Gray Fuller

La Luna e La Birra

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2025: VOL. 40.

It was very dark when Stefano and I finally stumbled up the hill and fell upon the benches in front of the house to take out all of the sharp seed heads of all sorts of grasses from the crooks of our jeans, webbing of our socks, and crevices of our boots. Earlier that evening when the sky gleamed gold and rusty, we had removed all the plastic tubing from the field, sometimes a very hard work because it would be found underground or wrapped around plants or caught in a pile of long grass. We often paused and talked as the evening went on, the night falling like a heavy sigh and Davide’s tractor bumbling by in the next field over—this time about grammar and Italy and America and all the ways to say sex. There were so many ways and so many tubes, and so we went on pulling; Stefano used a scythe to cut the stems holding us up and I would pull the tubing as best I could. Along the path, we found strawberries hidden beneath the grass we unearthed and tasted the raspberries in the bushes that lined the edges of the field. Once, Stefano showed me a green, tomato-looking fruit that was a little bit sour. 

When we finished, the moon was full and had such a mysterious gleam: white but not clear, fuzzy with long, wispy clouds that slid across its face like crocodiles in shallow water. (Ivana loved to say that word—crocodile—in her performative American accent. I liked the small puff of air that came from cupping your mouth and saying cocodrilo, the roll of the l that followed and the click of the tongue that stopped the whole thing.) Stefano looked up and called the moon sorella. Then I remembered that people do wild things when the moon is full—that we are transformed by the land, just the reason that Stefano keeps white, pink, and red roses on the edge of the orto: “Because beautiful things bring out the soul,” he said. “And when working, the plants can feel your emotion.” I thought to myself, that it might well make a difference in someone’s work, if all the while in the garden the faint smell of pink perfume is drifting about, as intoxicating as champagne. In the field I felt that if we could smell le rose, then the wheat might very well sense us, and I hoped our presence was pleasing. Stefano also told me that one day he’d like to have a few cows and a horse along with his three little sheep. I perked up. “A horse? Why?” 

“Because they are beautiful,” he said. “And they are calm.” There was also something about the manure, but as he was speaking, I just pictured a beautiful brown horse with a flowing mane, very calm and pretty, in a small stable that would sit next to the sheep house. 

We had taken out the tubing for Davide, who, beyond us, on the tractor, rolled a cigarette with one hand and steered it with the other, then carefully took both of his hands to light it. A click and then a little flame in the darkness. Night had fallen and the moon was bright and perfect and I did not want to leave, but I was exhausted, hungry, and very thirsty; up the hill we went. Beneath the purple sky, among the brown silhouettes of the trees and the tractor, I could see Davide’s fiery orange dot expand and contract like a firefly, breathing with the tractor as it roared on into the night. I could see it now within the noise of the engine and the crumbling sound of the grass through the window in the bathroom that I loved to look out of. Watching that light from the house, I knew he was well, knew that down in the field he was breathing and the orange dot in the black night under the white moon was him. 

I asked Davide when he returned if he believed in the moon. “You don’t believe in the moon,” he said sternly, “you can see it.” Davide stared suspiciously at me. Maybe he was upset that I even asked him, skeptical of what I knew of these hills and annoyed that I hadn’t known of the soil that grew the grapes and that if bottled on a waning moon, the wine would go bad—sparkle if it was supposed to be smooth, turn flat if it was supposed to sparkle. Stefano, who’d been listening, nodded towards the silent space in between us. He believed in the moon. Then Ivana and Roberta called us inside and we picked out what was left of the seed heads stabbing at our ankles and shins. 

I was happy to see the ladies, surprised that they were up this late in the night, making bread and making one side of the house smell like it. They were happy to see me too, very jovial this hour. I followed them into the magazzino and while they looked for bags of flour, I did a little dance to get them to point and chuckle. Ivana made a joke I laughed at, which I only partly understood. I told her dreamily that she was my second mother, my Italian one, hugged her and went for a bath. 

I came back very clean and very childlike wearing my blue knit sweater that flopped past my fingertips and found Stefano and Davide in the main room, the ladies giggling. Roberta and Ivana each had a cup of the family’s beer, almost empty so that only a golden gloss and a bit of white foam remained. They laughed at each other at the table and Ivana scampered to the stove to serve the dinner she had prepared. Before the toast, Stefano announced to the table that earlier I had moved the sheep all on my own, and I felt very proud and very young as they all smiled very grandly and some patted me on the back. Then, in the voice of a kindergartener, Ivana beamed, “Buon appetito!” 

Over the meal we cheersed many times and the ladies drank much more than us. Davide would go and fill our cups from the keg and would bring them back very tall. Roberta had trouble keeping the window open, fumbling with Playdoh and children’s toys which she used to prop it open. Ivana leaned over upon the table, spooning food with her fork as Roberta sat up very straight, very calm, judgingingly but only slightly and still very drunk. They both were just like their young girls, who at the table always made a fuss during the family dinners—but Roberta’s girl was older than Ivana’s and knew to make less of a fuss. Sometimes I’d see Roberta and her girl whispering slyly at what a snob the baby was, and then without fail, Roberta’s girl would act out too. The ladies remembered all the silly things their girls had done in the day and giggled about them. Stefano, at the head of the table, smirked, and Davide pointed across and said, “Troppa birra.” And then I could feel it. 

Like a baby I dropped my head to the soft wood of the table, slid my cheek against it and began to giggle. Then Ivana skipped from the kitchen to the magazzino and brought forth her bottle of limoncello. I downed a shot and then got up smiling, walking to Ivana as she skipped away like a fairy, laughing and teasing me not to follow her. Our pace picked up and in just a moment I was chasing her about the house as we laughed like maniacs: outside round the benches and back into the house, ducking through the narrow doorway, around the couch in the main room and past the old iron stove, cackling and eyeing Stefano’s tired, pretty eyes still at the table. Again we stumbled outside—the drunks—ceasing the chase but still circling in the dark, whispering about nothing and looking for the moon. Now it was higher and even brighter and like if the night had its own sun, ripping through the pines on the hill and filling the blank space between the nocciole with milky white. 

Back inside I plopped onto the couch. Ivana began to clean the table. Roberta took out her lyre. She focused her eyes on single strings and strummed very slowly. I wanted to say her name, and so I did: “Robi.” (I liked to roll the r, bounce my lips on the b.) She smiled softly but kept staring deeply into the strings.

“He needs sleep,” I heard—something about dormire. And suddenly I felt dead tired, caught Roberta’s eyes as she plucked them away from the lyre and couldn’t help from laughing a little. Ivana said something about it being Capodanno, but I knew that couldn't be right: it was summer. Then “San Giovanni”—but the day didn’t match and I hadn’t yet heard a thing about the bonfires, just that whenever I asked an old man with crooked teeth in Le Langhe, he would tell me that this was the true place among places. He’d say that in the grapes and the barley and the moon, there was something I couldn’t take in my luggage back to the States. And at some point in my little life, I thought, I’d have to find it. 

Gray Fuller is a young writer from St. Louis, Missouri with long legs, round glasses, and brown curls. He thanks Ste and Ivana and their friends and family for hosting him and teaching him, and he recommends that you read Cesare Pavese’s La Luna e i Falò.