JANELLE BARONE
Janelle Barone is a Melbourne-based illustrator. She loves to tell stories and create atmosphere in her work.
It is widely agreed by the family that Francesco Repacholi was twelve when he almost froze to death in the Alps and was rescued by a St. Bernard dog. But that’s about all anyone can agree upon.
The way the story is usually told glosses over the whys, the precise wheres, the hows. But it always starts with him falling into the snow, his tiny body numb and cold with hypothermia.
I always imagine he’s huddled in a coat, but inexplicably wearing lederhosen underneath, even though I know he’s not German, he’s Italian. I just don’t know what clothes a twelve-year-old Italian boy would even be rocking at that time, in the nineteen-whatevers. And it’s not something I want to ask—who’s going to interrupt querulous old Uncle Quentin at this point in the story to ask what the kid was wearing? He’d do that thing where you watch him visibly lose his train of thought, and lick his gummy lips loudly as he sought it again.
In my mind, I see Francesco stumbling through a blizzard in his culturally inappropriate clothes, shivering, and then falling flat on his face in a snow drift.
Aunt Margo doesn’t like my blizzard idea, which I brought up at the table out of politeness, as a way of engaging with a story I had to have heard at least twenty times by then. This family loves to tell you about Francesco Repacholi and his goddamn dog, who travelled to Australia during the gold rush and accidentally started a family, a family who hundreds of years later would gather for Christmas lunch and use his name like a sword, like currency.
It was weird being back in Australia, weirder being back in Margaret River where I grew up, and strangest of all being back at the old family farm having Christmas lunch. I hadn’t seen the extended family for close to ten years, and despite everyone being greyer, more stooped and wrinkled, it was like time had stopped—and all the same conversations were still happening. But ten years ago I had been 22 years old, barely graduated from the children’s table (which was currently swarmed by a confusion of cousins), and my great uncles and aunts, grandparents, and other miscellaneous old relatives weren’t used to thinking of me as an adult yet. Never mind the fact I’d moved back to Australia after divorcing my husband, after gaining my PhD, after several jobs. I came back after living a full and momentous adult life—but a life away from them all. They still saw me as a kid, I think.
The worst thing was that I felt myself falling back into that kind of thinking. Only a few days earlier I’d managed to get annoyed by my dad and found myself storming off to sit in the barn with one of the many dogs, sulky, like I was sixteen again.
‘Hmm,’ Margo responded after an awkward pause, pursing her dry lips together. ‘I can’t be entirely sure of course, but we’re relatively certain he crossed in the summer, which means a blizzard would be unlikely. That’s how he got tricked—started walking in the warm Italian summer, and then got so high up the Alps he was surprised at how cold the snow was! He was a very smart young man, Francesco.’
Aunt Margo had started a family tree project, and used that knowledge of nées and begats like a cudgel in this family; brutally beating everyone around the head with dates and obscure and distant relatives. She knew how Repacholi had died, and where—and sometimes when I look into her pale watery eyes, I think she knows exactly how I will die too.
To be honest, Francesco’s main achievement in his life seems to be not realising how cold an Alp could be, so I wasn’t entirely sure of his intelligence.
Margo believed Francesco to be a smart if tragic figure. She ended every anecdote about him with a slowly shaking head and sometimes a tut-tut. ‘Very sad,’ she would mutter. She championed the belief, based on some vaguely credible history work, that Francesco had set off on his infamous journey because a dictator named Garibaldi had been conscripting boys in that region, and his mum sent him away so he wouldn’t die in a war.
Uncle Eliot, winking so broadly it was almost funny, always said Franky received a message from God to go to Switzerland and get some cheese. Why Switzerland? ‘Because it has the holiest cheese.’
Everyone pretty much ignored Uncle Eliot full-time.
Aunt Elizabeth loved to really set the scene with Francesco’s emotions—he wasn’t strolling up the Alps like some people seemed to imply, he was fleeing! And he was scared!
‘That poor boy missed his family, but he knew he couldn’t be drafted into a war he didn’t believe in. He ran for days, his little stick legs carrying him all the way up the Alps—and he didn’t stop!’
I actually looked at the map from his village to the Alps, and it’s an insanely long way to walk, but whatever. I guess back in 1850 (ish) you just walked more places.
‘And then, his little heart thudding in his tiny chest—’ Aunt Elizabeth didn’t have children, and seemed to think their prime characteristic was being miniature, like snack-size chocolate bars, ‘—he gave up all hope and surrendered himself to the snow!’
Aunt Elizabeth loved to establish the emotions of everyone involved, which I realised after a while didn’t really lend any credibility to the story of Francesco Repacholi. The family had cobbled together this narrative from hearsay, from scrapings of actual historical documents like wills, like obituaries, even a rare newspaper article. Its gravity, its reality, was a tentative thing, built on a shifting foundation of facts. Aunt Elizabeth’s embroidery of what she knew might have been entertaining—mostly to her—but you could see it weaken the dignity of the story for the rest of the family.
Aunt Margo, hoarder of facts, would close her eyes every time Elizabeth started giving things like the snowstorm emotions and motives (malicious, cold, hates boys). The Alps were often characterised as being dim-witted and confused by the boy dying on their backs, yet also lofty and above it all. If she wasn’t so scattered, Aunt Elizabeth could have had a rich career in children’s books, I reckon.
‘Well, hang on! What’s this over here? Some kind of miniature, hairless puppy! Well, hello!’ Elizabeth would continue in her best Scooby Doo voice. This was when she introduced the St. Bernard, and this is always when she would be quickly and mercilessly interrupted.
Unlike Francesco, my own return was never celebrated. Instead, they trod gingerly around the topic of Harry (my recently ex-husband), refusing to delve into the tragedies and adventures that caused me to cross the metaphorical Alps (I’d been living in London, stubbornly Alpless), unwilling to turn those keen historical minds to my own tragic archive. It’s not that I wanted to have to talk about my heartbreak—to remember the horrible feeling of separating our belongings into separate piles, watching him drive away with a van full of furniture, not knowing if I’d ever see him again. But sometimes I felt like I was still stuck in that moment, doomed to spend night after night chewing on it like an old soft-toothed dog with a stubborn bone.
Discussions of Francesco Repacholi could, and often would, happen anywhere—it could be as we strolled the grounds with the dogs in the early misty morning, or sat on the balcony overlooking the long rolling hills covered in cockatoo-encrusted gumtrees, or shouted through closed doors to me as I vainly, strenuously, furiously sought solitude somewhere.
But usually, it was seated around the long, polished oak table that took pride of place in the centre of the house. It was at this moment, when the St. Bernard was brought into the narrative, that Granddad would clear his throat and begin to talk at us.
I have decided now that men have families purely so they can become old guys who are able to shush a huge table of twenty-plus adults purely out of minor gravitas and ingrained politeness. Granddad wouldn’t raise his voice, because he’s one of those small old men who speaks way too loudly at all times anyway, but his trick was to mostly stay silent until he could speak at everyone. He monologued.
‘Magnificent animal, the St. Bernard,’ he’d say. The first time he did this I got confused by the long pause, and did something stupid like nod my head enthusiastically, or say ‘oh wow’. It wasn’t a querulous pause, like Uncle Quentin. It was a pause for effect, the gap between a bowling ball dropped into a lake, and the resulting splash.
And Granddad didn’t need a response at this point. After the pause, he’d hold up his fingers. ‘Between 65 and 120 kg or more, and the approximate height at the withers is 70 to 90 cm,’ he’d begin. ‘The coat can be either smooth or rough; the smooth coat being close and flat while the rough is dense, flat, and more profuse around the neck and legs. The colour is typically a red shade with white, or a mahogany brindle with white. Black shading is usually found on the face and ears.’
And the insane thing, the thing that should tell you everything you need to know about this family, is that they’d eat this up. They were passionate for dog breed facts, and the slow methodical recounting of them by their loud patriarch.
‘The tail is long and heavy, hanging high. Eyes are usually brown, but sometimes can be icy blue, and should have naturally tight lids, with haws only slightly visible.’ He’d pause at this point, usually so one of his sons or daughters could get in a comment about haws. To this day, I have been too scared to ask what a ‘haw’ is. ‘Yep, that’s right,’ he’d say, ‘of course, you can blame the mastiff breeding for that one,’ and get this—they’d all laugh. This long table of adults laughing because of a haws gag, because of some old dog breeding. These nerds.
That said, maybe the dog-nerd genetics breed true in our family, because this is probably my favourite part of the story too. Sure, Francesco was an interesting boy, but he had that kinda hard-protagonist glow about him, which made it hard to really like or hate him, like Buffy or King Arthur. He did all these big things like getting rescued by a dog as a child, like rioting against the government to impress his wife, like giving birth to a bicycle con artist, that made him seem unrelatable.
But the St. Bernard that saved him—I mean, it’s a classic trope. As Granddad would always make a point of saying, they did not have a little barrel of rum around their neck. That was supposedly the conceit of an artist, who stayed at the monastery where the rescue St. Bernards were bred.
But as Margo pointed out, the period in which Francesco was crossing was the peak in St. Bernard popularity—with the dangerous pass they patrolled criss-crossed by the huge shaggy dogs. It seems ludicrous that people were walking over mountains to such an extent that they needed a whole monastery devoted to breeding rescue dogs.
Elizabeth always continued the story here (Scooby Doo voice and all) by claiming the St. Bernard somehow hoisted Francesco onto its back, and then bounded up the mountain to deliver him to a bunch of bemused yet ultimately benevolent monks to raise for a few years. However, if she was in the room, Margo would take one of those deep, soul-gathering sighs and correct her yet again.
‘Actually it’s quite an ingenious system, I went to the St. Bernard museum in Bern—Switzerland.’
Margo didn’t take pauses, she bullied through a conversation like a flood in an attic, so there was no time to react, no time to say: ‘Oh, sounds lovely. I love Switzerland. I have also travelled.’ As you might be able to tell, conversation was not particularly a two-way street in this family.
‘So, the hounds are trained in pairs—when they find a poor soul in need of rescue, such as our Francesco, one hound pulls the subject out of the snow and then lays atop of them in order to conserve their warmth. Meanwhile the other St. Bernard retreats at speed to their handler, who then arrives with a sled and first aid gear. Ingenious.’
There was a lot of spirited muttering and even a few muted, room-temperature cheers.
On this evening, as the Christmas dinner reached a climax, my grandfather reached this point of the story, looked at the small moon rising and said ‘Gee whiz, imagine how that must have felt. You look up and there he is, there’s this beautiful dog, and you know everything’s going to be OK. You know you’re going to be fine.’
I excused myself from the table at this point, and went outside with my glass of wine. Under the brilliant scatter of stars and a hot summer moon, I let myself fall forward onto my knees and then face down into the fragrant grass, and waited for one of the dogs to find me, to rescue me, to show me how to find home.