Moving to Italy: Birth--Part 1

The story of our move to Italy starts with "Arrival" on the June 26, 2017 blog post.

The whole time we were at Gabi, Zio Silvio owned two or three cows that never left the barn. They were tied to their stalls, and he fed them morning and evening. He also cleaned out the stalls regularly. At first it seemed strange and cruel that he kept them penned up and didn’t let them loose to graze. But in time I realized that wasn’t practical. Since the fields he owned, and the ones that he rented from my father-in-law, were not located next to our barn, he would have had to transport the cows daily to let them out to pasture. That was further complicated because the fields he used were not always next to each other. They were scattered across the hillside and many had no fences. Everyone just knew whose field was whose and where to stop plowing. Cows let loose could easily wander into a neighbor’s field and graze all of their grass, or corn, or sunflowers, or, heaven forbid, gobble up all the grapes! Under those conditions, the sensible way to raise livestock was to keep them in a barn. 

Matthew was the only one Zio Silvio took into the barn to see the cows. I never asked to see them up close. I suppose I could have, but I followed my in-laws’ lead of never interacting with them. They said the cows weren’t used to strangers and would get nervous with too many new people. I think also that I didn’t want to know the animal I might have to eat one day. We'd look in from time to time, but all we could see was their large, brown rumps. 

One evening we had a more interesting experience. The children were fast asleep, and we had already changed for bed, when my mother-in-law knocked on our bedroom door and whispered for us to come down quickly. A calf was being born.  

George and I threw on clothes and shoes and hurried across to the barn where Rina stood outside. A shaft of light slid across the courtyard as Marino opened the barn door slightly and came out. He said that the calf was a breech birth, and they were trying to decide what to do. We couldn’t go in because we might be in the way, and we might upset the animals, so we peeked through the small opening between the doors. The images were constricted but riveting.  

Like the other buildings at Gabi, the barn was built of cement. Only one half of it was used for animals, and the other side was piled with hay. The huge cavernous interior was illuminated by a single, overhead light bulb. Against the wall opposite the door, one cow was standing, chained to a ring on the wall. It turned its head, eyes wide, to watch the activity to its left and then swung back, occasionally stamping its foot and rattling the chain as it shook its head. Beside it, a huge, brown and white cow lay on her straw, while Zio Silvio walked back and forth between her lower end and her head. He murmured to her in low, soothing tones. His range of usual expressions was small, but the one he wore that night was definitely tension. Two neighbors from Bertola, alternately stood and squatted at the cow’s back legs. Then all three men gathered at the cow’s middle, talking and pointing, and Marino joined them. Because of the arthritis in his knees, he couldn’t help physically, but he was there for moral support, and he could drive into town to fetch the vet if it became necessary. (Reminder: no phones at Gabi.)

Since the calf was coming feet first, the men tried to turn it in the womb. George, Rina, and I alternated watching through the slit between the doors as they worked over the cow’s body, pushing and heaving the enormous creature. While they pushed at her, the poor cow was having labor pains. I could see her huge body shudder and hear her occasional moo of protest, and every now and then she raised her head from the hay to look at them. All of them were sweating, and we could feel the heat from their efforts bulge at the doorway. The stakes were high. Those cows were Zio Silvio’s main livelihood, and he only got one shot a year at increasing his profits. If something were to happen to either the mother cow or the calf, the financial hit to him could be devastating.