A Small Place in Italy (9 page)

On these journeys we visited places into which it seemed impossible that anyone could take a tractor, let alone a trailer and return with it, loaded to the equivalent of the gunwales, in fact much higher than the gunwales because he set up stakes vertically around the edge of it that enabled it to be loaded to a far higher level than would otherwise have been possible; after which the whole load had to be lashed down with ropes.

I could only admire Tranquillo’s consummate skill on the return journeys to what seemed like the outside world when he hauled the trailer up through rocky gorges in which the air was full of the sounds of waterfalls, and skirted the edge of precipices on tracks that were often pot-holed and deep in mud. In these moments I began to feel that I was a ‘real’
contadino
, something I could never be.

Going down the hill, past Signora Angiolina’s place – she had gone to spend the evening with her sister – we were engulfed in the peculiar kind of melancholy that envelops one after a prolonged luncheon when one finds oneself all of a sudden in the open air,
bound for an unheated house. So that evening we went and had a modest meal in La Scaletta on the outskirts of Sarzana, which became our favourite restaurant. In it the food was
cucina casalinga
, the sort that Italian mothers turn out for all their working lives.

Later La Scaletta was the scene of a spectacular mishap when having celebrated a nice review of my latest book and having become ‘over excited’ in the process, I fell down the entire flight of steps from which the restaurant took its name, measuring my length in the road below and hurting myself considerably. Fortunately, Wanda was away at the time visiting her mother. And it was the proprietor, Signor Tito, who took me home.

The meeting with the skilled men, the
esperti
, at least we hoped they were, took place at an early hour on Easter Monday. Mercifully, it wasn’t raining.

There was Alberto, the carpenter, Bergamaschi, the plumber, who was the oldest, about sixty-five, and there was Renato, the stonemason. He arrived on an old Lambretta with his small son on the pillion seat. There had been no point in summoning an electrician at this stage of the proceedings as there were such huge voids in the fabric of the building, the equivalent of black holes, that in many places there was literally nothing to which the wires could be attached.

Among those present, the only one with any kind of transport was Renato. Scarcely anyone up there in the hills at that time owned anything in the way of a motor vehicle. There were still some pack mules, but these were already becoming rare at such low altitudes. Cycling was out of the question, unless one was training for the Giro d’Italia, the equivalent of the Tour de France. This meant that if any of our
esperti
needed to bring any materials to the site they either had to hire a van, or else find someone with a tractor and a trailer, such as Tranquillo, and pay them. It was lucky that we had a Land Rover. In the following week we were
able to move quite a lot of stuff but it was a pity it was only a short-wheelbase model, which meant that it had very little room in it.

Also on site was Attilio, who was to do as much as anyone to help us in this time of need. He had emerged from what was to us the still undiscovered country around the Foce il Cuccù, no doubt because some equivalent to a bush telegraph had informed him that something important was going on down the hill that merited his presence.

Now he stood on the eminence on which the sale of the property had been negotiated, accepting with equanimity the various affectionate pleasantries that were being bandied around by the
esperti
, such as ‘Been doing any flying lately, Attilio?’, things that would have been gibberish to us unless we had been briefed by Signora Angiolina, and at the same time discomfiting them by going into his ‘Heh! Heh! Heh!’ act, the one I liked the best.

From time to time he disappeared into the ‘secret’ room in search of various tools when any of the others asked for a loan of them. For, just like
esperti
everywhere in the world, they preferred to borrow other people’s tools rather than wear out their own.

It would be tedious to attempt to describe everything that was agreed and arranged between ourselves and the
esperti
that Easter Monday.

With Attilio’s ladders leaning against the walls and Renato and Alberto up on the roof, with parts of it already removed in order that some exploratory work could proceed, the scene brought to mind an Irish eviction during the Hungry Forties in some such place as Skibbereen, with Attilio on his little hill, playing the part of the aged, evicted tenant to perfection.

Meanwhile Signor Bergamaschi, whose face was so pockmarked that it resembled a close-up of part of the surface of the moon, had turned his attention to the plumbing.

What he was really interested in discovering was the whereabouts of the septic tank, that is if there ever had been one. Attilio was not a mine of information on the subject of plumbing.

Eventually after prodding around on one of the terraces below the house, using a sort of dipstick, Signor Bergamaschi found the tank when it sank up to the hilt in what appeared to be solid earth. It proved to be a tank in such a spectacularly awful state, having failed to perform its biodegradable functions for a long time, that he decided that I should dig another, larger one and that when I had done this, Renato should line it with bricks and mortar, also with my assistance.
‘E un merdaia’
(a shit heap) was how Signor Bergamaschi described it, and he could scarcely be accused of exaggerating.

When I had done all this, Signor Bergamaschi said, dangling a carrot before me that I found difficulty in resisting, we should be able to have a water heater, a wash basin, a shower, a lavatory basin and even, unimaginable luxury, a bidet, all this in what was still a stable, and we could also have a bigger sink in the kitchen, instead of something that resembled a holy water stoup. But of all these it was the thought of the bidet that really hooked me. At last something in which to wash my rubber boots.

To realize this dream, and damn near kill myself in its execution, in the next couple of days I dug a hole in one of the terraces below the house and some distance from the abandoned
merdaia
, in clay that looked like over-cooked steak and was as difficult to work. It was twelve feet square and five feet deep and to do it I used a pick and one of Attilio’s triangular-bladed spades.

From it I dug trenches up to the house which would carry the waste pipes from the kitchen and the soon-to-be-emergent bathroom, which I hoped would take care of our combined wastes for some time to come. And indeed, apart from an occasional hiccuping sound which the tank emitted when the house was
overflowing with guests who insisted on pouring detergent into it and other inimical noxious substances, and an occasional wave of gaseous smells when the wind was in the south-west, it did take care of them.

No sooner had I finished digging the hole for the septic tank than I found myself promoted to being Renato’s assistant, in the position of
manovale
, one which I shared with his youngest son who already knew more about the work of a
muratore
than ever I would.

From now on my more or less permanent task whenever I worked with Renato was mixing cement to whatever was the consistency he required; in this case first of all for the septic tank and then, when that was done, carrying buckets of it up to him on one or other of the roofs on one or other of the numerous ladders which had been set up against the walls, giving the impression that the house was a besieged city that had been taken by storm.

Once up there I was sometimes permitted a couple of minutes’ respite to admire the view and Renato’s skill with a trowel, before being sent below once more with his urgent cry of
‘Ancora un po’ di cemento!’
(‘More cement!’) ringing in my ears.

Meanwhile the orders for various materials came pouring in, most of them placed by Signor Bergamaschi: plastic piping – we were lucky, a few years previously it would have had to be lead – a meter for the water supply, and a valve to reduce the pressure of La Contessa, the spring having such a head on it according to him that, uncontrolled, it could blow a hole in an electric water heater of the sort he was proposing to install in the bathroom. This, about the power of La Contessa, proved to be only too true when, having taken delivery of a rather tinny-looking water heater from a builders’ merchant in Sarzana down the hill, he connected it up with the water supply without setting the valve to the correct
pressure, with the result that the water, as he had foretold, blew a hole clean through it.

Most people would say that this was a misfortune that Signor Bergamaschi had brought upon himself but all he did was to take the heater back to the supplier, complaining that it was defective, whereupon they gave him a replacement free of charge. Tinny-looking it might be but this Velodoccia lasted us for twenty-five years and, for all I know, may still be functioning.

We also took delivery of a load of tiles and several large cans of Vellutina, a sort of whitewash.

The only material we seemed to have a superfluity of was sand. This was the sand that I had moved to the back of the house from the entrance to the bathroom in a series of what seemed innumerable wheelbarrow journeys because with it where it was we couldn’t open the bathroom door. I also thought it was better out of sight. But Renato didn’t.
‘Non l’ha messo nel luogo giusto! Bisogna spostarla!’
(‘You haven’t put it in the right place! You must move it!’) was the first thing Renato said when he saw where I had put it. So I did, carrying it round to the front of the house again in another series of what seemed endless wheelbarrow journeys, where the residue remained for twenty years in case he might need it.

At the same time there were what ought to have been comic interludes but weren’t particularly when all four of us – Renato, Alberto, Bergamaschi and myself – were up in the loft, trying to rid it of the coils of wire which more or less filled it, wrestling with it, rather like the Laocoöns in their death agonies, beset by iron snakes.

That Monday morning, while Wanda was making coffee for the assembled company, an old man came steaming up the hill and halted outside our kitchen door.

He was about five feet five, had white hair, a white moustache, a good show of white stubble on his cheeks, a white shirt, a white
tie, a black suit, a beautiful black felt Borsalino hat and black, well-polished mountain boots. It was difficult to know how old he was but he was very sprightly. His name was Anselmo and everyone knew him, including Attilio, who took his hand and shook it vigorously.

Apparently he had been a
mezzadro
and he lived in one of the Malaspina houses on what was a short cut down to Sarzana, but his real skill was in making the big wooden sleds with wattle sides until comparatively recently used to bring wood down from the forests. His wife didn’t go out much as she had arthritis. He was now on his way to a house further up the hill where he went to be shaved every Monday morning. The reason why he was shaved on Monday when all barbers’ shops in Italy are closed, was that this barber did it as a favour to Anselmo on what was his day off.

‘I’m just making some coffee,’ Wanda said to him.
‘Vuol favorire?’,
using the expression, ‘Will you do us the favour of having some?’

‘
No, grazie
,’ Anselmo said. ‘
A me il caffè fa male
.’

‘Allora, un bicchierino di grappa?’
Wanda said, producing a big bottle of the stuff that had been distilled by one of her relatives in Slovenia, across the frontier near Trieste.

He didn’t say ‘no’ so she poured him a two finger glass; and then, quite suddenly, it was gone. It was strong stuff.
‘Vado a farmi la barba
,’ Signor Anselmo said to no one in particular, having refused a second dose, ‘Now I am going to be shaved,’ put himself in bottom gear and zoomed over the torrent, up the hill, round the bend, and past Signora Angiolina’s house for his appointment with the barber, as if he was propelled by rocket fuel, which was more or less what Wanda had given him.

For many, many years every Monday morning whenever we were in residence, Signor Anselmo used to drop in on his way to have a shave and, every so often, a haircut in a house up the hill
that we never saw. He didn’t really drop in. Like all the rest of our male visitors he always used to hum some song or other just sufficiently long before he actually arrived on the scene for Wanda to be ready with a bottle to furnish him with a
bicchierino
, a stirrup cup without a stirrup. He never actually entered the premises, even when it was raining, as he had an umbrella.

He always went home by a different route, Signor Anselmo, presumably so as not to bother us further. He was a man of sensibility.

Then, one Monday, he failed to appear and never came again. He had died while we were in England. Everyone assumed that we would know that he had gone, and so no one told us, not even Attilio.

According to Alberto, the carpenter, the problem was where was he going to be able to lay his hands on some well-seasoned timber for the floors, for joists and roof beams and for a complete set of windows and shutters. ‘All I can get from the merchants is junk,’ he said. ‘I think the best chance is with one of the
demolizioni
,’ he went on. ‘They have a lot of seasoned wood. What I would like for the floors would be old deck planking; but it will be full of nails and it can be very expensive.’

‘What are these
demolizioni
?’ Wanda asked.