La Befana and the Travellers

There was an old woman who lived at the last house on a hill in Italy, and she was the best housekeeper anybody had ever heard of.

Her floor was so clean you could have eaten off it, and people did say that, and she liked it when they said it. She swept in the morning and she swept in the evening. She had a broom she had had for forty years and she knew exactly how it liked to be held.

One winter night there was a knock at her door.

Outside stood three travellers, very tired, very grand, wrapped up against the cold. They said they were following a star. They said there was a child, somewhere ahead of them, and that they were going to find him, and they had been walking a long time.

And they asked her — and this is the important part, so listen — they asked her to come with them.

And she looked past them at the dark and the cold and the long road. And she looked back at her kitchen, at the fire, at the half-swept floor with the dust still in the corner where she had not finished.

And she said: not tonight. I am busy. Perhaps tomorrow.

And she shut the door.

She finished the floor. It was an excellent floor. And then she stood in the middle of her very clean kitchen and she thought about the three travellers walking away up the hill in the dark, and she thought about the child, and she thought — oh.

She was out of the door within the hour. She took bread and sweets in a sack because she did not know what else to bring. She took her broom, because it was hers and she was used to it.

But it was already too late. The road had branched. The snow had come. There was no sign of anybody, and the star, if there had been a star, was behind cloud.

So she has been looking ever since.

Every year on the fifth of January she comes down the chimneys of Italy, covered in soot, with her sack over her shoulder, and she looks at every sleeping child in every bed in the country in case this is the one. And she leaves something behind in the stocking, every time, because she has never once been able to pass a child and leave nothing.

And she has not found him. And she has not stopped.

Italian children will tell you Befana is a bit frightening to look at, and she is — she is old and ragged and there is soot on everything she touches. They will also tell you she is the one who brings the presents, and that she has never missed a house, not once, not in hundreds of years.

There is usually a lump of coal in the stocking too. Everybody gets one. It is made of sugar and you are meant to eat it, and it is her way of saying: I know. I know exactly what it is like to get something a bit wrong. Have a sweet.