Читать книгу Loves & Miracles of Pistola - Hilary Prendini Toffoli - Страница 14

Six

Honeyed Words to Charm a Woman

‘Fighting?’ Nonno Mario’s eyebrows raise as his grandson walks through the back door at Via Luigi Caprini, sporting Teresa’s rage on his cheek. It’s more a comment than a query. His mind, his grandson knows, is really on the day’s collection of trilobites and ammonites now displayed on the kitchen table after a few hundred million years in the earth. ‘This one’s certainly worth a report in the Gazzetta.’ An ancient relic rests in his large veined hand. But already Pistola is in the bathroom putting ointment on his face.

Later, over risi e bisi made with peas from the garden, his grandfather announces that he and Teresa have decided on the main course for the wedding. Bollito misto. A gargantuan treat involving an arsenal of meats that includes a pig’s trotter and a calf’s head, served with an accompanying salsa verde that’s a giddy mix of anchovies, capers, egg yolks, vinegar-soaked bread, parsley, garlic, and rivers of olive oil.

Nonno Mario eats a forkful of the risotto and then gives a quiet chuckle. ‘Teresa reminded me of the time you stuffed yourself with salsa verde at Zio Umberto’s birthday party and then got violently sick. You were about four years old. Already you loved anchovies and garlic.’

‘Teresa has a damn good memory,’ says Pistola. And if he was four, he wonders, would his mother have been alive? ‘My mother was there too. I remember,’ he says, lying.

Nonno Mario is silent.

Pistola persists: ‘Teresa says she was the kindest woman she’s ever met.’

‘Course she was.’

‘Was she like you?’

Nonno Mario always answers a question with another question: ‘Are we talking what she looked like?’

‘Well, was she like me at all?’

‘Are we talking facial features?’

‘I’m asking what kind of person she was.’

‘A very special human being.’

‘Did she make sfrappole with me every Easter?’

‘Suppose she did. Don’t remember.’

‘What was she doing in Brescia in that air raid?’

An enigmatic look crosses his grandfather’s face. He shrugs. ‘Working. Living there.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Never really knew. It was war. Nothing was normal.’

‘You never asked her?’

‘Ma va là! Come on!’ Nonno Mario’s patience is notoriously limited. ‘Your mother was a law unto herself. If she didn’t want to tell you something, that was it.’

‘She couldn’t have cared about me if she just left me with you.’

‘War was a funny time for everyone. And then when it was over, we had lost her.’

‘Where do you think she is? In heaven?’

‘Heaven is a fairy story.’ To close the question once and for all, Nonno Mario slaps the table. ‘Why believe in something just because the Pope wants you to? Heaven is an idea invented by witchdoctors in caves to make people feel better about dying. Man’s ideas about God and eternity make no more sense in relation to what lies beyond their understanding than the cheeping of Sandrina’s canary in its cage outside her front door.’

He gets up to help himself to more risotto, and carries on from his position at the stove, banging the wooden spoon on the pot: ‘How much sense can you make of the fact that the God who gives meaning to the lives of these so-called believers encourages them to wipe out people who believe in other gods?’

But Pistola is relentless. ‘Why are you so mysterious about my mother, Nonno?’

‘Mysterious?’

‘Why don’t you ever talk to me about her?’

‘You want my heart to break all over again?’

Before Pistola can say, Nonno, it’s not your heart this is about, his grandfather says in a murmur so soft Pistola can barely hear him: ‘Children are not meant to die before their parents. It’s against the laws of the universe.’

He says it with such utter sadness that Pistola feels tears springing into his eyes. For the first time in his life it strikes him that his grandfather is an old man.

Later, as he boils water for his weekly bath in the wooden bathtub in the kitchen, a heartbreaking recollection from years ago pops into his head. Nonno Mario weeping at Pistola’s mother’s graveside. It so disturbs him, he leaps into the bath and scrubs himself till his skin is raw, splashing soapsuds all over the stone floor till it’s running with water, and Nonno Mario comes rushing in, shouting: ‘Trying to drown us all, cretino?’

That night, his miserable dreams are all of Teresa and Aguinaldo rolling around in ecstasy in gondolas. Which is probably why, the next morning, while he’s doing the monthly washing of the bed linen in the same wooden bathtub – soaking the sheets between layers of soap shavings and chlorine, and putting wood ash on top so that the lime can bleach them – he finds himself day-dreaming about where he would take Teresa for a honeymoon. Lago di Garda, he decides. The long stretch of blue water not far from Campino where he often goes on his bicycle with Fiorenzo and Donato. He would take her for a granita, as many as she fancies, at one of the bars that line the lake, and then to Sirmione at the end of the strip of land stretching into the water. There, they’d lie in the shade of the gnarled old olive tree by the remains of Catullus’s Roman villa, the most romantic place he knows.

Afterwards, they’d go to the garden of Gabriele d’Annunzio’s villa high above the lake, his other favourite spot, and he’d recite D’Annunzio’s poetry to her. Love poetry so seductive he’s convinced it had to be how that unattractive little flamboyant gnome managed to seduce so many legendary beauties. It’s a notion he has pilfered from his Italian teacher, who pointed out to the class that D’Annunzio’s expertise as a lover was rooted in his ability to charm a woman’s mind with words. A lesson not lost on Pistola.

As an illustration of this, the class was instructed to take note of the suggestive stance chosen by D’Annunzio to describe Lago di Garda in the morning: Everything is blue, like a sudden rapture, like a head bowing to receive a deep kiss …

Professor Spagnoli also explained that it helped to be a famously courageous World War I daredevil, always making headlines, like the time the Italian government gave Fiume to Yugoslavia, and D’Annunzio decided to march there with two thousand volunteers and claim it back, thrilling his female fans who lined the streets blowing kisses.

As it happens, Nonno Mario has his own personal memento of the man, acquired when he was a soldier. It’s a note handwritten with a fountain pen, featuring D’Annunzio’s curlicued signature above the simple message: Hand the bearer the documents as requested. There were no documents with the note, and Nonno Mario has always been exasperatingly vague about its origins. But he keeps it along with his most precious possessions, even though he has always disparaged D’Annunzio, describing him as ‘a cocky little depraved southern fool’ since he came from Pescara, which, though not very far south, is not in the north either.

D’Annunzio is not the only reason Lago di Garda has over the years become a significant part of Pistola’s erotic geography, inextricably bound up in his mind with bare flesh and pretty women. Its blue waters and pebble beaches are a magnet for female visitors from further afield. They come loaded with Deutschmarks and sunblock, to bake themselves on the pebbles until they resemble bronzed goddesses. Even though there’s rarely much flesh visible outside of their modest bathing costumes, they’re the only girls over whose bare skin Pistola has ever let his feverish eyes roam.

Once, when he was ten and beginning to develop an academic interest in body parts, he managed to get a brief but tantalising eyeful of Gianna Galetti, sister of the boy with the performing penis. Gianna is older than all of them, a big blonde beauty whose mother famously made her a dress out of the parachute silk that carried the British airman on to Valetti’s farm. Pistola once saw her in that dress strolling down Campino’s main street with a friend during the evening passeggio. Even to eyes still in the innocent stages of this intriguing newfound thrill, she looked ravishing.

When Pistola congratulated Giancarlo on having the best-looking sister in Campino, the young entrepreneur-in-training invited him for a viewing, hoping no doubt to capitalise on another lucrative body sighting. It turned out disappointingly short-lived. As Pistola peered through the smudgy panes of the glass door at the Amazon soaping herself in a steamy tub in the kitchen, the only body parts he could make out before his left ear was grabbed hold of by Signora Galetti and he was agonisingly removed, were two giant rosy-pink nipples.

The boy-girl scenario is fraught in Campino. When boys tell each other they have a girlfriend, the girls in question often have no idea they’ve been singled out. Even if a girl suspects a boy fancies her, the boy rarely gets a chance to get near her since she’s always chaperoned by elder sisters or brothers.

Pistola has always been envious of the girlfriend Fiorenzo once had briefly before her family moved away. Franca was thirteen and pretty, and her family watched her like a hawk. Her mother was a tiger, and so were her two fully grown brothers. The only time she and Fiorenzo ever managed to get together was one cold evening after a school choir performance when they succeeded in having an illicit squeeze huddled upright in an unlit corner of a building, with the sleet coming down. Unluckily for Fiorenzo, a passer-by who couldn’t see them in the dark came and pissed against his leg, and there was nothing Fiorenzo could do but keep quiet and let the warm liquid trickle into his shoe.

Deprived as they are of female contact in a village where the girls’ movements are constantly monitored, Pistola and Fiorenzo are drawn to the potential thrills of Lago di Garda. Donato’s father has a bar there in Sirmione, and so naturally he has had more chances to exploit the boy-girl situation than his friends. Slightly older and more assertive, he’s a small bony charmer with the brazen cheek of one of those waifs who run off with your purse at Rome’s central station.

His trick is to zero in on girls who speak a bit of Italian, and walk them to his father’s bar to eat granita. Then he walks them to the edge of the lake. Magical at twilight.

Girls find granita very sensual, this finely crushed ice the consistency of snow, covered with syrup that comes in a range of indecently brilliant colours. When describing the taste of each different syrup – peach, tamarind, pistachio, almond – to one of them, Donato becomes as poetic as D’Annunzio. The girl is invariably mesmerised. Pistola and Fiorenzo sit listening on nearby bar stools, torn between resentful envy and bitter fits of sniggering. By the end of the tasting session, the girl and Donato will be licking the syrup off each other’s fingers. It works every time.

The seduction that gave Pistola and Fiorenzo the biggest laugh happened one evening when their friend picked up a German girl at the campsite and went back late to her tent, having had a few vinos along the way. Crawling in after her, he tripped over a guitar at the entrance. The loud bonggggg! woke her boyfriend in the tent. Fortunately, he was so drunk he merely turned over. The next night, Donato was back at the bar, hair slick with brillantina, inviting another German girl to taste his granita.

Pistola is aware that Donato’s success has nothing to do with his looks, and everything to do with his honeyed words. What makes this realisation even more galling is the fact that, as everyone knows, Italian men are supposed to be world experts on seduction. It was an Italian, Ovid, who wrote the world’s first sex manual, his Ars Amatoria, years before Christ – or Rodolfo Valentino – was born.

Even though Pistola is good at putting words on paper, he’s agonisingly conscious of the fact that he doesn’t have a silver tongue. Would he ever have been able to charm Teresa’s heart? Even if Aguinaldo had never existed?