A Small Place in Italy (7 page)

The name of the carpenter was Alberto – he insisted on being called Alberto rather than its diminutive Berto, the Italian equivalent of Bert.

Alberto was just the sort of man we needed. He was young and agile and promised to come and look at the house the following Monday morning – Easter Monday. We asked him if he knew of a plumber, and he said he did, an older man called Bergamaschi, but a good one and he could ask him to come too.

Then we set off in search of the
muratore
, whose name was Renato. He lived in a nearby valley that terminated under the precipices on the east side of Fosdinovo.

Renato was a small man in his thirties with very bright blue eyes, as brown as a nut from a lifetime spent mostly in the open air, and full of energy. Things looked like getting off to a bad start at our first meeting when Wanda asked him if he was a
manovale
. In Italy a
manovale
means an unskilled labourer, the sort of labourer I was destined to be from now on, whereas Renato was a
muratore
, and a highly skilled one. For a moment it looked as if the meeting might come to an end there and then, but fortunately he had a sense of humour.

‘I am a
muratore
, not a
manovale
,’he said, his eyes twinkling, ‘but I have also been in my time a
manovale
.’

Renato lived in a smallish house in the middle of a fine vineyard with his wife and three children, two small boys of about nine and eleven and a pretty daughter who was a couple of years younger. He was an ardent
cacciatore.
He owned several shotguns and rifles, there were piles of shooting magazines everywhere and the walls of his house were hung with trophies of the chase.

Renato constantly bemoaned the fact that to all intents and purposes
la caccia
in Italy was finished. He was now planning, together with a number of like-minded others, to release a couple of pairs of male and female wild boars, in a dense forest near the Foce il Cuccù, the pass to which Attilio had gone to do a
giornata
, in the hope that they would breed in sufficient numbers to make it worthwhile hunting them. There was no danger of the boar failing to procreate. They did so to such an extent that the area became infested with them.

In addition, hedging his bet as it were, he was saving up to go on a shooting holiday in one of the Iron Curtain countries, such as Yugoslavia or Bulgaria which, at that time, were arranging hunting expeditions for those who wanted to engage in such capitalistic activities as shooting bears, wild boar, deer, game birds, wolves and hares in exchange for large sums in foreign currency. In some of these countries the shoot had to be paid for in gold.

Besides being a good shot Renato also knew how to make really good wine in spite of this being, as we were beginning to find out after some sampling in depth, not a particularly good area for wine. The end product at that time had no denomination such as DOCG
(Denominazione de Origine Controllata e Garantita)
or DOC
(Denominazione de Origine Controllata),
or even DS
(Denominazione Semplice),
the humblest of all. When we began
bottling our own wine, our son designed a label with a pen and ink drawing of the house and the words
Produzione Propria
on it.

Now Renato opened a bottle of his own red wine, something he was going to continue to do for all the years we were to know him, which made up for the somewhat meagre ration Wanda had imposed on us because it was still Lent. He, too, promised to come to the house on the morning of Easter Monday, but before we left he gave us what proved to be some useful advice.

‘You won’t have any difficulty in getting people like Alberto or Bergamaschi, to work for you, or even me, a
muratore
, a onetime unskilled labourer,’ he said mischievously. ‘But if you want us to continue to work for you we must be paid when we tell you we need the money. One of the curses of Italy is that if you are engaged in manual labour, whether skilled or unskilled, you can never get any money owing to you without a struggle. If you do eventually succeed it can take months, even years. So if you pay on time then you will have no trouble, word will soon get around and you will never lack for help.’

We followed his advice, only having work done that we could pay for at the time, and as a result no one who worked for us ever failed to do what we asked them to do – well almost none of them. In fact many years were to pass before things really changed for the worse, by which time what had previously been accomplished at I Castagni in a matter of months was no longer possible.

Our next stop was at the ironmonger’s shop at Ponte Isolone. There we put in a crash order for things to be delivered that evening before dark: for a gas stove and a gas cylinder, a couple of rubber buckets of a sort that Renato assured us were indispensable to a
muratore
, a ‘real’ galvanized bucket, an assortment of brushes and brooms and one of those things you sweep all the dust into and then knock over, some sacks of cement, sand and
a hosepipe with a connection that I hoped would fit the tap in the kitchen.

We were the first foreigners who had ever entered his establishment, the proprietor told us in a most uncharacteristic burst of confidence. Uncharacteristic because it was the last occasion, apart from greeting us formally at such ceremonies as weddings and funerals –
‘Come sta, Signora, Signore?’
– that he ever addressed a single word to either one of us for a period of twenty-five years, apart from telling us the price of something in his shop or, when he rang up the till, how much we owed him.

After this we went back to the house to await the delivery – at least we were getting it free.

The goods arrived in a largish but rather feeble-looking van that was certainly not equipped with four-wheel drive, which the driver brought down round the bend and across the torrent with consummate ease, making me feel pretty silly. He then set up the gas stove, which was only a two-ring affair without an oven, on top of the
fornello a carbone
which Wanda understandably funked using.

The last act performed by the van driver before taking off up the hill and round the bend without touching the tree, was to pour a Sahara of sand on to the ground outside what was going to be the bathroom before we could stop him, making it impossible for us to enter it, until I shifted it round to the back with a wheelbarrow, which took ages.

That evening of Easter Saturday we found ourselves without any milk, having forgotten to buy any in Fosdinovo, and by the time we got to the shop downhill from I Castagni it was already shut.

‘Rina will let you have some milk,’ Signora Angiolina said. ‘That’s who I get it from, Rina Dadà. She’ll let you have some for sure. She is the wife of Tranquillo, the eldest son, and they have a cow. She goes twice a day to the cowshed, at five in the morning and in the evening, to milk the cow.

‘You should go and meet the family, anyway. They are all very interested to know what you are like. And at the same time you can make an agreement with Tranquillo about paying your share of the water from La Contessa, the spring, because he is in charge of it.

‘They are a good family, the Dadà,’ she went on. ‘And although they are
contadini
they are a sort of
famiglia reale
– royal family – hereabouts and are very much respected.

‘Take this bottle to put the milk in,’ she said, ‘and go now before it’s all gone. The cowshed is at the back, at the far end of the house. Don’t go round the front unless one of the family is there because they have a dog on a chain, and it’s a long chain.’

‘Shouldn’t you have a dog, Signora?’ Wanda asked her. ‘It’s a rather lonely place, isn’t it, for a woman to be alone in?’

‘I’ve got my cat,’ she said. ‘She’s enough to be getting on with. Besides, nothing bad ever happened to me, except once.’

‘Why, what happened then?’ Wanda asked.

‘I’ll tell you one day,’ Signora Angiolina said.

The Dadà farmhouse was set back from the road and reached by a track at an acute angle to the main road, which was why we hadn’t noticed it before.

The house was a solidly built, rather austere building, painted in
sangue di bue
, with only one of its windows visible from the side from which we were now approaching it, and it had a big chimney stack with smoke coming from it. Outside in the yard there were ploughs and harrows, a tractor and a big trailer with rear-wheel drive and mounds of logs cut for firewood, all now barely visible in the dusk.

Happy to be out of sight of what proved to be a thoroughly unpleasant dog we approached the shed from which deep bovine noises were emanating, and knocked on the door, at the same time saying,
‘Permesso?’
and heard a female voice telling us to enter.

Inside it was very warm and it made me remember all the cowsheds I had slept in during the war, while on the run, and how happy I had always been whenever I was told that I could do so. You might suffocate in one but at least you were in no danger of dying of cold.

Illumination was supplied, as it always had been all those years previously, by an oil lantern and Signora Rina was sitting on a stool with her head alongside the cow’s flanks, milking the beast. And, as it always had, the lamp cast fantastic shadows of the protagonists on the walls, distortions that used to remind me of Plato’s ‘Myth of the Cave’.

Signora Rina proved to be a slim, brown-eyed, brown-haired,
very good-looking young woman, with finely delineated features, a Diana of the Hunt and the Moon, but one dressed in the
contadini
uniform: headscarf, cardigan, knee-length skirt, apron, thick, hand-knitted socks and clogs with leather uppers and wooden soles.

‘Excuse me!’ she said, ‘I’m just finishing. Urrgh,
stai brava Bionda, brutta bestia!
’ This to the cow who was doing her best to upset the results of their joint labours.

Seeing and hearing this I was back in the cowshed of Signor Ugolotti at Lagrimone in the Apennines of Parma, in the autumn of 1943. Then it had been a dark, wet night and I had asked him if I could sleep in his cowshed, or loft, while he was still milking – his cow was called Bella – and he had said no, I couldn’t but I could have a bed, and I did, one that I have never forgotten.

And now, just as Signor Ugolotti, now dead, had done all those years ago, Signora Rina invited us into the house, into the room with the single window looking down the track towards the main road, which was the kitchen, past the now growling guard dog whose name was Mosso, which meant ‘rough’ in the sense of a rough sea, or simply ‘troubled’. Mosso was both of these. There was no one else in the kitchen but something was cooking over a stove.

Then, when Signora Rina had poured the milk into the bottle Signora Angiolina had given us and we had paid her and had put in a similar order, night and morning, for as long as we were at I Castagni, she asked us if we would like to come to Easter Sunday lunch the following day. ‘Then you will be able to meet some of our family,’ she said.

In all the years we were to know Rina, and we still know her, neither of us ever saw her simply sitting down. If she was sitting then she was mixing or mending something. Otherwise she was always on her feet either in the fields, in the kitchen, or washing clothes, ironing or making
salsa di pomodoro
, or
pesto
, the green sauce of Genoese/Ligurian origin made with basil, garlic,
pecorino
,
a hard cheese made from ewe’s milk, soft when newly made, crushed pine nuts and olive oil, or cooking meals, or getting her son off to school, and so on. At that time, when we first met her, she was expecting what proved to be her second son.

Back at the house, having eaten supper in front of the fire, we retired to our sleeping bags on the upper floor. There Wanda balanced her airbed on top of the mediaeval chest; but it turned out to be impossible to sleep on as it had a domed lid. After falling off it twice she abandoned her attempt to spend a mouse-free night and joined me on the floor.

In fact there were no mice on duty either this evening or on any succeeding one as, according to their way of looking at things, spring had already broken out and they had left for the fields and would not be back until the autumn when we would really be able to appreciate the damage they were capable of wreaking on our clothing and bedding, all of which, including the mattresses, had to be wrapped up in thick plastic sheeting and suspended in mid-air from the ceiling on wires.

Sometime during the night, I became conscious of Wanda blundering about the room in the dark – I had dropped and broken the torch the previous evening – trying to find the exit to the staircase and the ground floor. What she wanted was a drink of water from the kitchen.

The next thing I heard was a cry of alarm, ‘Eric! Help!
Aiuto! Aiuto! Ci sono dei scarafaggi!
There are thousands of
scarafaggi.’
Not having any idea what
scarafaggi
might be, I writhed my way out of my sleeping bag, groped my way to the stairhead where, still partly asleep, I tripped over a brick which was used as a doorstop and nearly did a swallow dive down the entire length of the stairs to the ground floor.

The light was on in the kitchen where an awful sight confronted me. Wanda was standing on Attilio’s mini-chair looking down on
what would have been the floor around the fireplace if it had not been almost entirely covered by a heaving brown sea of cockroaches, which were pouring in and out of a number of holes in the brick surround of the fireplace beneath which they presumably spent the hours of daylight.

If I had been a man of the calibre of my father I would probably have laid into them with a frying pan, something he had done years ago during a picnic on the River Thames to a swarm of wasps, having smeared the underside of the pan with jam, with disastrous results; but I knew when I was beaten. There was nothing to be done at this time of night, unless we could lay our hands on a blow lamp. What we really needed was a full-size
Flammenwerfer.

I took Wanda on my shoulders, felt the cockroaches crunching under my bare feet and carried her crunch by crunch out of this now nightmare kitchen.

‘You’ve forgotten to turn the light out!’ Wanda said when I finally deposited her on cockroach-free ground at the foot of the staircase. She hates wasting electricity.

‘Bugger the light!’ I said – in the same tone of voice I imagine George V employed when told by his physicians that they were going to send him back to Bognor, ‘Bugger Bognor!’ – ‘I’m not going back in there tonight. And how do you think I’m going to wash my feet, when the only water is either in the kitchen, or else somewhere outside down a well, for which we have a brand new galvanized bucket but no rope?’

‘The trouble with you is,’ Wanda said, ‘you’re always making difficulties. There’s lots of wet grass.’

So I sat on the bottom step but one of the staircase and cleaned my feet with wet grass; but nothing would make me go back into the kitchen to put the light out.

It was already daylight the following morning when I went down to the kitchen to find out the situation
vis-à-vis scarafaggi
, but apart from those I had squashed underfoot there were none to be seen. However there was very little comfort to be gained from this. They would certainly be back in force this coming night.

In theory nothing could be done until Easter Monday when those we called the
esperti
, the skilled men, were due to appear on the scene; but neither of us could face another irruption of this kind. What Attilio’s attitude was to the
scarafaggi
was unclear. Perhaps he had always gone to bed before they surfaced and began their nocturnal revels. Perhaps they only emerged in the small hours of the morning. Whatever the answer we had to do something now.

‘I’m going to get Renato,’ I said to Wanda who was displaying the symptoms of someone who had been put on the rack, after spending a night on the floor on what proved to be a punctured airbed.

‘You can’t,’ she said. ‘It’s Easter Sunday.’

‘I don’t care if it’s Guy Fawkes Day,’ I said. ‘It’s only seven o’clock in the morning. Someone’s got to help us.’

So I went to see Renato.

He asked me if I had a pick and I said there were several on the premises all belonging to Attilio. Then we set off, Renato having first of all armed himself with a blow lamp.

With the picks we dug up the brick floor of the fireplace and the surrounds and then Renato proceeded to burn out a seething mass of creatures from what must have been age-old nests. Even he was impressed by what we discovered, judging by the number of times he used what was his favourite expression,
‘porca miseria’.

The smell created by this fry-up was indescribable, but from that time onwards we never saw another cockroach there or anywhere else in the house. Presumably the fireplace had been
the only part of it warm enough to attract them. Neither of us had any scruples about destroying them. Either the
scarafaggi
were going to continue to live at I Castagni, or we were. They had not formed part of the dreams I had dreamt while locked up in Germany.

This was the morning that Wanda began to plant numbers of roses, Queen Elizabeths, that she had brought from England. In a few years Queen Elizabeths would be proliferating all over the area grown from Wanda’s cuttings.

Years later a swarm of hornets took up residence somewhere deep in the walls of Attilio’s ‘secret’ room, from which they emerged to drone around our heads but without ever actually attacking us. Nevertheless, it was an unnerving experience and, advised by one of our neighbours, I decided to smoke them out.

I expected to be attacked while carrying out this operation but in fact the only thing the hornets were interested in doing was saving their young. I felt like a murderer.