My First Seven Years (Plus a Few More) (6 page)

‘Let the doctor get on his way. We've already put him out enough, getting him to rush round here.'

‘My husband's right. You must think I'm paranoiac, the way I'm buttonholing you, but I'm not mad.'

‘That's what all mad people say,' Papà cut in.

CHAPTER 5

My Grandparents

I had two grandfathers. The first, my father's father, was a giant of a man, almost one metre ninety in height. By trade he had always been a stone mason, like his father, grandfather and great-grandfather before him. In his village, he was known as
Maister,
in the sense of ‘master builder'. My father, too, as I have already mentioned, started life as a mason, and only after the 1915–18 war did he enrol at a technical institute and take up work on the railways. ‘We can drift into the most outlandish professions in this world,' my father often remarked with ill-concealed pride, ‘but come what may we will remain a race of stone masons.' His word for stone mason was
comasin,
which does not mean masons from Como but comes from
faber cum macina,
that is, workers who operate using machines – scaffolding, mobile frames, cranes, winches and so on. Perhaps mechanical thinking has insinuated itself, alongside a story-teller's taste for paradox, into my DNA, so that I constantly find myself torn between rational rigour and the most weird surrealism.

When I was a boy, this predisposition manifested itself in the enjoyment I felt in taking hold of a stone and trying to modify its shape with chisel and club. I got the same sensation from kneading clay.

The many moves that my father was forced to make brought us to Oleggio, near Novara. Nearby there was a kiln alongside a brick and tile factory, and that's where Fulvio and I spent a large part of the day. We won the confidence of the manager, who not only taught us the techniques of mixing and baking but also let us work on the potter's wheel used for shaping vases. It was a truly magical game: the wheel was not only for vases, flasks and bowls, but if you had the technique to manipulate it correctly, you could adapt it to produce more complex forms, like a head or even a torso with chest, stomach and buttocks.

However, to my enormous distress, we had to move on from Oleggio as well. In fact I had to go by myself since my mother was expecting another child (who turned out to be a girl), and could not cope with both Fulvio and me. So, to give my mother peace during her pregnancy, I was dispatched to my other grandfather in Lomellina, in Sartirana.

The nickname of the Sartirana grandfather was Bristìn, which means ‘pepper seed'. It did not take me long to find out the reason for that ‘title': my grandfather's comments and jibes stung the tongue and stomach of anyone who had to swallow them.

I was really annoyed at having to stay who knows how long in that flat land without so much as a hill in sight … swarms of insects that bit you, clouds of midges that got up your nose and a huge marshland that they called rice fields.

But when I got to Grandfather's farm, my mood changed instantly. The first thing that met my eyes was a spacious portico skirting the wall of the house, where bunches of fruits and vegetables by the thousand hung from the arches. The whole thing looked like majestic decorations for a major feast. A huge cart horse stood in the centre of the yard. I had never seen a horse of such dimensions, one which could have easily passed for an elephant. Next to him an agile and graceful mare was performing caracols by herself, to the annoyance of a donkey which was kicking out, although more as part of a game than in anger.

An orchard with vegetable patches and an incredible variety of fruit trees opened out on the far side of the canal which cut through the farm. Grandfather Bristìn took me by the hand and together, astride the donkey, we crossed the wooden bridge over the canal. The first thing that came into view was a plum tree but, incredibly, different coloured plums, yellow, red and blue, were hanging from each branch. My grandfather explained that it was a ‘multiple transplant', and was his own work.

I had never seen the like! It could have been an enchanted scene in a fairy story. A long ladder was propped against the trunk and Grandfather encouraged me to climb up: ‘Go on, climb up and try one. See how each one has a different taste from the one next to it.'

And it was true. First I bit into a dark plum, and beautifully scented, red juice squirted over my face. When I tried others on other branches, I found that the yellow plums had a delicate, sweet pulp, the red ones seemed to have been dipped in rosolio, while others again were swollen and fatter with a harsh, bitter flavour. The most succulent were the tiny yellow ones which hung in bunches and had a soft stone that you could chew. I was astounded when I came across a large branch with reddish-yellow fruit … incredible: an apricot transplant on a plum tree!

‘You're a magician, Granddad! When I tell them all at school, nobody's going to believe me. They'll tell me I'm a fibber, although they've already stuck that title on me millions of times!'

The pathways to the different nurseries were lined with myriads of plants and flowers. High jets of violet irises or blue gladioli appeared at intervals along the way, while a luxuriant bower of roses held pride of place at the crossroads in the centre of the farm. In the background, in the distance, lay the railway track: ‘Thanks, Granddad, for that railway line,' I said. ‘You did it to make me feel at home, didn't you?'

‘Good lad,' he exclaimed. ‘Very witty. You're a Bristìn as well.'

The following day, I discovered that Granddad Bristìn was a greengrocer as well. In addition to growing vegetables and fruit, he went to sell them in the town and in all the farms and farmsteads in the district. He came to wake me up that morning when it was still dark, and took me down to the kitchen, a big room with a fireplace as grand and deep as a closet in a sacristy. Five or six young men sat around the table in the centre of the room, taking their breakfast. Each of them greeted me noisily and wanted to pick me up and throw me in the air like a puppet. These were my uncles and they all had ferocious strength. Grandmother was worried and stopped them: ‘Enough of that. You'll hurt him.'

Grandmother's name was Maria but they all called her
la bella Maria.
She was fifty-five and even though she had had nine children and had worked hard all her life in the fields and spinning mills, she was still worthy of the name they had given her. She was gentle and kindly, and moved with unimaginable grace.

Grandfather Bristìn was in the farmyard, harnessing the horse to the vegetable cart with the help of Aronne, his eldest son. All of them, uncles and farmhands, went over to the wagon to help load the last baskets of fruit and newly picked bunches of flowers. Granddad picked me up and placed me astride the horse's back, then handed me the reins: ‘You drive,' he ordered.

‘But I don't know how to, Granddad. I've never done it.'

‘Nothing to it. When you want the horse to turn right, pull this rein. When you want it to go left, pull the other one. To make it stop, tug both of them together.'

‘And to get it going again?'

‘Let the reins go slack and bring them down on his back. Give him one or two digs with your heels and above all, you have to shout – Go! Giddy-up!'

‘I'll have a go, but where are you going to sit?'

‘On the cart. I'll have a little snooze.'

I was terrified. ‘But at least tell me the way.'

My uncle, trying to be helpful, said: ‘So that you won't get lost, here's the map with the way marked in red. You follow this route and stop the horse where you see these yellow signs. You can't go wrong.'

They were all mad in that house. For God's sake, I wasn't even seven, and they were packing me off down roads I had never seen before, with a horse and cart I had never ridden, and at the same time my grandfather was planning to snooze in the back. And now I had to read a map!

‘Excuse me, Uncle Aronne, but what does this sign mean?'

‘It's a bridge, a big bridge over the river Po.'

I was near to tears, but all together the whole family began chanting:

Il fantolino è un gran fantino,

E' un carrettiere che non può sbagliare.

Il nonno dorme come un ghiro

e lui, tranquillo, lo porta in giro.

What a horseman is this young boy,

He'll drive the wagon like a toy.

His granddad's sleeping like a dormouse

As they trot from house to house.

A slap on its hindquarters and off goes the horse, slowly but surely, its hooves clinking against the hard cobbles. First right … straight on, over the bridge … down to the first farmstead. Unbelievable! I've made it! The collection of houses was as big as a small town: an open space in the centre and on all four sides an enormous porticoed structure housing ten or more families. Women and children emerge from every corner and come charging over to Bristìn's cart as though they had been waiting for him. He greets them all by name and, in a tone of good-humoured ribaldry, has a complimentary or ironic joke for each one. He teases each in turn about their husbands or lovers, devises clownish bits of nonsense on their relationships, all the while throwing vegetables up in the air and catching them as they fall, like a real juggler. At the time, I did not grasp the storm of sexual, often downright obscene, allusions which my grandfather was firing off as he fiddled about with courgettes, enormous carrots and cucumbers festooned with odd bumps. His comic routine produced shrieks of high-pitched laughter, not to say hysterics in some quarters.

‘Oh stop it, Bristìn, that's enough,' begged a large lady, holding her tummy. ‘I'm going to wet myself.' And with those words, she hoisted up her skirt, swept it back and revealed a long stream of pee on the cobbles.

The women chose the merchandise, nearly all pre-season fruit which Grandfather obtained by cultivating them in his greenhouse. He weighed all the fruit and vegetables on his scales, always adding something extra – a few carrots, a sprig of rosemary, a big marrow or some flowers, accompanied usually by jaunty declarations of love delivered in mock poetic tones. It was clear that all those customers flocked in such numbers to his cart more than anything else to savour the show given by that merry chatterbox. I have often wondered if they ended up buying things they did not need simply to repay the enjoyment Bristìn offered them.

The ritual of sales and farce was repeated for the whole of the merchandising round. Every so often, Grandfather would make me get down from the horse's back and lift me up onto the cart, on top of the baskets of melons and watermelons. When the women asked who the child was, he would go into a rigmarole of being astounded at seeing me there for the first time. ‘I have no idea who this little ruffian is, or where he came from,' he said. ‘A while back, a girl handed him over to me, telling me he was my own flesh and blood. The father is supposed to be one of my five sons, but the girl couldn't remember which one. “What do you mean? How did it happen? When did all this take place?” I asked her. And the girl replied: “In the woods near the Po … I was walking along the banks of the river, picking mushrooms, long thin ones and little stubby ones. All of a sudden, what a bit of luck! I saw an erect one, as firm as a rod, protruding from the ground. A big juicy
porcino!
I love that kind and couldn't wait to grab hold of it, but I banged my head on the branch of a poplar tree so hard that my knees buckled and I sank to the ground. As I did so, I got skewered by this hard rod of a mushroom. A warm flame shot through my whole body from feet to brain. Ye gods, what a feeling! I stayed where I was, stunned. Then I heard a loud groan, and before my very eyes, in the thick grass, I saw emerge first a face, then shoulders and the rest of a body. Behind my bottom, I espied two thighs and two legs: ‘Holy God,' I think to myself, ‘a mushroom born of a man!' The youth with the mushroom, or the skewer-woman equipment, sighed and groaned: ‘Thank you, pretty maiden!' And I said to him: ‘What are you doing here buried in the shrubbery?' ‘I was splashing about naked in the water, and had covered myself with leaves to get dry … I fell fast asleep, and when you suddenly plopped yourself down on my pecker, I thought I was going to die.' ‘And what if you've made me pregnant?' ‘We could always call him Mushroom!'” The girl said she'd had a hard time getting away from that scoundrel. “I pulled my sickle from my bag and shouted to him: ‘All right. I'll give you a son, but in return I want the mushroom,' and with one chop, off it came.” And here it is,' yelled Bristìn. ‘Now then ladies, this is your chance!' and so saying he held up a firm, erect, ruby-red mushroom. ‘This is a satisfaction-guaranteed mushroom, but don't expect me to sell it. However, I will agree to hire it out a week at a time. Plant it in your woods and fall on top of it whenever your fancy takes you.'

I need hardly say the women laughed long and hard. They joined in the fun, and went off with the mushroom, pretending to fight over it.

Lucian of Samosata said: ‘Everything depends on the masters you have had. But watch out. Often you do not choose your masters, they choose you.' My grandfather Bristìn had chosen me as his pupil in clowning when he put me on the back of that gigantic nag as though I were one of the seven dwarves.

*   *   *

But Bristìn was no mere buffoon. One day I discovered that his orchard was an academy of agrarian science. In addition to the transplants, he had accomplished incredible marriages between different species of tomato, peperone and cucumber.

‘You see,' he explained to me, while taking a sharp knife to those vegetables as though they were the bodies of animals he wanted to cut open to show me their structure, ‘we've got male and female here, too, not to mention various hybrids. All of them, fruit and vegetable alike, are creatures like us. They are sensitive to fear and perhaps even pain, they feel attraction and repulsion among themselves just as men and women do. There are fruits which fall in love normally, and others which lose their head for creatures of another species. Even though I've tried my level best, I've never managed to get a persimmon and a papaya to join together in loving union!'