My First Seven Years (Plus a Few More) (25 page)

The following day was a Sunday, when no work is done in the fields, so I convinced him to pose for me for a portrait. He had on a velvet jacket and a newly ironed shirt, and sat bolt upright as though he were on horseback. I needed him to relax and not to appear to be encased in plaster, so to put him at ease I threw at him a load of questions on problems which I knew were close to his heart.

‘Excuse me, Granddad, but what's happening now to your orchards, trees and greenhouses? Who's left to help you?'

‘No one. Who do you think is interested in this work? I've got five sons and three daughters, and I was the first, even if involuntarily, to do everything to make sure they had other interests. I got them passionately interested in mechanics by dragging every kind of machine, even an electric-powered pump, into the house! I taught them how to dismantle and reassemble engines, driving them crazy by making them do it over and over again. A peasant cannot only know about sowing and harvesting, spreading shit … I beg your pardon, manure and verdigris on the vines. If he limits himself to that, he will never be anything more than a country bumpkin, with all the vision of a blinkered horse. Be curious, throw open all the windows of your brain! And they have thrown them open. Beniamino has become a test pilot with Macchi in Varese, Giosuè is an insurance agent, Mattia is a gold engraver in Valence, and Nino, as you know, is also mad about engines. He has taken a diploma in mechanical engineering and now he's enrolled for an evening course at the
politecnico
in Milan. Aronne, the only one who gave me a hand with the farm work, has gone and decided to set up a garage. I have chased my sons off the land! But don't worry, I have no intention of letting my barns go to wrack and ruin. I'm putting together a cooperative of young people just back from the war. I'm very gradually getting them broken in. It was them you saw yesterday, putting up the cupola-conservatory. They're coming along nicely. I make them pay a little rent, and if it all works out, I'll hand the lot over to them.'

Grandfather was beginning to relax. He was throwing his arms about and gesticulating, and at one point even got to his feet.

‘Hey, Granddad, where are you going? I'm doing your portrait.'

‘Ah, yes, sorry.' He came round behind me to get a better look at the painting. ‘Goodness! Wait till I change glasses. Well done, that's me exactly!' He gave me a slap on the back and went back to his seat. Now he was silent, following his own thoughts, then, as though talking to himself, he came out with: ‘And to think that I was born a
perdapé.
'

‘
Perdapé?
What does that mean, Granddad?'

‘It's the bottom level, the lowest rank among peasants. They are the tenant farmers who have the right to take what remains of the crops only after the landlord has taken his fixed share. And if the harvest goes badly that year, they die. The
perdapé
contract is called the
angheria,
in other words the ‘vexation'. Does that term not say something to you? Look at it, I was born to
perdere i piedi,
to lose my feet, destined to wear out my feet by having them sunk in the earth from dawn to dusk.'

*   *   *

When winter was over, I went back to visit my grandfather. I met him coming towards me as I came out of the station, using his stick to pick his way among the trunks of the lime trees on either side of him in the avenue. The people he met called out to him, said hello, stopped to chat and tried to needle Bristìn into coming out with one of his witty, trenchant remarks. He was by now almost completely blind, but he put up with this situation with an impressive degree of self-irony. Occasionally he would walk backwards: ‘In this way,' he explained to those who questioned him about this odd habit, ‘I manage to get the sun on my face, and that gives me great pleasure. And anyway, what's the point of walking forwards? I can't see a thing!'

When he was at home, he was never on his own. Peasants came to ask his advice about planting such-and-such citrus fruits or cereals, to check whether the moon was right, or if the seeds they had bought at the cooperative were any good. It was true that he could not see but, as he had taught me as a boy, touch and smell were infallible tools of judgement. He would plunge his hand into the sack of grain or rice, let the seeds run through his fingers as though they were rosary beads, then he would sniff at them, put them in his mouth and chew them. At the end he gave his verdict. Bristìn was the terror of seed merchants.

Many times he insulted his peasant friends who came along to show him the anti-cryptogamic concoctions the consortium had advised them to use to get rid of moths, mole crickets and other scourges of the fields: ‘It's quite true, bonehead, that with these pesticides you can wipe out at least ten bastard variations of seed-devourer, but have you ever thought of how many other grubs of good insects you would slaughter? No, you didn't, did you? Take DDT, for instance, look at the damned disaster that brought … last year, you remember, they flew over the fields with an aeroplane spraying out this poisonous sludge as though it were holy water at Corpus Christi. “It is a panacea, a marvel,” intoned the agronomists … the bastards, as ignorant as pigshit they were. Oh yes, it's true, they did away with the bugs in the maize, the weeds in the rice-fields … there were savings on rice-weeders, red mushrooms and phylloxera. But at the same time, they killed nesting birds, fireflies, bees, dragonflies, frogs, carps by the ton, and even flocks of swallows. What a bunch of swine! You eliminate the birds, sparrows and starlings, you kill off the blackbirds … and then you're surprised that processionary caterpillars grow tenfold and strip bare whole woods of poplars, tearing them apart. But who was it – you tell me, hare-brain – who was it who in years past used to gobble all those thousand-footed, slimey grubs when they dangled from branches, hanging from their own slobber like so many miniature Tarzans? The swallows, sparrows, starlings and so on! And it was the same with the frogs: it was they that swallowed the larvae of the mosquitoes and horseflies as they floated on the waterways. It was the dragonflies who got rid of the vermin which devour the rye and the tender potato flower. Now it will take years before that astonishing equilibrium can be re-established!'

‘So are you saying that we should stop praying weed-killers and pesticides … should we stand by and watch these vermin destroy our crops?'

‘For God's sake, no. Chemistry and progress are sacred things, but don't trust anybody straight off, as though you were blind moles: get the information! Stop holding on to the damn idea that all that's important is to secure your own advantage, and the hell with whatever comes after. Look, it's like hitting out when you're playing
lippa,
the kind of rounders game they play in these parts. You strike, the
lippa
flies through the air but there's always the risk it will come down slap-bang in somebody's eye. Sure, not everything that brings death is necessarily negative. My grandmother treated her sciatica by having herself bitten on the buttocks by a poisonous snake, and incredibly enough she was completely cured. But her sister was stung by a wasp and died. In nature, everything can be overturned, everything has its double, negative or positive. You can never say: “I do not know the effect of this medicine, nor do I want to know.” No, you've got to know, you've got to get the information, you've got to learn; otherwise, this great mother Nature will become as ferocious and vindictive as an ordinary god, and strangle us all in our cradles … or will poison us while she breast-feeds us at her great tits!'

I stood close by, listening, always fascinated by how my grandfather managed to express such important concepts with such simplicity. As I observed his gestures, I imprinted each lesson of his in my brain, and there came to my mind that stupendous maxim by Montesquieu: ‘An erudite expert is one who uses complex terms and expressions to communicate nothing at all.' My grandfather was exactly the opposite.

The former students of the Faculty of Agrarian Studies, all now graduated and well advanced in the practice of their profession, often came to visit him. Punctually, every Friday, he received a visit from the parish priest of Torreberetti. He and the priest would take a seat in the wisteria bower, and their conversation was never less than animated. Once I heard my grandfather roar: ‘The fact is that if you are to survive, my dear Roman and Apostolic Catholics, you need all the rites of holy religion, starting with confession which frees you of all guilt: a touch of repentance and you're on your way again. If you've got problems, you get down on your knees and say a prayer to Our Lord, the saints, or Our Lady to come and fix things up for you. We atheists, on the other hand, have no saint to attach ourselves to. For our guilt, we can only turn to our consciences. If we've got problems, we've only got our reason to rely on!'

Soon after, as he was waving goodbye to the parish priest, who was now in the distance, he commented: ‘I'll have to watch out I don't go too far with him. What's going to happen is that one fine day he'll start having doubts, pull off his vestments and turn atheist. Then I'll have to go and take his place in the parish.'

Three years later, my grandfather died. There was a huge crowd at his funeral, many from the farms round about. Some came from the other side of the River Po. They were all on bicycles. Since the Sartirana cemetery was on the other side of the railway line and the canal, they followed the hearse, as was the custom with every funeral, cycling slowly. It was not considered respectful to follow by motorbike. A procession with so many bicycles swarming silently over the plain was, to say the least, a bit surreal!

I pedalled close to the Torreberetti priest, who was not wearing clerical garb. The professor from Alessandria had been asked to say a few words of farewell at the grave-side.

One sentence has remained alive in my memory: ‘At the death of a peasant who knew his own land and who knew the history of the men who worked that land, at the death of a wise man who knew how to read the moon and sun, the winds and the flight of the birds, as Bristìn did, it is not only one man who dies: it is a whole library which is burned down.'

CHAPTER 26

Waiting for Picasso

I was in my second year at the Brera Academy and had chosen the course on frescos with Achille Funi, an extraordinary teacher. Every so often, Carrà, a highly likable as well as talented man, would take the class. In the post-war period, all the academic conventions and rules had been set aside: any student was free to go to any class and follow an entire lesson without fear of being asked to leave. So it was that every so often I would turn up in the principal lecture hall where the sculpture instructor was Marino Marini. On another occasion, I managed to get into the studio of Giacomo Manzoni, better known as Manzù, to fashion clay on the lathe, to help in the operations of casting plaster and fusing moulds. There was no timetable: it was permitted to carry on working even after six o'clock in the evening … not in all classrooms, obviously. In Perspective, that is in the School of Stage Design, it was possible to enter even after dinner, right up until night-time. The director of this genuinely free academy was Aldo Carpi, recently returned in poor physical condition from the Matthausen labour camp. He had always shown himself to be a man of extraordinary cultural and civil openness, a true example of what is meant by ‘free ideas'.

My companions at the academy included Morlotti, Peverelli, Alik Cavaliere, Bobo Piccoli, Parzini, all of whom would make a certain name for themselves in succeeding years. I was not aware of it, but I was living in a really extraordinary and unrepeatable moment of our history, from both the political and cultural point of view. Among the
trattorias
and
osterias
of Via Fiori Chiari and Via Fiori Scuri, interspersed with the occasional brothel, there were colourful shops and bars like the
Jamaica
and
Le Sorelle Pirovini.
At any moment you could run into people of great importance: writers, theatre and cinema directors who later became famous. I often found myself seated at the same table as them in the Fiori Chiari, eating plates of badly cooked and badly flavoured pasta. But nobody minded. The only complainants were our stomachs.

We talked about everything, about the political situation, about stage sets, about the Italian and foreign books which we were finally able to read after twenty years of Fascist censorship. We did not have much money, often we had to tighten our belts or live on what we could borrow, but I have never lived in such a climate of carefree rumbustiousness as in those days and at that level.

*   *   *

Often, while we were in the Jamaica having a sandwich, my friends would encourage me to tell them some new tale, and there was no escape, even when I was not in the mood. By now I had put together a considerable repertoire, mainly of pieces with some reference to current affairs, but also of caricatures of our professors and great teachers whose mythical obsessions, generosity and meanness were well known to us. One of the most frequently requested satires was on Carrà. I invited them to imagine the Master intent on painting one of his famous beaches with its brightly coloured cabins, and in the background the sea and a bather running along the waterline pursued by a playful dog jumping in the air. Carrà scratches the figure of the dog off the canvas three times: he cannot get it right. Finally he asks his wife to act as model: ‘Get into the right pose, on all fours, please … that's it … just like that … now make a gesture of leaping … try harder … paws up … yelp a little. Pity you don't have a tail.' Obviously, in this case, the situation was ironical and had little to do with reality, unlike in others, such as the one which satirised the behaviour of De Chirico. The most requested sketch was the one in which I performed dialogues between various characters, the merchant who begs the Master to reproduce his most famous masterpieces from his metaphysical period. De Chirico fends him off, but sets to work with the help of a pupil once he has fixed the price. Here was the Master of metaphysics seized by a creative impulse, painting at top speed and reproducing the same subject on four different canvases. As though he were on an assembly line, he is overwhelmed by his own demonic rhythm and slaps paint over the pupil and the merchant who is standing by, desperate for the ‘merchandise'. At this point, as he evaluates the result, the Master decides to introduce into the four copies some variants on the original, the famous piazza in Ferrara with the castle, the towers and the heightened perspective sloping down to the sea. ‘Here we are, I'll add an extra tower, and instead of the grey sea, I'll put in a nice green, stormy sea. I could trick this one out with some little pyramids in the background and a yacht out at sea. On this one, I could do a female nude:
Dido Abandoned.
On the sea, we could have a ship sinking beneath the waves.' The whole thing, obviously, recounted with mime gestures to suggest the frenzy of his painting.