely serious detail—he felt like doing things.

That was precisely the feeling that startled him more than anything. The urge to do. An unrequested impulse, unplanned, unaccompanied by any cost-benefit analysis. Something that, in his entire life, had never happened to him. He had always been a man willing to let others do things, or at most to postpone. Doing, instead, implied a different posture, an energy he didn’t recognize as his own.

Yet that morning he felt like a different count.

A landowner.

Perhaps—and the thought almost made him smile—an entrepreneur.

He went downstairs with a determined step, which the floor received with a certain surprise. He sat in the living room at the long table that had once hosted the lavish dinners organized by his parents. A monumental table, designed to hold at least twenty-four guests and an embarrassing quantity of useless conversations. Now, in the middle, sat his chipped English ceramic mug, painfully nicked, surrounded by two silver utensils worn down by how Ida polished them with liturgical devotion.

Breakfast was the usual:

a soft-boiled egg,

some toast with blackberry jam,

a piece of soft cheese with a reassuring smell.

Nothing, apparently, had changed.

When he sat down, Ida came in carrying two steaming jugs, one of milk and one of coffee. They greeted each other as they had for decades: a nod, a quick glance, a habit so well-worn it seemed like an automatic gesture of the house more than of people. Ida set down the jugs with millimeter precision and stood for a moment, as always, waiting for a signal that never came.

The count began breakfast.

He tapped the top of the egg with the teaspoon, searching for the right opening, with a concentration he usually reserved only for counting frogs. Just as he was working delicately on the shell, he spoke.

“Ida…”

She stiffened slightly. The tone was different. No longer the flat, sideways tone of always. There was a new vibration, a confidence that immediately put her on alert.

“Please sit,” the count said, without lifting his gaze from the egg, “on the other side of the table.”

Ida remained still.

The table was long.

Sitting “on the other side” meant a distance that was never used. It meant a conversation. It meant a confrontation.

She obeyed.

She sat down, smoothing her apron, and looked at him with that attention mixed with caution one reserves for children when they start talking too seriously. Gianalberto finally lifted his gaze and met her eyes, without losing his focus on opening the egg, which proceeded with surgical precision.

“Ida,” he said, “I’ve been thinking.”

Ida swallowed.

For the count, thinking was a dangerous verb. In her experience, it always announced extra work.

“I’ve been thinking about my future.”

The egg opened with a perfect crack. A clean, elegant opening, almost harmonious.

“And I’ve decided I have to do something.”

Ida felt a faint buzzing in her ears. It wasn’t mystical—it was the beginning of a looming migraine. She watched him without interrupting, praying inwardly that this “something” would be brief, vague, and, if possible, reversible.

“This farm,” the count went on, “has potential.”

Ida thought of the manure pit.

Of the oboe-playing cow.

Of the two-legged dog.

She decided not to comment.

“And I…” said Gianalberto, carefully dipping the teaspoon into the egg, “finally feel ready.”

Ready for what, Ida didn’t dare ask. She knew the danger of open-ended questions.

“I’d like your opinion,” the count added.

That sentence, more than anything else, made her falter.

Her opinion.

In fifty years of service, no Marchetti had ever asked her for an opinion. They had asked her to cook, to clean, to organize, to be quiet, to endure—and when she was young, to put up with the occasional hand on her backside from Count Ulderico. But an opinion? Never. Not once.

Ida cleared her throat.

“Count…” she began cautiously, “did you sleep well?”

Gianalberto nodded, serene.

“Very well. Better than I have in years.”

Ida sighed.

Inside herself, she began a quick prayer, without punctuation, addressed to any saint available for overtime shifts.

The count kept eating the egg methodically, as if performing a propitiatory rite. Every gesture was slow but decisive. Every word seemed to come from a new place in him, one Ida had never visited.

“Ida,” he concluded, “today I want to begin.”

She stared at him.

Then lowered her eyes.

Then raised them again.

“Begin doing what, Count?”

Gianalberto smiled. A small, sincere, almost excited smile.

“I don’t know yet.”

And in that answer Ida understood two things with absolute clarity:

that the day would be long, and that the punishment was not over.

“I need to think about what happened yesterday at the manure pit.”

The count spoke that sentence with the same solemnity with which, in other times, peace treaties or declarations of war would have been announced. Ida, seated neatly on the other side of the table, nodded slowly, with that practical devotion one reserves for a master’s statements when it isn’t clear whether they’re orders, thoughts, or simply noises produced by a mouth.

“It wasn’t a clear incident,” Gianalberto went on, “nor a random event.”

Ida thought that, judging by the count’s life, randomness had always been the only real organizer of his days. But she said nothing.

“It was… a thing.”

He paused, searching for the right term.

“A thing that could be leveraged, that could have an entrepreneurial rationale.”

Ida stiffened her shoulders slightly. Every time the count used the verb “to leverage,” someone ended up working more. And statistically, that someone was her, since they were alone in the farmhouse now.

“To ease people’s suffering,” he continued, in a suddenly missionary tone, “and generate income for the farm.”

There it was.

Ida realized the morning had officially taken a bad turn.

She listened—composed, martial—to the nonsense (because that’s what it was, in her view) coming out of her employer’s mouth. She could smell in the air that blend of enthusiasm and naïveté that, in the Marchettis, had always preceded grand silent failures. Inside herself, she wondered—again—what original sin had condemned her to remain there, lucid and sitting upright, while the count, simply by talking for more than two minutes in a row, was experiencing an epochal event.

“Excuse me, Count,” she finally said, with the prudence that had saved her life more times than the rosary, “but… how would one make money from manure?”

The question was sincere. Practical. Earthbound. Worthy of a woman who had seen floodwaters carry houses away and hunger empty plates.

Gianalberto, however, did not flinch. On the contrary, he seemed invigorated.

“You see, Ida,” he said, setting down the teaspoon carefully, “yesterday all our animals gathered at the manure pit.”

Ida thought of Gina trotting like a debutante and of Caligula deciding to defy Darwin. She merely pressed her lips together.

“And after a relative amount of time,” the count continued, “they left in a state of euphoria never seen before.”

Euphoric.

A cow.

Ida made the sign of the cross in her mind, but only in her mind.

“I myself,” Gianalberto added, lowering his voice as if confessing a venial sin, “don’t know if it was from breathing the miasma of the manure pit or because I chewed a blade of grass… but I was carried away.”

Carried away.

Ida fixed her gaze on an indistinct spot on the wall behind the count’s head, where a stain of dampness had taken the shape of an unrecognized saint. Maybe it was a sign. Or maybe it was just mold. Either way, it felt more reliable than this conversation.

Inside herself, Ida thought about why, at seventy-eight, she was forced to listen to a grown man speak seriously about ecstasy from a manure pit. And she did it upright. Martial. As if listening to a general and not to a count who until yesterday counted frogs to pass the time.

Gianalberto, undeterred, went on.

“Therefore I deduce,” he said, enunciating carefully, “that for reasons still obscure to me, the area around the manure pit retains within it… and I still don’t know how… a euphoria-inducing substance.”

Ida felt her heart give a small jump. The word “substance” promised nothing good.

“A substance,” he repeated, “that positively affects the mood of Christians… and animals.”

Ida lowered her eyes to her hands. She thought of all the Christians she had seen suffer for far more concrete reasons: hunger, cold, war, masters. And now someone was suggesting curing them with manure.

“For us, Ida,” the count concluded, with a solemnity that allowed no reply, “the arduous task of discovering it. And exploiting it.”

Then he stopped.

A theatrical pause, studied—one he didn’t even know he could perform. During that silence, he took a slice of bread, spread it carefully with a generous amount of soft cheese, and added a thin veil of blackberry jam. A daring pairing, but not without its own logic—like everything he did that morning.

He ate.

He chewed.

He swallowed.

Finally he raised his eyes.

“What do you think, Ida?”

Ida’s opinion.

Again.

Ida looked at him. Really looked. She saw a man who, for the first time in his life, wasn’t slipping away from things, but trying to grasp them—even in the wrong way, even starting from a manure pit.

She inhaled slowly.

“Count,” she finally said, with a calm that tasted like intelligent surrender, “I think yesterday you got sunstroke. Or something like it.”

Gianalberto didn’t take offense. On the contrary, he seemed to consider the hypothesis seriously.

“But,” Ida added, because life had taught her that opposing him head-on was useless, “I also think that if there truly is something out there that makes both people and beasts feel good… then it’s either a grace, or a temptation.

She paused.

“And in either case,” she concluded, “sooner or later it sends the bill.”

The count nodded slowly.

Not because he understood everything.

But because, for the first time, he felt he was on the right path.

Inside herself, Ida resumed praying.

Not because she believed in the project.

But because she understood that whatever that miraculous substance was, she would be involved.

“Very well, Ida. I take note of your statement.”

The count delivered that sentence with the air of someone who has just recorded an irreversible decision of the Council of Ministers, when in fact he was still sitting at the table with a breadcrumb on his waistcoat.

“And I inform you,” he continued, “that this morning I relieve you of your household duties.”

Ida’s eyes widened.

Relieved.

Not of worries, not of the count, not of life.

But of household duties.

It was such an unexpected piece of news that for a moment she feared she’d misunderstood.

“So you can focus with me,” Gianalberto added, in a grave tone, “on a further experiment that will, I hope, confirm my theories about the thaumaturgic virtues of the manure pit.”

Ida understood nothing.

Nothing.

Zero.

But she had grasped the first part perfectly: no cleaning.

And that, in her long experience, amounted to an armed truce, a suspension of daily hostilities worth accepting with cautious gratitude.

The count checked the imaginary clock he carried within himself and decreed:

“Meeting in the yard at ten o’clock sharp.”

Then, as if organizing a scientific expedition were a draining activity, he withdrew under the garden porch, allowing himself the time—his words—“to enjoy a good cigar.”

At ten o’clock sharp, Ida was in the yard.

Standing.

In the center.

With a feeling on her that resembled an imminent disaster more than the beginning of a revolutionary discovery.

She looked toward the porch.

Nothing.

Five minutes passed.

Then ten.

Then fifteen.

Ida, who famously couldn’t stand still, began to shift from one wooden clog to the other, trying to relieve the discomfort in her heels and, at the same time, in her soul. Every so often she glanced up at the sky—not to check the weather, but to see whether someone up there was taking notes.

At ten-thirty, with the dignity of someone who has waited enough even for an entire lifetime, she walked toward the porch.

And there she saw him.

Gianalberto Marchetti, count by hereditary grace, seated in a wicker chair, with an unlit cigar jammed in his mouth, snoring loudly. The stub of cigar moved in sync with his nose and lungs, back and forth like a tired but methodical piston.

Ida watched him.

For a long time.

So this is the formidable manure-pit entrepreneur, she thought.

The man of the future.

She coughed.

Once.

Then twice.

Then three times.

A crescendo worthy of a liturgical call.

At the fourth cough, the count jolted awake, opened his eyes, and said abruptly, with absolute conviction:

“I was waiting for you, Ida.”

Ida didn’t answer.

She looked at him.

The count stood up, satisfied, as if that nap had been a fundamental phase of the creative process, and walked toward the center of the yard with a determined stride, signaling for Ida to follow. The air was that of a military muster, even if the army, for now, consisted of two people and a great deal of skepticism.

He stopped.

He turned.

And declared:

“Ida. Bring before me all the herds at our disposal.”

Ida stared at him the way one looks at a child who has just discovered a new word and wants to use it immediately, and wrongly.

“Count,” she said with iron patience, “all the herds are made up of one cow, one horse, and one dog.”

Gianalberto nodded, unmoved by any numerical implications.

“Exactly.”

Ida sighed.

Turned on her heels.

And went to the stable.

Ten minutes later she returned, dragging reality behind her: to the right, Gina the cow, placid and vaguely smiling; to the left, the horse, accepting the matter with the resignation of one who has seen worse. Caligula followed at a distance, with the air of someone participating more out of curiosity than conviction.

Ida positioned them in front of the count in a martial way, like an improvised parade. The cow in the center, the horse to the side, the dog slightly off to one side, because even he had his dignity.

Gianalberto inspected the troops.

Herwalked slowly, hands behind his back, nodding.

Observing.

Evaluating.

Then, with a broad, heroic gesture—wildly disproportionate to the situation—he said:

“Forward. Follow me.”

And he set off toward the manure pit.

Ida followed him.

The cow followed him.

The horse followed him.

The dog, after a moment’s thought, decided yes: it was worth seeing how this madness would end.

And as they advanced in that improbable procession, Ida felt a clear and definitive certainty: whatever had happened the day before at the manure pit hadn’t only changed the count.

It had opened a new season. And she, as always, was in it up to her neck.

Arriving at the manure pit, Count Gianalberto Marchetti immediately assumed the attitude that came naturally to him only on rare occasions: that of a man about to make history, even if he wasn’t entirely sure what history it was.

He stopped on the raised edge of the embankment, inhaled with a certain emphasis the dense, complex air of the place—a bouquet combining vegetal notes, hints of marsh, and a persistent stable base—and then, with a broad sweep of his arm, pronounced the solemn order:

“Ida.

Release the troops.”

Ida didn’t answer.

She had learned that when the count used military vocabulary, it was best to limit oneself to mechanical execution and postpone any comment to a future life, preferably in paradise.

She gave the cow and the horse a pat on the rump and the “herd”—a term that in that context had more symbolic than numerical value—spread out into the manure pit.

The cow was the first to move.

She took a few slow, measured steps, with that bovine dignity that no event, not even mystical, seemed able to shake. She headed toward an area where sturdy clumps of very green grass had grown, lush beyond any agronomic decency. The roots sank into a semi-marshy strip near a row of cultivated fields, whose ground level sat at least fifty centimeters higher than the manure pit. It was as if that grass had decided to thrive against logic, feeding on what ran down, what seeped, what was discarded.

The cow slipped her muzzle into the clumps with a studied slowness, almost ritual, and began to graze. Each chew was deep, concentrated, as if she were reading a sacred text written directly into the soil. Now and then she lifted her head, looked at the world with an expression that might vaguely resemble a smile, and then resumed, convinced.

The horse, faithful to the unwritten but rigid rule of the farm—never hurry—headed toward a muddy area made up of an amorphous heap of cut branches, green residues of rotting corn stalks, and manure from the chicken coop. A place that, for a well-mannered equine, ought to have been a natural deterrent. And yet, no.

He sank one hoof, then the other, with the resignation of someone who has realized that resisting fate is pointless. He lowered his muzzle, sniffed, exhaled softly—a gesture that, in the language of horses, could mean everything or nothing—and stayed there, grazing peacefully.

Caligula, instead, made a different choice.

He didn’t move away from the edge of the manure pit. He stayed close. Cautious. He started playing with a wild plant with a tough, leathery stalk that bent under his teeth with elastic resistance. He bit it, pulled it, let it go, caught it again. A childish, almost therapeutic game that had nothing scientific about it and everything necessary. Every now and then he glanced up at the count, as if to say: I’m doing my part, but let’s not get carried away.

The count and Ida sat on the edge of the concrete basin.

They let their legs dangle into the void above an obvious pool of dark, viscous liquid that could be called, with a certain terminological generosity, liquid manure. It was the runoff from the manure pit’s drainage: a slow, patient distillate of everything the earth had decided not to hold.

“Observe, Ida,” the count said, in a low voice full of expectation. “Observe carefully.”

Ida observed.

Always.

She had observed the Po flood.

Hunger.

Nuns.

Counts.

Death.

Now she observed this too.

Sitting there, they looked like two spectators in a theater. In front of them, the “battle” announced by the count had nothing epic about it: no roar, no charge. Only slow chewing, hooves in mud, teeth bending stalks, soft and deep squelching sounds. And yet, in the air, there was something.

A gentle tension.

A suspension.

The count leaned slightly forward, as if afraid of missing a crucial detail. Ida, instead, simply stayed there—with that solid presence she had developed through decades of silent survival.

“You see?” Gianalberto resumed. “There’s no violence. There’s… adherence.”

Ida didn’t know what he meant, but she didn’t like the word.

The cow slowed her chewing.

The horse shifted his weight from one leg to another.

Caligula dropped the plant and sat down.

The liquid below them reflected a dull, almost oily light, and now and then a bubble rose slowly to the surface and burst with a soft plop, like a thought that can’t quite become a sentence.

Ida felt something move inside her. A kind of alert calm. Like when you’re tired, but not unhappy.

The count, on the other hand, was enraptured.

He was taking mental notes with a new fervor. Every animal gesture seemed a confirmation. Every sound, a clue. Every silence, proof.

“There is something here, Ida,” he said softly, almost with respect. “Something that works slowly. The way the earth has always worked.”

Ida looked at him.

She didn’t answer.

But for the first time, she didn’t immediately think of punishment. She thought—carefully, almost suspiciously—that perhaps, in the middle of that manure pit, she wasn’t witnessing just another one of the count’s oddities.

Perhaps she was watching the beginning of a much bigger problem.

Or, worse still, an idea.