Читать книгу Loves & Miracles of Pistola - Hilary Prendini Toffoli - Страница 10
ОглавлениеEven though she’s a year older, and related to him, he has been in love with Teresa Faccincani for what seems his whole life. It’s a secret his heart has nurtured forever, warily unspoken for fear that revealing it will expose him to the ridicule not only of his cynical grandfather, the eternal sceptic, but the entire village. The beautiful Teresa Faccincani, daughter of the wealthiest pig farmer in the region, is considered the ultimate catch.
Half his height, she’s a tiny but spirited dynamo. Sultry, mischievous, exquisitely packaged, she has high cheekbones, arching black eyebrows over piercing black eyes, and a thick sweep of shiny blue-black hair that surges above a widow’s peak which, in Pistola’s mind, is exactly like Esther Williams’s. That’s where the similarity ends. Teresa cannot swim at all, let alone in sequins or in time to music with a gang of bathing beauties. Unlike Hollywood, there are no swimming pools in Campino, only rivers in which well-bred girls like Teresa don’t make a habit of immersing themselves.
His all-consuming passion was kindled one afternoon when he was a small boy. No moon and stars. Just a simple accident. He had been hiding under a bundle of washing on the floor of the Galettis’ bathroom during a game of nascondino with Giorgio Galetti, brother of the penile flautist, when Teresa happened to visit the house with her mother and come into the room to pee. Unlike Nonno Mario, whose toilet is in an outhouse, the Galettis are fortunate enough to have an indoor toilet.
It was the first time he had seen a girl peeing. He had always thought girls did it standing, like him and his friends.
Teresa’s temper was well known in Campino. When she lost it – which even as a very little girl was often because the boys of Campino are not saints at any age – you got out of her way. He knew that if she discovered him under the washing, she would annihilate him. So he held his breath and sat as still as Zia Andromaca’s ginger cat stalking a bird.
Straining to see through the worn fabric of the sheet, he could make out the indistinct image of a tiny figure lowering itself carefully on to the reconstituted cork seat that Valentino Galetti had put in place of the old broken wooden one. Though he couldn’t see them, the panties she pulled down were homemade like his, only hers were decorated with prettily embroidered flowers by her industrious mother. After a few moments, he heard the faint sound of liquid hitting liquid in the cracked porcelain basin that had received so many of his own bodily emissions.
Then, as luck would have it, Giorgio burst into the room shrieking, ‘I know you’re here! I know you’re here!’ Pistola saw her rush at Giorgio and slap him hard on the head, shrieking like a banshee, ‘You’ll get a big stye on your eye, you little cockroach, Giorgio Galetti, if you go around spying on girls in bathrooms!’
She was so dazzlingly indomitable in her six-year-old rage, from that day on Teresa Faccincani inhabited a special place in Pistola’s heart. There was no girl like her in Campino. No one nearly as strong-minded and smart and beautiful.
Pistola decided early on that in spite of the age difference she was the one he would marry. It was a resolution that deepened over the years, until the fiery little girl he had watched peeing had turned into a young goddess he couldn’t look at without getting a funny feeling of sick excitement.
But instead it’s Aguinaldo Bersella she has set her heart on.
The tragedy inherent in this misguided choice has tormented Pistola ever since the heartbreaking moment he first became aware of it. It’s a scenario engraved on his soul, and it took place during a showing of Tarzan Uomo Scimmia – Tarzan of the Apes – in Eros Ferrari’s yard which serves as Campino’s new open-air cinema.
Pistola was there on the same bench as the love of his life, only at the other end from her. Aware of her ever-vigilant family, he stopped himself from leaning forwards too often to gaze at her. But in the semi-dark, as the hero’s distinctive Tarzan yell set off an ear-splitting response among the audience, he craned to check her reaction and saw with shock that she was exchanging steamy glances with the cocky elder brother of his friend Fiorenzo, seated on the same bench a few bodies away from her.
A few months later, their engagement was announced. He thought he would die.
The whole affair is an agonising mystery. He can appreciate that his rival has Johnny Weissmuller’s straight-jawed looks and chest-beating confidence. But in Pistola’s down-to-earth country boy’s eyes, Aguinaldo’s behaviour and general being falls considerably short of the accepted standards of decency. He’s a loudmouth bighead, a know-it-all who, before he left school, where he was a few years above Pistola, was regarded by most Liceo students as nothing but a smartarse with a rapier tongue, who enjoyed fixing his malicious eyes on the priests and talking them into red-faced distraction with puerile questions they were too embarrassed to answer, like, ‘Can you explain more clearly for us the Immaculate Conception?’ He famously managed to offend his entire class during a discussion about the priesthood by telling Don Pollini, the one priest all the boys had a lot of time for, ‘Well, in my opinion, you fellows are simply parasites of society.’
Worse than any of this, though, is Pistola’s suspicion that what attracted Teresa to the despicable Aguinaldo is his determination to scandalise the village. It’s a notion that has privately tortured Pistola ever since he detected admiration in her voice one day in the school corridor when he overheard her telling a friend that Aguinaldo’s reputation as a wild fellow was ‘something he’s quite proud of’.
There’s not a kid in the village who hasn’t heard the story of how Aguinaldo and his professore of philosophy once bumped into each other in a casa di tolleranza in Mantova not far from the Liceo. Aguinaldo was over eighteen by that stage and it was common knowledge that he’d visited both of the area’s two state-run bordellos.
It was at one of them, the Villa delle Rose, not far from the church of Santa Anastasia, that he walked straight into his professore. The professore, true to his philosophical vocation, was an eccentric who went around with grease spots on his lapels and dandruff on his collar. Naturally, no woman would look at him; he had to pay for one.
So there they were, schoolmaster and school student, unable to avoid each other. What could Aguinaldo do but greet his teacher?
‘Buona sera, Professore.’
The professore looked Aguinaldo straight in the eye and said without a smile, ‘Don’t bother with the title, Bersella. Here we are all animals.’
Considering the family Aguinaldo comes from, this nonchalant sardonic upstart is something of an intriguing phenomenon. Even Pistola has to admit that. Where does this product of one of the poorest homes in the village get his superior airs and graces? His sharp-talking cynicism? His audacious confidence and pig-headed determination to put the rest of the world down? His eyes, which to Pistola look like those of a lunatic?
Aguinaldo’s father, Pino Bersella, is so sickly that all he can do is raise silkworms, poor fellow, while his wife, Sandrina, has a particularly poor deal in life. She’s a mondina, a weed-plucker in the rice fields. She gets up at four every morning and spends all day bent double under the baking sun, arms and legs immersed in stagnant slimy water, bitten by horseflies and scratched to glory by the vicious rice plants.
Every morning she cycles past Pistola’s house with the other rice-field workers. All of them wear the wide-brimmed straw hats worn by Silvana Mangano in the movie about the seductive mondine that not a single male in Italy has missed seeing – Riso Amaro.
Straw hats are where the comparison ends. While Silvana Mangano sizzled on the lamppost posters that were solemnly drooled over by Pistola and his friends, none of Campino’s rice-field workers do their weeding in dripping shirts that cling to their shapely breasts. Pistola has given up searching for Silvana Mangano’s ripe lips and flaring nostrils among the women cycling dolefully to work every morning. They’re mostly the age of his friends’ mothers, faces and forearms tanned the rich amber of honey and skins as rough as the thigh-high thick knitted leggings they wear as protection against the spiking weeds. Of them all, it’s only Aguinaldo’s mother with her dyed blonde hair and well-endowed figure who has any charm whatsoever.
The rice fields have been in the valley ever since the Duke of Milan sent sacks of rice to his neighbour, the Duke of Ferrara, a hundred years earlier to plant in the marshes drained by the Gonzagas. Weeding them is a tough job that provides a backbreaking but desperately needed income. Sandrina spends eight to ten hours a day with her backside in the air and her dress tucked into her pants. Along with the heat and the insects, she and the other mondine also have to contend with their male supervisors walking up and down on the bank behind them, gazing slyly at the tantalising strips of milky-white flesh between their leggings and short shorts.
To their faces, though, no one dares mess with them. They have loud voices and tongues that can fly. Pass some clever comment about their legs and they let you have it.
‘I’m telling your wife, you filthy bastard!’
‘Get it chopped off, you crazy pervert!’
‘Look at you! I’d never go out with that face! Ugly as mortal sin!’
The only time they’re silent is in the early mornings on their way to a gruelling day’s work on their bikes. In the evening when they’re riding home you can hear them singing and shouting and laughing on the other side of the village.
Pistola can still remember the first time Sandrina appeared one evening at the front door of the house in Via Luigi Caprini clutching a jiggling stocking filled with fat green spotted leaping frogs she’d caught in the rice fields. The thick knitted stocking made an ideal bag, stretched with the weight of the frogs going crazy at the bottom.
Initially, Nonno Mario kept saying, ‘Grazie, ma no’, until Pistola, eternally curious, persuaded him to buy some. They ate them for supper, skinned, tossed in flour, and deep-fried.
‘Eat the whole thing, bones and all, tutto,’ Nonno Mario told him as he crunched his way through the crispy pile that tasted a bit like chicken and a bit like fish.
In summer, they often eat Sandrina’s frogs, and afterwards, as the long hot evening turns to dusk, they sit outside on chairs on the pavement, relishing the cool air. It’s the time of day people stop to chat. Nobody stops to talk to their neighbour, Squarcione, though, who’s usually cooling down the pebbles outside with a watering can. He’s a miserly money-lender, a man in Nonno Mario’s opinion ‘with about as much spark as a potato’, who they all know has haemorrhoids and who they all think deserves them. Over time, Squarcione has sold just about everything Nonno Mario has pawned with him, including a silver canteen of cutlery acquired during the former chef’s more lucrative pre-war years in a little Verona trattoria.
Cremonini the coffin maker lives on the other side. A cherub in comparison. His coffins are custom-made and he never leaves the house without his folding wooden tape measure. Anyone who looks a bit off-colour can be sure some friend will mutter, ‘Is it time to send Cremonini for the measurements?’
Cremonini also sits outside his house in the evening, gazing at the heavens where his last client must be. When he switches off the lights to discourage the bugs, Pistola can see the stars shining in the inky sky as brightly as the headlamps of Bepi Faccincani’s Fiat Balilla. The only sounds filling the night are the millions of frogs in the rice fields. Raaargggk! Raaargggk! Raaargggk!
Though he enjoyed playing with these frogs when he was little, his relationship with them has changed. Now he takes his fishing rod to the rice fields and ties to the end of the line a cork that bounces like a fly in the light of his torch.
The first time he fried a bucketful of his own frogs, his grandfather suggested they should amaze everyone at Teresa’s wedding with a risotto con le rane as the second course. At that stage the marriage was still weeks away, the bridegroom had not disappeared, and the wedding feast was an ongoing daily discussion in the kitchen at Via Luigi Caprini.
Dessert was the one course Nonno Mario had already decided on. As his grandfather Vittorio used to tell anyone who’d listen, the most delectable way to end a good meal is to eat a few pieces of the firm juicy flesh of a pear along with a few chunks of nutty, sweet Grana Padano, the hard grainy cheese created by monks of the region. The two flavours are sublime together.
And he would quote a proverb: ‘Al contadin non far sapere quanto è buono il cacio con le pere.’ Don’t tell the farmer how good cheese is with pears (or he’ll put up the price).
When Nonno Mario told the bride that was how he was planning to end the meal, she clapped her hands. ‘Bravissimo!’ she announced. ‘It will be the best wedding feast any girl ever had!’
