A Small Place in Italy (3 page)

Her other favourite expression, one which she used when confronted with a
fait accompli
which had on the whole turned out well, as, for example, if I had cut down, as I subsequently did, one of two trees, and it turned out to be the right one I had felled, not the wrong one, was
‘Hai fatto bene!’
(‘You have done well!’), uttered in resounding tones.

I loved it when Signora Angiolina gave me one of her
‘Hai fatto bene!’
broadsides. It always gave me the feeling that I had just received an accolade from the Queen for saving her corgis from being run over, or that I had just been kissed on both cheeks by General de Gaulle after having been decorated with the Croix de Guerre avec Palmes for doing something frightfully brave and important – ‘Well done, Eric!’

In fact if Signora Angiolina called me anything it was what everyone else called me in this part of the world, that is if they called me anything, which was ‘Hayrick’ without the ‘H’, ‘Eyrick’, or failing that ‘Enrico’.

So now, having delivered her
‘Ma!’,
Signora Angiolina went off to get the keys from some hiding place, five of them altogether, all very old, three of them large and very beautiful works of art.

Then, having armed herself with a small reaping hook and giving it a preliminary sharpening on a special sort of sharpening tool embedded in a large log, she set off down the track, leading the way, to the place where Signor Vescovo had written that there was a way to the right off the main track. From this point it then made a very steep, slippery descent to a little bridge which, at that point, spanned a torrent.

‘The track goes down through a chestnut wood,’ he had written, ‘which is why the houses and the place are known as I Castagni.’

The bridge which spanned the torrent was nothing but a couple of cement drain pipes covered with earth. The torrent itself was deep, narrow, bone dry and almost completely hidden from view by the chestnut trees which soared up into the air from the ravine the stream had carved for itself. The bed of the stream was horrible, filled with the refuse that people further up the hill had chucked into it: bits of plastic sheeting, half buried in the bottom of it, empty bleach containers, rusty tins and other assorted muck.

Now, for the first time, we saw the house.

It stood at the far end of a grassy dell, overlooking the terraced fields that covered the hillside one above the other, and it was surrounded by vines and old olive trees that cast a dappled shade as their branches moved in a light breeze from the west.

The house itself faced south. It was sheltered from all the winds that blew between north-east and south-east by the groves of chestnuts that also rendered it invisible from further up the hillside
in summer, and did so even now in what was autumn although the leaves were beginning to thin out.

It was a small, two-storey farmhouse, built of stone partially rendered with a cement that, over the years, had turned a creamy colour in some places and in others a lichenous green. The overall effect was of a building on the verge of becoming a ruin.

It was roughly rectangular in shape, roughly because it was possible to see where, over the years, other small wings had been added on, which was why the ones that looked the oldest were roofed with stone slabs. Others, of more recent date, were covered with tiles that had either weathered to a faded pink, or else to a yellowish golden colour. To prevent them being whisked away by some freak wind, stones the size and shape of footballs were disposed along their outer edges in what looked like a rather dangerous fashion for anyone standing below if one of them rolled off.

There were no roses, or any other kind of climbing plant winding their ways up the walls, as there would have been in England. No garden. No shrubs, only an orange tree. There was no muck lying about either, apart from that in the torrent. Everything else was spotless. This had been up to now a strictly utilitarian establishment.

As soon as we had taken all this in, without even seeing the interior, we both knew that this was the house we had been looking for and this was the house we would have to have if we were going to have one at all.

The first door we came to had the orange tree growing up a wall to one side of it. As was all the other timber used in the construction of the house – floorboards, roof timbers and joists – the door was chestnut.

The planks from which this had been made had faded over the years to a beautiful silver-grey colour but when Signora Angiolina
finally succeeded in turning the key in the lock and we went inside, the door shut on us and we found ourselves in what would have been complete darkness, if the door had not been riddled with holes through which the sun shone in long, slender beams as if someone had fired a shotgun at it.

Yet although it looked as if it was on its last legs, as did the bridge over the torrent, and one of the first things that would have to be replaced if we bought the house, this door was still there, in the same condition, when we finally left I Castagni twenty-five years later.

What we were now standing in was a room about fifteen feet long, ten feet wide and six feet high, what had been a cowshed, or a stable for mules, or possibly both.

Until very recently the principal means of moving supplies from one place to another in the mountainous areas of Italy had been by pack mules, hand carts, big wooden sledges with sides made of wattle, wooden stakes interwoven with split branches, which were usually drawn by cows. For the rest it was what people could carry on their backs.

A few years before we arrived on the scene the asphalt road up which we had driven, following the bends, had not existed. Neither had the bends. All there had been in those days was a steep, cobbled mule track which went straight up the hill from Caniparola to Fosdinovo without any bends at all, and stretches of this ancient route still existed and were still used by local people travelling on foot.

The floor of the cowshed was also cobbled, with thin rectangular stones laid edge to edge. Iron rings for tethering the animals were sunk in the rough stone walls in the back part and there was still a good deal of dung lying about, but so dry and powdery that it was impossible to know what sort of animal had produced it.

The only illumination, apart from that provided by the
self-closing door with the holes in it, which was of rather limited usefulness, came from a small, barred window that looked out towards the bridge over the torrent some thirty yards away.

Overhead a trap door with a ladder opened up into a room which had been a hay loft. It was almost twice the height of the cowshed and much brighter, the light entering it through a large opening in one of the walls through which the hay had been forked up. Other illumination was provided by gaps in the tiled roof where the rain had been coming in. Every bit of timber in these two rooms – beams, ceiling joists and floorboards – was riddled with wormholes and you could break off bits as if they were biscuits.

Further investigation was made impossible because someone had had the truly devilish idea of more or less filling the loft with large coils of heavy wire, of the sort used to set up trellises in vineyards, each of which was inextricably interlaced one with another. The only other way in was round the back of the house where there was another door, literally in mid-air, which needed a ladder to get to it.

Meanwhile, as we were taking in all this ruin, lizards, no doubt deluded by the mild November weather into thinking spring had come, or it was still summer, scuttled about upside down on the tiled roof through which daylight was only too clearly visible. Looking at it I felt that one of us would only have to emit one really hefty sneeze to bring the whole lot, beams, floorboards, joists, roof tiles and all, down about our ears. On one beam there was the skin cast by an adder. Every year, even when the beams were put in order, the adder or its descendants continued to shed its skin in this same place.

‘Ma,’
said Signora Angiolina, as we all three gazed at these irrefutable evidences of decay. What she meant by this enigmatic utterance, devoid of the usual exclamation mark and without the
shrugging of the shoulders, was not clear, although I could hazard a guess. It was the first observation she had made since we reached the house, though she had made it abundantly obvious that she was not happy about the condition of the torrent when we came to it.
‘Sono gente ignorante,’
she said, but to whom she was referring was not clear. It could have been a whole band of ignorant people.

‘Cor!’ I said, the English equivalent of Signora Angiolina’s epithet. If the first two rooms were like this what on earth would the others be like?

Only Wanda expressed herself clearly and confidently, although she had said, ‘My God!’ when she first saw the loft and its roof; but then she had recovered.

‘Providing Signor Botti doesn’t want the earth, we’ll be all right,’ she said.

Having exhausted the possibilities of the cowshed and the loft for the time being, we moved on westwards to the main door of the house, passing on the way a bread oven that was built into the wall with a brick chimney rising above it to the height of the upper storey. According to Signora Angiolina it was out of action and was likely to remain so. The only man capable of repairing it had contracted a painful skin disease of a sort that repairers of ovens and users of cement are apparently liable to and was unable to carry out any more work of this sort.

To the right of the door a flight of stone steps led to the upper floor where the chimney of the oven terminated. Originally these steps had been protected from the elements to some extent by a tiled roof but the main support of it, a long beam, had collapsed, taking all the tiles with it and smashing most of them.

High overhead the main chimney stack rose into the air. It had a flat stone on top of it, supported by four rough brick columns, each about a foot high, to stop it smoking. To me it looked more like a tabernacle of the Israelites than a chimney.

Now we waited outside the front door while Signora Angiolina, Mistress of the Ceremonies, a role she enjoyed much more than being in mourning, selected the right key to open it. This was the finest door in the house. In fact, although rough and primitive, it was one of the best of its kind in the entire neighbourhood, apart from those we saw in some houses up the hill in Fosdinovo, but those were doors of town houses rather than rustic ones. It was difficult to imagine one more rustic than ours. Subconsciously, we were already beginning to refer to objects such as the doors at I Castagni as ‘ours’.

This door consisted of a number of large slabs, probably cut from a single tree and set up horizontally, one above the other, on a stout frame. These slabs were of a beautiful dark colour and looked as if they had been soaked in oil. And this is what we later discovered they had been treated with, linseed oil over a long period, a treatment which we ourselves were to continue.

Such a door would have been irreplaceable if it had been damaged and every time we came back to the house from England our preoccupation was always with the door. Had it fallen to pieces? Had it been damaged by vandals? These were the questions we always used to ask ourselves while descending the hill and crossing the torrent. In fact, like most other objects at I Castagni which we took over, it outlasted us.

The key for this door, which, like all the others, was of hand-forged iron, was the biggest of the lot. It was a key that was easily identifiable, even in the dark, not only because it was the biggest but because someone at one time had attempted to turn it in the lock, or perhaps another lock, and when it had failed to open had inserted a metal rod through the ring at the end of the shaft and twisted that a full half turn without breaking it. Now, in order to turn the key in the lock, it had to be inserted upside down and then jiggled about for what could be ages. Yet we never considered
the possibility of changing the key and the lock for a new one. The key was much too beautiful. In fact there was another complete set of keys but I lost them the first day we took over the house and we never found them again.

This lock had the peculiar foible that when the wind was blowing from the south-west it would open itself. The only way to prevent this happening was to secure the door to a ring-bolt in the outer wall of the building using the wire of which there were great coils in the loft.

This door opened into a living room of an unimaginably primitive kind, with a floor made from rough, irregular stone slabs on which it was difficult to set a chair without it wobbling.

To the left, as we went in, there was an old, varnished wood, glass-fronted cupboard with blue-check curtains, an
armadio a muro;
and against the far wall there was something known as a
madia,
of which this was a very ancient example, a kneading trough for making pasta with a removable top, which could also be used as a table.

To the right of the door there was a
fornello a carbone,
a charcoal-burning stove, built of brick, and next to it was an open fireplace, with a shelf over it. At one time, what must have been a long time ago, the walls, the stove and the fireplace had all been whitewashed but by now the smoke of innumerable fires had dyed them all a uniform bronze colour.

Inside the fireplace a long chain extended up the chimney into the darkness from which was suspended a large copper pot, and round about the fireplace were disposed a number of cooking utensils, all of them archaic but all of them still in use. The ashes in the fireplace were fresh and there was plenty of kindling and enough logs to make another fire stacked to one side of it.