A Small Place in Italy (5 page)

As soon as we got back on the Via Aurelia we telephoned Signor Vescovo and told him that we would like to buy the property and asked him how much the owner, Signor Botti, wanted for it. We didn’t dare use the telephone at the shop or down the hill at the Arco at Caniparola. If we had done so the news of what was happening would probably have been broadcast over the entire neighbourhood.

‘He isn’t asking anything at the moment,’ Signor Vescovo said. ‘As I already told you he hasn’t yet made up his mind whether to sell or not.’ Signor Vescovo was not the sort of man who liked having to repeat himself and he was repeating himself now. ‘If he does decide to sell,’ he told me, ‘the price will be, two and a half million’, which was then the equivalent of about £1500. ‘Will he take less do you think?’ Wanda asked, who dearly loves a struggle.

‘I think,’ said Signor Vescovo, ‘that the price is not negotiable.’

‘How long do you think it will take him to make up his mind?’ I asked, being of an impatient disposition.

‘It is difficult to say. It could be any time. The only thing you can do now is to wait. When he does decide I will let you know and then you must come instantly in case he changes his mind.
And you must bring the money. You may have to pay in ready cash. It is probable that he may not know anything about cheques. I don’t think it’s wise to bother him with such matters. They would only upset him.’

‘Where do we get two and a half million in cash?’ I asked Wanda when she hung up.

‘Don’t worry, we’ll get it,’ she said.

‘You’re in the wrong business, stringing along with a writer, a sorry scribe,’ I said.

‘I know,’ said Wanda, ‘you’re doing your best.’

I was thinking about Signor Botti and Attilio, and tried to imagine either of them with a cheque book and a current account at the Monte dei Paschi di Siena, Sarzana Branch, but failed.

The following day, cutting what had been our holiday short, we drove 900 miles to Le Havre and caught the midnight boat to Portsmouth. If we were going to have any time at all at I Castagni, that is if we succeeded in buying it, which we were both set on doing, then I was going to have to hoard any holidays owed to me like a miser.

Some three weeks later we received a telegram from Signor Vescovo. The message consisted of four words:
‘Vieni subito prezzi lievitano’,
‘Come instantly prices rising’, in the sense that dough rises.

Two days later we set off on the road back.

By now the weather had deteriorated dramatically. There was snow at the mouths of the Mont Blanc Tunnel on both the French and Italian sides and when we reached I Castagni rain was falling steadily with occasional violent gusts of wind from seawards.

The subsequent meeting eventually led to us becoming the owners of what, in the prevailing conditions, contrived to look a somewhat less attractive property than it had done formerly. It
took place, not as we imagined it would, indoors in the kitchen out of the way of the elements, but on an exposed piece of high ground at the rear of the premises from which a fine view could be obtained of its various ruined rooftops, with the rain belting down on them.

Other amenities, of which we had so far been ignorant, included a well lined with masonry which subsequent sounding proved to be about fifty feet deep, and a very rickety lavatory (in this case an outside earth closet without a roof) with a seat so small that it must have been hewn out by Attilio for his own personal use. It hung over what appeared to be a bottomless rift in the earth’s surface.

I knew a good deal about this sort of lavatory, fenced in by
canniccio
. They give whoever is seated within an entirely false impression that he or she is invisible to those in the world outside. During the war in Italy I had helped to rescue a buxom
contadina
named Dolores from a similar one in the Apennines, when the seat on which she had been perched had given way, precipitating her into its unspeakable depths, and a very unpleasant job it had been getting her out.

Present on this historic occasion were Signor Botti, the vendor – or was he going to be a non-starter? – and Wanda and myself, the buyers. Signor Vescovo was to act the part of
mediatore
, intermediary or mediator for the deal. Without the intervention of a
mediatore
no deal could be concluded, and in many places still cannot be concluded, in rural Italy, whether it involved the sale of a flock of sheep or the construction of some unsightly building for which no planning permission existed.

Signor Botti was a man of about sixty-five. He was very thin and had a long, melancholy face which rarely, if ever, betrayed any emotion, a face hewn by a Mayan from some dark, brownish stone. He had been involved in a terrible accident when one of
his legs had been run over by a tractor, which had left it in the shape of a bow. He was obviously in constant pain but endured it with great fortitude.

He spoke to us in what was an almost completely unintelligible dialect, which even Wanda, who could understand but not speak Parmigiano, the dialect of the Province of Parma on the other side of the Apennines, could make little of. It was fortunate that Signor Vescovo was fluent in it.

Signor Botti’s rather grim appearance belied his nature which was that of a nice, rather timid man who was not very well off and was, with good reason, terrified of being taken for a ride by two foreigners over what was, almost certainly, his most valuable asset.

He was dressed in a dark brown suit and a waistcoat with a heavy, silver watch chain draped across it, a white shirt without a tie, a snuff-coloured felt hat and mountain boots.

For this meeting all four of us had elected to bring umbrellas; and there we stood with them straining to turn themselves inside out while the rain hissed down, the lightning flashed and the thunder rolled and reverberated in the marble quarries above Carrara and recurrent blasts of what was the
scirocco
from Africa endeavoured to remove us from the hillside. Why this meeting had to take place in the open air in such apocalyptic conditions remained unclear, until Signor Botti proceeded to march us round the boundaries of the property, which were identified by small stones almost invisible to any but the most practised eye, rather like the choirboys who once a year beat the bounds of the Church of St Clement Danes.

But this was not the end of it. He then took us on a conducted tour of the various interior parts of the house, all of them, in order, as he said, that we should be absolutely sure that what we were getting was what he was selling.

‘That is,’ he said, looking thoroughly pessimistic, ‘if we are able to conclude something,’ which, at this moment, seemed highly improbable.

This second conducted tour led to the discovery of an amazing room at the back of the premises, at the far end, yet another part of the domain of Attilio. It was a room roofed with stone slabs and it had a door which could be only opened by inserting a hand in a hole in a wall and groping around until you could grasp a baulk of timber which acted as a lock, and pull it from left to right.

This room extended the whole height of the building and had originally been constructed for the purpose of drying chestnuts. They were laid out and dried over a fire that had a chimney which extended up to the height of the roof. When they were dry they were ground into a pale, brownish flour and used to make a rather sickly, sweetish sort of bread called
castagnaccia
which, until long after the last war, was a staple food in many parts of mountain Italy.

It contained a great collection of tools, a forge with bellows, several ladders, a couple of wine barrels, rather the worse for wear, some of the heavy tubs called
bigonci
, from which the grapes were poured into the grape crusher, various agricultural instruments, wooden mousetraps that looked like miniature lockup garages and were fitted with a sort of portcullis made of tin that would come down on the necks of the unfortunate mice if they tripped the trigger, axes, hammers, crowbars, scythes and sickles, leather clogs with wooden soles, boxes of hand-forged iron nails and racks of empty wine bottles of ancient manufacture, very heavy and black – all this to enumerate just some of the contents. Miraculously, it was as dry as a bone.

And even after all these preliminaries, getting Signor Botti up to the starting line, so far as selling his house was concerned, was about as easy as bringing a reluctant bride to the altar. Although
he had, apparently, agreed to accept two and a half million, which was what he asked for in the first place, he was not going to do so before the whole business had been gone over again with Signor Vescovo.

There followed what turned out to be an entire hour of rumbling, rambling dialogue conducted between Signor Botti who, I regret to say, I was beginning to have a desire to strangle, notwithstanding his disability, and Signor Vescovo whom we were both beginning to admire profoundly for his almost inhuman self-control. In the course of these exchanges Signor Botti, rather like the Grand Old Duke of York, at one moment advanced to take up a certain position, the next retreated from it, then advanced again to re-possess himself of it, while we all got wetter and wetter, having re-emerged for no apparent reason into the open air.

Then, suddenly, their dialogue ceased and Signor Vescovo seized Signor Botti’s right hand, at the same time contriving to bring our two right hands together with his, with the words,
‘Dunque, siamo d’accordo!’

It was done. At least we thought it was done. Nothing was as I had imagined it would be: no repairing to some snug hostelry, such as the Arco, for drinks all round, while we dried out. Only the four of us on an only too convincing Italian equivalent of a blasted heath. No sign of Attilio, whom I would not have been at all surprised to find lying in state in his bedroom, waiting for the weather to improve, or for that matter of Signora Angiolina, either.

What became only too apparent immediately, and something that put an additional damper on the proceedings, was that, as Signor Vescovo had predicted, Signor Botti didn’t like the look of Wanda’s cheque, or rather it was Wanda’s mother’s (she was paying for it), one little bit.

He took it gingerly in both hands as if it might have been about to explode and after holding it up to what light there was, getting
it nice and damp in the process, and generally behaving as if it was something the cat had brought in, rejected it.

We were in a spot. We needed the money in cash, not next week or the week after, but now, if we were going to be sure of getting I Castagni. If we didn’t produce it Signor Botti might quite likely succumb to another attack of the dithers and we would be back where we came in.

It was at this moment that Signor Vescovo who, so far as we were concerned, was getting nothing out of all this, showed himself worthy of his name and offered to cash a cheque himself for two and a half million and give the money to Signor Botti, which we didn’t want him to do.

But first there had to be a meeting with Signor Botti’s notary in Sarzana to finalize everything.

So we all tramped across the bridge over the torrent which was in spate, up the hill past Signora Angiolina’s place in the hissing rain, from which she waved encouragingly when we gave her the thumbs up sign, piled into the Land Rover and set off for Sarzana.

There in the office of the notary in the main square, we were told that a declaration would have to be made that Wanda was the only surviving child of her parents’ marriage. She was, in fact by now, the only survivor of a family of eleven children, only two of whom, Wanda and an elder brother, had survived beyond birth.

To do this we would have to go to Monfalcone, near Trieste, where Wanda’s mother’s notary carried on his business and would do what was necessary.

We took a night train to Monfalcone, got the document, spent the next night with Wanda’s mother, got the money in cash and returned to find that Signor Vescovo had already come up with the money and handed it over to Signor Botti.

Now, apart from a few formalities, we were the owners of a small place in Italy called I Castagni.

The winter that followed our acquisition of I Castagni was a bitter one. Our house, which was near Wimbledon Common, was colder than most, due to the fact that we hadn’t been able to afford to have central heating installed. All our resources had been consumed in stemming a disastrous outbreak of dry rot which had necessitated the removal of the entire façade of the building, so that while repairs were being carried out, looking at it from outside, having lifted the tarpaulin which covered it, was like peering into a doll’s house.

Sometimes, when working at home on some piece for the
Observer
with a title such as ‘The Best Bistros in Martinique’, written by someone I had commissioned who complained of the heat in the Caribbean, to restore my circulation, long before jogging was invented, I used to go running on Wimbledon Common and across Richmond Park.

There, while pounding up the long snowy rides in the dusk, between the giant oaks that had been planted centuries ago, with the rooks like black rags scattering on the wind high above them, I thought of the little house in Italy, as full of holes as the sieve in which the Jumblies put to sea, and Attilio, its diminutive occupant, and wondered if they were both still standing. The house
was not even insured. In the excitement we had forgotten to insure it. Should we now be thinking of insuring Attilio, in case the house collapsed on top of him?

One thing was certain: no one except Signor Vescovo, and he had his own troubles what with his
ristorante
and his
produzione propria
, or our friend Valeria at Tellaro would think of letting us know if anything untoward happened.

The only other persons even faintly interested would be Signora Angiolina and Attilio and all that one was likely to get out of him would be a series of ‘Heh! Heh! Heh!’ noises, which was what it sounded like when he went through the motions of chuckling to himself, while Signora Angiolina’s contribution would probably be a
‘Ma!’

All we could do now was to wait until the following Easter when, all being well, I would be able to have some more time off in which we could take possession of our newly acquired property. It was fortunate that by this time our children were sufficiently grown up to be at universities and no longer reliant on us for amusement during the holidays.

Easter Sunday fell almost as late as it possibly could, and when we set off for Italy on the Tuesday of Easter week, it was in a Land Rover crammed with everything we could think of that might help us to survive in what was little more than the shell of a house.

All the way across France and northern Italy it poured and poured, except at the Mont Blanc Tunnel where it was snowing at both ends, as it had been the previous time. As Wanda said, ‘When it comes to travelling we are some pickers!’

We eventually reached the eighteenth, twenty-first or twenty-second bend, or whatever it was, in the early afternoon of Good Friday, Venerdì Santo. The weather was much too bad to attempt
to open up the house and we decided to stay the night in a hotel up at Fosdinovo. We had had enough of camping.

So we continued on up another lot of bends until we reached the town of Fosdinovo, which up to now we had not seen except once in passing through it, and there we put up at one of the two hotels.

The town was situated on a steep-sided spur, more than 500 metres above the sea, and much of it was almost completely hidden from view behind its mediaeval walls and ramparts. The hotel we had chosen to stay in stood just outside the lower of the two principal gates. To the east and west the ramparts terminated in a series of precipices, falling away on the eastern side to dense forests. To the west they fell, equally steeply, to the same sort of terraced hill country in which I Castagni was situated. Through it ran a deep gorge, carved out by a torrent that had its origin higher up the mountainside, and eventually emptied itself, that is when there was any water to empty, into the Magra near Sarzana. All in all, Fosdinovo would have been a difficult place for a besieging army to take. The only possible way would have been to attack it from the top of the spur but this was effectively defended by the vast Castello Malaspina.

The Castello was an ideal residence for the Malaspina who spent much of the time over many centuries, in common with other members of the local aristocracy, plotting. From the fourteenth century onwards, they were a power in the region, reinforced by judicious couplings with such famous families as the Gambacorti of Pisa, the Doria, the Centurione, the Pallavicini of Genoa, the Orsucci of Lucca, the Santelli of Pesaro and the Cangrande della Scala, a union recorded by a marble relief over the entrance to the Castello, depicting a dog with a flowering hawthorn in its mouth. And they remained a power until 1796 when Carlo Emanuele Malaspina was deprived of his domains by the French.

The hotel was of a sort that had already long since become a rarity in most parts of Italy, even the most remote, and although we neither of us knew it at the time, its days in its present form were numbered.

Old, if not ancient, dark, cavernous, rambling were just some of the epithets that could be applied to it without being offensive. In fact it was lovely. Its rooms were full of good rustic furniture of the mid-nineteenth century and of later date, of a sort that we would have been only too happy to acquire for I Castagni: presses and chests-of-drawers in mahogany and chestnut which could swallow up heaps of clothes; cylindrical marble-topped bedside tables of the sort that Attilio possessed which also secreted within them massive
vasi da notte
with floral embellishments, receptacles of which, judging by the sanitary arrangements obtaining at I Castagni, we were going to stand in constant need.

But most desirable of all were the beautiful bedsteads, of all shapes and sizes, built of wood or wrought iron with tin-plate panels painted with flowers and arcadian landscapes, or decorated with mother-of-pearl, or very simple ones constructed entirely of wrought iron with no embellishment at all.

The hotel was owned by a local butcher who had a shop a few yards up the road, inside what had been one of the gates of the town. He also made excellent
salami.
He was a good butcher, but he always gave the impression of being on the point of falling asleep, like the Dormouse in
Alice in Wonderland.
Even shaking hands with him was an enervating experience.

His wife was of an entirely different disposition: large but not fat, black-haired, full of energy, what the Italians call
slancio
, and with a voice that made the rafters ring, and she was as adept at cutting meat or boning hams as her husband.

She was also extremely generous. The morning of Easter Saturday when we left the hotel to go down to I Castagni and
paid our bill she gave us an entire
salame
as if it were an arrival present, and whenever thereafter we bought anything in the shop and she was there she always gave us something extra, which meant that we couldn’t use it as much as we might otherwise have done.

There were two daughters of marriageable age, both of whom had fiancés. They were personable girls and were a good catch for any young men, with an hotel, a
ristorante
, a
caffè/bar
and butcher’s shop as visible future assets. Meanwhile they acted as waitresses and chambermaids and ran the bar, all of which was enough to be getting on with, while the Signora’s elderly mother did the cooking for the
ristorante
with some outside help in the season, which had not yet begun. Both subsequently married.

After we had signed in and had been consigned to one of the cavernous bedrooms which by now, with the awful weather prevailing outside, was almost totally dark, the two girls invited us to take part in the
Processione del Venerdì Santo
.

This procession, which had to end in the afternoon, at the hour of Christ’s death, was due to start in a couple of minutes from the Oratorio dei Bianchi, an old church in the middle of the town. In the course of this procession the participants would make an almost complete tour of it. They themselves were going to take part. Would we like to go with them? We said yes.

Swathed in the warmest clothes we had at our disposal, but still inadequately clad – the wind was coming straight off the Apuan Alps, which were newly snow-covered – we set off with the girls for the piazza in which the Oratorio was situated and in which the procession would be assembling.

The piazza was about the size of a squash court and one side of it was entirely taken up by one façade of the Oratorio, an austere and beautiful construction of what appeared to be almost translucent marble. It had been built in 1600 by Pasquale
Malaspina and a great marble escutcheon over the entrance displayed the coat of arms of the Malaspina, a flowering hawthorn. Below it there was an Annunciation carved in the same material. Inside the building, hidden behind the high altar, was a wooden statue of the Madonna, carved in 1300 and lodged here when the church was built, after the original one was destroyed by fire.

Normally the doors of the Oratorio were kept closed but this afternoon they were wide open to allow an effigy of the Crucified Christ to be taken out from it into the piazza on a wooden float carried by a band of porters, who supported the weight on their shoulders. Two other men also emerged from it bearing a funereal-looking black and silver banner which was now giving trouble in the wind that was swirling around the piazza.

At the head of the procession was the rather elderly priest of Fosdinovo and Caniparola, dressed in black vestments. He was accompanied by a couple of acolytes, who were without their censers, because they were not used in such processions, and a good thing too, in the wind that was blowing, they might easily have set themselves on fire, or some other participant.

They were followed by the main body of the faithful, among whom we found ourselves. Altogether there were not many more than fifty people and most of them were women. There were also a few children; but it was not surprising that there was a poor turn-out. It was terrible weather for a procession. Already at around two in the afternoon it was growing dark.

Conspicuous among the few men present in the piazza, apart from those who would be carrying the images, looking benevolently at all and sundry, was Attilio who, we later learned, was not only
molto religioso
but also a
grande appassionato
of religious feasts and processions. He had walked up from I Castagni in the appalling weather in order to attend this one and, in spite of the buffeting he must have received on the way, was very smart in a long, dark
navy-blue, fur-collared overcoat of antique cut which almost reached to his ankles, and an article of clothing without which neither of us saw him, except when, later on, he had to go to hospital, his cap.

As soon as he saw us he came shooting across the piazza as if it was ice – in fact it was wet marble and equally slippery. Then, after paying his respects to the girls in a formal manner, he took our hands in his, first Wanda’s, then mine, and pumped them up and down as if he expected water to come gushing out of our mouths, at the same time saying, so far as either of us could understand, how happy he was to see us.

But what was more extraordinary, so far as I was concerned, was that, when he began the pumping treatment he said, perfectly audibly, after having more or less cut me dead up to now,
‘Adesso ricordo!’
(‘Now I remember!’)

What he said was mysterious, if not ambiguous. Unless I knew, which I now did without a shadow of doubt, that he, Attilio, and the old man in the mountains of twenty-odd years ago were not one and the same, I would have thought that when he said,
‘Adesso ricordo!’
he was remembering that time, whereas what he was presumably referring to was our brief encounter five months ago. I gave up. Two storytellers, both of whom could make things, both of whom were
religioso
, one of whom, possibly both of whom prayed by their bedsides, although there must be, I realized, whole hordes of little old men in Italy who do just that, were more than I could cope with. Eventually the whole thing was resolved when I asked Signora Angiolina if Attilio had ever gone away from home during the war. She said categorically no, he hadn’t. I was sorry I asked. Perhaps it would have been better if it had remained a mystery but short of having a sphinx on the premises at I Castagni I could hardly complain.

Anyway I didn’t care. What he had just said to me gave me the same feelings of pleasure that I would experience in the future
when Signora Angiolina said to me
‘Hai fatto bene!’
To be remembered by Attilio was different from being remembered by any Tom, Dick or Harry, or even General de Gaulle. He never enlarged on what he meant again. Now, however, to show where his sympathies lay, he attached himself, as it were, to our suite and prepared to walk with us in the procession.

It was at this moment that the priest gave some kind of inconspicuous signal, but one that was sufficient to set the whole thing in motion, and we all began to move uphill with the priest in the van, flanked by the acolytes, followed by Christ nailed to the Cross and the two men carrying the black and silver banner flapping madly in the wind, and behind them the main body of whom I was certainly the only Protestant present, snuffling and sneezing, for a number of them had already contracted nasty colds, sometimes chanting, sometimes reciting the rosary or saying various Lenten prayers, but somehow contriving not to do all these at the same time, which would have resulted in pandemonium.

The priest, although he looked rather old, was fearfully fit. He led us at what amounted to a trot into the teeth of the freezing wind and zoomed us through the winding streets and alleys, flanked by secretive-looking houses that made up Fosdinovo, mediaeval streets and alleys in which, this Friday afternoon, almost every house had at least one window with a candle burning in it, to welcome the procession.