My First Seven Years (Plus a Few More) (2 page)

We are in 1930. The refugees in transit were usually persecuted anti-Fascists trying to reach Switzerland or France. I remember one particular night when I awoke with a start after hearing shouts, orders and a shot. I rushed to the window and peered out at what was going on below. They had seized a man fleeing the country and were dragging him off to the police station. The next day I saw them throwing him onto a truck bound for Luino, where the prison was. Later on, my father spoke to me about political fugitives, and although I did not understand much about it, that scene has remained indelibly imprinted on my memory, like a dark stain.

To meet boys of my own age to play with, I had to clamber up to the village. It was a sheer climb of at least three hundred metres, enough to leave anyone out of breath.

It was not hard to make friends with those children. They were huddled together in the piazza outside the church, and were more than a little curious to get to know a ‘foreigner' like me. They all spoke a harsh, Swiss-style dialect, with ‘z' in place of an ‘s', but they did not drag out their vowels as did the people in the Canton of Ticino.

To try me out, they improvised a couple of rather heavy practical jokes: as I was doing a pee down the cliff side, they tossed a cloth soaked in burning naphtha over me. It was a miracle I got away without scorching my willy. For the second test, they stuffed an enraged lizard – a
ghez
in the local dialect – down my trousers. They laughed uproariously as I leapt and tossed about in a frenzy, before managing to do a cartwheel which fortunately was enough to send the creature scuttling off.

These scoundrels were nearly all the sons of smugglers with one almost surreal exception – the gang leader was son of the local police chief. There were also two girls in the village whose fathers were customs men, but their parents did not want to see them in our company. The ‘shoulder-boys', the name given to the smugglers who carried baskets with merchandise across the border on their shoulders, had other professions apart from contraband. Almost all tended flocks of goats or sheep, were woodcutters or builders of the dry-stone dykes used to shore up the fields and woods which would otherwise have tumbled into the valley at every downpour. The customs officers were very tolerant: they were well aware that the labours of the shoulder-boys were scarcely likely to bring them wealth, but every so often they would receive orders to round up one or two of them to show that they were alert, on top of the job and deserved the miserable pay they received. So every now and then, a couple of smugglers would be marched off. To me it all seemed like a game. I watched the arrested shoulder-boys going down to the railway station: they had not even a chain on their wrists and chatted away to the customs officers or policemen as though they were off to have a drink together.

I loved wandering around the high crests, or climbing up the streams which had dug out deep gullies in the rocks, cutting into the mountainside and leaving scars of ugly, crooked furrows as they tumbled down into the valley. Certainly I never went on my own. I would claw my way up behind the Pino boys who were two or three years older than me. The policeman's son was nine years old, and so had been elected leader and guide. To listen to him, you would think he knew every water channel and cave in that labyrinth … in fact he regularly got us lost!

Once, we were hauled out by a smuggler who heard our desperate yells. He appeared to us, in the cross light filtered through the dark overhang of the ditch, like the vision of a saint. He was the uncle of one of my friends, and by an incredible coincidence was called Salvatore (Saviour). I, as I have already said, was the smallest of the gang, and so he hoisted me onto his shoulders, and from that perch I looked down with a certain haughtiness at my companions. I believed I was the living reproduction of a fresco on the facade of the little church at Tronzano, where a giant saint carried the infant Jesus across a river. The baby Jesus is giving a blessing. Now that I had the chance, I too administered a swift blessing … giggling as I did so. Already a blasphemer at that age!

As we approached the village, night was falling. My worried mother had gone up to the piazza in Pino and there had met up with other mothers who were also waiting for their respective children, but none of them showed any signs of anxiety, quite the reverse, since they were accustomed to our late-coming. As we reached the piazza, they came over to their sons without a word. No comment, no reproaches. My mother lifted me down from Salvatore's shoulders, gave me a hug and asked: ‘Were you afraid?' Lying through my teeth, I answered, ‘No, Mamma, I had a great time.' Hugging me ever more tightly, she said simply, ‘Oh, what a poor liar you are, my poor little crackpot.' (‘Crackpot' was the tender nickname by which my mother regularly addressed me.)

The police sergeant stood among the mothers and, like the others, addressed no word of reproach to his son … but he did push him in front of him. Then, as I went down the twisty road leading to the station in my mother's arms, I made out, at the point where the road doubles back on itself, the sergeant and his son, still one behind the other, with the father aiming kicks at the backside of his son, who was hopping about like a frisky goat.

*   *   *

After that adventure, Mamma was none too keen on my playing about in the hills with that gang of young hooligans, but it was not her way to straightforwardly forbid me anything, so, sharp-witted as ever, she came up with a fail-safe ruse of her own. When she figured that within a few hours the inevitable ‘call of the wild' would make me restless, she would lay out on the table a bundle of sheets of paper, a selection of crayons and coloured pencils and invite me to indulge myself: ‘There you are, my little crackpot,' she would say, ‘draw me a medley of pretty pictures.'

And I was off scrawling colours on the white page, pursuing with curling lines images which gushed out one after the other as though they had been imprinted on my memory. The more I entered into the delights of making patterns and filling spaces with colours, the more I was overcome by the sheer enchantment of it all.

It would invariably happen that after a bit my young hillside companions would turn up at the station porch and shout for me from under my window. ‘Dario,' my mother would alert me, ‘these little beasts of friends of yours are here. Want to go with them?'

She would need to repeat it over again. I was so absorbed in the paper before me that even the shrillest train whistle would pass me by.

‘Sure you don't want to go, my darling crackpot?' she cheerfully repeated. ‘Do you want me to tell them that you're not too well, or that you've got a bit of a temperature?'

‘No, no,' I replied instantly. ‘If you tell them I'm sick, they'll make a fool of me for a week: “Ooooh, poor little diddums.” Could you not say they've taken me to Switzerland for cousin Tullia's wedding?'

‘Her wedding! What are you talking about? Tullia's only twelve.'

‘All right,' I said, trying to make amends, ‘could the bride not be her sister Noemi … she's grown up.'

‘Yes, but she's about to become a nun.'

‘Well, then, say she's given up the veil to marry a captain in the Swiss Guards.'

‘The Pope's Guards?'

‘That's right. A nun can't just throw herself at the first man who comes along!'

*   *   *

Switzerland often cropped up in our conversation, in part because my father's sister and her husband and daughters, Tullia and Noemi, lived on the far side of the lake, in the rich lands of the Canton of Ticino. There was another cousin as well, the older son, who represented all that I wanted to be when I grew up. Bruno was his name and he was a champion footballer, a goalkeeper with Lugano, organist in Lucerne Cathedral and had been recently selected as representative of the Helvetic Republic to the Italian Government in Rome. And if that was not enough, he was also engaged to a beautiful young woman whom he brought every now and again to visit us. Among all his uncles, Pa' Fo was his favourite. They were more or less the same age. They spoke between themselves about politics, but they did so in a hushed voice: if they ever got so heated they could no longer keep their voices down, Mamma sent them outside. ‘Go for a walk along the lake because as they say in Sartirana (and here she would revert to her own dialect): Light talk glides soundlessly over the water, but heavy talk sinks.'

As soon as Bruno and my father were off the scene, I would do all I could to attract the attention of Bedelià, Bruno's fiancée. Her long neck, her soft hands, her Madonna-like fingers and above all her perfectly rounded breasts drove me crazy! When she lifted me onto her lap, I felt my cheeks flush and my whole being grow faint. Yes, I may as well admit it: ever since I came into this world, I have always liked women and they have always made my head spin. On those occasions when I have been with a radiant woman like Bedelià, with that scent of flowers and fruit emanating from her skin … Oh God, what raptures! In her arms, I gorged on her scents with the unrestrained greed of an addict.

My mother too was every bit as fresh and beautiful as Bedelià, and maybe even more so. After all, she was only nineteen when she had me, but a mother is beyond all comparison. My mother's scents made me drool, brought on some desire to suck at her breast and a yearning to cling close against and inside every curve and crease of her body. In her arms there was neither wind nor heat. Her warmth melted every fear: I was indeed in the belly of the universe.

But to come back to Bedelià, every time that she and Bruno left, I was downcast and silent for a whole day. They set off by boat, and we would accompany them down to the pier. Their journey was short, only to the other side of the lake, where Brissago faced us. I would stand on the passageway leading to the mooring point, following the boat as it grew hazy, leaving behind a foamy wake which dispersed as the craft became smaller and sank into the distance. But it never disappeared. In fact I could see it moor on the far shore of the lake.

Once the police sergeant lent me his binoculars. When I put my eye to it, I saw the boat and the Swiss wharf come towards me. I got Bedelià too in my sights. Then I turned my eye to the roofs and houses. ‘Lucky things,' I exclaimed, ‘they live in the midst of all that chocolate and marzipan.' You see, ever since I had arrived in Pino Tronzano they had convinced me that over there, in Switzerland, everything was made of chocolate or almond paste and that even the roads were coated in nougat! The one who first fed me this lie was the telegrapher in the station, who offered me a square of chocolate with the words, ‘Life's not fair! Here are we nibbling miserable, tiny squares of chocolate and there they are over there, bloody Swiss, with chocolate to throw away, even onto the roofs of their houses!'

‘Onto the roofs?' I said.

‘That's right. Can't you see the dark red roofs they've got? That's because the tiles are made with crushed chocolate.'

‘Chocolate tiles! Lucky things.' And I swallowed enough saliva to flood my system.

That bastard of a louse of a telegrapher passed the word to the signalman, customs officers, the policemen … each and every one of them was in on the joke about a chocolate-coated Switzerland.

‘That's why,' those swine told me, ‘the other side is called the fat shore. If you're good, I'm sure one day Pa' Fo will take you there. Have you got your passport? You haven't! Ah well then, you'll not be going.'

Since I had fallen head-first for this tale about the land of milk and honey on the other side, even my mother, not wanting to disappoint me, joined in. ‘Bruno's coming to see us next week, and he's sure to bring you a lot of plain chocolate.'

My father had already got in touch with my cousin's father, so when Bruno arrived in his usual boat, I was standing waiting for him on the pier, near to fainting. He and his girlfriend got off, carrying a large packet. At the customs booth, the officer made them open it. I was peering in from the gangway but I couldn't see what was in the parcel. The customs officer, raising his voice, let them pass with the comment: ‘It isn't really legal, but just this once we'll turn a blind eye…'

The couple were finally on dry land. I was so excited and curious to find out what the parcel contained that I almost failed to greet the splendid Bedelià. In our house, up at the station, the surprise was revealed. When the paper and packing were removed, there appeared a large, slightly curved tile, entirely of chocolate!

‘I pulled it off my roof,' said Bruno slyly, ‘and it's for you, little crackpot. Don't eat it all at once.'

I was so astonished that I could hardly breathe. ‘Can I give it a lick to taste it?' I said uncertainly, and every last one of them chorused: ‘Of course. Lick away!'

‘God bless Switzerland,' shouted Mamma.

*   *   *

A full year passed before I was able to cross the lake to Brissago. I was just five, and was as excited as a grasshopper in spring. When the parish priest in Pino spoke to us in religious education classes about Adam and Eve and the Earthly Paradise, my thoughts went to Switzerland, or more precisely to the Canton of Ticino: there in the Swiss Eden lay the abode of the elect, while our side was the home of the sinners, doomed to eternal punishment!

My mother was very cautious in feeding me information about our next journey to the Promised Land. ‘Maybe … in a few days…' was as far as she would go, ‘if they manage to get the boat back in service, then we'll take a trip to see uncle and aunt … perhaps.'

That night I dreamed they had once again suspended the ferry service: my father was standing on the gangway in a state of uncontrollable rage, as happened to him on his bad days. He pulled around him an embroidered blanket (the one from the big bed in our house), raised his arms to heaven as though he were Moses, and declaimed at the top of his voice: ‘Cursed lake, open up and let us pass, for the Promised Land awaits us.'