Grotesque rural tale featuring postmen, local saints, and unwanted discoveries

Humorous mystery novel. The Recipe of the Pelican Farm. Chapter 6: When the Animals Started to Dance

The sparrows were chirping on the branches of the trees lining the north side of the manure pit, and their tiny chatter—insistent, cheerful, a little gossipy—gave the scene an almost normal air. Almost. Because normality, at the Cascina del Pellicano, had become an elastic concept: it stretched and tightened depending on what the animals decided to do.

The count watched his “herds” with rapt attention, as though he were witnessing a laboratory experiment rather than a cow, a horse, and a dog grazing around a foul-smelling drainage and composting basin. He had the look of someone who finally believes he has found something that doesn’t require the effort of inventing it: a ready-made discovery—he only needed to figure out how to cash in.

Ida, seated beside him on the edge of the concrete basin, was absorbed in thought. Her legs dangled above the dark pool of liquid manure, and she held her hands clasped in her lap as if she were praying. In part she truly was, but not with the theatricality of churches: she prayed with the practical devotion of someone who turns to God the way one turns to the local doctor—no frills, no ceremony—hoping the intervention comes before the trouble becomes irreversible.

The morning breeze was light. It passed over the skin, slipped into the nostrils with a mix of wet grass and rotting life, and seemed to carry away the words that would have been expected in that rural little theatre. Because there were always “expected” words: remarks, judgments, lines to prove you were present. Ida, instead, had learned that too many words make situations worse. So she kept quiet, and in her silence there was a kind of ancient balance: if the world is already mad enough, there’s no need to add explanations.

The cow grazed greedily on the lush green grass that had sprung up along the edges, as if that marshy strip were a Michelin-starred restaurant. The horse moved among mud and brush with the calm of someone with no ambitions, sniffing and choosing the best spot to exist without bothering anyone. Caligola, more cautious, stayed close, chewing on a tough stalk and glancing at the count now and then with the prudence of dogs who can recognize the beginning of trouble.

Their religious silence was suddenly broken by a distant hiss.

At first it was a thin sound, like the moan of a water pipe or a belt running badly. It came from the road that, starting from Cava Manara, cut through the countryside, crossed the stretch up to the Cascina del Pellicano, and then slammed noisily into the embankment that led to Sommo Lomellina on the right and Tre Re on the left. A sound that, as it drew nearer, became sharper, more metallic, more irritating.

Neither the count nor Ida paid it much attention at first. In the countryside, sounds always arrive before meaning. Then, as the hiss grew, Gianalberto cast a glance toward the road.

And he saw it.

The postman’s yellow scooter in the distance.

Riding it: Aurelio Malcontento.

In town, his name never needed introductions: Aurelio was almost as famous as the count, but for more democratic reasons. A loafer like him—only without a noble title. To deliver three bills and six advertising flyers in the area between the municipalities of Sommo and Cava Manara, he took the canonical six and a half hours of his contract. And mind you: six and a half only when the weather was mild. Otherwise, the man followed an inviolable principle: mail gets delivered when it isn’t a nuisance. If it rained, if it was cold, if it was windy, if the air was “strange,” he didn’t leave the post office at all. You could call it a form of personal sustainability.

Posterity—if anyone ever has the patience to deal with the postmen of the Lomellina—may debate at length whether that day it was fate, cowardly destiny, or the miracle of Saint Roch, protector of Sommo, who had a hand in it. The fact remains: Aurelio Malcontento was coming. At speed. More or less.

The scooter was heading toward the farm at a pace oscillating between twenty-seven and thirty kilometers per hour: a respectable speed for a man who considered effort a contractual abuse. In the little front compartment there was surely the Giornalino del Coltivatore Diretto, which Gianalberto had been receiving for years without ever opening it, yet kept having delivered to reassure himself that, at least on paper, he was a farmer.

The count followed the scooter with his eyes, more out of curiosity than genuine interest. And it was precisely then that the herds began to perform completely bizarre acts.

First, the cow.

The dairy cow stiffened, lifted her head, and for a moment seemed to listen to something the others could not hear. Then, suddenly, she began a circular dance. Not a stroll, not a cautious turn: a real, whirling rotation, in the absurd attempt to bite her own tail. Her moos turned into terrible, almost hysterical sounds that resembled a dog’s bark more than a cow’s call. But the most unsettling thing was the intensity: the cow spun faster and faster, harder and harder, drifting in a spiral toward the road, filling the air with a deafening noise—as though a pack of dogs had decided to invade the countryside.

Ida’s eyes flew wide open. Not out of fear, but disbelief. She had seen everything in life, but a cow possessed by the idea of being a dog was new even for her.

Then the horse.

Meanwhile the nag, as if it had received a signal from an invisible loudspeaker, began to jump in an unnatural way. Not the usual clumsy leaps of a frightened animal: no. Choreographed jumps. He tried to bring his legs together in mid-air, making all four hooves touch down at the same time, like an acrobat who studied the discipline badly. And at every synchronized landing—tac!—he let out a long, metallic whistle, like a ship leaving the dock for the lands of America.

A whistling horse. A wolf-cow. The morning was degenerating with a creativity no playwright would have dared propose without being accused of exaggeration.

The count remained seated, motionless, his mouth slightly open. He wasn’t afraid. If anything, he was fascinated. Inside him, the entrepreneur’s idea swelled like a balloon: there’s the proof, he thought. There’s the phenomenon. There’s the substance.

Ida, instead, felt something different: not proof, but an omen. The kind of omen that never leads to clean profit.

And then came the final theatrical flourish.

Caligola.

The dog, who just a second earlier had been playing with wild grass like a retired philosopher, sprang with unexpected agility and leapt onto the cow’s back in full clockwise rotation. He climbed up with the precision of an experienced circus performer, maintaining a balance that defied not only gravity but also the dignity of the species. Once in the saddle, he began to spin too, but in the opposite direction to the quadruped’s movement, trying to bite his own tail—as if he wanted to prove that delirium, if shared, becomes discipline.

The scene was so absurd that for an instant Ida couldn’t even react. She felt like laughing and crying at the same time, and she had to choose: she opted for a strangled little laugh, because crying would have required too much energy.

The postman’s scooter, meanwhile, kept approaching. Aurelio Malcontento, oblivious—or perhaps simply accustomed to noticing nothing that wasn’t a direct obstacle—aimed toward the farm with the gait of a hero of the collective labor contract.

“Count…” Ida murmured, finally finding her voice, “I don’t know what it is you’re trying to discover… but this stuff here… it doesn’t look blessed to me.”

Gianalberto didn’t listen. His eyes were glossy, entranced. He looked like a child in front of fireworks—only the fireworks were made of manure, ship-whistles, and bovines in a trance.

The cow kept spinning, the horse kept jumping, the dog kept dancing. The wind carried the sounds and blended them with the sparrows’ chirping, as if all of nature were taking part in a concert gone mad.

And in that chaos, while the embankment threw back the echo of the approaching scooter, Ida understood a simple truth: whatever was in the manure pit wasn’t meant to stay hidden. And when something doesn’t want to stay hidden, sooner or later someone gets hurt.

It wasn’t pessimism.

It was experience.

Saint Roch—who in Sommo Lomellina enjoyed a solid reputation and a crowded agenda of minor intercessions—decreed that the postman would need a few weeks of rest. Not a punishment, mind you, but a proper convalescence, accompanied—as Lombard tradition demands—by a nice medical certificate written in indecipherable handwriting and stamped with conviction. An administrative miracle more than a mystical one: Aurelio Malcontento would finally have an official justification for not delivering the mail.

But the saint, evidently, had decided to intervene in a theatrical way.

Gina, in the midst of her whirling spiral, headed straight for the road. She didn’t swerve. She didn’t hesitate. It was as if an inner compass, calibrated to incomprehensible coordinates, had indicated asphalt as her inevitable destiny. Caligola, steady on her back, seemed to spur her on with canine enthusiasm, barking in rhythm and helping increase that centrifugal force that was turning a placid dairy cow into a rotating agricultural projectile.

The count followed the scene with eyes wide, unable to form a complete thought. Ida, on the other hand, had already understood that the day was about to enter the phase she mentally labeled “then don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

At 11:02—an hour that would remain etched into collective memory like a marginal note in local history—the yellow meteor of the Italian Post, ridden by Aurelio Malcontento, slammed into the cow blocking the country road.

The speed, taking into account the scooter’s meager braking and Aurelio’s natural aversion to energetic use of the brakes, could be calculated between fifteen and seventeen kilometers per hour. It wasn’t the Big Bang. It wasn’t even a pause in the Earth’s rotation. But the impact had a certain dramatic dignity.

The scooter wobbled.

The cow did not.

Caligola wobbled.

The world, for a second, held its breath.

Then the postal vehicle, with all its cargo—leather bag, farming newsletters, bills, flyers for improbable deals—slid toward the manure pit as if pulled by a law of physics all its own, a selective gravity that punishes only those who don’t feel like working.

The ninety-degree turn after the impact was decisive.

The scooter sank into the manure pit with a dignity it had never possessed. Aurelio Malcontento, still clinging to the handlebars by pure conditioned reflex, followed his mechanical steed into that final embrace with the slurry. The liquid manure closed over him like a warm, foul-smelling blanket, covering him with miasma, vegetal residue, thick splashes, and a new olfactory identity that would accompany him for days.

For a moment there was silence.

Then Aurelio surfaced.

His face unrecognizable, eyes wide, mouth open in an expression hovering between astonishment and professional indignation. The postal cap floated beside him like a war relic. From the scooter’s front compartment, the Giornalino del Coltivatore Diretto slowly slid out and opened on the water like a useless flower.

“Madòna…” Aurelio managed, and it wasn’t clear whether it was a prayer or a statement of fact.

Ida brought a hand to her mouth. Not from shock, but to hold back a laugh that would have been unchristian. She had seen men fall into water, into mud, into misery. But an Italian postman immersed up to the waist in the Cascina del Pellicano’s manure pit was a variation that deserved, at the very least, a respectful silence.

The count, instead, reacted as only he could: he did nothing.

He stayed seated.

He watched.

He made mental notes.

Interesting, he thought. Intense reaction even in the human being.

Meanwhile, the herd—if it could still be called that—continued its horrid show undisturbed along the fields near the farm. Gina, freed by the collision, resumed spinning in the opposite direction, as if the accident had merely been a choreographic variation. The horse whistled and jumped, now fully devoted to his new career as a wind instrument. Caligola, still on the cow’s back, seemed to conduct the whole thing with almost professional concentration.

Aurelio, meanwhile, tried to climb out of the manure pit. Every movement produced wet, discouraging sounds. The stench had become a physical presence, an autonomous entity that clung to clothes, hair, and future intentions.

“Call… call someone…” he slurred.

Ida rose slowly.

“Count,” she said calmly, “maybe we should help the postman.”

Gianalberto nodded, as if the idea had just been suggested by an external consultant.

“Yes. Of course. Later.”

Later what, he didn’t specify.

In the end, with a shovel, a rope, and an amount of grumbling worthy of a pagan liturgy, Aurelio Malcontento was hauled out of the manure pit. They sat him on a low wall, dripping, silent, with the lost gaze of someone who has just watched his routine dissolve.

Someone would call the doctor.

Someone would fill out a form.

Someone would talk about bad luck.

But Ida knew the truth.

Saint Roch had decided to make himself noticed.

And the manure pit, by now, was no longer just an agricultural issue.

It had become a sign.

And that is where, once again, the wheelbarrow came into play.

The same wooden wheelbarrow that had already carried the count, the same one that seemed to have a key role in crisis management at the Cascina del Pellicano, was unearthed with a pragmatism bordering on resignation. The postman Aurelio Malcontento was laid inside with a certain care, the way you do with the wounded when you’re not sure whether they’re alive, dead, or simply too frightened to react.

Ida, naturally, took hold of the handles and pushed him toward the farmhouse.

The count did not.

He watched from a prudent distance.

Not out of cowardice, but pure survival instinct: the miasmas Aurelio, soaked in manure down to his soul, gave off were such that they seemed to have physical consistency. The air grew thicker around the wheelbarrow, as if the stench had decided to occupy a space of its own, with well-defined borders.

Aurelio didn’t complain much. The shock of the accident had been so paralyzing he felt one foot in the grave and the other—very slippery—still in the manure pit. His gaze was lost, fixed on a point only he could see, and he murmured something that might have been a prayer or a list of regrets.

Ida pushed him to the garden water pump, set the wheelbarrow down, and left him there, sunk in his spiritual trance.

Then she grabbed the hose and turned on the water without hesitation.

The water hit Aurelio with a purifying violence that allowed no debate. The liquid manure ran off in dark rivulets, gradually revealing a human being beneath layers of unwanted farm life. The washing was methodical, thorough, almost professional.

The cold jet abruptly cut off the postman’s prayers.

Aurelio returned to reality as if recalled by an alarm siren. With a leap he didn’t know he possessed, he shot out of the wheelbarrow, coughing, spitting water, with a vitality that contradicted years of certified laziness.

“Holy Madonna!” he shouted, finally present.

Once the superficial washing was done, Ida decreed it was no longer appropriate to leave him there like a cloth hanging to dry.

“Count,” she said, “it would be better to take him inside. He needs to change. And drink something warm.”

The count nodded gravely.

The trio went into the house.

In the kitchen, Ida gave him a change of the count’s clothes: loose trousers, a shirt too long, a sweater that had seen better eras. Aurelio was told to go to the bathroom to change, while they would prepare a hot herbal tea—one of those that, in Ida’s mind, cured everything: cold, shock, adverse destiny.

Ten minutes passed.

The bathroom was still closed.

Silence.

Twenty minutes passed.

The count began to worry, but in his own way.

“Ida,” he said, “go check.”

Ida looked at him with calibrated disdain.

“Count,” she replied, “it wouldn’t be honorable for a woman to knock on the bathroom door of a stranger.”

The count failed entirely to catch the hint.

“What do you mean, stranger?” he replied serenely. “We know the postman perfectly well. He’s been coming every other day for twenty years to bring us the mail.”

And he closed the matter with a wave of the hand, as one closes a pointless debate.

Ida sighed.

She left the kitchen and headed to the bathroom. But as she approached, she began to hear a voice. Hoarse. Panting. A timbre she had dreamed of at night for years when she was younger, when life still seemed willing to surprise. Too bad that, in her experience, dreams were never followed by facts.

She pressed her ear to the translucent glass door.

She heard a snort.

A deep, animal snort, unmistakable.

The breath of a bull in heat.

Ida had seen and heard plenty of them in the countryside. That sound allowed no alternative interpretations. For her, it was total shock. An emotional short-circuit that left her wordless for a moment.

With a courage she didn’t know she had, she brought her knuckles to the door and, in a gentle voice, said:

“Aurelio… everything okay?”

The door flew open.

Standing before her was the Italian Post’s postman.

Naked.

Visibly aroused, in his parts, without any need for technical specifications.

But with the peaked cap still on his head.

Ida let out a scream that made the glass tremble—a primal, agricultural scream, containing seventy-eight years of discipline and a final surprise no one had requested.

She bolted like a sprinter, ran the corridor in record time, climbed the wooden stairs covered by a rough green runner, turned right, and shut herself in her room, turning the key with trembling hands. Her cheeks burned—not from the run, but from the image now branded into her memory: erect private parts, yellow visor, mocking fate.

The count, appearing in the kitchen doorway, watched the scene with a mix of astonishment and scientific satisfaction. Aurelio walked through the house with an uncertain but determined step, looking around for a woman, for meaning, for some continuation of that sudden rebirth.

In that instant Gianalberto had certainty.

Not suspicion.

Not a hypothesis.

A clear certainty.

The postman had come into contact with the substance in the manure pit. And that substance didn’t merely improve mood or make cows and horses dance. It had awakened something far deeper, far more powerful.

Forget Viagra.

This was about things unthinkable for a man of his age. Drives. Energies. Impulses that life, routine, and the collective contract had lulled to sleep for decades.

The count smiled slowly.

Ida, locked in her room, prayed as she hadn’t in years.

And the Cascina del Pellicano, silent outside, seemed to hold its breath.

After about an hour and a half, the manure pit’s exciting effect faded from the postman’s body with the same discretion with which it had arrived: without goodbye, without explanations, leaving only a vague sense of fatigue and a great thirst. Aurelio Malcontento, who in the meantime had not found even the shadow of another woman—a fact that, in cold blood, suddenly seemed coherent with his entire biography—surrendered to the evidence and sat down in the kitchen.

The herbal tea was still there.

Ida had prepared it a geological era earlier, when it was still believed the main problem was cold, not the sudden hormonal rebirth of a state employee. He drank it in silence, in small sips, with the air of someone who feels something important has happened but has no intention whatsoever of understanding it. Each sip seemed to bring him a little closer to the official version of himself: postman, lazy, cautious, perfectly installed in mediocrity.

From his chair, Aurelio caught sight of the count.

Gianalberto Marchetti was bent over the large dining-room table, buried under an impressive quantity of handwritten pages. Not scribbles, not hasty notes: orderly sheets, elegant handwriting, margins respected with a discipline no one would have suspected possible in that man. He seemed like someone else. Or, more disturbing still, he seemed finally like himself.

He had written everything down.

Every detail of the past two days at the manure pit:

– the cow’s dance,

– the whistling horse,

– the balancing dog,

– his own euphoria,

– the effect on the postman,

– the average duration of the altered states,

– even the direction of the wind.

Each observation was accompanied by considerations he proudly defined as “almost scientific.” At the end of the pages, Gianalberto drew a clean line and, beneath it, wrote a word that cost him more effort than all the signatures the notary Gallotto had put down in a lifetime.

Drug.

He stopped to look at it.

Drug—it sounded good.

He didn’t write it with disgust. Nor with enthusiasm. He wrote it with the satisfaction of someone who, after years of circling things without grasping them, finally calls them by name. Because yes: in the end, that was what it was. Not miracle. Not divine punishment. Not nature’s prank.

A mixture.

A mixture of chemical elements that, from the fertilizers and herbicides spread on the fields over decades, percolated with the rains into the manure pit. A primordial agricultural broth—legal from start to finish—because no one made anything, no one dealt, no one broke any law. The earth did everything on its own, as it always had.

The count lifted his head and stared into the void.

The brilliant point—he understood it in that instant—was exactly there: no clandestine lab, no powder to cut, no sleepless nights. Just a manure pit, a farmhouse, and a man who, through pure existential inertia, had become its exclusive custodian.

The problem, however, remained.

To understand what was truly in that foul-smelling slurry, he would have to bring the substance to a lab. Analyses, test tubes, microscopes. And that would endanger the drug’s security. Because once science sticks its nose in, others arrive: universities, companies, patents, consultants, and in the end—he thought with a shiver—people who work.

No.

Better not to know too much.

Better to remain in operational ignorance, the kind that allows you to do business without too many questions. The count smiled. It was a small smile, but genuine. For the first time in his life, the idea of not digging deeper felt like a strategic choice, not a weakness.

Aurelio watched him from a distance, holding the cup between his hands.

“Count…” he ventured. “I… I feel better now.”

Gianalberto nodded distractedly, without taking his eyes off the papers.

“It’s normal,” he said. “The effect has a limited duration. I’d say… an hour and a half. Two, at most.”

The postman blanched slightly.

“Ah.”

“But excuse me, Count,” the postman said. “What effect are you talking about?”

A silence followed.

“And… and before?” Aurelio asked, in a low voice.

The count finally looked at him.

“Before, you were a case study.”

Aurelio nodded slowly, as if that explanation were sufficient, though in reality he understood nothing. After all, in his career he had done worse without knowing why.

Ida, listening from the doorway, shook her head. She said nothing. She had understood that the count had made an irreversible decision: to think. And when Gianalberto thought—rarely, but when he did—he went all the way.

The count gathered the sheets, aligned them carefully, and put them into an improvised folder.

Aurelio finished the tea.

He set the cup on the table.

He stood up.

“I… I’d go home,” he said. “The doctor… well…”

“Convalescence,” the count supplied. “Take all the time you need.”

Aurelio nodded, grateful.

He left the kitchen with a slow step, still wrapped in the count’s clothes, leaving behind the smell of herbal tea, manure, and something new.

“Ida,” said the Count, “there’s a future here.”

Ida sighed.

“Count,” she replied, “I just hope no one comes asking you how it works.”

Gianalberto smiled again.

“If they ask,” he said, “it means we’ve already lost.”

Gianalberto stayed there, looking at his notes.

At last he had found a word.

And with that word, an idea.

The fact that it was a terrible idea didn’t even cross his mind.