Читать книгу Loves & Miracles of Pistola - Hilary Prendini Toffoli - Страница 11
ОглавлениеWhenever he visits his friend Fiorenzo, Pistola bumps into his hated rival. Not that Aguinaldo is even aware that Pistola thinks he’s the one who should be marrying Teresa. Aguinaldo would find the notion hilarious.
Though Pistola is always at the Bersella house, he’s grateful he’s not Fiorenzo. Not many families in Campino are well off, but at the bottom of the heap are the Bersellas. Take the matter of shoes.
Only when Italy’s economic miracle eventually takes place, and pig farmers make fortunes exporting prosciutto, will everyone in Italy have more shoes than they know what to do with. Right now, they don’t. While Pistola is fortunate enough to have two pairs – ‘No child in this house goes barefoot, even if we have to do without butter,’ says Nonno Mario – the two Bersella brothers have only three pairs between them.
As the elder one, Aguinaldo has two in the latest fashion – two-tone with pointed toes. Fiorenzo has a pair of school lace-ups he uses as little as possible to avoid wearing them out. The person Pistola feels most sorry for, though, is Fiorenzo’s father, Pino. He’s a yellow-faced chap who always tries to be kind, and who Pistola fears won’t make it through the summer.
Pino Bersella works hard for little money. He’s determined to educate his boys so they can lift themselves out of the peasant rut. Raising silkworms is not a lucrative occupation, but he and Sandrina are willing to make sacrifices to send Aguinaldo and Fiorenzo to the Liceo along with the sons of the wealthy of Mantova. The Liceo is a high school that opens doors.
So every year Pino makes huge bamboo structures filled with trays to house thousands of munching worms. Since they have to be kept in the shade, they’re all over the house. In the attic. The back garden porch. The woodshed. There’s even a silkworm installation as high as the ceiling in the corner of the Bersellas’ living room.
As the silkworms grow bigger, the house in Via San Salvador becomes filled with the dank smell of their rotting mulberry leaf extrusions and the noise of their voracious chewing. It sounds like the sea. When the time comes for them to pupate, Fiorenzo and Pistola help Signor Bersella fill the trays with branches for the silkworms to make their golden cocoons in. Then the busy silk-buyers come around to buy sack-loads to take to the textile factories of Milan and Como. They depart, leaving Signor Bersella looking forlornly at the few miserable lire in his hands.
Sandrina is never there, always away in the rice fields up to her thighs in stagnant water. Aguinaldo is never at home either.
‘Where’s your maledetto brother?’ Pistola invariably mutters to Fiorenzo as the two of them struggle down the steep stairs from the attic carrying buckets of silkworm debris. ‘Why doesn’t he help?’
One day, they punish Aguinaldo by pouring some of the buckets’ contents into his fancy two-tone shoes. When later he comes after Fiorenzo with a belt, his younger brother easily outruns him in spite of his bare feet. Yelling taunts and curses as he races away down the street towards Pistola’s house, Fiorenzo is safe in the knowledge that when eventually he gets back home, his mother’s strong bronzed arms will protect him. He’s her baby, though not smart like his elder brother. That extraordinarily handsome black-eyed son who was once her treasure has become Sandrina’s black sheep. His brothel escapades have made her the laughing stock of the rice fields. He shows no shame or remorse. Worse, he’s home so little that she and her husband suspect he’s in with bad company.
Their only hope is that Teresa will get him on the right track once they’re married.
Fiorenzo gleefully describes to Pistola his regular visits with Sandrina to the village graveyard to unburden her woes on her mother.
‘The sooner he’s out of this house, the happier I’ll be,’ Sandrina tells her mother, gazing into the calm eyes of the tombstone’s porcelain portrait in the vain hope that this woman, such a force to be reckoned with in life, might in death have some power over the living. ‘Such a sweet little boy when he was young,’ she sobs. ‘How he loved his mother! What happened to change him, Mama? Where did I go wrong?’
The intriguingly fertile subject of Aguinaldo tends to exercise the mind of Fiorenzo. He tells Pistola that, as he lies sweating at night between the sticky sheets on his lumpy mattress full of wool offcuts, he can hear his mother next door, muttering to herself in her bed beneath the sad-faced Christ on the cross on the wall, while beside her Pino snores quietly and dreams of silkworm moths mating.
Even though Pistola accepts that Aguinaldo’s film-star looks might have made him one of the most desirable single males in the valley, he can’t comprehend how a smart girl like Teresa could fall for someone so self-obsessed and mean-spirited.
He and Fiorenzo debate it one hot Saturday afternoon in the golden maize fields of the Valetti farm where they often go to smoke and discuss Juventus’s chances. It’s their favourite place on a hot afternoon. The maize grows as high as two metres in rows wide enough to run flat-out in. A great place to hide from a farmer whose watermelons you’re eating.
Pistola has come up with a theory.
‘He’s had so much experience in the brothels, he thinks he’s now some kind of superhuman lover. He’s told her no one will be able to satisfy her as well as him. Bet he’s told her he’s got a huge one.’
‘Ma va là! Do me a favour!’ Fiorenzo is almost paralytic with scorn. ‘It’s not even as big as your thumb. No, I bet he tells her he’ll be a rich man one day. You know what girls are like about money.’
To Pistola, the idea that Teresa could ever be a gold-digger is inconceivable. In his indignation, he inhales a burning mouthful and has a coughing fit. They’re smoking the cheap, rough, black, thin Alfas that Fiorenzo steals from his father. The Alfas smell like cheroots and are only a cut above the ghastly throat-searing imitations they used to smoke here as small kids, made from dry beards of corn packed loosely into Nonno Mario’s cigarette papers.
‘All the females in this village just want to get out of this place,’ Fiorenzo says. He’s lying on his back, gazing upwards and indulging with his free hand in an erotic experiment that feels natural under the wide blue sky. ‘They want to go and live in Milan. Ask any of them. Ask my mother.’
Pistola is not in the habit of having meaningful conversations with females. He doesn’t know many. Zia Andromaca, his aunt, the baker, is the only one he has ever spent much time with, which was once when he had to help her bake bread after her bakery assistant broke his leg. One thing he’s sure of is that with her hairy legs and moustache, she’d have no desire to live anywhere near all the sharp shiny Milanese silk buyers who come to the Bersellas’ house.
He and Fiorenzo are not the only ones using the maize fields as a hideout. As they lie dazed by the heat and the nausea inevitably provoked by a bout of black tobacco, they hear a commotion. Bounding down the row towards them comes a pretty, skinny gypsy girl with her petticoats bunched up as she runs, carrying a bundle. Only when she’s almost on them does she see them and in her fright trip and fall, dropping the bundle, which immediately goes hopping away, long ears bouncing. Without a word, she picks herself and her petticoats up, and is gone before they can say, ‘Ciao, bella!’
When they emerge later they spot the carabiniere’s bicycle lying on the ground a few rows down. He must be stomping up and down the field looking for the girl, but by now she’ll be safe in the camp outside the village that the gypsies put up every summer, coming here from Montenegro with their multicoloured caravans, bony horses, and thieving fingers.
That night while Nonno Mario is stirring the polenta, Pistola tells him about the pretty gypsy girl.
‘So why didn’t you nab the rabbit?’ is his grandfather’s response. ‘We could’ve had a delicious coniglio cacciatore.’ He pours the thick maize meal on to a wooden board to cool before cutting it into strips to grill over the stove’s embers. ‘Don’t let me hear you going on about pretty gypsy girls. That tribe is evil.’
Disagreeing with Nonno Mario usually opens the door to a bout of righteous indignation. Instead, as he waits for the crust on the sides of the pot to cool so he can pick at it, Pistola contents himself with spooling seductive visuals through his mind of brown legs glimpsed briefly under bunched-up petticoats.
‘And why the smile, Sifolin?’ asks Nonno Mario, using the nickname he employs when he’s feeling affectionate. Pistola’s real name is Ettore, but as a toddler he was so obsessed with the little pistol between his baby legs his grandfather had called him Pistola. Nonno Mario, however, chose to give his grandson his own dialect name for that important little appendage. Sifolin. Little whistle. He continues to call him Sifolin even though that little whistle is more prone nowadays to become a little flute, as it is now, with the alluring images of those brown legs flitting through its owner’s mind.
‘I want to ask you something.’ Pistola picks at the cooling polenta crust. ‘Why do you think Teresa is marrying Aguinaldo?’
Long silence. Then, ‘Who else is there in this village smart enough to marry her?’
‘But doesn’t she deserve—’
Nonno Mario’s shrewd blue eyes give him a quick exploratory once-over. ‘Is she so special because she’s rich? Is that why he’s not good enough? Who’s been gossiping? And why do you care?’
Pistola carefully heads his grandfather off in another direction. ‘Tell me again about the British airman Valetti shot down …’
His grandfather bangs his wooden spoon on the table. ‘When Giacomo Valetti catches you fooling about in his precious maize fields, it won’t be funny. Mark my words. That man is capable of anything. You’re playing with fire going into his maize fields.’
‘Tell me, Nonno! Was he covered with blood?’
‘That maledetto blackshirt!’ Now the flesh crinkles ferociously around his grandfather’s blue eyes. ‘Giacomo Valetti has the soul of a Mussolini medallion. I hope one day he rots in hell. Any of us who saw that tiny figure floating down like a thistledown seed would’ve hidden him …’
‘So why did he shoot him?’
‘He’s another breed. He could’ve just handed him over to the Germans. But no! Pam! Pam! Pam! We all went rushing out into the fields. But we couldn’t save him. Dead as a dodo. Draped all over the mealie plants. We wanted to string Valetti up by the balls.’
In Pistola’s mind the dead airman has the wavy blond locks and noble features of Leslie Howard in Gone with the Wind.
‘Not many women married to a violent bastard like Valetti would dare do what Liana did afterwards,’ says Nonno Mario. ‘But then my niece has always been a far more decent human being than her husband. It took spirit to go and get that dead airman’s clothes, wash the blood off, and wrap them up with his identity documents so she could send them to his family after the war.’
He starts cutting the polenta into strips, then, glancing at Pistola through shrewd eyes, says, ‘So, is Aguinaldo Bersella up to something?
‘Like what?’
‘Smart, that one. Doesn’t intend to end up living off mulberry leaves like his father. Saw him today with that small-time crook Ignazio. Wouldn’t have thought he’d have much time for that man.’
Ignazio is Zia Andromaca’s brother. He has never wanted to join her in the family bakery and instead moved to Rome. ‘Your classic low-rent conman trying to be a high-rent conman’ is how Nonno Mario describes him. Whenever he comes back to Campino, he swaggers around weighed down by his gold chains and his thick-framed sunglasses, telling everyone he’s involved in something a lot more lucrative than baking.
‘Guess what’s on the menu tonight?’ Nonno Mario is suddenly excited. ‘That big stream down by the rice fields is being drained and there are only a few pools of mud at the bottom. Catch the eels with your bare hands …’
Fishing is one of Nonno Mario’s many passions. When he spots a prize fish in a Campino river – a hump-backed gobbo, for example, that can reach five kilograms – he stalks it for days. He and Pistola will be sitting out on the pavement and Nonno Mario will suddenly put down his grappa and say, ‘He’s still there, that big one. Saw him again. I’ll get him.’ And he does.
But eel is another story. With its snakelike body and soft sticky freshwater flesh, it doesn’t appeal to Pistola. The only way he can get it down his throat is with large amounts of the wine with water that his grandfather sometimes gives him at mealtimes. Regrettably, however, Nonno Mario regards eel as a delicacy and can’t understand how anyone can resist it, especially after it has been submerged for hours in his own special sweet and sour agrodolce marinade – he doesn’t use recipe books – which he makes accompanied by a running commentary, ‘Should of course be using capers. But who can get capers? So we’ll use mint. Or what about sage. Or …’
He rolls up the eel like a cartwheel, pins it together with crossed skewers so it looks like some exotic Eastern treat, and then grills it over the embers, all the while singing arias in a perfect soprano, like his favourite, ‘Amami, Alfredo’.
Tonight it’s a bigger eel than ever. He’s beside himself with delight.
‘Bet the Queen’s not eating this tonight!’
‘What queen?’
‘Any queen. The English one whose uncle-in-law doesn’t want the throne.’ He pops an eel eyeball into his mouth and begins chewing on it with noisy delight. ‘Poor woman. What she gets to eat is not fit for human consumption. Rubbery pink sausages and smelly boiled cabbage.’ He has recently heard about the horrors of the English diet from Zio Umberto’s son, Eros, who spent a holiday there on the profits of his new open-air cinema. ‘They can only eat what’s on the plate when they’ve smothered it in some brown goo from a bottle on the table.’
He slyly pops the other eyeball into his mouth, observing Pistola’s horrified face out of the corner of his eye. ‘No wonder so many of them come to Italy for real food.’ Then, after a pause, he says, ‘Bepi Faccincani caught a sack full of these. Everyone wanted to know if he was going to serve them at the wedding.’
‘Eel? At Teresa’s wedding? Never!’
‘Why not? The eel was Italy’s most popular fish in the Middle Ages. Bred in freshwater tanks.’
Even though it might alert his grandfather to his hidden hostility, Pistola can’t resist a dig, ‘Poor Teresa doesn’t need any more slimy creatures at the wedding. Bad enough the one she’s marrying.’
But Nonno Mario isn’t listening; he’s dreaming up a new wedding sauce for the eel dish.
