My First Seven Years (Plus a Few More) (3 page)

And wham! A high wind arose, the waters started to bubble as though in a great cauldron and … a miracle!… sucked upwards by the wind, the water spiralled towards the heavens and divided in two, causing the Red Sea – sorry, Lake Maggiore – to open, whereupon the entire family, followed by the people of Pino Tronzano, Zenna and Maccagno, made their way across, chanting and singing, while the customs officers shouted after them despairingly: ‘Halt! Come back or we open fire! It is forbidden to cross without passport and visa.' No one paid the slightest heed. Even the peasants and shepherds from the uplands with their cows, sheep and goats made their way across.

‘No, no goats! That's not allowed,' the police yelled.

The goats in reply fired off little pellets of shit as round as bronze billiard balls, and went on their way, wagging their tails behind them. What can I say? I was already dreaming in cinematic terms.

A cry of ‘Wake up, wake up!' from my mother stopped me from completing that biblical dream. ‘We're late, get up. The boat's here in a quarter of an hour.' I was in such a state that I put my trousers on back to front, put both socks on the one foot, spilled the coffee cup on top of the cat and even forgot to stick the paint brushes and paper into my bag. ‘Hurry up, hurry up.'

The siren from the boat tying up at the mooring was answered by the whistle of a train emerging from the tunnel. The station water-pump groaned. We were at the quay.

‘Careful on the gangway. You're OK?'

‘All aboard.'

‘Cast off.'

I went to take my place at the prow. Mamma came up to me and whispered: ‘My little darling, I've got a bit of bad news for you.'

‘What sort of news?' I asked, without taking my eyes off the Swiss coast as it rushed towards us.

‘The roofs in Brissago are not chocolate any more.'

‘Whaaaaat?' I screamed in disbelief.

‘Yes, darling. The Swiss government made them change the whole lot. The order had to be carried out at once because all the children had been chewing the tiles so furiously that they were making the roofs leak … holes all over the place. So every time there was a downpour, the houses flooded and the inhabitants got colds or pneumonia, not to mention the fact that greedy children ended up in bed day after day with shooting pains in their stomachs.'

‘How could that be? Chocolate doesn't give you a sore stomach.'

‘It all depends. If the tiles are old and as rotten as those ones…'

‘Rotten chocolate! But the tile that Bruno brought me wasn't old.'

‘But that was from a new house.'

‘Oh well, then, at least his roof is safe.'

‘I'm afraid not. A couple of nights ago, some thieves stole the lot.'

I burst into tears of despair. ‘Damn them!' I called down curses in silence. ‘God damn all thieves of fresh chocolate roofs and bring down on them a landslide of old cocoa, rotten marzipan and boiling vanilla!'

I could not be consoled.

*   *   *

At the quay in Brissago, Aunt Maria, whom I had never seen, Uncle Iginio Repetti and my two cousins were waiting for us. I was in such a state that I did not even deign to greet them with a glance, not even a cursory
ciao.
‘What's wrong with him?' asked Aunt Maria, genuinely concerned. Mamma made her a sign to desist. ‘A tragedy. I'll explain later,' she whispered under her breath.

On the way to their house, we passed a cake shop whose windows were groaning with piles of chocolate bars. Noemi, the elder of the two cousins, had gone ahead and was coming out of the shop with an enormous lump of chocolate. When she offered me some, I accepted the offer but with a severe, disdainful look which said: ‘If you think for one moment that you can fob me off with a square of dry cocoa, you've got it wrong.'

My uncle and aunt's house was on the lakeside. It even had a private harbour with a long, narrow boat, a yawl. Mamma and I were given a large room with a balcony. My God, what lodgings!

I immediately asked if it was possible to go out on the boat. In Pino I had been allowed every so often onto the customs men's motor boat, but that yawl was of a different class. To say its balance was precarious is putting it mildly. You couldn't move an inch in the boat without it immediately rocking about crazily.

They lowered me on board first: the two sisters jumped in right after me, the yawl overturned and all three of us ended up in the water. ‘Damn it all! I'm only five and I can't even swim.' To make matters worse, the yawl fell on top of me and I found myself trapped inside the hull, as though under a lid. I knocked, shouted, drank in gulps of water, and somehow, I'll never know how, managed to grab hold of the bar of the seat. I heard Noemi screaming; ‘My God, the boy! Where has he ended up?'

Her sister replied: ‘He's not in the water. I'll bet he's stuck under the boat, inside the hull.'

My uncle dived in. Together they managed to get the boat upright, and I came back to the surface, still clinging onto the crosspiece. I was spluttering like a flooded engine.

My God, life is hard in bloody Switzerland!

*   *   *

That night I had nightmares which made me toss and turn about in bed I don't know how often. Just as well I was in the arms of my mother, who every time I moved gave me a kiss and dried the perspiration which had soaked me through and through. ‘All right, it's nothing,' she reassured me. ‘Never mind these bad dreams. You're not in the water any more, little darling, there are no more lakes or boats. Go back to sleep.'

It didn't work. As soon as I got back to sleep, water came at me from all sides. The rain was lashing down, the rivers were overflowing and bursting their banks, the water in the lake was high and rising until it seemed ready to flood onto the shoreline and submerge the station, dragging the trains beneath the waves. My mother was fleeing, holding me in her arms, climbing up the steep path which leads to Pino and on to Tronzano. Pa' Fo was somewhere behind us, balancing on his head the huge copper tub we used as a bath … It might come in handy as a life boat. This recurring dream, or nightmare, was derived from an experience I had lived through the previous year, when a real cataclysm had made the water rise to the highest levels ever recorded. It seemed that the water, rising inexorably, was determined to swallow us all up.

When I awoke the following day in Switzerland, I was almost surprised to find that my bed was not floating on the waves. A bit dazed, I went down to the kitchen for a cup of coffee only to find on the table a huge paint box, a clutch of brushes and a sketch pad to paint on. They were not children's toys but professional material, real painter's equipment.

‘Are these for me?' I asked hopefully.

‘Yes,' replied my uncle, with a laugh.

I hardly recognised him. He was dressed as a soldier: green uniform with red edgings, boots and hat complete with visor. ‘Uncle, are you off to war?'

‘No, it's my ordinary uniform. Didn't you know? I am a sergeant in the town gendarmes.'

It was only then that I noticed the pistol in the holster of his belt. ‘Are those yours too?' I asked, pointing to a trombone and a rifle with a bullet-holder displayed on the wall.

‘They are. I play in the police band, and this is my official rifle. Don't ever touch it.'

He then picked up the paint box and emptied all the paint tubes onto the table. ‘See how lovely they are. They are from the Le Frank firm, a famous brand. When I was your age, I always dreamed of having paints like these. Did you know that I still paint sometimes? Have you every tried painting with colours and brushes like these?'

As he spoke, he squeezed tube after tube onto a big plate, showing me how to prepare a palette. He dipped his brush into the burnt sienna colour, handed it over to me, filled a cup of water and, setting it down on the table on a piece of cardboard, issued the peremptory order: ‘Right, then. Let me see if you really are the infant prodigy they say you are.'

It is easy to imagine the outcome. In my excitement I splashed paint left, right and centre. My idea was to depict the previous day's incident with my cousins falling into the water, the boat capsizing and me ending up underneath, flailing about desperately. Instead, disaster upon disaster, nothing whatsoever of the story emerged from the hotchpotch on the page. A queue of onlookers formed, peeping over my shoulder. The whole family was there, including my mother and four gendarme colleagues of my uncle's, all arrayed in uniform with their trumpets and trombones. They vied with one another in their enthusiastic comments on my artistic skill. ‘He's a real artist! I've never seen a monster like that.' ‘What is it, Noah's Ark?' ‘No, it's the naval battle of the Malpaga family against the Borromeos.'

At the time I was sure they were churning out these flattering words only to please me, but a dozen years later, when I was already a student at the Brera Academy, I went back to visit Uncle Trombone (as everyone called him), and happened to see that painting hanging on a wall. They had even gone to the trouble of having it framed. I realised then that it was a fine piece of work. It looked like a Kandinsky! Who knows how I would have preened myself if I had been aware of that earlier but, both fortunately and unfortunately, candour and consciousness never take up residence in the same person at the same time.

*   *   *

In any case, that first week in Switzerland was unforgettable. I had the luck to be there during the festival of the Free Cantons. An assembly of people in period costume gathered in the piazza: first came those in gold and blue embroidered tunics playing the part of the tyrannical dukes, behind them in the procession the German soldiers, then the noble ladies and finally the patriotic rebels led by William Tell and his son. In the centre of the square, against a wall decorated with a bas-relief motif to signify a portal, stood a small boy with an apple on his head. William clutched a cross-bow, aimed it at the boy but a woman shouted: ‘No, my son, nooooo!' It was the boy's mother who obviously had little faith in the much-heralded accuracy of her husband. The point of that scream, I learned years later, was to distract the audience's attention momentarily from the boy with the apple on his head. Taking advantage of that brief loss of concentration, the portal with the boy in front of it swung on its own axis. The real child disappeared, and a dummy of the same dimensions, same costume and face as the boy appeared in his place. Only the very smartest saw the trick, and at five years I was not even an apprentice smarty. In a flash, William Tell fired the arrow, piercing the apple, yells from an ecstatic public, end of show. ‘But what does it all mean?' I asked my mother, who before the performance had tried to recount to me the sequence of historical facts. ‘It's an absolute outrage,' I exclaimed in indignation. ‘It's always us children who end up in the middle of these things! The Baby Jesus is born in a stinking stable, with the roof falling in, no heating or stove, so he's got to make do with the breath of an ox and ass. Herod, who knows why? wants him dead, and so goes off and slaughters all the children in the country as though they were goats. God Himself, just to teach poor Isaac a lesson, orders his father to chop off his head with an axe. Are we supposed to be impressed if He changes his mind and comes out with a “Stop right there! It was all a joke, a godly joke!” And to crown it all, this apple on the poor Swiss boy's head, so that if Tell's aim is out, his head is going to be split open. It's him, the boy, who is the real hero but nobody even remembers what he's called. The feast is in honour of his father, the idiot who put on the bet in the first place.'

To tell the truth, my indignation did not last long because at that moment the mounted gendarme band came on the scene. I let out a cry of amazement. My uncle, mounted on horseback like the others, was one of the musicians, and was blowing into his trombone with big oompas which resounded all over the square. I was puffed up with pride: in my eyes, the reputation of my gendarme uncle soared at the very least up to the stars!

*   *   *

The following day Mamma had to return to Luino, and to cheer me up Noemi took me with her to the kindergarten where she worked as nursery nurse. I found myself surrounded by a pack of children more or less my own age but who came mainly from the Cantons of the Léman, so they were Swiss-Germans, without a word of Italian. I attempted to communicate in the Lombard dialect, but they looked at me as though I were crazy.

After a while, we were all taken into a big room dominated by an organ. A large lady, who seemed to be made of butter and cream, was seated at the keyboard and began to play. Another woman, pedalling the bellows with all her might, was seated beside her. A sound worthy of a cathedral emerged from the pipes, and the children's chorus gave voice to a magnificent hymn, the aria rising to a crescendo as it was repeated with only minuscule variations. Once I had got the hang of it, I joined in the chorus, at first quietly, then with full-throated gusto. I even imitated the words, pretending I had them at my fingertips: ‘
Antzen ut Schivel mit nem lauben troi wirt
…' God knows what sort of fantastic tale I was recounting.

*   *   *

A few days later, Uncle Trombone presented himself on horseback in the open space in front of the house. Noemi heaved me up on the animal's back or, more precisely, onto its neck. I was beside myself with joy. ‘Come on, let's go and visit Bruno in Lugano. He's expecting us.' A hour's journey on horseback with a gendarme uncle! A super-luxury marvel!

We did not go down the usual roads, but cut along the byways, beside the fields, through the woods. At one stage we were almost attacked by a swarm of bees. My uncle put his gendarme's hat over my head and took off his jacket to cover my legs. ‘Put your hands in here too. Unfortunately, with your delicate skin, the bees will eat you alive,' he said.