The Buffardello

The story

At Camporgiano, in the Garfagnana, there is a phrase that grandparents still say to children, as a game.

"If you are not good, the buffardello (a little wind elf) will eat you."

Nobody believes it, of course. But when on an autumn evening the wind begins to blow down from the mountain and the shutters start to bang, even the grown-ups raise their eyes towards the window.

There was a girl, in one of those houses, who had heard the phrase a hundred times and had never been afraid. The buffardello, for her, was a story. Like the bogeyman, like the wolf.

That evening her grandfather looked at her for a long time before sending her to bed.

"Do you hear the wind?" he said.

"Yes."

"When it blows like this, they say he is passing. They say, the buffardello is blowing."

She smiled. Her grandfather did not.

"I am not trying to frighten you," he added. "I am telling you what to do. If it ever happens to you, remember just one thing."

"What?"

Her grandfather came closer and told her a phrase, softly. Then he made her repeat it. Then he made her repeat it again.

The girl went to bed, and for a while she thought only of that phrase, because it was funny and because there was nothing else to think about.

Outside, the wind was rising.

An hour went by. Perhaps two. In the house everyone was asleep. The girl was awake, motionless under the covers, with her eyes on the ceiling.

Then she heard the first sound.

It was a small sound. A rustle near the window, like cloth being dragged. The shutters had stopped banging. The wind had not stopped, but it had changed its sound: now it seemed a thin whistle, almost a laugh.

The candle that her grandfather had left on the bedside table went out.

Not because of the wind: the window was closed. It went out, and that was all, as if someone had blown on it.

The girl did not move. She counted to ten. Then to twenty.

The blankets moved.

First softly, like a tug of fingers. Then harder. Her feet were uncovered, then her knees. She took the blankets back with both hands and pressed them to her chest. On the other side, someone was pulling with the same strength, but without hurry, as if in play.

The bed began to shake. Slowly, then more and more.

Something fell on the floor. Something was moved. From the kitchen came the noise of objects put in the wrong place, one after another, with the air of someone who knows what he is doing. In the dark, near her feet, she seemed to hear a light little step, and then another, with a shoe tapping on the floor: tock, tock, like a pointed shoe.

And then, all of a sudden, a weight.

It was on her chest. Light at first, like a cat. Then heavier and heavier, like a stone, like a sack of chestnuts. She could not breathe. She tried to move and could not: her arms were pinned, her legs of lead. She opened her mouth to cry out and nothing came.

The old people, in dialect, have a word for this feeling. They say the buffardello "calcolisce", that is, he sits on you with all his weight.

In the dark, in front of her eyes, there was a small shape. No taller than half a metre, sitting on her chest. It had a red cap, or perhaps a red robe. It had two thin hands that held her arms still. The face could not be seen: it might be a beardless child's, it might be an old man's with a long beard, nobody ever knows which.

The girl thought of her grandfather.

She also thought of something she had been told when she was small: that the buffardello's hands are pierced, that they cannot really grip, that this is the only reason he does no harm to anyone. So they say. And as she thought it, the phrase came back to her.

The phrase she had repeated ten times in bed, for fun.

She took a breath, the little she could. She gathered it all at the bottom of her lungs. And she said, in a voice that did not seem her own, but which made the darkness tremble:

"You can't smother me anyway!"

The weight vanished.

Not slowly: all at once. As if someone had pushed it off the bed. There was a rustle, a small fast run, the sound of a window that opens by itself and then closes. And then, suddenly, the wind dropped.

The girl stayed a long time without breathing. Then she breathed, long and hard, as after a race.

The next morning, her grandfather found her sitting at the kitchen table, with a cup of milk in her hands and eyes a little shiny.

"Did you sleep?" he asked.

"A little."

Her grandfather said nothing more. He opened the front door. In the mud of the yard, still damp with dew, there were small prints that crossed the yard and vanished towards the wood. They looked like fox paws.

"It happens," said her grandfather. "Some say that now and then he takes the look of a fox. Some say a cat, or a big bird of the night. Nobody has ever seen him properly."

She looked at the prints for a long time.

"Will he come back?" she asked.

"When there is wind."

The girl smiled, just a little. Then, for the first time, she repeated the phrase under her breath, only for herself. You can't smother me anyway.

Outside, among the trees, the wind began to blow again.