Читать книгу Loves & Miracles of Pistola - Hilary Prendini Toffoli - Страница 18

Ten

The Brotherhood of Man

Teresa’s sadness has retreated to the back of his mind. He’d rather not think about it. He’s more concerned with the mysteries of his own existence, weighed down by his own sorrowful secrets.

Yet, as his old friend Heraclitus might remind him, all is flux, and the waters of his daily life are about to carry him in a new and more intriguing direction.

The question is: how much has their course been influenced by his decision to go to the annual Festa de l’Unità, the Communist Party fete whose posters the hunchback Gobbetto has put up all over Campino? It’s not an event he normally attends. Yet for some reason the universe is trying to get him there.

Nonno Mario does not approve of the Communists, even though the days have long passed since Campino’s Communists and Fascists would break one another’s legs whenever they happened to meet on a dark night. That struggle is over. Those who still regard themselves as Fascists have by this stage reinvented themselves under another name and become insignificant, while Italy’s Communist Party has developed into the biggest in the Western world, thanks to the country’s massive working class, all desperate for the better living conditions they think Communism will provide.

The fathers of several of his friends are Communists. Right until his death Fiorenzo’s father, Pino, was a card-carrying member. He tried to get his sons to become party workers too. Aguinaldo fought him ferociously. Fiorenzo took the line of least resistance, always finding something to occupy him whenever Pino went off to attend a party meeting at the house of Giacomo Gandolfini, Campino’s mayor and head of the local Communist cell, whose wine cellar’s ample supply of Bardolino boosted party numbers.

The merits and demerits of Communism during illicit smoking sessions in the maize fields are often the subject of the debates between Fiorenzo and Pistola. What attracts them to Karl Marx’s thinking are his ideas on the redistribution of wealth – mainly because neither of them has any – and it’s after one of these debates that Pistola ends up at the Communist fete.

It starts as a discussion in the form of what they like to think is a Socratic Dialogue. Socratic Dialogues are not normal conversational fare for Campino boys, but since Nonno Mario has insisted on his grandson’s having the classical education he didn’t have himself, Pistola has indulged in so many Socratic Dialogues with Fiorenzo in Professor Orvieto’s philosophy class they both consider themselves experts.

The Liceo Classico Virgilio in Mantova is a stuffy school where the principal insists on calling students ‘Signor’. Yet it’s advanced for its time, encouraging free thought and animated discussion. It provides the kind of classical education that produces notaries, theologians, men of letters and senators of distinction. Pistola and his friends don’t want to be notaries, theologians, men of letters, or senators of distinction. What makes it worse is that, unlike the school’s other students, all from elitist old families who live in Mantova so they can walk to school, Pistola and Fiorenzo and Donato have to take the train to Mantova from Campino. It’s a little puffer that stops every few kilometres to pick up workers, and takes an hour. They get home at dusk and have to stay up until midnight translating Latin and Greek.

But they get a perverse kick out of their classical studies, and since they’re by nature argumentative, the debating virtues extolled by this particular barefoot unwashed Greek appeal to them. They can recite the concepts Professor Orvieto has drummed into them: ‘Respect other points of view; postpone judgement; willingly revise your opinion; trust your doubts; persevere and be patient.’

This time it’s Fiorenzo who leads the Socratic Dialogue, puffing on the last of Pino’s thin black Alfas, which he found under a silkworm tray while gathering up the final remains of the dank-smelling mess. In Professor Orvieto’s professorial tones and measured pace, he launches forth: ‘Is the brotherhood of man a viable concept? Are human beings capable of working together for the common good?’

‘Well, you have to ask yourself how many human beings are basically selfish,’ Pistola replies. ‘And how many,’ he goes on, lying on his back gazing at the sky, ‘instead of doing their fair share, will simply take advantage—’

‘Are you saying people are by nature out for themselves only?’

‘How else do you think mankind has survived since the Stone Age?’ Pistola stretches out a hand for his turn at the cigarette. ‘How will you live to fight another day, and continue to reproduce your own seed, unless you’re more concerned for your own welfare than that of your fellow man?’ This line of reasoning so enchants him that he sits up and continues, trying not to smirk: ‘I’m willing to revise my opinion but your argument had better be good.’

‘Wait a minute! If a soldier is wounded in battle,’ says Fiorenzo, frowning, ‘and his friend might get killed if he drags him to safety, you’re saying most people would leave him to die so they can live to fight another day?’ He stares hard at Pistola. ‘So why did my father save Cremonini then?’

It’s such a potent point that Pistola collapses back down again, fearful that Fiorenzo might unleash one of the emotional outbursts to which he’s been prone since his father’s death.

‘Your father was not like other men …’ Pistola begins lamely, ambushed again by feelings of guilt and responsibility. ‘Tell you what,’ he says brightly, handing the cigarette back to Fiorenzo, ‘in memory of your father, I’ll go with you to the Festa de l’Unità. I’ll buy you lunch. Your father would like that. He knows what’s going on.’

‘Cristo! And I’m smoking his last Alfa!’ Fiorenzo lets out a stream of evil-smelling smoke, and breaks into a paroxysm of coughing.

Knowing there’ll be girls at the festa, they rush home to spend time in front of the mirror with their pots of brillantina, both trying to achieve the current trend known as ‘Tipo Inglese’. For Pistola, this involves battling to divide the springy Italian locks that leap from his scalp with the curly vigour of a sheep’s coat into the neat side parting managed easily by English boys, whose thin straight hair tends to limp tamely from their heads. He usually loses the battle.

Tipo Inglese includes shirts in a fine check, and trousers in a dusty greeny-grey called ‘lovat’, tapered with no turn-ups. Not an outfit that falls within Pistola’s financial ambit. Instead, he has to make do with a short-sleeved cotton shirt in a Hawaiian print he found on Campino’s street market. He toys with the idea of going for a hairstyle that suits the shirt, the Tipo Americano crewcut, also all the rage, but decides it would be an even more difficult game for his energetic curls to play.

He does however have classy new birthday shoes. Pale camel-coloured mock-suede lace-ups for which Nonno Mario has outlaid a hefty sum.

On the way to the festa, they fetch Donato. By the time they get to the grassy farm field outside the village where the festivities are being held under the trees, things are well under way. The indefatigable hunchback Gobbetto has put his festa posters on the walls of all the nearby villages and attracted a larger crowd than usual.

The Festa de l’Unità manages to be both a social occasion and an unashamed party promotion, though few people take much notice of the shrill, tinny rendition of the Communist Party anthem, the ‘Bandiera Rossa’, being blared out from loudspeakers hung on trees. It’s just background noise. So are the fuzzily printed posters of Stalin, Lenin, and Italy’s most famous Communist martyrs, nailed up on the trees. Men like Giacomo Matteotti, the politician who spoke out against Fascism when Mussolini came to power, and for his courage was bundled into the boot of a Lancia and murdered with a carpenter’s file.

Fun is what people have come here in search of, not politics. Even though it’s a festa organised by amateurs, the food at the stalls is of an elevated standard in this culinarily conscious neck of the Italian boot. The queues are large and eager, paper plates piled high.

Sandrina’s is the first stall the boys spot. Thanks to her late husband, she’s a festa stalwart, every year dishing out platefuls of risotto con le rane as generous as her cleavage. Since the main ingredient is free, her busy stall makes the biggest profit. For days before the event, she searches the rice fields after work and arrives home with jiggling stockings full of fat green spotted frogs which join their comrades in a barrel outside the kitchen door. Their mournful croaking rends the air night after night.

Fiorenzo would like never to set eyes on another crispy amphibian again. Which is why he steers his friends in the direction of Gamba Mischi’s stall.

Gamba’s polenta con cotechino is legendary. When he isn’t collecting fossils or cycling round the village with his postbag on his back, he’s making cotechino in his kitchen with a sausage maker from the village, who brings with him his grinding machine and sausage filler. Gamba and Fifi Perracchia labour into the night. Cotechino is a traditional speciality of the region, and theirs is one of the tastiest. It’s such a succulent combination of flavourful spices and coarse-textured porky bits, courtesy Bepi Faccincani’s pigs the size of small Fiats, that cotechino lovers look forward to eating it every year at the Festa de l’Unità. These rich, sticky slices even attract diehard Christian Democrats, who under normal circumstances wouldn’t be seen dead supporting the Communists. People like Giacinto Zanetti of Bar Da Cinto, who’s here in the queue behind Pistola and his friends, getting ready to wash down his cotechino feast with the bottle of cold fizzy red Lambrusco he’s clutching.

Like all good bartenders, he automatically exchanges a few words with whomever happens to be standing in front of him.

‘Heard your brother’s in Rome,’ he says to Fiorenzo, who in response emits the unintelligible grunt he has developed over the course of endless condolence encounters. ‘Not even the Pope could clean up that corrupt city,’ Giacinto continues. ‘I’ve got a brother there too.’

The dance floor is another lively sphere of action. La Famosa Orchesta Farina has progressed from a dozy waltz to an animated boogie-woogie. In the crowd of antediluvian couples gyrating with cringe-making abandon on the wooden planks laid down on the grass, Pistola gets a horrific glimpse of his ancient uncle, Zio Umberto the butcher, making a spectacle of himself with his equally large and flabby wife, Zia Dalia.

Fortunately, there’s a distraction. In the queue are two pretty strangers in voluminous skirts and puffy petticoats. One is directing coy looks at Donato from behind her cats’-eye sunglasses as she loudly crunches her way through almond brittle.

‘My sister broke her teeth on that last year,’ Donato tells her, casually removing his aviator sunglasses.

‘Told you we should’ve got the torrone,’ the girl snaps to her friend.

Pistola instantly moves in, attempting Donato’s droop of eyelids followed by a direct gaze. ‘Be glad you didn’t get the tiramola. I know a girl who got her tooth pulled out.’

Then it’s Fiorenzo’s turn. He zeroes in on the friend. ‘Didn’t I see you at the Esther Williams movie?’

She giggles. ‘No.’

‘Gone with the Wind?’

‘No movie places where we live.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Ponte Lungo,’ a masculine voice announces. It belongs to a tall older youth who has moved up behind them, built like an oak. ‘What’s going on here?’ he growls, too young to be a Fascist militia leftover, but imbued with the same bullyboy spirit.

The girls exchange grimaces.

‘Just talking,’ says Cats’ Eyes petulantly. ‘Go away, Giorgio.’

‘You’re going to end up in a maize field with your skirts over your heads,’ he sneers.

‘Give it a break!’ she says.

He glares at the boys, repositions himself closer and snarls, checking their reactions: ‘Campino studs-in-training!’

Instantly Donato becomes the epitome of cool shrugging nonchalance. Pistola, on the other hand, resorts to some ludicrously ineffective prize-fighter shoulder-hunching while Fiorenzo goes one further and surreptitiously gives the Ponte Lungo bully the finger.

Mistake. The brute lifts him off his feet, shakes him hard, and then throws him down and kicks him. A couple of times. Against background sounds of stuck-pig squealing from the two girls.

Mindful of their Socratic Dialogue about wounded soldiers in battle, Pistola is about to leap to Fiorenzo’s defence when he’s shoved aside by a tornado of enraged maternal flesh that comes whirling across from the next-door stall, clutching the heavy metal spoon with which it has been scooping frogs from the frying pan. Drops splatter the bully’s fancy shirt as Sandrina smacks him around the head with the spoon. She then bends over her precious baby and indulges in a bout of demented shrieking, louder even than Tosca’s after her lover’s execution: ‘Murderer! He’s all I’ve got left! You killed him!’

As people come running from all directions, Fiorenzo tries to get to his feet, groaning as much from mortification as from pain. The humiliation of having your life publicly saved by your mother has to be even greater than any shame you might feel at being brutally kicked to death in front of the entire village. Pistola knows this too, though secretly he thinks he would probably enjoy an unashamed public show of maternal love.

He’s contemplating this unachievable prospect when he notices Giorgio’s friends are approaching. Judging by the expressions on their faces, they aren’t coming to smooth things over. Is an innocent chat with two pretty girls going to turn into World War III? Is he once again going to find himself involved in a death that is somehow his fault?

By now Giorgio has pulled himself together after Sandrina’s battering and is managing to laugh the kind of nasty cowboy-villain laugh that’s supposed to suggest someone is going to pay.

Into the breach steps Giacinto the bar owner, a man used to handling confrontations between irrational males. Pistola hears him quietly informing the sinister-looking group from Ponte Lungo that it might be in their best interests to retreat, a point he makes by casually indicating with his eyes Zio Umberto the butcher. The strongest man in the village has abandoned Dalia on the wooden planks and is ambling nonchalantly towards them. Forearms the size of Parma hams are bouncing gently against his massive thighs. Hands that can tear a deck of rummy cards in two are clenched. On his face Pistola recognises the same calm but intently purposeful expression it wore when he was helping Nonno Mario strangle the goose for Teresa’s wedding.

The Ponte Lungo boys instantly get the message and move off, dragging with them the ever-defiant Giorgio and his uncomfortable sisters, both girls casting longing backwards glances at Campino’s studs-in-training.

Pistola feels a hand on his arm. It’s Teresa, even more pinched and stricken than when he last saw her.

‘No worries, I think he might pull through,’ he tells her jokingly. Then, when she doesn’t smile, he resorts to Campino’s routine midday greeting: ‘Had a good lunch, Teresina cara?’

‘Not hungry,’ she says in a low voice.

‘Heard from him?’

‘No, and don’t want to.’

‘Eat something.’

‘I’ll vomit.’ She shakes her pale miserable head.

‘I know where he is,’ he says. He takes her away from the crowd of boys who have gathered round Fiorenzo with endless jokes about his warrior mother, and sits with her on a bench. ‘I’m going to go and get him.’

‘Never want to see him again.’ She’s vehement. ‘You were right. He did have another woman …’

There was once a time when, hearing this, he would have felt vindicated. Now he just feels terribly sad, and is about to tell her so when she doubles over and throws up all over his new camel-coloured mock-suede lace-ups.

‘Cristo! What the …!’

Though he doesn’t normally care too much about his possessions, he has only two pairs of shoes. This is the brand-new pair. Now their fashionably pointed toes have been ruined by a red mass of what looks like half-digested berries.

‘Mulberries,’ Teresa squeaks. ‘Breakfast …’

She looks so wretched he doesn’t know for whom to feel more sorry, her or him.

‘You’re sick, Teresa. I knew—’

‘You knew what?’ she shrieks.

Even wretched and with puke all over her mouth, she can still let loose with her famous temper.

‘What did you know, you scandalous boy?’ she screams. With a sudden wild-eyed lack of control, she begins waving her arms around. Is she going to hit him again?

Just then, Dottor Pacchioni’s wife comes by and gives him a stern look. As quickly as she has whipped herself into a frenzy, Teresa collapses in a small, sobbing, puke-smelling heap on the bench where he has taken her. He nervously pats the heaving little mound of misery.

‘Teresina cara, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

She sits up, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘Well, now you do. I’m pregnant! I found out yesterday.’ Her eyes are abject. ‘I haven’t told anyone. I want to kill myself.’

He stares at her in stunned silence. ‘Porca miseria! Not even your mother?’

‘She’d kill me.’ She shudders. ‘Can we find water?’

Why, he wonders, has she chosen to tell him of all people? This is something he doesn’t want to know. Doesn’t want to think about her and Aguinaldo making a baby together.

Yet as they go in search of water, he hears himself saying, amazed at his calm self-assurance, ‘Don’t talk like that. There’s only one thing you can do. You have to tell Aguinaldo and he has to come home and marry you.’

‘Never!’ she barks.

‘You have no choice,’ he says firmly. ‘It’s what you have to do.’

She stops in her tracks and glares at him.

‘You crazy? You’re the one who thinks Aguinaldo isn’t good enough!’ She shakes her head like a sick bewildered puppy. ‘Anyway, what do you know about these things, Pistola? You’re just a kid. Madonna! Never even been in love! You don’t know the meaning of the word. Why am I even telling you about it? As if you could help …’

What can he say? Tell her he’s the one who should marry her? Tell her he has even planned his honeymoon with her and have her laugh at him? Staring into her beautiful face contorted with misery he knows, as surely as he has ever known anything, that there’s only one right course of action for her right now. To make her understand the rightness of it, he knows he has to tell her the sad little story of his own mother and father.

She listens wide-eyed. ‘She never let him know she was having a baby?’

‘Didn’t give him that chance.’

‘Why don’t you try to find him?’

His voice roughens with exasperation. ‘It’s all a mess. The sort of mess you can still avoid.’

‘But I thought you hated Aguinaldo?’

‘Zia Andromaca says he was really sad the night he left.’

‘No! Don’t want to see him ever again.’

‘Teresa, I don’t think you should do to that baby what my mother did to me …’

She stares at him. ‘Pistola, you’re crying …’

Overwhelmed with self-pity and helplessness, he tries to hide it, tries to sound convincing, attempts a smile.

‘Wouldn’t you have tears in your eyes if you had to go and tell your grumpy grandfather someone puked mulberries all over the new shoes he just bought you?’

‘I’m so sorry. I’ll buy you a new pair.’

If only, he thinks, it could be so easy to make up for your mistakes. To say, I’m so sorry. I’ll buy you a new life.

Instead, he says, ‘I know where Aguinaldo is. I’m going to go there and bring him back here, Teresa. Don’t try to stop me.’