A Small Place in Italy (11 page)

And then Wanda would ask them if they would like a cup of tea and Signora Angiolina would accept and Signora Fernanda would hold up her hands in total prohibition, as if it was some sort of deadly poison she was being offered, at the same time saying,
‘Non lo voglio’
(‘I don’t want it’), only to drink it when it finally appeared.

Sometimes Signora Fernanda took us to visit the present occupants of Il Posticcio, a house of the Malaspina in which she and Signora Angiolina had lived when they had been girls. This strangely named house, Posticcio, signifying Sham, was a large and tall house with a turret rising from one corner of it which gave it a mediaeval aspect. In fact, it probably was mediaeval. Inside the entrance door there was a huge, now-decayed room with a big, gaping fireplace at one end, and upstairs there was a
labyrinth of rooms, some of them very small and under the eaves. It was the sort of house from which I imagined Don Quixote setting out on his travels, accompanied by Sancho Panza. Outside, what had been the
vigneto
was so overgrown with brambles and blackberry bushes that it was difficult to believe that it had, at one time, produced the best red wine in the area.

One afternoon Signora Fernanda came down to the house alone, ostensibly to cut some alfalfa and have the usual chat. This time it was still going to be a chat, but one of a rather different kind. Signora Angiolina, finding herself too timid to tell us the secrets of her life, the ones she had promised to tell, now sent her sister to impart them to us. There was no obligation for Signora Angiolina to unburden herself in this way or for Signora Fernanda to act the part of the messenger but this is what they had decided to do.

‘I must tell you,’ Signora Fernanda said, after some general preamble, ‘that Angiolina was a very beautiful girl and had innumerable admirers, all of whom had their heads turned if she even looked in their direction.

‘Partly because of this, our parents thought it would be better she became engaged when she was still very young, about seventeen, to a local boy about a year older than she was. This was when we lived in Il Posticcio over the hill below the Dadà place.

‘Now she had this
fidanzato
, a nice, serious boy but not old enough, or experienced enough, you know, Signora, to protect Angiolina as she needed to be protected.

‘For there was another, a man five or six years older than she was, a man of violent passion, and when she became betrothed and he realized that my sister would never be his, he made the decision to destroy them both.

‘His opportunity came when my sister and her
fidanzato
went to a
ballo liscio
[literally a ‘smooth dance’], a dance on a shiny wooden floor, usually in summer in the open air, for which we
used to buy tickets. A sort of dance that used to be very popular, and still is in some places, although now thought to be rather old-fashioned.

‘There, as Angiolina and her
fidanzato
were dancing together, he took out a pistol and first shot her
fidanzato
dead and then shot Angiolina, the bullet passing so close to her heart that she was lucky to survive.’

‘What happened to him, the man who shot them?’ Wanda asked.

‘He was sent to prison,’ Signora Fernanda said, ‘for three or four years, I can’t remember now how long. It was not for very long because it was what we call here
un delitto di passione
, a crime of passion, not a murder.’

It sounded pretty premeditated to me.

‘But that was not the end of it,’ Signora Fernanda continued. ‘Somehow the news of this
delitto
got into the newspapers in New York and as a result Angiolina received a number of offers of marriage from Italians living there; but she never replied to any of them.’

‘What happened then?’ Wanda asked.

‘Three years later she married a local man, a few years older than she was. He was a good man.’

Almost every day Signor Giuseppe used to take off from his new house up the hill where he was getting ready to do Signora Angiolina’s
vendemmia
and come down the hill to our dell, singing a bit on the way. This was what most men did when visiting or passing through other people’s properties by the labyrinth of tracks and paths that were normally open to anyone who wished to use them, except uninvited
cacciatori
. Women would cough discreetly or carry on an over-loud conversation with whoever they were travelling with.

These footpaths were an important part of the rural economy and had been since time immemorial. Without them the whole system of intercommunication on the hillside would have come to a halt. One reason for all this ceremony – the coughing and the singing – was probably so as not to catch the owners of these properties with their trousers down or their skirts up, or both, something that did happen in the course of the long, hot afternoons.

When Signor Giuseppe did come it was invariably to bring with him some useful offering, or to give us some useful piece of advice, such as pointing out some defect in the building that had not yet been made good, but ought to have been.

It was at this time, soon after we had arrived, that he decided that the trunk of a small chestnut tree that had been used as a newly installed beam to support the tiled roof over the staircase that led up to the upper floor at the front of the building was too thin at one end to perform this function satisfactorily. What was needed was a real, rectangular beam of the sort we had bought from the
demolizioni.

The tree trunk had been set up by Alberto and Renato who frequently joined forces in order to carry out some particular piece of work more easily. The reason why they hadn’t used a beam from the
demolizioni
was that they had used up all the long ones and didn’t relish going all the way back there to get another. In the circumstances, I would have done the same thing. The only persons Signor Giuseppe expressed his fears to were Wanda and myself. He never said anything either to Alberto or Renato, but in order to draw attention to its fragility – the trunk certainly was rather thin at one end – he found a well-seasoned piece of timber about five feet high which he painted an unsuitable shade of pale blue so that it would show up nicely and then wedged it vertically under the trunk at the thin end which helped to take some of the weight off it.

If either of us had done such a thing, or even suggested that the trunk might be insufficiently strong at one end to do the job, then both Alberto and Renato might well have decided to down tools and walk off the site; although by now we were on such friendly terms, particularly with Renato and his family, that such a happening was unlikely.

It was only because Signor Giuseppe was a local man, born in the neighbourhood (even the years spent at Pagazzana didn’t count against him), married to a local woman, Signora Fernanda, and an
esperto
in all sorts of things, including vine-growing and wine-producing, that he was able to get away with it.

In fact, the thin end of the tree never gave the slightest cause for alarm, although what would have happened to it if Signor Giuseppe’s pale blue baulk had not been put in to relieve the strain, we shall now never know. Nevertheless Renato went on for years and years about the solidity of the thin end, every time he was on the premises.

It was during another of Signor Giuseppe’s visits that a really awful rustic mishap occurred.

He had got it into his head that our well needed cleaning out and being a countryman saw nothing strange in arriving on our doorstep at half-past six in the morning to discuss the matter, without telling us that he was coming and without the usual premonitory arias. He was, therefore, at the front door before Wanda espied him. She was already in the kitchen – she likes getting up early – heating up the basic ingredients for a soup. I was still asleep in the bedroom overhead.

‘ERIC!
E VENUTO IL SIGNOR GIUSEPPE!
’ she cried in her best Slovenian banshee voice.

Leaping to my feet in answer to this cry I managed to get one foot out of the bedclothes but then, instead of placing it on the
floor, succeeded in plunging it into what was now a more than half-full
vaso da notte
, turning it over in the process. We had installed it in the bedroom in order to avoid making a journey down the front steps in the open air to what was now the bathroom; and it was with horror that I watched its contents flow down through the gaps in the floor planking, part of it, it transpired, on to the head of Signor Giuseppe which was now perfectly sited down below in the kitchen to receive it, and part of it into Wanda’s soup which was bubbling away in a vessel on the stove.

It was fortunate that Signor Giuseppe never discovered what he had been anointed with. I told him that it was clean water from a wash basin that I had overturned, and he appeared to be content with this explanation. Wanda, on the other hand, who had had her dish defiled and was under no illusions as to what it was, was less contented. She didn’t speak to me for the rest of the day, which was soupless.

Sometimes in these late September days quite suddenly the sky clouded over and the thunder rumbled behind the peaks and those who had vines prayed that they would be spared the hail, which could destroy an entire crop of grapes in a matter of minutes at this time of year. And at night the terraces around the house were alive with bats, and sometimes there were fireflies floating among the vines, looking like illuminated galleons floating in a sea of darkness.

We were happy at I Castagni.

That year, Wanda was buying an ox-tongue from the shop up at Fosdinovo when the Signora asked her if she would be prepared to act as a waitress, for the midday meal in the restaurant at the hotel on the day of the Festa di San Remigio. Apparently she always laid on a special lunch for the farmers and their wives on that day when they came in from the country to attend the
festa
and because the prices were very reasonable and the food was good it was always a great success.

The problem was that it was becoming increasingly difficult to recruit extra waitresses. This year, the Signora said, she was desperate. Two of her best girls, sisters, had been taken ill with flu and were unable to come. All she now had left were her daughters, the ones we had accompanied on the procession, and one of them would probably be needed to work in the bar. Her husband would help but would probably be needed in the bar, too.

‘What do you think?’ Wanda asked me. ‘Should I do it? I don’t have to wear a uniform, or anything.’

‘I think you should do it, that is if you want to,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure about not wearing a uniform or anything, with a lot of gentlemen about; but you might get some tips. You might even get a proposal from some lonely farmer.’ At the time I thought I was
joking. So Wanda said she would do it. Meanwhile the preparations for the
vendemmia
in Lunigiana and in every other part of northern Italy where grapes grew were approaching a climax. Now every wine-growing property, however small, had its barrels, standing outside the cellars in the open where they had been scrubbed and washed and kept standing upright with a hose running water into them until the staves swelled sufficiently to ensure that they didn’t leak. Uncountable thousands of gallons of water were consumed in this way. We had done the same with the two modest barrels that we had inherited with I Castagni, one for red, the other for white, following the instructions of Signor Giuseppe.

And throughout the surrounding countryside, and in the nearby towns and villages, relatives and friends were recruited to take part in the picking of the grapes and the crushing of them and the pressing of them. And wherever a quorum of
contadini
came together the talk was of nothing but the
vendemmia
.

And every specialist shop in Sarzana, Fosdinovo and along the dreadful traffic-ridden Via Aurelia towards Carrara had most of their stock out on the pavements: barrels, some of them enormous;
bigonci
, heavy wooden tubs used to carry the grapes to the grape crusher, which now performed the function until recently performed by human feet; the presses; the apparatus used to cork the bottles; and demijohns, and other receptacles of all sorts of shapes and sizes, sometimes straw-covered, more often now covered with plastic.

And there were corks, wooden bungs, funnels, secateurs,
olio enologico
, the special odourless oil used to protect the wine in the demijohn from the air, and pipettes to draw the oil off, and metal caps for the demijohns to foil the local mice, which had the peculiar habit of eating their way through plastic ones, then dipping their tails in the oil and sucking them, until all the oil had been consumed, leaving the wine free to go off.

And there were all sorts of chemicals on sale, used to clarify white wine, and to prevent it changing colour when it was sent elsewhere, to England for instance, an overdose of which renders the wine as unnaturally pallid as water and gives whoever drinks it a fearful headache between the eyes.

It was a fine and sunny day for the
festa
, a day on which, according to the inhabitants of Fosdinovo, any day could be called a good day providing it wasn’t coming down in buckets; but this was a really wonderful one, a day to remember.

Long before dawn we were woken by what sounded like an armoured division on the move, the noise made by an almost interminable procession of heavily laden vans, lorries and cars groaning up through the last nineteen or so bends head to tail to Fosdinovo. Normally all we heard down in our dell at I Castagni in the way of loud noises was when the driver of the bus between Sarzana and Fosdinovo, or vice versa, pulled out all the stops on what were the modern equivalent of motor horns, which he did every time he entered one of the hairpins. This was something he would continue to do, and his successors would continue to do, three or four times a day for the next twenty-five or so years, and are still doing.

The market was set up in a large, open space shaded by magnificent plane trees below the ramparts at the lower end of the town. It took hours for these market people to unload all the merchandise from their vehicles and set it up on the stalls. It was difficult to imagine anyone unpacking, for example, several hundred pairs of shoes, setting them out on a stall and then, a few hours later, packing the whole lot up again; but this is what the market people did, six or even seven days a week. For them every day was a
festa.
Normally they didn’t enjoy the Festa di San Remigio because of the effect it had on the weather. Today
they were happy. The only one who wasn’t was a man with a stall full of umbrellas.

It would be nice to pretend otherwise but even then, back in the 1960s, the great majority of what was on offer was cheap, mass-produced stuff, and one would have had to go back another ten or fifteen years in time to find anything different. But nevertheless artifacts of an Attilian, pre-plastic age were still on sale, and some of them still are on sale in markets all over Italy to this day.

Here, if you were in the mood, you could buy rope, chains, pack-saddles, harness, whips made from bulls’ pizzles, shepherds’ crooks, sheep and cattle bells, butter churns, axes, all sorts of knives, cross-cut saws (chain saws were still not in general use in these parts), the sort of hand saws Attilio made, in which the tension of the blade was maintained with a twisted cord, the wooden shovels used in bread ovens, scythes, reaping hooks, various sorts of bill hooks which varied in shape from region to region,
rotelline
(small, toothed wheels with wooden handles used for cutting certain kinds of pasta), hand-knitted socks and vests with the natural grease still in the wool, corduroy trousers robust enough to stand up by themselves without anyone in them, clogs, and mountain boots.

And there were mousetraps, the sort Attilio made, and casseroles, and copper cauldrons. And there were
preti
, priests – wooden frameworks put between the sheets on cold winter nights with iron pots full of hot ashes inside them which warmed a bed more thoroughly than any other sort of warmer, and could also quite easily burn the house down while doing so, as they not infrequently used to when almost every family had one.

But most of the real business was being done at the stalls which dealt in less rustic objects, which made up the majority of what was on sale. In
indumenti intimi
, otherwise women’s underwear,
where ladies, some of them pretty generously designed, were measuring what looked like being rather inadequate knickers against their thighs; in
residui di guerra
, otherwise army surplus, where you could buy old gas mask cases and genuine imitation leather Flying Fortress jackets with imitation sheepskin linings; while on the LP record stalls people were stocking up on Ornella Vanoni belting ‘I Giorni dell’Amore’ and Mongo Santamaria doing ‘Water Melon Man’, which, mingled with the cries of a couple of hundred stallholders all inviting the customers to close in and buy, made a fine old din.

And there was also a brisk trade being done in what appeared to be highly dangerous gas balloons which adventurous grandmothers were snapping up for their grandchildren. An expensive way of sending the little darlings on a trip to eternity.

A short distance down the side of the hill towards Monte della Forca, a place where the Malaspina used to operate a gallows, there was an open space under the trees in which the cattle market was taking place. In it pigs and mules and sheep and cows were changing hands, the potential buyers squatting on their haunches while the owners, hard-looking men, dealt with them by way of
mediatori.
Occasionally, one of these sellers would mount a horse and trot it up the road and back for a bit to show off its paces. Most of the buying and selling was already finished. It had taken place as soon as the animals had been led down into the market from the various lorries and loose boxes in which they had been brought here, but as one old man said at the drinking booth, ‘Every year the sales are diminishing here at Fosdinovo, and every year more animals are left unsold; but nevertheless people will still bring their animals to be sold here and will do so for a long time yet because they enjoy buying and selling, and the day.’

Meanwhile, up in the town of Fosdinovo, in the Church of San Remigio, the bells were clanging away, summoning those of the
faithful who were not still in search of over-sized knickers or Flying Fortress jackets with imitation sheepskin linings, or had not yet started looking for them, to attend a high mass celebrated by the Bishop of Massa, or it could have been Carrara, we were never quite sure. This was the most important of the three masses that were celebrated at Fosdinovo on the Festa di San Remigio, in the course of which enough incense would be ejected from their thuribles to satisfy the most profligate of acolytes. It was a happy scene that confronted me down there in the market place – Wanda had already gone off, not without a certain amount of apprehension, to be instructed by the Signora in her waitressing duties – the sun shone down through the leaves on the plane trees which were oscillating in the light breeze that was blowing, filling the market place with tremulous light and shade so that it, and its now almost innumerable occupants, looked as if they were at the bottom of the sea.

Down here in the market there was plenty to eat and drink. There were booths under the trees, furnished with long trestle tables with white cloths on them, at which uncannily look-alike farmers, all wearing suits and felt hats and waistcoats with watch chains, sat drinking either
vino bianco
or
nero
, munching
panini
, sandwiches made at the table with the local
mortadella
or
salami
, and all having animated conversations about the state of the nation, the coming
vendemmia
which, apparently, was not going to be too bad, and who had run away with whom – one being a priest who had done a bunk with his housekeeper – I couldn’t hear where this had taken place. Otherwise they talked about the weather.

If you wanted the ultimate in
panini
you went to a stall across the way from the booths where a man and his wife made them to order – with crusty homemade bread, filled with pork cut from a
porchetta
, a suckling pig, peppered and stuffed with garlic and
herbs, that had been roasted on a spit, delicious, very expensive and very rich.

Armed with one of these
panini di porchetta
, I ordered half a litre of
vino nero,
joined the company at one of the tables and waited for them to come up with the next subject. What would it be, the Beatles, birth control? No one spoke to me, apart from saying,
‘Buon giorno
,’ in a friendly way. It was incredibly restful down here under the trees. Rather as I imagined Wodehouse’s Drones Club might have been. Disappointingly, when they did start to talk, it was about football.

Here, everyone was drinking last year’s wine, decent but unremarkable, as most people said this year’s would be. Here, too often in early autumn it rained and rained when the
scirocco
blew from Africa, and then the grapes began to suffer from mildew. Here, in an area which only appeared on the most optimistic wine maps as being of moderate wine production, it was rare to have an outstanding year. Here, the farmers made white and red wine – the red was better – using as many varieties of grapes as possible.

This wine was rarely, if ever, on sale to the public. When farmers sold what was surplus to their own enormous needs, it invariably found its way into the houses of friends and acquaintances or else into the sort of
trattoria
which announces that its cooking is
cucina casalinga.
But not any
trattoria
, however good the cooking. Of the four we had so far patronized in the area, all recommended by local people, only one served wine that had not been
lavorato
, mucked about with. This was not because the proprietors of the other three were dishonest; but because there wasn’t enough of the wine that hadn’t been mucked about with to go around, after the producers had had a go at it.

It was mid-afternoon when Wanda finally appeared, tired but happy. She had really enjoyed herself. ‘I haven’t worked so hard for years,’ she said. ‘People started to arrive at about half-past
eleven and by
mezzogiorno
the place was full. There must have been fifty people sitting down, most of them men, most of them farmers, not many women. And there was a queue of about twenty all the way up the stairs, waiting for tables. They were going to have a long wait, so the Signora said that they should come back at half-past one and that she would keep some tables for them. Some went down to the bar and had a glass of wine and a
panino
to keep them going.

‘The Signora’s mother did the cooking, helped by the Signora who had to keep on going back to her shop for fresh supplies. Her husband and one of her daughters worked in the bar and when he had a moment he acted as a waiter. The other sister worked as a waitress and did all the bills which was a great help. And I didn’t have to do the washing up.

‘The food was very good. There was a choice of
antipasti
, the usual things, and pasta
al forno
, and roast veal, pork chops, stewed tripe, all with roast potatoes, and ended with jam pastry, and all sorts of fruit. And there was lots of wine.