Aristocratic rites, class vanity, and a pheasant hunt that spirals out of control in the countryside of Lomellina

Ironic mystery novel. The Recipe of the Pelican Farmstead. Chapter 3: The Perfect Hunt. When power shoots blanks (and not only)

Thirty years after losing his parents, Count GianalbertoMarchetti—written all in one word, as always, because even time had given up trying to separate him—rose from his chair beneath the portico. The gesture, in itself, deserved to be logged as an extraordinary event. First, however, he completed the ritual: he finished his glass of wine, mentally counted the oil crostini (six, as per immutable tradition), and granted himself a few extra seconds of stillness, just to be sure the impulse wasn’t a passing error.

Then he decided to undertake the titanic feat.

A walk to the manure heap.

He skirted the now-abandoned house where the farm manager’s family had once lived. The windows, blind and opaque, seemed to watch him with a mix of reproach and relief: they too, after all, had stopped expecting anything. He crossed the small rear yard, where grass had been growing undisturbed for decades, and passed by the laundry building that had once been used by the peasants when they worked for his father—today a silent structure, with the air of someone who has finished their shift without receiving instructions for the next day.

He walked along the chicken-wire fences, observing hens who ignored him with enviable professionalism, and finally emerged in front of the manure heap.

The manure heap looked as it always did: a nauseating rot of cuttings, plant remnants, and liquids draining from the cultivated fields, forming a surface uncertain between the solid and the philosophically questionable. It was a place that promised nothing good, and precisely for that reason it always kept its promises. The smell was the usual one—penetrating but honest—and it gave the scene a wild, primordial air, as if civilization had decided to stop there and think.

His only cow—the old Gina, though he rarely called her by name—was busy grazing the abundant grass that grew along the edges of the heap. And that’s where Gianalberto noticed something unusual.

The cow seemed to be smiling.

Between one chew and the next, there was a curl of the lips—or whatever, in a cow, can reasonably be defined as such—that vaguely resembled the satisfied expression of someone who has just understood a joke too late. Then she rotated her head with suspicious amplitude, almost three hundred and sixty degrees, as if checking the entire world before speaking. And finally she mooed.

But not just any moo.

A strange sound—prolonged, modulated—that immediately reminded Gianalberto of an oboe at the Christmas concert. Not the oboe of a brilliant soloist, but the oboe of a village band, when the air is cold and the reed does whatever it wants. Something unheard of. Not even in his long years of low-intensity bovine observation.

He sat down on the edge of the manure heap, cautiously, choosing a spot that seemed less inclined to swallow him. He kept watching the cow with a sincere astonishment—rare for him. To pass the time—if it could even be called passing time—he plucked a blade of grass and put it in his mouth, chewing slowly, more out of imitation than any real gastronomic conviction.

Meanwhile the cow had decided to head toward the barn. But not with the usual slow, weary step that Gianalberto knew so well. No. She was trotting. With an agility he would never have credited her with, almost with an offensive lightness, still rotating her head and mooing her personal oboe, as if rehearsing a solo.

“How strange…” thought Gianalberto, without saying it aloud, so as not to break the spell.

An idea came to him. A dark idea, but consistent with his character.

Could it be the old cow was on the verge of death?

After all, he’d been expecting her departure for years. Years of careful psychological preparation, culminating in a drastic yet prudent decision: he had started drinking soy milk. Not out of ethical or health conviction, but to train himself for the inevitable. A sort of preventive mourning, diluted into the everyday.

He watched the cow disappear slowly into the barn, still trotting, still musical. He remained seated, chewing the grass, with the vague impression that something, somewhere, was changing. He didn’t know what. Nor, to tell the truth, whether it was worth intervening.

After all, he thought, even if the cow had decided to reinvent herself, it didn’t follow that he had to do the same.

As Gina hopped and wriggled along the return path toward the barn—with that cheerful, improper gait no respectable cow should ever have allowed herself—Gianalberto sensed a presence behind him. A faint, irregular sound that belonged neither to the wind nor to the bovine oboe concert that had just ended.

It was Caligola.

Or rather: it was something that looked very much like Caligola, the well-known tired dog, faithful companion to a master equally known for his sloth. And yet something didn’t add up. Gianalberto wondered whether it was the light, the mephitic air of the manure heap, or the glass of wine he’d had under the portico—wine that, perhaps, after thirty years of routine, had finally decided to do its job.

Caligola was advancing toward him with an unnatural concentration.

At first Gianalberto thought he was limping. Then he realized it wasn’t that. The dog was walking in a completely unprecedented way: for a few meters he balanced on his front legs, hindquarters raised like a botched acrobatic trick, then, without any break, straightened up and continued upright on his hind legs, with an air that wavered between dignified and bureaucratic. All four paws, that day, were not being considered. Not out of laziness—out of choice.

Gianalberto watched in silence, with the same attention with which years earlier he had counted frogs and toads, trying not to jump to conclusions. Inside himself, though, a question began to make its way forward, slow but stubborn:

But I only drank one glass…

Caligola stopped in front of him, still upright. He looked him in the eyes with an expression that, if it weren’t completely absurd, might have been called inquisitive. Then he slowly lowered his front paws, returned quadrupedal for a moment—just to remind everyone who he was—and immediately rose again, as if he had decided traditional posture was no longer adequate to the historical moment.

“What are you doing?” murmured Gianalberto, more out of courtesy than any real expectation of an answer.

The dog tilted his head. No whine, no bark. Only a silence heavy with intentions, the same silence that had preceded the fatal shotgun blast that killed his parents—though Gianalberto did not make that association. He wasn’t in the habit.

He looked toward the barn. The cow no longer mooed, but he could hear her moving inside with suspicious energy, as if she were tidying up the place. He returned his gaze to Caligola, who now seemed impatient, swaying slightly on his hind legs like a clerk waiting for the office to open.

What was happening to his animals?

An omen, perhaps. But of what kind? Gianalberto, who had never had much of a relationship with the concept of destiny, felt vaguely called into question. Until then the world had always asked very little of him: stay still, observe, don’t disturb. Now, instead, it seemed to be preparing something. Something involving a musician cow and a bipedal dog.

He rose slowly from the edge of the manure heap. Not out of heroic initiative, but because the situation required it. Caligola followed him, still upright, with an almost respectful air.

“All right…” said the count, sighing. “Let’s see where you want to get to.”

He didn’t know whether he was speaking to the dog, the cow, or the entire world. But for the first time in thirty years, Gianalberto Marchetti had the distinct feeling that immobility would no longer be enough. And for him, that alone was a revolutionary event.

Gianalberto took two steps. Only two. Not three—because at the third, the world decided to change register without asking permission.

Something inside him made him feel light. Not light in the poetic sense, but physically light, as if someone had unscrewed a fundamental bolt and left him temporarily suspended. His head began to spin with a slow, circular, polite motion, without violence, like a village carousel that has decided to run at reduced capacity. Colors, previously well-mannered and separate, began to mix without civic sense: green became greener, the brown of the earth turned welcoming, the sky took on a shade between blue and “I never noticed it was like this.”

His body—which until then had responded only to minimal impulses: sit, stand, drink, sign—began to react to stimuli he had never catalogued. His legs were his, yes, but they seemed to have taken autonomous initiative, like employees who suddenly discover they can get promoted without the boss. His hands tingled discreetly—not annoyingly, more like encouragement.

Then came the flashes.

Not the dramatic kind of great revelations, but brief, casual bursts: the yard as a child, frogs miscounted, the smell of oil on crostini, Notary Gallotto coughing while he signed, the cow’s oboe-moo, Caligola standing like a civil servant. All together, all layered, as if someone had decided to project thirty years of unproductive nothingness into a single badly edited trailer.

There were also pops. But internal, muffled pops, like champagne corks opened underwater. And tastes. The blade of grass he had chewed—whose ambitions he had not suspected a few instants earlier—now left an unexpected sweetness in his mouth, vaguely herbal, reassuring, as if the manure heap, in a sudden maternal surge, had decided to take care of him.

Then came the laughter.

So much laughter.

Not his—at least not at first. Laughter that seemed to come from outside and inside at the same time. Laughter of children he had never had, of parents no longer there, of himself who, for the first time, seemed vaguely likable. There was no mockery in that laughter, only a kindly acknowledgment: look at this type.

Gianalberto stopped. Or perhaps the world stopped for him, out of kindness. He felt good. Calm. Extraordinarily calm. As if every demanding thought had been placed in the next room with the door shut and a sign: “back later, maybe.”

He understood, with the lazy lucidity that was his own, that he wasn’t dying. Nor going mad. He was simply… being. But better than usual. Without the weight of inertia, without the obligation to decide. A kind of democratic well-being, distributed evenly through his body.

“Ah…” he thought.

And added nothing, because there was no need.

If that was the end, it was a comfortable end.

If it was the beginning, he only hoped it wouldn’t demand too much.

Positive sensations arrived with suspicious gentleness, like guests who don’t knock but apologize as they come in. There was no aggression, no sharp break with reality: rather, it was as if reality had decided to become cooperative, finally willing to explain itself without raising its voice.

The first thing Gianalberto noticed was a soft clarity. Thoughts, usually scattered like hens in the yard, lined up in orderly rows—without hurry. They weren’t running toward a conclusion; they were simply making themselves seen. Each idea seemed to say: here I am, I’m not urgent. And for him, this was an absolute novelty. For the first time he didn’t feel the weight of decision, because everything already appeared, somehow, acceptable.

Time stopped behaving authoritatively. It didn’t speed up, it didn’t slow down: it widened. Each second seemed to have more room inside itself, like a room that suddenly gains an extra window. Gianalberto had the impression he could inhabit instants, not merely pass through them. Even breathing struck him as an interesting activity, worthy of attention, as if inhaling and exhaling were small daily successes to celebrate in moderation.

Then came the colors, but not theatrically. No psychedelic explosions, no poster-visions. The colors were simply… right. The green of the manure heap was no longer just any green, but that green, exactly as it should always have been. Every shade seemed to carry a benevolent intention. The world, in short, finally appeared well calibrated, as if someone had adjusted the contrast after years of a disturbed broadcast.

There was also a deep sensation of connection, with nothing mystical about it and everything practical. Gianalberto felt he belonged to things without needing to own them. The cow, the dog, the manure heap, the poplars, even the mud: everything was there with him—not to serve him, not to judge him, but to share the same moment. A simple communion, almost administrative. We’re all here, things seemed to say. And that’s fine.

The euphoria, if it could be called that, was sober. It didn’t push him to jump, to shout, to proclaim universal truths. It was an inner, discreet joy, like good news received by mistake and kept, out of politeness. The corners of his mouth lifted just slightly, in a smile that asked for no witnesses. For the first time, being still didn’t feel like a renunciation, but a legitimate choice.

Finally, there was a profound calm, almost therapeutic. Worries—few, but stubborn—dissolved like sugar in lukewarm water. The future, which he had always perceived as a vague and tiring threat, now appeared as an optional possibility. Not something to face, but perhaps to meet, if and when necessity arose.

Gianalberto had a tiny revelation, and precisely for that reason a powerful one: there was nothing to fix urgently. Nothing to prove. Nothing to recover. His life, as it had been—slow, lateral, often useless—suddenly required no apologies. It simply existed, and for once it did so with unexpected grace.

If that sensation had a chemical name, he didn’t know it.

But if he had to describe it, he would have said simply:

it’s as if the world, for a few minutes, stopped demanding.

Then, without warning and without any elegance, the sensations changed nature.

They didn’t fade: they snapped.

It was as if someone had suddenly turned on a light that was too bright directly behind his eyes. The soft tranquillity of moments before was swept away by a sharp, nervous, impatient energy.

His heart sped up. Not dramatically, but with stubborn determination, as if it had decided to work overtime without being ordered. His breathing became short and rapid, more frequent than necessary, and yet never enough. Every inhale seemed incomplete, every exhale useless. His chest was crossed by an electrical sensation—neither painful nor pleasant, but invasive—like a current that can’t find a ground.

The mind, which moments earlier had collaborated gently, now switched into hyper-productive mode. Thoughts no longer lined up: they crowded. They all arrived at once, shouting. Every idea seemed urgent, fundamental, indispensable. Gianalberto had the distinct impression of understanding everything—immediately—while being unable to stop on anything. An aggressive lucidity, brilliant and sterile at the same time.

He suddenly felt capable. Capable of what, it wasn’t clear. But capable—of speaking, deciding, doing, starting a hundred things at once. A sense of artificial power ran through his body, an inflated confidence resting on no concrete proof, yet demanding to be believed. Even his posture changed: shoulders straightened, head lifted, as if the world now had to adjust to him.

His senses became hyper-acute. The sounds of the countryside—the wind, a wingbeat, distant croaking—grew too present, invasive, almost irritating. Smells, previously welcoming, turned aggressive: the manure heap was no longer a vital matrix, but an olfactory provocation. Everything was too much: too close, too intense, too real.

And then came the restlessness.

A feeling of chronic incompleteness, as if something essential were about to happen but refused to occur. Gianalberto felt the urge to move, to do something—anything—without the slightest idea what that something might be. Standing still became unbearable. Even thinking became hard, because thought was running faster than comprehension.

Calm had turned into obsessive control. Every detail demanded attention, but none truly deserved it. Time, which before had widened, now shattered into nervous fragments: brief, unusable instants that slid away without leaving space. There was no longer acceptance, only expectation. And expectation was never satisfied.

Gianalberto also felt a strange emotional coldness. Not sadness, not fear: detachment. As if empathy had been temporarily suspended to make room for efficiency. He looked at the barn, the cow, Caligola, but he didn’t feel them. They were extras. He, suddenly, was the center of everything—and instead of comforting him, it unsettled him.

The most destabilizing thing, however, was realizing that the sensation had something seductive about it. Not pleasant, but convincing. An inner voice—new, insistent—seemed to whisper that this state was better, more useful, more “right.” A well-packaged lie, but effective.

The vortex returned.

It didn’t explode, it didn’t attack: it wrapped around him.

Colors and sounds recomposed like a blender that, tired of making noise, suddenly decides to become velvet. The vivid sensations from before—sharp, nervous, overexcited—melted into one another, losing edges and demands. Gianalberto had the distinct impression that someone had turned down the volume of the world without asking his consent, but with such courtesy as to make any protest superfluous.

His body stopped weighing.

Not in the euphoric sense of lightness, but in the deeper sense of emotional weightlessness. The limbs were still there, but they no longer demanded attention. His shoulders relaxed the way they do after a day that has been too long and finally ends; his legs were no longer an instrument for moving, but an acceptable condition. His heart slowed down—not from fatigue, but from disinterest: it understood there was nothing left to chase.

The mind, which a moment earlier had been producing thoughts like an office in full overtime, shut down with an almost suspicious sweetness. Not absolute silence, but a kind of warm cotton. Thoughts didn’t vanish: they simply stopped being important. Every worry lost its urgency, like a letter left too long on a desk, now without an addressee.

A different happiness arrived.

Not bright, not declarative. A low, continuous, uniform happiness. I’m not happy, but it’s fine like this. Gianalberto felt an inner caress, a sensation of total protection, as if the world had decided to cradle him without ulterior motives. No desire, no lack. Even the future, which usually appeared as an annoying obligation, had been politely postponed to a date to be determined.

Sounds became distant and at the same time intimate. The wind among the poplars seemed to come from inside him, the croaking of the frogs was no longer noise but rhythm, the distant moo of the cow a familiar song. Everything had the perfect distance: close enough to be perceived, far enough not to disturb. It was like being underwater, but without cold and without fear.

Time flattened out.

It no longer flowed: it stayed. A continuous present, without edges, without before or after. Gianalberto didn’t remember how long he had been there and, above all, he didn’t care. There was no hurry, because there was no direction. There was no need to decide, because everything seemed already decided for the best.

He felt a sudden tenderness for himself.

Not pity, not self-indulgence. A quiet tenderness, like the one you feel for someone who did their best even when it looked like they were doing nothing. All the mistakes, renunciations, slowness, missed chances: everything appeared not only justifiable, but irrelevant. Not because it hadn’t happened, but because it no longer hurt.

It was a thick, deep, enveloping peace.

So complete that it was almost dangerous in its perfection. A peace that didn’t ask to be understood, or remembered. Only inhabited. Gianalberto felt he could stay there forever—without boredom, without question, without a name.

And for the first time in his life, the idea of doing nothing didn’t seem like a lack.

It seemed like a vocation.

Gianalberto knew, with a quiet and non-negotiable certainty, that he was no longer of this earth. Not in the tragic sense of the word, but in the administrative one: as if his body were still there, duly filed, while he had obtained a temporary permit for elsewhere. He traveled without knowing where, and this ignorance not only didn’t bother him—it reassured him. At last, a direction that demanded no explanations.

He floated in waves of pleasure with surprising naturalness, as if he had always been made to drift and had only wasted time walking. Emotions arrived softly, one after another, without urgency. Each sensation felt like a gift that didn’t require thanks. Then, slowly, something changed again.

Not violently. Curiously.

The world began to speak, but not with words. Surfaces became permeable to his gaze: the edge of the manure heap was no longer just an edge, but a living line, pulsing, breathing at his rhythm. The grass was no longer made of single blades, but of woven textures, intentional designs, as if someone had finally admitted that even disorder follows an elegant logic.

Colors freed themselves from their decorative function. Green was no longer “on the grass”: it was the grass, and at the same time an idea of green, a reassuring concept slipping into him. Shades multiplied without confusion, as if each color had decided to tell its own personal story. Gianalberto didn’t understand them all, but felt it wasn’t necessary.

Forms began to move. Not in the disjointed way of aggressive hallucination, but with narrative grace. The poplars swayed in a slow, conscious choreography. The brambles seemed like ironic observers. Even the manure heap—manure heap for his entire life—now had the air of a portal: not disgusting, but ancient, as if it held a wisdom that had chosen not to speak until now.

His body became strange, but not hostile. His hands felt distant, yet perfectly his. Every movement left a trace—not visual but perceptual—as if each gesture continued to exist even after it was done. The boundary between inside and outside grew porous: it was no longer clear where Gianalberto ended and where everything else began. And this loss of definition, rather than frightening him, lifted him.

Time, too, finally stopped behaving in any recognizable way. It didn’t stop, it didn’t speed up: it branched. There were moments that seemed to last an eternity and others that ended before they could even be perceived. Distant memories—Ida when she was young, the cow in a full barn, the far sound of a hunting horn—surfaced and blended with the present without asking permission. Everything was now, and everything was legitimate.

A feeling of childlike wonder arrived. Not loud amazement, but that silent wonder of childhood, when you look at something without needing to explain it. Gianalberto felt part of a larger story—not as protagonist, but as the perfect extra. At last, a role suited to his inclinations.

Even identity became flexible. He didn’t forget who he was, but stopped considering it relevant. Count, son, heir, lazy man: labels useful in certain contexts, but now superfluous. In that moment he was simply a point of perception drifting through a surprisingly cooperative world.

And as new images kept emerging—vegetal geometries, animals that seemed to carry messages that were not urgent, sounds that had shape—Gianalberto had a clear thought, perhaps the clearest of his life:

If this is an illusion, it’s made better than reality.

And, true to his character, he decided not to investigate further.

The trip ended without announcements, without final epiphanies, without credits. Like all the important things in Gianalberto’s life, it ended out of fatigue.

The first thing to return was weight. Not moral weight—that had never really gone away—but physical, concrete, undeniable weight. Weight that creaked. The second thing to reappear was a rhythmic, irregular noise, accompanied by panting breath and a rosary murmured under one’s breath with an accent time had never managed to smooth away.

When he opened his eyes—or rather when he half-opened them to check whether the world had become usable again—Gianalberto understood he was lying inside a wheelbarrow.

A real wheelbarrow.

Wooden.

Old.

With a wheel that had stopped believing in its mission sometime in the 1970s.

Ida was pushing.

She pushed with the determination of women who have made it through a flood, two regions, three charitable institutions, and a noble family without ever receiving a proper thank-you. Every step came with a huff, and every huff with a prayer—spoken not out of devotion, but pure negotiation.

“Lord… give me strength…”

Creak.

“…because this is too much…”

Creak.

“…I did what I could…”

Creak.

Evening had fallen. A Lombard evening, mild, with air that smells of earth that has worked all day and now demands rest. Shadows stretched along the farmstead walls, and the light turned indulgent, as if the sun too had decided not to ask questions.

Gianalberto, still dazed but surprisingly lucid in his sideways way, did a quick calculation. Not with scientific precision—it wasn’t his field—but with the intuitive math you develop when your body has been in the same place too long.

If the sun was high… then slanted… then gone…

At least six hours.

Six hours in the manure heap.

“Ida…” he murmured, in a voice that sounded as if it too had spent the day reflecting on the meaning of existence.

Ida didn’t stop.

Didn’t turn around.

Didn’t answer right away.

“Ida… I think something strange happened to me.”

At that, Ida stopped. She kept her hands on the wheelbarrow handles, sniffed, lifted her eyes to the sky, and spoke directly to the high office in charge.

“You see, Lord?

He’s talking.

He’s alive.

And now he even says something happened to him.”

She started pushing again.

Inside the wheelbarrow, Gianalberto watched the sky pass overhead, bump by bump. He tried to reconstruct: the sensations, the colors, the dancing cow, the bipedal Caligola, the peace, the euphoria, the noise, the silence, the certainty of no longer being earthly. Everything felt far away and close at once, like a dream had during a nap that lasted too long.

“Ida…” he tried again, cautiously. “I… I don’t really remember what happened.”

“Better,” she replied dryly. “Then you won’t tell me.”

The wheelbarrow’s wheel dropped into a hole and produced a sound like a human groan.

Ida huffed, sweated, prayed. She prayed not for the salvation of the count’s soul—that she had long since handed over to higher management—but to obtain a settlement. A definitive solution to the punishment life had delivered to her with sadistic punctuality: continuing to look after Count Marchetti.

A count who never fell ill, never died, never changed, but who now and then decided to become suddenly unmanageable without warning.

When they reached the portico, Ida stopped the wheelbarrow with a sharp jerk. Gianalberto remained there, flat on his back, staring at the wooden beams as if they were a new ceiling.

“Tomorrow,” Ida said, wiping her hands on her apron, “you are not going back to the manure heap.”

Gianalberto nodded slowly.

He agreed.

Not out of obedience, but prudence.

Inside himself he knew something really had happened. Something enormous, impossible to explain, and above all too exhausting to repeat. But, consistent with his entire life, he decided to file the event under a reassuring category:

Country oddities.

Then he closed his eyes.

Finally tired in the right way.