My First Seven Years (Plus a Few More) (14 page)

At the third veil, Herod rises to his feet, goes over to the girl and, like an overexcited lecher, seizes hold of Salomè and hoists her onto his back. Herodias, the infuriated mother, rushes over brandishing an enormous fish by the tail. All the faithful had by now grasped the allegory and were guffawing wildly. Some scattered applause was heard, and many people turned towards the Mangelli palace to see the reaction of the lady of the house.

A few days later, Signora Sveva packed her bags and left town in a car loaded with an improbable quantity of suitcases, followed by an articulated lorry piled high with objects.

The Sunday after the great escape, the parishioners filled their church for mass as usual. We choirboys processed down the apse in our white embroidered lace surplices and red soutanes. From the foot of the nave, the Engineer made his way forward. He was dressed in jacket, neatly ironed trousers, white shirt and the usual cravat round his neck. As he passed by, one or two worshippers sniffed at him: not the remotest trace of the sewage stench. He took his seat in the family pew, smiled at the priest who returned the greeting and made a sign to us in the choir to start up with the
Te Deum Laudamus.
We began our chant, loudly: a solemn tone, which managed also to be somewhat lively, almost festive. Most of the congregation joined in what became a jubilant piece fit for any grand finale.

CHAPTER 15

Spawning Time

At the beginning of spring, the boys and girls along the lakeside were in a state of ferment. The
risciada,
that is, the mythical leaping of the fish from the water for their spawning festivities, was about to explode on us. For anyone unfamiliar with the reproductive conduct of ichthyological fauna, let me explain that ‘spawning' indicates the moment when fish get horny. To lay their eggs, the female fish allow themselves to be carried by the waves close to the shore at the point where the waters lap the
risciada,
the rocky coast. Shortly afterwards, the male fish, after a ritual which sees them shoot out of the water and perform an infinite variety of pirouettes and dives, arrive to fertilise the eggs.

All of us children used to gather together on the quayside and there we would decide which groups to divide into and where to go. Some would choose to go northwards along the coast, and others to go down towards Laveno. Everybody brought along one or two buckets, and the more organised among us would even have fish nets or proper fishing tackle. Those in my group had chosen the beach near Luino. We agreed to meet up at dawn: it was important to be on the spot where the spawning took place before the sun rose over the mountains. We were all excited, especially the girls. As well as buckets, we brought with us long poles to chase away the snakes which would quite definitely be there, like us, on the shoreline.

The old story-tellers recounted that going along to see the fish leaping was an ancient rite dating back to the first matriarchal communities in the Verbano. Professor Civolla, acknowledged as the most prestigious historian of local traditions, insisted that as recently as one hundred years before, only girls past the age of puberty were allowed to take part in the great spawning event.

I was not even ten years old, and it was the first time I had had the chance to attend this extraordinary phenomenon. Perhaps, apart from two female classmates, I was the youngest in the gang. When we got to the shore, we started leaping about on the small gravel stones. ‘Watch out! There's a grass snake!' At that, all of us turned on the poor reptile, who took to his heels, so to speak. ‘There's another one … quick, get it!'

‘But what are all these snakes after?' I asked. ‘You never usually see them.'

‘They're here for the same reason as us, to grab a couple of fish as soon as the spawning begins,' was the reply.

‘But when does it start?'

‘Hold on a minute and you'll see.'

In fact scarcely a minute later we see a ray of light fan out over the coastline under the Verzoni mountain range. The sun rises and peeps out over the highest mountain in the range, covering the whole shoreline in a golden sheen. ‘Look, the bleaks are first.'

We see two or three tiny fish jump up in the air, out of water scarcely ruffled by a breath of wind, then further out, in a flash, hundreds all at once. Up, up, then splash!… they fall back into the water. These are males and females that spring up lightly touching each other, aquatic acrobats that lovingly brush one against the other as they somersault.

‘Look, we're nearly at the mass spawn!'

The low sun, its rays piercing the air, adds glitter to the sparkle of bright scales from the thousands of excited fish. Bleaks and gudgeons by the handful begin falling on the gravel. We, jumping barefoot on the pebbles which hurt our feet, race over to the fish as they writhe about on the gravelly beach. We gather bucketfuls!

A little later, one of the older boys removed his jumper and trousers and went with his net into the water, where he was literally assaulted by acrobatic fish which flew at him and leapt into his net of their own accord. ‘Quick, pass me the bucket!' Baldy, a smaller boy with a shaven head, took off all his clothes and dived into the lake in the nude, to the scandalised screams of the girls present. Soon afterwards, all the others followed his lead, wading into the middle of the foaming spray of fish now rising improbably high in the air. Then the climax: a girl stripped down to her knickers, holding her arms over her little breasts, and jumped in with the others.

‘Chubs!' screamed one of her friends, as she too plunged in half-naked. ‘The chubs and the whitefish are jumping as well!' And it was true: now the bigger fish were darting about, leaping in the air, twisting and turning with the agility of dolphins. The girls were now all in the water, and I too went in. I held on to my underpants to cover my embarrassment because, as I was taking them off, I had burst the elastic. In the event, no one paid any heed.

Now children and fish were leaping together in the water.

‘Oh God, I'm ready for a spawning session myself,' shouted out one young lad as he dived off a rock, executing a pirouette with jack-knife entry. ‘Yes, we're all up for it!' And on and on went the leaping and jumping!

By now all the buckets were filled to the brim.

‘Oh help, I've got a fish in my pants!' shouted one.

‘Hold on to it,' one of his friends teased him. ‘It's bound to be bigger and firmer than your own tackle.' Raucous laughter all around. The girls joined in too … and it seemed that even the trout and pike were giggling.

‘Where do we empty the buckets?' asked the curly-haired girl with the little breasts. Nearby there was a boat which had been completely sunk underwater to make the wood swell. Four or five of them hauled it off the bottom, lifted it keel-up to let the water run out, floated it upright, and then pushed and manhandled it over the bed of the lake to where we were. ‘In here, jump in here, all you fishies large and small.' As though obeying orders, bleaks, chubs, ruds and trout threw themselves into the hull of the boat.

A dark-haired girl with milk-white skin, the only one endowed with regulation-size tits, cried out in anguish. ‘Goodness, it's ripped my knickers!'

‘Who? How? Where? When?' we all asked at the same time.

‘A trout, I think. I had stuck it in there because there was no room left in my bucket.'

‘Don't worry. You can have mine,' said the boy called Rosso, to reassure her.

The sun was already high in the sky when we returned, exhausted, to the quay, pushing our big boat and hanging on to its sides. Our clothes were piled up on the prow. By this time, such an atmosphere of euphoria and complicity had been created among us that each of us had long since jettisoned every residue of embarrassment. We ourselves must have resembled a merry party of spawning fish!

CHAPTER 16

The Portrait of Nofret

I had just turned thirteen. One evening as darkness was falling, we went with our gang to pinch fruit from the garden of the Polish woman whose villa was perched a hundred metres above the point where the Grifone, a cobalt-blue lake more than three hundred metres deep, widened out. We learned from Vescica, the oldest in the gang, that in those days the estate was uninhabited. I had already been to the villa at the invitation of the Polish woman's youngest son. Everything in the suite of public rooms, starting from the enormous mirrors which covered the walls and gave the impression of a fairground gallery, had seemed to me overelaborate and overdecorated.

We clambered over the precinct wall and scrambled down the creepers. The targets of the raid were the bunches of grapes hanging from the pergola which ran round almost the whole villa. There were four of us: our guide was Bigulòt, who had slipped down the wisteria onto the pergola and who was crawling along the trellises towards the most plump, juicy bunches. We followed his lead, taking care not to tumble off. I was the last in the line, with Germàn, son of a German glass-blower, crawling along ahead of me.

We were very close to the glass shutters which looked onto the Grifone when all of a sudden the central section was flung open. As one, we all crouched down among the leaves of the vine. Some people appeared at the grand windows, a man and a woman. Fortunately the darkness gave us complete cover, and from up there they could not see us. I raised my face slightly to have a look and I recognised the girl. She was called Elise and she was the woman of one of the most wealthy crooks on the entire coast – Brizzi, also known as Scorridór, a thug who was boss of the criminal underworld.

‘Look at the shining ripples of the moon on the waters … but in this pitch black it's quite scary!' said Elise in a whisper to the man who had his arm round her waist.

The man with Elise had nothing to do with the gangsters. He was much younger. He embraced her and they kissed. Now they were talking quietly, whispering from mouth to mouth. We held our breath. I kept my face buried in the foliage and it was all I could do not to sneeze, but luckily they moved away from the window and went back inside. We heard them groaning and panting. Our fear did not permit us to take any pleasure from our peeping-tom situation. I have no idea how long their idyll of writhing, entwining and groaning went on. The lights inside the house were magnified by the mirrors which projected the images onto the windows, increasing and multiplying them so as to give the impression that there were as many as three or four couples holding tightly to each other and rolling around as though in some dance. The result was that when they closed the windows and switched off the lights, we were exhausted. We had not the strength to touch even one of those sweetly scented grapes. We dropped from the pergola and, doing our best to make as little noise as possible, climbed over the wall at an easier point further along.

When we got back to the high path hewn out in the rock-face, we walked one behind the other without speaking a word, until all of sudden Bigulòt exclaimed: ‘God, they were really going at it hammer and tongs, that pair! Sometimes you could hardly tell if they were trying to screw or to claw away at each other's skin.'

‘I'll tell you one thing. If Brizzi finds out, he'll skin the two of them, and no kidding!' said Vescica.

‘But did you recognise the guy who was laying the girl?' I asked, awkwardly.

‘Yeah, that was Stumpy, the Polish woman's eldest son.'

‘Stumpy?'

‘That's right, you must have seen him around. He's only got one hand. The other one got chopped off by a motorboat propeller.'

‘Poor bastard. Life's hell for these rich folk!'

‘Anyway,' cut in Vescica, ‘I'd give one of my feet for a chance to get it off with that Elise. Wasn't she gorgeous! For one moment I saw her naked as she walked in front of the window … Madonna, never seen the like!'

However, of the whole gang, the one who was most overwhelmed was me. The enlarged, duplicated figures of the two lovers dancing on the window panes lingered in my brain as though from a film. Back home, I couldn't help rushing off and getting down to my painting in an attempt to capture those images of bodies moving in the lighted space. I sketched patches of colour on a black background and then repeated the same motifs on white and coloured paper. My mother asked me: ‘But what's got into you? Are you off your head? That looks to me like some painting by a drunken lunatic.' And I was indeed inebriated.

The following day I was strolling along by the lake with Gog, when I heard someone call out: ‘Hey, Beanpole.' It was the most recent of my nicknames. I turned round and two paces away stood Stumpy, who smiled at me and said: ‘They tell me you've done a raunchy portrait of my girlfriend!' My face flushed the colour of a red pepper, and I stuttered out something incomprehensible. He stopped me in my tracks: ‘Take it easy. I haven't been spying on you. It's just that those mates of yours who go crawling along pergolas chatter away like the priests' housekeepers in the sacristy. Certain rumours have reached me, including a description of some of your sketches where you go into all kinds of no-holds-barred details and variations about the two of us! Would you mind letting me see them?'

‘No problem!' I took him back to my house. We went up to the studio where I did my painting and I showed him my drawings and tempera sketches. He stood in silence for I don't know how long, then murmured under his breath. ‘I'll buy the lot! How much do you want?' He caught me completely on the hop, and I mumbled something senseless, finally saying: ‘Nothing, nothing at all … I'll be glad to make you a present of them,' before adding hurriedly, ‘but leave me a couple of them.'

The speed with which, with only one hand, he managed to lift every one of the paintings, stare at them over and over again before tucking them all under his arm, apart from the two I had succeeded in grabbing from him, was incredible. ‘You've done me a great favour,' he said as he went out, ‘I don't know how to thank you.' And he rushed off down the stairs. Gog leapt up at him, trying to sink his teeth into the canvases which Stumpy was carrying off as booty.