My First Seven Years (Plus a Few More) (7 page)

Professor Trangipane, who taught in the Faculty of Agrarian Science at Alessandria, was a frequent visitor, always accompanied by students who were spellbound by the practical lessons, spiced with comic turns, my grandfather imparted to them.

One day, while he was giving a lecture in the greenhouse, the sky all of a sudden turned black. Bristìn put two fingers in the corners of his mouth and let out a shrill whistle. His sons, fully aware of what was required of them, came running out of the carriage sheds. They stretched a covering, a gigantic fine-meshed net, out in a circle. Bristìn made sure everyone was involved in the operation, students and farm workers alike. Guy-ropes with pegs at the end hung down from high poles surrounding the greenhouse, and the net was laid along that line of poles. Following my grandfather's orders, the men started to tug at the guy-ropes in twos or threes. The net was swiftly hauled up and pulled out like a circus big-top to cover the glass of the greenhouse and give it full protection. Bristìn and his sons hammered in the stakes at top speed and secured the bottom end of the cover to the ground. The whole set-up was hardly in place when a terrible wind, whistling through the mesh of the net, got up, followed by thunder and lightning and a hail storm which sent chunks of ice as big as eggs bouncing off the net as though they were tennis balls. Everyone else rushed for shelter under the portico, but Bristìn took me by the hand and dragged me inside the greenhouse: ‘Come and I'll show you a sight you won't forget even if you live to be a hundred.'

Under the glass, it seemed as though the world were coming to an end. As they struck against the net and bounced off it, the hailstones generated indescribable sounds, while the vibrating panes of glass produced howls which were in turns terrifying and entrancing. The flashes of lightning, reflected on the greenhouse glass, had their brightness multiplied as in a distorting mirror at a fairground.

When later at school I encountered for the first time the adventure of Dante's Ulysses, strapped to the mast of his ship, awestruck and bewitched by the special effects of sound and light organised by the Sirens, I could not help connecting that magical situation with the spectacle I had witnessed as a boy inside that crystal nursery, where the storm performed for us a concert that presaged the end of the world.

‘You're a madman, fit to be tied,' screamed my grandmother with that thin voice of hers. ‘Don't you realise what would have happened to you and that poor boy if the wind had blown the net away? The whole glass structure would have shattered to pieces and fallen on top of you.'

Bristìn, normally so strong and sure of himself, bowed his head before that fragile, delicate little woman. ‘Yes, you're right, Maria. I was a bit thoughtless … in fact completely thoughtless. But to experience certain moments, you've got to take risks.'

CHAPTER 6

Back in Oleggio

After several months, Uncle Beniamino, the youngest of my mother's brothers, was given the job of taking me home. As I was leaving, Granddad lifted me onto the back of that great horse, Gargantua's stallion. ‘We'll let him take you to the station!'

I took hold of the reins, but made no effort to manoeuvre with them. I had long since discovered that there was no point in pulling the reins up and down since the horse made up its own mind about where it was supposed to turn. For years, it had been padding at least three times a week along the same roads that led to the farms and villages where my granddad dispensed his chatter and wares. They had put one over me, but I refused to give them the satisfaction of knowing that I knew, and so I carried on unperturbed, mimicking the various actions of driving the cart.

Moreover, the horse responded to variations in routine only when its master gave orders with a shout or a jerk of the bridle. That was why on this occasion Granddad got up on the horse's back beside me: our destination was the station, which was not part of the horse's usual round.

Kisses, hugs, a lump in the throat and a few tears … shaking hands … the train moving off. I remained glued to the window the whole time we travelled through Lomellina, and I thought back to the day of my arrival in Sartirana, to the aversion I had felt towards that countryside infested by mosquitoes and midges, lined with rows of poplar trees marking the boundaries of rice fields and cut into an infinity of labyrinthine patterns by the vertical and horizontal spider's web of canals and waterways. Now those complex geometries had entered my brain like expressions of some surreal, metaphysical calm.

The guard on the train was surprised to see me riding alone in the carriage: it was not normal, especially in those days, for a child to travel on his own without a guardian, but I was used to it. Trains, railway tracks, stations were all as natural to me as breathing, drinking and going to the toilet.

On my arrival in Oleggio, all I had to do was look around and there, near the engine, red hat pulled down over his head, was my father. He came towards me, picked me up with one arm, gave me a hug, held me close to his face, whistled to the engine driver to give him the sign to move off and then announced with a big smile: ‘There's a big surprise waiting for you at home! You've got a little sister … Bianca! You'll not believe how pretty she is, like a porcelain doll!'

She was indeed just like a porcelain doll, my little sister … so delicate in her features, with those big, shining eyes. They let me hold her in my arms for a little, but I had to give up almost immediately because she wriggled like a baby goat and burst into a terrible wail. Everybody gathered round her: relatives, friends, as well as the three schoolteacher sisters who lived on the landing. No one paid any heed to me or to my brother Fulvio. They seemed to be aware of our presence only when they tripped over us, so we decided to keep ourselves to ourselves. We played in the courtyard and in the wasteland among the trees in the park on the other side of the road. There they were putting up a circus tent. Incapable of minding our own business, we set out to get on good terms with the workers erecting large poles and stretching out the ropes which would support the Big Top. They soon found work for us: we were dispatched with the owner's son to stick up posters on the walls and lampposts all along the main streets.

In this way we won the right to get in free for the evening performances. We did ask our mother for permission but she was so busy with the new baby that she scarcely put up any resistance. We were first in the queue outside the Big Top, two hours before the opening. The attendant in charge of the wild animals took us over to see the cages. A good ten metres away from the animal compound, we were overcome by an odour that nearly made us throw up – the stench of the lions.

What a disappointment! An animal of such majesty, the symbol of might and courage giving off such a rancid stink. How can an emperor raise as his standard the image of that foul shitter?

‘To be consistent, it really should bring its smell along with it everywhere it goes…' I said to the attendant. ‘This is what happens to them when they are locked up … animals in captivity, forced to live in a cage, that's what makes them smell like that. Normally, freedom has no stench. When they are at liberty in the forests, they certainly do not pong that way. They smell the way they should, just enough to let themselves be recognised by their own kind and feared by their prey.'

That first encounter with the circus was overwhelming for both of us: lions prancing about and roaring so loudly that they made your insides churn up, elephants on parade, sometimes with movements of such lightness that they seemed filled with warm air, like giant balloons.

But the act which left us breathless every time was undoubtedly the acrobats' turn. Two girls starting off from their position up there on the trapeze, swinging backwards and forwards, leaving traces of evanescent light as they go. My God, what was that? A somersault … a girl upside down, with no grip, hands waving in the void … she's going to fall … no … a miracle! I have no idea how, but she remains hanging by her feet from the bar of the trapeze. Now, she swings across the whole arch of the Big Top, swallowed up by the spotlights' back-lighting, and then comes back into view, slender and sinuous. From nowhere, another girl appears walking on a tightrope which crosses the dome. She dances in mid-air, pirouetting and twirling.

Beneath, in the centre of the arena, a clown lets out shrill screams of fear at each turn, but now he is enchanted by the grace of the girl on the tightrope and wants to join her up there. He produces a long ladder and, without supporting it on the wire, climbs swiftly up. The rungs come away one after the other, but the clown continues relentlessly, clinging on by the sheer strength of his arms. There he is. He has reached the tightrope: with one leap he is there, on his feet, keeping his balance as he strolls along with his hands in his pockets. The girl tells him off and orders him to go away, and all of a sudden the clown realises he is suspended in mid-air and is overcome by panic. He wobbles, topples over … tumbles … grabs a hold of the girl's feet … an incredible sway to one side and there he is, upright once again, tenderly embracing his beautiful tightrope walker. He kisses her. Rapturous applause.

CHAPTER 7

Porto Valtravaglia

The school year had only just begun and Mamma had to take us to the head teacher to announce that since Papà had been moved yet again by the State Railway, her children would have to continue their education at Porto Valtravaglia. A week later, they unloaded our baggage, furniture and assorted odds and ends at the new station to which my father had been assigned.

An incredible town, this Porto Valtravaglia: standing on the banks of the lake and flanked by a river on either side. On the one side, a cliff as spiky and majestic as the Great Pyramid of Cheops. A lime kiln at the foot of the cliff. The port with fishermen's boats, an ancient spinning mill, two engineering workshops and, last but not least, a glassworks with no fewer than five ovens.

The inhabitants of Porto Valtravaglia were nicknamed the
mezarat,
that is, the semi-mice, in other words ‘bats', a name given to them because most lived and worked by night. It was a necessity: the ovens in the glassworks had to remain operational twenty-four hours a day because, as is well known, shutting them down and opening them up again meant a break in work patterns of around one week. In addition, to get the best results from the moulding and blowing of the glass amalgam, there is no choice but to work back-to-back shifts. The same was true of the workers at the lime kiln and of the fishermen who, as is known, have to drop their nets before dawn; it was also true of the near-historic community of smugglers who, here as at Pino, operated by preference in the hours of darkness.

So it was that in the town of the
mezarat,
the hostelries, the
trattorias,
the bars and hotels never pulled down their shutters. At the Bar Garibaldi on the harbour, they removed the shutters altogether, because what was the point of them? There was a great coming and going in those places at all hours: kiln journeymen waiting for the start of their shift kept company with other night birds, including the indispensable ornament of any such locality – all types of gamblers and idlers. Finally, lined up in an orderly file at various points, there were prostitutes of differing levels, casualness and cost.

But among this host of misbegotten fantasists, the ones who commanded greatest attention and respect were beyond all doubt the story-tellers and spinners of yarns.

There was no independent profession of
fabulatore,
or storyteller, and in fact these great talkers came from every almost every walk of life in the Valtravaglia, but there was no question, and we shall shortly see why, that the greatest number came from the ranks of the glass-blowers.

These story-tellers were the pride and glory of this new home of mine. You came across them in bars, in the piazzas, on the church steps, on the benches down at the harbour. Often they spoke of events which had occurred centuries and centuries previously … but it was pure chicanery, that is, they borrowed mythical stories to deal with day-to-day life and with events reported in recent newspapers, adding a touch of satire and of the grotesque.

CHAPTER 8

Foreigners and Strangers

It is a curious fact that even today, more than sixty years on, anyone leafing through the pages of the Valtravaglia telephone directory will come across an unusually high number of foreign surnames. Here are some chosen at random: Gutierrez, Vankaus, Schumacher, Batieux, Besinsky. These are the grandchildren of the master glass-blowers who, towards the end of the nineteenth century, arrived at the factories of Porto Valtravaglia from all over Europe, each with his own speciality in casting, moulding and glass-blowing.

These
vetradór,
to adopt the dialect term, turned up in family groups with clearly differentiated values, trades and skill levels.

Inside each ethnic group, people obviously expressed themselves in their language of origin, but at work, in the factory, in the bars and on the street, communication was not in Italian but in an eccentric Lombard dialect, a speech which, continually enriched by new lexical additions, was transformed into an idiom without equal anywhere in the world. The valley of the
mezarat
had quite suddenly become a fantastic crucible of the most diverse, outlandish and often irreconcilable cultures, traditions, prejudices and mentalities, and yet, however much it might strain belief, there was never any manifestation of racism among those people. Certainly they made fun of each other, were even bitingly sarcastic over their respective pronunciations, stock phrases, gestures or modulation of guttural or sharp sounds, but never aggressively or malevolently so. It was genuinely funny to hear Germans, Spaniards, French or Poles railing at each other in a dialect that was already more than sufficiently abstruse and contorted.