Steal You Away (5 page)

Dr Celani was so happy. ‘Thank heaven for Pietro. Gloria has quietened down a bit. Poor little thing, what she needs is a baby brother.’

But there was one little problem: Mrs Celani no longer had a uterus, so that was that. They wouldn’t hear of adoption, and anyway now they had Pietro, the angel from heaven.

In short, the two children began to spend every day of their lives together, just like brother and sister.

And when Mariagrazia Moroni, Pietro’s mother, began to be unwell, to suffer from a strange, inexplicable condition that left her feeling weak and listless (‘it’s as if … I don’t know, as if my batteries were flat’), from something the doctor called depression and which Mr Moroni called being bone idle and finding cleaning the villa too much like hard work, Dr Mauro Celani, the manager of the Orbano branch of the Bank of Rome and president of Chiarenzano sailing club, had stepped in and drafted a plan with his wife Ada:

And the plan had worked to perfection.

Poor Mariagrazia had been taken under the protective wing of Professor Candela. This luminary had prescribed a powerful cocktail of psychotropic drugs all ending in ‘il’ (Anafranil, Tofranil, Nardil, etc) which had introduced her to the magical world of monoamine oxidase inhibitors. An opaque and comfortable world of pastel colours and grey expanses, of mumbled, unfinished sentences, of constantly repeating, ‘Oh dear, I can’t remember what I was going to cook for dinner.’

Pietro had been taken under the maternal wing of Mrs Celani and had continued to go to the villa every afternoon.

Strange to relate, even Mr Moroni had been taken under a wing, the large rapacious wing of the Bank of Rome.

Pietro and Gloria had attended the same primary school, but not in the same class. And everything had been fine. Now that they were in junior high, and in the same class, things had got more complicated.

They belonged to different castes.

Their friendship had adapted to the situation. It became like an underground river which flows unseen and constricted beneath the rocks, but which as soon as it finds an opening, a crack, gushes out in all its awesome power.

In the same way, at first sight you might have thought the two of them were complete strangers, but you’d have had to be blind not to notice how they were always looking for each other,
always passing close to each other and how during breaktime they would sit whispering in a corner like a couple of spies, and how, strangely, when school was over Pietro would wait there at the end of the street till he saw Gloria take her bike and follow him.

Gina Biglia, Graziano’s mother, suffered from hypertension. Her blood pressure was never below a hundred and twenty-eight and sometimes rose as high as a hundred and eighty. It only took the slightest anxiety or excitement and she would have palpitations, giddiness, cold sweats and fainting fits.

Usually, when her son came home, Gina was so joyful that she felt ill and had to retire to bed for a couple of hours. But when, that winter, Graziano arrived from Rome, after two years without a visit or even a phone call, announcing that he had met a girl from the North and that he wanted to marry her and come back to live in Ischiano, her heart leaped in her chest like a jack-in-a-box and the poor woman, who was making fettuccine, fainted and crashed to the floor, pulling table, flour and rolling pin down with her.

When she came round, she couldn’t talk.

She lay on the floor like a capsized tortoise among the fettuccine, making incomprehensible mumbling noises as if she’d become a deaf mute or worse.

A stroke
, thought Graziano in a panic. Her heart had stopped beating for a second and she’d suffered brain damage.

He rushed into the living room to call an ambulance, but when he returned he found his mother as right as rain. She was washing the kitchen floor with Cif and when she saw him she handed him a piece of paper on which she had written:

Graziano read the note and threw himself disconsolately onto a chair. ‘But Mama, this is ridiculous. Don’t you see? How are you going to work? And what am I going to do about Erica? What’s she going to think, that you’re raving mad? Stop it. Please.’

Gina wrote:

‘Tomorrow. But do stop it, now, Mama, please. We haven’t fixed the wedding day yet. Pack it in, please.’

Gina suddenly started rushing round the kitchen like a hysterical goblin, yelping and digging her fingers into the voluminous perm on her head. She was a small, round woman, with bright eyes and a mouth like a chicken’s sphincter.

Graziano ran after her, trying to catch her. ‘Mama! Mama! Stop, please. What the hell’s got into you?’

Gina sat down at the table and wrote again:

She put on her mink coat, hoisted a bag full of curtains onto her shoulder and went out.

No operating theatre in the local hospital was as clean as Gina’s kitchen. Even if you’d examined it with an electronic microscope you wouldn’t have found a dust mite or a speck of dirt. You could eat off the floors of the Biglia household and safely drink from the toilet. Every ornament had its doily, every shape of pasta its jar, every corner of the house received a daily check and vacuuming. As a child, Graziano had been forbidden to sit on the
sofas because it spoiled them: he’d had to walk around in overshoes and sit on a dining chair to watch TV.

Mrs Biglia’s first obsession was hygiene. Her second, religion. Her third and most serious of all, cooking.

She would prepare industrial quantities of gourmet food. Maccheroni timbales. Three days’ supply of ragù. Game. Aubergines alla parmigiana. Rice sartùs as high as panettoni. Broccoli-cheese-and-mortadella pizzas. Artichoke and béchamel pies. Foil-baked fish. Stewed calamari. And Livornese cacciucco. Since she lived on her own (her husband had died five years earlier), all these delicacies were either stored in the freezers (there were three of them, all crammed full) or given away to her customers.

At Christmas, Easter, the New Year and any other festival that merited a special meal, she would go berserk and shut herself up in the kitchen for thirteen hours a day, ladelling, greasing baking-tins and shelling peas. Purple in the face, with a crazed look in her eyes and a bonnet to keep the grease out of her hair, she would whistle, sing along with the radio and whisk eggs like a woman possessed. During the meal she would never sit down, but gallop back and forth like a Burmese tapir between the dining room and kitchen, sweating, panting and washing dishes, and everyone would tense up because it’s not pleasant to eat with a madwoman who watches every expression of your face to see if you like the lasagne, who refills your plate before you’ve even finished eating and who you know, in her condition, is liable to have an apoplectic fit at any moment.

No, it’s not pleasant.

And it was hard to understand why she behaved like that, what the nature of this culinary frenzy that tormented her was. The guests, by the time they got to the twelfth course, would ask one another under their breath what she was trying to do, what was her purpose. Did she want to kill them? Cook for the whole world? Feed the starving millions on risotto with cheese and grated truffles, linguine al pesto and ossobuco with purée?

No, Mrs Biglia wasn’t interested in that.

Mrs Biglia didn’t give a damn about the Third World, the children of Biafra and the parish poor. She vented all her pitiless fury
on relatives, friends and acquaintances. All she wanted was for someone to say to her: ‘Gina, dear, nobody makes Sorrento-style gnocchi like you do, even in Sorrento.’

Then she would go all shy like a little girl, stammer out her thanks, bow her head like a great conductor after a triumphant performance and take a container full of gnocchi out of the freezer, saying: ‘Here you are, mind you don’t put them straight in the water or they won’t be good. Take them out at least a couple of hours beforehand.’

She would stuff you mercilessly, and if you begged her to stop she’d think you were just being polite, and wouldn’t take no for an answer. You would stagger out of her home, groggy, with your flies unbuttoned and feeling in need of a trip to the health spa at Chianciano for a detox.

Every time Graziano came home he put on at least five kilos in a week. His mother would make him sautéed lamb’s kidneys with garlic and parsley (his favourite!) and since he had a hearty appetite she would sit in ecstasy and watch him eating. She had to ask him, she’d die if she didn’t. ‘Graziano, tell me the truth, how are the sautéed kidneys?’

And Graziano: ‘Delicious, Mama.’

‘Is there anyone who makes them better than I do?’

‘No, Mama, you know that. Your sautéed kidneys are the best in the world.’

Deliriously happy, she would return to the kitchen and start doing the washing-up by hand because she didn’t trust machines.

You can just imagine what kind of banquet she was preparing to cook for her future daughter-in-law.

For waif-like Erica Trettel, who weighed forty-six kilos and said she was a horrible fat lump and who when she was feeling cheerful ate cottage cheese, spelt and Energy Bars and when she was depressed devoured Algida Viennetta ice creams and takeaway chicken.

Graziano spent the morning feeling at peace with himself and with the world.

He went out for a walk.

The sky was overcast. It was cold. The rain had stopped but some big black clouds boded ill for the afternoon. Graziano didn’t care. He was glad to be home at last.

Ischiano seemed more beautiful and welcoming than ever.

A little old-fashioned world. An unspoiled rural community.

It was market day. The vendors had put up their stalls in the car park in front of the bank. The village women with their baskets and umbrellas were doing the shopping. Mothers were pushing prams. A van, which had pulled up in front of the newsagent’s, was delivering bundles of magazines. Giovanna, the tobacconist, was feeding some obese, pampered cats. A group of hunters had gathered in front of the war memorial. The hounds on the leash were shifting about excitedly. And the old men sitting at the tables outside the Station Bar were trying, like arthritic reptiles, to catch a ray of that sun which was so reluctant to come out. From the primary school came the shouts of children playing in the playground. The air was filled with the delicious smell of burned wood and of the fresh cod laid out on the fishmonger’s stall.

This was the place where he’d been born.

Simple.

Ignorant, perhaps.

But real.

He was proud to be part of that small God-fearing community and proud of his own humble occupation. And to think that until recently he had felt ashamed of the place, and when asked where he came from had always replied: ‘The Maremma. Near Siena.’ It sounded cooler. Nobler. More sophisticated.

What a fool I was. Ischiano’s a wonderful place. A guy should
be happy to have been born here
. And at the age of forty-four he was beginning to understand this. Maybe all that globe-trotting, all those discotheques, all those nights spent playing in clubs had
helped him understand, restored his desire to be a true Ischianese. You have to go away from a place in order to find it again. Peasant blood flowed in his veins. His grandparents had slaved their lives away working that hard barren soil.

He passed his mother’s haberdashery.

A modest little shop. Tights and knickers neatly arrayed in the window. A glass door. A sign.

This was where his jeans shop would be.

He could see it now.

The pride of the village.

He must start thinking about how to furnish it. Perhaps he would need an architect, someone from Milan or even America to help him create the best possible effect. He would spare no expense. He must discuss it with Mama. Persuade her to take out a mortgage.

Erica would help him, too. She had very good taste.

After these positive thoughts, he got out the Uno and drove it to the carwash. He ran it through the brushes, then vacuumed the inside, removing stubs of joints, receipts, left-over French fries and other assorted rubbish that had collected under the seats.

He looked at himself for a moment in the rear-view mirror and realised that he hadn’t obeyed the first law: ‘Treat your body as a temple.’

Physically he was a wreck.

The months in Rome had affected his looks. He had stopped taking care of his appearance and now resembled a caveman, with that stubbly beard and that bristly mop of hair. He really spruced himself up before Erica arrived.

He got back into the car, drove out onto the Aurelia and after seven kilometres stopped outside the Ivana Zampetti Beauty Farm, a large concrete building by the side of the road, between a garden centre and a store that sells handmade furniture.

Ivana Zampetti, the owner, was a large woman, all curves and bosom, with black, Liz Taylor-like hair, a zip of a mouth, gappy incisors, a remodelled nose and greedy eyes. She went around in a white coat which allowed glimpses of firm flesh and lace, and a pair of Dr Hermann sandals. And she was constantly enveloped in a cloud of sweat and deodorant.