Remembering Light and Stone (12 page)

‘She holds it against her family that they gave her the sort of life they did. I think she particularly resents that after her father retired, her parents went back to Edinburgh and bought a house there. They’re happy and settled there now, and somehow that makes it even worse for her. As for her job, I don’t know if that’s been a help or a hindrance. She works for a big international auction house, and she travels all over the place, mainly in the States and Europe, looking at furniture for them. It’s a really good job; the sort of job a lot of people would kill for, but she doesn’t love it. You can see what a great place she has here: she owns all this antique furniture, and those paintings – and she earns a lot of money, but she’s the most unrooted, maybe even the most unhappy person I’ve ever known. She would deny this, I know, but I always think Maria believes that somewhere there is a place where she could be contented – if only she could find it. She believes that there are places where you can find happiness, just as there are places where you can find wild mushrooms.’ I felt even meaner and more small minded than I had done earlier.

We stayed in Venice for four days. At first the weather wasn’t good, and then on the second day the fog lifted, and we went out across the lagoon to the islands. I remember the coloured houses of Burano, and the Byzantine church on Torcello. I always think that it’s impossible to predict the impression particular places will make on you. Often, especially in Italy, I found that the big famous monuments left me cold, but that some small detail of them would be unforgettable, like a mosaic of Noah’s ark high up in St Mark’s. I remember that, and I remember the long, dark stern-faced Madonna on a gold field in Torcello, and the Last Judgement on the back wall of the church, where black devils forked the damned into the flames. Two days later, we visited the Jewish quarter, where the buildings are taller than in other parts of Venice, to accommodate all the people who were forced to live there at the time when it was the only part of Venice where
Jews were allowed to live. Now it was almost deserted. We visited an empty synagogue, and looked in the tiny bright window of a kosher grocery shop. There was a memorial to all those who had been taken from the ghetto and died in
concentration
camps all over Europe. Sometimes, standing on railway platforms in Italy, a goods train would go through at high speed, and I would shudder when I thought of what had happened in Europe not so long ago. The paintings in the church seemed a quaint fancy in comparison to the reality that had emptied the ghetto.

The fog came back on New Year’s Eve, and made all the lights of the city pearly, including the little coloured lights on the Christmas tree in St Mark’s Square. The city was rife with cats, their eyes full of cold appetite, like sharks, intent on their own concerns, and closed in their own worlds. We had dinner in a restaurant that night, and there was an air of excitement in the city as the year ran down to its conclusion. For days now people had been throwing firecrackers around. In S. Giorgio they had been tossing them in front of unsuspecting people since well before Christmas. Now in Venice the noise was building up. The steady monotonous banging noise made it sound as though the city were being shelled. Ted asked me at dinner, ‘What will it be like in S. Giorgio tonight?’ and I laughed.

‘It’ll be like the end of the world,’ I said. ‘At midnight, there’ll be the most almighty explosion of firecrackers and fireworks, as if it were the most important night ever, as if everyone’s lives and fortunes were going to change in the morning. The whole sky will be lit up, and it’ll be like it’s to mark something new, something wonderful. And then tomorrow morning the silent pall of provinciality will fall over the place again, and people’s lives will go on exactly the same as they always did, and will for ever.’

One morning in January, a little convoy left S. Giorgio for the mountains. Franca packed her mother-in-law and Davide into the car, together with four bottles of
spumante
and some cakes and chocolates she had taken from the shop, including a
four-kilo
cake, wrapped in gold foil and tied with a red ribbon, that looked like a gift-wrapped bomb. Lucia and Ted came in my car, and shortly after a quarter to eight, we all set off.

Almost as soon as we left the village, by the high back road, instead of the route I usually took to the lower village and the plain, we were into territory where tourists rarely ventured. It was a strange phenomenon, for every year thousands of people visited S. Giorgio, but invariably went back down the hill afterwards, as if there were a line on the road at the back of the town, beyond which they were forbidden to go. The real reason that they didn’t go there was because the guidebooks didn’t tell them to. Perhaps in any case they wouldn’t have liked the scenery, for there was a harshness up in the mountains which there was not in the softer, lower hills, with their olives and vines and ploughed fields, with the gentle open contours of the land. Here, the valleys were high and closed, the roads steep and twisted. We passed outcrops of friable white rock, from which grew stunted trees and bushes. Sometimes the land had fallen away, and the whole root system of the tree could be seen. For all its harshness, I thought it had a real beauty of its own, unlike the soft, easy loveliness of the lower land, with its muted colours. Not least of the mountain’s attractions was the view it afforded. Looking back, we could see S. Giorgio now far below us. From that angle you couldn’t see the new town, just the back of the
village, neatly walled, and pale in the clear light of the morning. It looked as it must have done so long ago, at the time when town planning was an innate skill, when people still lived on a human scale, and did not build sprawling, malfunctioning towns. There was a light mist on the floor of the valley, so we could see only faintly the sprawling glitter of the towns down on the plain, but off in the distance was clearly visible the chain of blue mountains that stretched away to the south.

I had been up here many times before, but it was Ted’s first visit, and he was enthusiastic, much to Lucia’s amusement, who thought it the dullest place in the world, and couldn’t imagine what anybody could see in it. We drove through a tiny village, completely closed and shuttered up. ‘Nobody stirring there today,’ Ted said. ‘That’s because there is nobody there,’ Lucia said. ‘Very few people live up here now. When Mama was growing up there were lots of villages and isolated farms, but now there’s hardly anybody. They got smart,’ she laughed, ‘and moved down the hill, the way Mama did when she got married.’ I had heard before that the population hadn’t grown much for twenty years, but had simply relocated, with people moving down the hill to work in shops and factories and offices. Now the hills were empty, but for a few remaining farmers, such as Franca’s brother, whom we were on our way to visit, and a sprinkling of foreigners, who bought old farmhouses and
restored
them, grew lavender and kept bees and did not mix with the locals.

‘I think this is great,’ Ted said. ‘I think I’d like to live here. Maybe I’ll buy a house and fix it up. What do you say, Lucia? What about that one there – that would be nice, wouldn’t it?’ She almost fell off her seat laughing. He was pointing at a place that was almost a complete ruin. ‘He’s crazy, your boyfriend,
Aisling
.’

I didn’t join in the laughter. Lucia had obviously developed a real adolescent crush on Ted, which was normal, if you think about it, as she was an adolescent. I couldn’t reason that way at the time, and I was irritated by the way she was flirting and giggling with him, and how he was teasing her. I had looked
forward so much to this day out, but already I was aware of a black mood closing in around me. The silent huff I sank into was a waste of energy, for neither Ted nor Lucia took any notice of it, and went on talking.

‘You think I’m kidding?’ Ted said, trying to keep a straight face. ‘I think it would be great. Wouldn’t you like to marry a farmer and live up here, have kids, keep hens, stuff like that?’

‘You really are crazy,’ Lucia said. ‘Me? Marry a
contadino
? Nowadays, nobody wants to marry them, don’t you know that? They have a marriage bureau in Perugia, and almost all of the men on their books are farmers. Women come up from the south, from Calabria and Sicily and marry them. Nobody here wants them.’

‘So it’s the bright lights for you then. I suppose you’ll be off to Rome as soon as you’re eighteen.’

‘I didn’t say that,’ Lucia interjected quickly, suddenly serious.
‘Sto
bene
qui.
I like it here. I like it at home with Mama and Papa. They do that in other countries, go away, but I don’t want to do it. When Aisling’s not here, I’ll get married and move upstairs. If you’re happy and you have everything you want in a place, why would you ever go away?’

‘Why indeed,’ I thought grimly. ‘Why bother to live your life when you can let not just your parents, but the whole of society live it for you?’

After a time, the mountains closed in, so that we could no longer see down to the plain. We arrived at the farm almost an hour after we left S. Giorgio. Franca and Davide had arrived just moments before, and were unloading the car. The door of the farmhouse was open, and we all went in. The kitchen was almost empty. Patrizia, Franca’s sister-in-law, was making pasta, the wooden board before her already piled with yellow ribbons of tagliatelli. Franca’s mother, an old woman in black, was sitting on a low stool beside a blazing wood fire. When we greeted her, she looked as blankly at Davide, her son-in-law, as she did at Ted, a complete stranger. Patrizia was delighted to see
everybody
again.

‘Where are the others?’ Franca asked, as Davide carried in the
wine and cakes. ‘Michele’s on the hill, with the second pig,’ Patrizia replied. ‘The others are down in the barn with the pig that was killed yesterday.’

‘We’ll go see Michele first.’ We went out of the house with Franca, and followed her along a narrow path which wound behind a gentle rise. As we got nearer we could hear a light
clink-clink
-clink, clear in the air, like a bell being struck. And when we went round the corner and saw what was there, suddenly I felt dizzy, sick to my stomach, and then I felt foolish, for what, after all, had I expected to see on such a visit?

A little huddle of people were standing around a dead pig, which was hanging by its back legs from chains attached to a strong wooden post. The pig had been half split open, and the people gathered around were in the process of cutting it
completely
in two. The clink-clink noise was the sound of a hammer and chisel against the bones of the pig’s spine. The animal’s ears were flopped over its eyes, as if it couldn’t bear to look at what was happening. The warm open cavity of the body smoked in the cold air. I was glad that we hadn’t got there any earlier. The ground was splashed with blood, and a trio of hefty cats sat under an old broken cart a short distance away, impassively waiting to be fed. Michele and the others were delighted to see us, and the pig was ignored for a few moments while a full round of greetings and introductions took place. Michele offered his wrist to be shaken, because his hands were covered with blood. He looked at me very intently, and I felt uncomfortable. Franca slapped the side of the pig admiringly, and it swung
lugubriously
on its chains. Michele got back to work with his chisel, and Ted took some photos of the pig, which confirmed Lucia’s belief that he was crazy.

‘The others are down in the barn, you can go and see them if you want,’ Michele said, but Grazia, one of the women who had been holding the pig steady, interjected. ‘Don’t go just yet. Let’s see if the wedding has started.’ Grazia was huddled up in heavy clothes and boots. Her crude apron was covered in blood. She led us to the edge of the rise, and looking down, in a lower valley far below us, we could see a church with a group of people
standing outside. ‘I’ve been watching them all morning,’ Grazia said. ‘Look, here they are now.’ A car pulled up and a figure in white got out.

‘It’s Paola Calzolari, do you remember her, Franca? She went to live in Frascati and married a man there, but it didn’t work out. They had a little daughter, and got divorced three years ago. Now she’s living with another man, and she’s pregnant again, and this time she wants to do it in church. I suppose she hopes it’ll be the last time. Her little girl’s to be an attendant. Here she is.’

The figure in white was followed by a child in pink. Some people who had been waiting gathered around them, and they stood for a short while talking. Then they all disappeared into the church, and from where we were, it was as neat and as swift as a clockwork toy. ‘Good luck to them, anyway,’ Grazia said. She wiped her hands on her apron.

Franca said, ‘I always tell Lucia, when the time comes for you to get married, don’t settle for a civil service. Go to church, because you’re going to need all the help you can get.’ They all laughed, and as we turned away, she added, ‘Anyway,
whatever
gets you through your life, grab at it, that’s what I always say.’

We turned back to where the pig was hanging. It was so solid, so dead, the cold dead fact of the pig’s body hanging there was a shock to me, and it remained in my mind throughout the day.

We left the hill, and the steady clink-clink of metal and bone followed us, as we went down to a shed at the side of the house. When Franca opened the door there was a mixed confusion of voices, noise and light, of greeting and introduction, but above all, the two things that struck me were, first, the coldness of the shed, and second, the stench of blood which had been evident up on the hill, but was much stronger here. I recognized some of the people, and I was introduced to the butcher who had been hired for the day, and was there to oversee the correct
preparation
of the meat. With a long slender knife he was shaping the fat at the edge of a pig’s leg into the familiar shape of a ham,
which would then be salted and hung to dry in a cold place. The protruding knob of bone was glossy and white.

Ted and I spent the morning in the shed. After the hams were completed, piles of chops were cut, some set aside for lunch that day, some wrapped for the freezer. Meat was prepared to make salami and sausages. They put a lot of pepper in some of the salami, and then tied a red ribbon to the string around it, so that they could tell it from other salami, the ones that were not
piccante.
For the sausages, the butcher clamped a mincer to the table, and produced a jar of damp grey intestines, which looked like overwashed elastic. A long length of intestine was fitted over the end of the mincer, and by a combination of gently pressing on the meat in the hopper and coaxing along the rapidly filling intestine, a long meaty cord appeared, which the butcher deftly twisted into links. Ted took a turn with the mincer, but he wasn’t very good at it, and almost minced his fingers, so he let the butcher take over again.

Around noon, Lucia and I went up to the kitchen, taking with us a pile of sausages and chops to be cooked for lunch. Patrizia and Lucia started to set the table for fifteen people. Franca’s mother was still on the little stool, huddled over the fire. She had the saddest face I’ve ever seen. ‘I’m cold,’ she said to me. ‘I’m always cold. I sit by the fire all day, and no matter what I do, I can never get warm. See,’ and she drew her hands away from the blaze and touched my face. She was as cold as marble. It was all I could do not to let her see how repulsed I felt. It was like talking to and being touched by a person who was already dead, and whom the family had simply neglected to bury.

Franca came over and started to poke vigorously at the fire, stoking it up at the back, and raking out the burning embers at the front, where the meat was to be cooked. She opened a wooden chest where the firewood was stored, and took out a huge log. The fire sparked and crackled when she put it on, and flames licked quickly up the side of it. Franca beamed with delight. ‘Nothing like a good fire, is there? It’s company. I could sit and look at a blaze like that from morning to night. Do you
know the old saying, Aisling – “A hearth without a log is like a man without a prick.”’

Franca’s mother looked confused. ‘What’s the proper name for it, Franca? I don’t remember. The Italian name for the man’s thing.’

‘Penis.’

‘And the woman’s thing?’

‘Vagina.’

Franca smiled. ‘Poor Mama. She only remembers the dialect words for them. They’ve got a million names in dialect. Probably never needed the Italian words. Not that words matter that much, I suppose.’ She lifted a grid-iron down from a hook above the fire, opened it, and began to neatly arrange pork chops on it as she went on talking. ‘Things aren’t the way they were in Mama’s time. They aren’t even the way they were in my time, and thank God or whoever for it, that’s what I say. All that stuff they told us when I was growing up, to frighten the hell out of us, and it did, too. Sometimes it still puts me off. Sometimes I still feel guilty, even now. Can you believe that? It won’t be like that for Lucia. I’d rather she got into the odd scrape, so long as she enjoys herself, so long as she’s happy.’

Franca closed the grid-iron, and set it carefully over the
raked-out
glowing wood embers. Then she took down another
gridiron
, and began to prepare the sausages in the same way.

We went on getting ready for lunch – setting out glasses, fetching wine from the cellar, dressing salad, slicing up bread. At about ten to one, Patrizia put the pasta on to cook, and Lucia was sent to call in the workers.

What with the early start, the cold weather and the hard work, everybody was hungry, and more than did justice to the meal, which was a huge affair. One thing that annoyed me was that I didn’t get to sit beside Ted. Michele slipped in beside me and throughout the meal kept plying me with more food than I could possibly eat. He also topped up my glass constantly, so that I couldn’t keep track of how much I was drinking. I didn’t like it that he was so attentive to me, and I kept trying to catch Ted’s eye. For a long time he didn’t notice me, because he was so busy
laughing and eating and talking, and when at last he did look my way he was so delighted with the lunch and life in general that he didn’t seem to notice that anything was amiss. I was vexed and angry.