PEDREPAULE

The Donkey

It opened up before you without warning, like the opalescent automatic doors guarding the entrance to the lobby of a grand luxury hotel.

When you stand in front of them, you cannot see beyond. You cannot see anything at all. Only a white screen.

But take a single step—just one, cautiously, half afraid that your advance might end abruptly against a solid pane of milky glass—and the doors slide apart and there, as if by magic, a glittering world of gold and mirrors reveals itself before your eyes.

Something similar happened at the end of the long, winding dirt road that led from the village of Boe to the foot of Su Monte ’e Sa Rughe.[1]

You lowered your head to keep from striking it hard against the low branches of the young cork oaks which, growing with exuberant vitality, almost closed over the path. And when you raised it again, you found yourself looking out over a landscape from a fairy tale.

There was no gold or glass, of course, but there was no shortage of shimmering light and reflecting surfaces.

After winding for several kilometres between low dry-stone walls and thorny blackberry bushes, the mule track brought its meandering journey to an end beside a small wooden gate, always left wide open and hidden from sight behind a screen of cork oaks.

Beyond it, in all its magnificence, stretched a vast field dotted with tiny pools.

Hardly more than puddles.

Their small surfaces, rippling with silver reflections, caught the light of a timid sun, multiplying it and scattering it generously across the beads of dew of that early spring morning.

The droplets, in turn, seemed determined to return to the sun what they had stolen from it moments before.

The result was something out of a fairy tale.

Completing the picture was a simple, square, single-storey cottage built of stone and wood, standing at the far end of the field and looking rather like the one house left standing in the tale of the Three Little Pigs.

This was precisely Pietropaolo's destination.

He was the country doctor of Boe, a small village of around two thousand five hundred souls tucked away in the mountainous country of north-western Sardinia, and he had been summoned there in great haste to attend a young woman who was about to give birth.

Pietropaolo was a thin man of average height, with large dark eyes, bushy eyebrows and a thick black chevron moustache whose languid downward sweep helped give him an austere, permanently sullen appearance.

In truth, Pietro—as his family called him—was warm by nature and quick to smile. During the many evenings spent with friends, he delighted in comic routines, poetic sparring and impromptu singing.

He was, in short, excellent company.

But he also possessed a sensitivity to others and a gift for understanding a patient's history that had made him a point of reference for the entire community.

Now he was feeling somewhat tired after spending much of the day wandering from one patient to another across the surrounding countryside. On the less treacherous stretches of the journey, his eyes would occasionally begin to close, allowing him to surrender to the briefest of restorative naps.

And yet, the farther he travelled, the more he felt a vague sense of happiness growing inside him—something almost like a quiet cheerfulness.

He had deliberately saved the most pleasant visit for last.

Even so, this steadily rising emotion seemed excessive, and made him feel a little foolish.

[continued...]

[1] The Mountain of the Cross

Pedrepaule is a novel set in Sardinia between the late 1950s and the early 1970s. It follows the life of Pietro Paolo Pes, a country doctor, provincial intellectual and man of uncompromising principles, with a deep faith in the power of words.

His clear-eyed view of the world is tested against a society undergoing profound change, where beneath the surface lie violence and parallel forms of justice capable of challenging both public institutions and the most intimate family bonds.

In a human landscape governed by discretion—and often by unwritten law—Pedrepaule holds fast to friendship and trust, while becoming increasingly aware of the distance between what is right and what is possible.

His encounter with Zuanne Crobu, an educated yet brutal fugitive, marks a turning point. Between the two men develops a tense relationship founded on an unspoken recognition of one another.

Around them moves a community that seems capable of absorbing almost anything and allowing almost anything to pass: death, betrayal, desire, illness and the widening divide between generations.

The novel does not unfold chronologically. Instead, it moves through echoes, recurring motifs and overlapping layers of time. Concrete, vividly observed scenes alternate with more reflective passages, seeking to capture the opacity and moral density of everyday life.

Pedrepaule is a novel about the limits of action, the uneasy compromise between responsibility and reality, and the word as an act of resistance—even when words themselves seem no longer enough.

Throughout the novel, a persistent but never superficial irony accompanies both narrator and characters: a final form of lucidity in a world that rarely offers simple answers.

Pedrepaule is looking for the right publisher. If the synopsis and opening pages below speak to you, perhaps you can help the novel find its way into the world.

Incipit