A Small Place in Italy (10 page)

‘Demolizioni
buy up all the removable parts of ships when they go to the shipbreakers – the
demolitori di Navi
. Most of these
demolitori
have their yards near La Spezia at the head of the Gulf, just over the hill from here, beyond the Magra.’ (La Spezia was one of Italy’s principal naval bases.)

‘Where can we find one of these
demolizioni
?’ I asked him.

‘There are a couple down beyond Sarzana where the road bridge crosses the Magra. If you like I will take you there. We could go this afternoon,’ Alberto said, ‘after the
merenda
.’ The
merenda
is
a snack, or a picnic. All the
esperti
had brought one with them, except Renato who went home for his midday meal, taking his son with him on his Lambretta.

‘But it’s Easter Monday,’ Wanda said. ‘Surely they won’t be open?’

‘Demolizioni
usually only close when it’s too dark to see your money. I wouldn’t be surprised if they opened on Easter Sunday,’ Alberto said.

Together the three of us drove down to the left bank of the Magra where a couple of the
demolizioni
were situated. It was an area of peculiar squalor, one that had until quite recently been almost arcadian, now the sort of place where people shot their rubbish and made themselves scarce.

Here, in the shadow of the bridge, under the abutments, now that the air was growing colder, a couple of tarts, probably despairing of drumming up any business on Easter Monday afternoon, had deserted their posts on the approaches to the bridge and were warming themselves over a fire made from discarded cardboard boxes.

So far as the
demolizioni
were concerned, there was very little to choose between them. Each was surrounded by corrugated iron fences with the tops cut into spikes. Both were guarded by Germanic-type dogs, four to each compound, which patrolled the perimeters on running wires.

Made free to go where we wanted, after the dogs had been called off, we drifted down avenues on either side of which an extraordinary variety of marine objects were thrown up, as if by some gigantic storm: Carley floats, life belts, rafts, sidelights, huge swathes of rope and chain, blocks, bo’s’ns’ chairs, teak pin-rails from sailing ships still equipped with belaying pins, binnacles, mahogany chart-houses, fire extinguishers, engine room telegraphs, companion ladders, lifeboats, bundles of oars, signs that read ‘First Class Saloon’ and ‘To the Swimming Bath’, teak gratings,
fog horns, rockets, enormous white ventilators, anchors, hundreds of ash trays, cane chairs and wooden ones with extension pieces on the arms for first-class passengers to put their feet up on while drinking beef tea, signal flags, wash basins as big as fonts, mahogany-panelled lavatory basins with a vertical flushing handle which, when you pulled it, gave you the feeling that you were bombing a city, stacks of timber, including masts and planking.

Eventually we ended up buying a whole lot of pine planking that had come out of a ship built around 1903, and some beams to support them. The only wood we couldn’t find was for the window frames and shutters, and it had to be bought new elsewhere.

The terms included free transport to I Castagni, cash on delivery. Alberto had exaggerated the toughness of the proprietor. The only snag was, as Alberto had predicted, that the planking was full of nails. He gave the job of extracting them to his young son, which he accomplished in two evenings, after school. He was paid the going rate for anyone pulling six-inch nails out of old ships’ planking.

The visit to the
demolizioni
also yielded a number of other useful objects: a teak stepladder that would be useful for reaching the door in the back wall of the loft, the one up in the air, and a couple of teak gratings for the floor of the bathroom; but what I would really have liked was a fog horn. Never mind, I was getting a bidet, you can’t have everything in this world.

The next week went like a flash; but it wasn’t so bad because we knew that we could rely on the
esperti.
By a stroke of good fortune Renato was able to work a full day every day, instead of only a few hours in the afternoon and evening after his ‘real’ work was finished.

In the course of it he and Alberto, with a bit of help from me in my guise of carrier of raw materials up ladders, were able to put a new roof on Attilio’s bedchamber, and on most of the loft.

During this time Bergamaschi managed to get the plumbing in
all the way down the trenches I had dug as far as the septic tank; and when he was quite sure the pipes weren’t going to leak all over the place, he told me to fill the trenches in. I filled them in.

Before doing this, early on Tuesday morning, Wanda and I made a flying visit to a couple of marble yards near Carrara in order to find a sink for the kitchen and a wash basin for the bathroom. There we were able to acquire, ready-made, a kitchen sink, a wash basin and a draining board, all fashioned out of gleaming white marble. And by that evening all these and the shower were in position.

With the plumbing in it was now possible to dig up the cobbles under the shower in the bathroom and for Renato to cement and tile that part of the floor where the waste pipe was. We left the rest of the cobbles where they were for the time being. Although picturesque they were impossible to keep clean, and eventually they had to be replaced by tiles, which would have cost a fortune if I had not been given a lot of old ones by Tranquillo. Unfortunately most of them still had rock-hard cement on their backs, which had to be chipped off with a hammer, which took me ages. That same year, Renato transformed the kitchen and the living room by flooring them with
terrazzo
, made by setting marble chips into a layer of mortar and polishing the surface.

It was this afternoon that Bergamaschi performed his famous
coup de main
with the water heater. That same afternoon we also got hold of an electrician, Signora Angiolina’s nephew, her sister’s son, to put in some temporary wiring. We could now have hot showers.

While all this was going on Wanda whitewashed the whole interior of the house, with the exception of Attilio’s ‘secret’ room, giving it two coats of Vellutina, a huge job, but at least it looked more cheerful. The worm-eaten floor of the loft would have to be replaced while we were back in England, using the planking
and the joists we had bought from the
demolizioni.
The big tree trunk that was the principal support of the roof in our upstairs bedroom – the one that was split almost from end to end – was fitted with a wrought-iron collar, made by Attilio, a miniature Vulcan at his forge, and never gave any more trouble. And finally we painted the floor of the fireplace in the kitchen, what we hoped was the permanent tomb of the
scarafaggi
, a deep, appropriately mournful shade of
sangue di bue.

Each evening, too done-in to bother about cooking, we each had a delicious hot shower and then drove down to the Arco, the little
trattoria
at Caniparola, for supper.

The son of the Signora who ran the place was studying to be an architect at Pisa, but when he was at home he used to help out by acting as a waiter. It was he who later arranged to take us to see the splendid baroque interior of the Malaspina villa. The Signora’s female assistant, who also did some of the cooking, was ginger-haired and rustic. What we were given there was simple home cooking, the sort described as
nostrano.

By the end of this punishing week, with only a couple of days to go before we were due to leave for England, we were both beginning to feel that there must be something a bit more entertaining than spending twelve hours a day making I Castagni habitable, which it certainly wasn’t going to be this time round, or this coming autumn either, unless we found some beds.

So when Signora Angiolina suggested that we might like to go on a wild asparagus hunt, and take Attilio with us – apparently she had a bit of land about half a mile away on which wild asparagus grew – we were happy to accept her invitation. ‘It’s a good year for
asparagi selvatici
,’ she said.

The following morning, armed with baskets to put the asparagus in – always a rash thing to do, take a basket in anticipation
when looking for temperamental, unpredictable wild growths such as asparagus and
funghi
– we set off in Indian file for the asparagus field, with Signora Angiolina leading the way and Attilio bringing up the rear, talking away, if to anyone, probably to Wanda,
‘la mia padrona’,
occasionally coming to a halt in order to observe more closely some previously unnoticed wonder of the world which had presented itself for his delectation, rather as my father used to when confronted in the street by someone with a bottle nose.

We followed a series of grassy footpaths that passed beneath long pergolas of vines, from time to time skirting barns that gave the impression, quite wrongly, of being disused, and small houses, some of them a bit similar to I Castagni of which we and Attilio were the occupiers.

On one occasion early on in our occupation of I Castagni we visited one of these houses and took away some implements under the impression that it was an abandoned house, only to find to our horror that it wasn’t.

The only sorts of asparagus I had eaten up to now were herbaceous varieties grown from seed which, after a slow beginning, emerged from the well-manured soil in which they had been planted, as vegetables of various lengths and diameters bearing some resemblance to miniature ballistic missiles, although other comparisons as to their appearance have been made.

What we were now, all four of us, confronted with in Signora Angiolina’s field, which was much wilder than any English field, or any other field I had seen anywhere, for that matter, was something very different. Cultivated asparagus was taken from the earth. These
asparagi selvatici
were waving about in mid-air and thin enough to be very nearly invisible. It was now that I discovered that I had left my bifocals at I Castagni which, so far as gathering wild asparagus was concerned, rendered me more or less
hors de combat.
All I could see were the hands of the other three when
they snatched the asparagus out of what should have been, if I had only had my glasses, my field of vision.

At the end of half an hour the entire crop had been harvested. Signora Angiolina and Attilio, who had some difficulty in reaching the highest ones but employed a thin stick with a crook in it for the purpose, had each succeeded in quarter filling their baskets. Wanda had less and my basket had only about half a dozen shoots in it. I was consumed with envy, which I did my best to conceal. Nevertheless, insubstantial though they appeared, these
asparagi selvatici
, when boiled until tender and then eaten cold rather than hot with vinaigrette dressing, were delicious.

When the time came for us to go back to England, Attilio’s farewell offering was very acceptable but difficult to deal with: a great earthenware jar that looked as if it had been dug up at Luni that contained the entire olive oil harvest of I Castagni for the previous year which had been pressed at the
frantoio
at Caniparola. Even after giving him a generous quantity it had been difficult to find any containers at this late stage to transport it in; but eventually we found some plastic containers that were sufficiently large. Signora Angiolina’s gift to us was a vast bottle of red wine, which was equally difficult to find room for.

We left for England at five in the morning when the sun was just beginning to shoot up behind the Apuan Alps. It was going to be a wonderful day, even the radio said so, something spring days had mostly been able to avoid being up to now. The vines in our
vigneto
had already begun to sprout small shoots.

When we went to say goodbye to the Dadà, Tranquillo had already left for the woods but Rina was there, looking more like Artemis than ever, to see us off, give us lots of hot coffee to fortify us for the journey to Le Havre and gifts of
salsa di pomodoro
and
pesto.

‘Come back soon,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget us.’ It was the nicest thing anyone could say to us.

It was not until the end of September that we were able to return to I Castagni, just a few days before the
vendemmia
was due to begin. Usually, the grapes in these parts were not ready to be picked any earlier than this. The
vendemmia
began after the Festa di San Remigio which took place on 1 October, the saint who had baptized Clovis, King of the Franks, and whose effigy looked down on everyone a trifle severely from high above the altar in the church in Fosdinovo. It was said that it always rained on the Festa di San Remigio.

One important piece of local news was that Rina’s baby was due the following spring. It turned out to be a fine boy who was christened Michele. In spite of this she still contrived to milk Bionda, her cow, almost until the moment of his arrival.

The other was that ever since we left for England Signora Angiolina’s sister and brother-in-law had been living with her. During this time they had managed to have a house built next door to Signora Angiolina’s place. This seemed like some sort of record as it had not even been started when we left for home, although it was not completely ready for occupation.

It was a single-storey building with four rooms including a kitchen and a bathroom, an almost unheard of luxury then that
few people actually made use of, even if they possessed one, and it had an ample veranda which sheltered it from the sun and from which the passing traffic could be observed, altogether an ideal place for a pair of
pensionati
such as Signor and Signora Tarsiero.

Signora Fernanda, Signora Angiolina’s sister, was at that time still dark-haired and very, very thin. Her husband, Signor Giuseppe, was a handsome man with a fine head of grey hair and an impressive Roman nose. He looked like a better sort of Roman senator. Both he and his wife were still full of energy. They had needed to be to get a house built in six months; but in fact they had already got permission to build it long before we arrived on the scene.

Both Signor Giuseppe and Signora Fernanda had spent many years of their lives cultivating fruit and vegetables and a large vineyard for some landlords at a place called Pagazzana in the valley of the Magra, beyond Sarzana. It had been a hard life and they had worked like Trojans. Now they had retired.

Signora Fernanda’s favourite expression, the equivalent to her sister’s
‘Hai fatto bene!’
was ‘
mosca!
’ which in Italian means either ‘fly!’ or ‘Moscow!’, depending on whether the ‘m’ is a capital or not. When Wanda asked her what she meant when she used it, was it
Mosca!
or
mosca!
, she said
mosca!
with a small ‘m’. No, she couldn’t remember where she learnt it but it was long ago, when she was a young girl.

When Signora Fernanda was going flat out in the conversation game, and she spoke rather rapidly, we both used to try and guess when
‘mosca!’
might come up. It was a bit like playing roulette. ‘Now!’ Wanda used to say in English to avoid hurting the Signora’s feelings; but it never did come up at that moment. Sometimes it didn’t come up for ages, which made it even more welcome when it did.

Signor Giuseppe had a good singing voice which he used to
exercise on his way down the hill to visit us at I Castagni. He also wrote poetry, poems about the arcadian beauty of the woods which surrounded us and the general salubriousness of the place. One, rather surprisingly for a man of the Left, was addressed to the Madonna.

We always used to look forward to listening to Signor Giuseppe reciting his poems. He made the world about us seem and sound good, much better than when he went on, as he sometimes did, about the State of the Nation, about which he had strong feelings; ‘the Nation’ being Italy and the Italians. Listening to him on this subject always left me wondering how Italy could survive at all and why, in spite of doing all the wrong things economically and not paying tax on a grand scale, Italians not only seemed to enjoy themselves more than we did but appeared to live better, in everyday terms, than we did.

Signora Angiolina was very happy that they had come to live next door. Now Signor Giuseppe would be able to take over her vineyard which her husband had planted but which was now showing signs of neglect. This was also good for Signor Giuseppe who otherwise would have to start one from scratch.

We too were happy at the thought of Signor Giuseppe arriving amongst us. We badly needed his advice about what we should do with our own vineyard. The whole property required a lot of new vines and these would have to be planted in fresh soil that had not had vines growing in it for many years, otherwise, we were told, they wouldn’t flourish.

I would have liked to have asked Attilio to take over the job of tending the vines but, Leonardo da Vincean genius though he might be in so many fields, the making of drinkable wine was another of the few skills that seemed to have escaped him. That is if some of the wines he had made at I Castagni were anything to go by. When Attilio opened a bottle of wine of his own production strange unidentifiable things sometimes used to come to the surface, as I remembered them surfacing when, as a sailor many years previously, I had passed through the Sargasso Sea. However, we could hardly complain. In our absence he had cut up a whole lot more wood we had got from Tranquillo the previous Easter,
into more burnable lengths. I was pleased and proud to be liked by Attilio; but the one he was really devoted to was Wanda. This was partly because whenever possible she used to ask him his opinion on important matters connected with the property, which probably no one had ever done before, and partly because she was always giving him things to repair and he loved mending things. The modern idea of ‘replacing the unit’ if anything broke would have been as repugnant to Attilio as it was to Wanda.

To carry out these repairs he used to retire to the ‘secret’ room for hours at a time where he could be heard chuckling to himself as he worked away and carrying on all sorts of what would have been fascinating conversations with himself if only anyone else had been able to hear what he was saying. Now, of course, they could be taped. Once he repaired a large English ceramic meat dish that had broken into three pieces, using iron rivets. Often he went away to do
giornate
; but when either of us asked him whether things had gone well his invariable answer was
‘Non c’è male’,
‘Not too bad’. And with that one had to be content. But he did tell us some of his stories. We used to invite him to sit by the fire in the evenings with a few glasses of wine, which he really enjoyed. He told them with his eyes closed: the wonderful adventures of the Green Seaweed Man and so on.

Now for the first time, the house began to look like a house, albeit a rather battered one, less like a Stone Age fort. It now had a roof, or rather a number of roofs, and the windows had glass in them and were fitted with shutters, instead of being gaping holes in the masonry; but there were still more windows for me to excavate in these walls, and I started work on them with a hammer and chisel.

Attilio made another memorable contribution to the rehabilitation of I Castagni while we were away. With the aid of another old and almost equally diminutive man called Dadà Settimo, a member
of another ramification of the Dadà family, and a seventh son, hence his name, he built a splendid pergola on to the front of the house where the bread oven was, using timber left over from what we had bought at the
demolizioni.
They had then planted it with creeping vines which were now clambering up it at a tremendous rate. This meant that, if all went well, we would soon be able to eat outside in the middle of the day which at the moment was impossible in the hot weather because of the absence of shade.

Dadà Settimo and his wife lived in a little house on the edge of the next bend on the main road going up to Fosdinovo, high up on the far side of the torrent from us. He had been in the Alpini in the First War and had fought against the Austro-Hungarians in the Alps. He had a small black moustache, always wore his Alpini hat and looked the absolute model of an Alpino. He used to attend Alpini reunions at which, he said, some pretty tough drinking used to take place.

He and his wife had a married daughter, Signora Maria, whose husband, Signor Marchini Orfeo, worked in the naval dockyard at La Spezia. Orfeo had also been a member of the Alpini in the Second World War and had gone to Russia with the Divisione Giulia. He had been one of the comparatively few to survive the Russian winter and return home relatively unscathed.

Countless Italian soldiers had died in the Steppes because they were appallingly badly equipped – instead of being issued with thick stockings and lined boots to wear in mid-winter they had been given pieces of cloth to wind round their feet. The majority were never heard of again.

Orfeo was a gentle person, nothing like one imagined an ex-Alpino who had fought in Russia in winter would be. He had been a driver with, eventually, nothing to drive when temperatures plummeted way below zero. When he smiled the smile used to break slowly over his face. It was like the sunrise coming.

The Marchinis had a grown-up daughter; all five of them – Marchinis and Dadà – lived in the house. It was difficult to imagine how they contrived to do so but they did. We saw a lot of them, except the old lady, Settimo’s wife, who was ill and rarely appeared. Their property was linked to ours by a labyrinth of paths so that, when they were working in one of their minute fields, they were doing so immediately overhead and we could carry on a conversation with them at the same time. Sometimes in the evenings we used to drop in on them. When we did I talked to Signor Settimo and Signor Orfeo about war, and Wanda talked to Signora Maria, who was dark and very thin and had bad eyesight – most people were thin in these hills – about how to grow roses. Everyone was interested in her Queen Elizabeths – a subject about which almost everyone in the neighbourhood was ignorant, as they were of most other kinds of ornamental gardening. And sometimes we would stay to dinner.

In fact we didn’t visit Signor Orfeo and Signora Maria as much as we would have liked to have done because every time we did so they loaded us with wine and vegetables, and at that time we had not got all that much to reciprocate with.

Eventually, the bringing of presents from England for all these various families became a major preoccupation, involving a complicated protocol. There were lots of people and families to visit now. And quite a number of these were beginning to visit us, sometimes doing so quite deliberately when we were not at home, leaving behind them some offering, and making us rack our brains to try and guess who it had been.

Now there was mist in the early mornings and the vines were heavy with grapes, even our own in their ancient
pergole.

It was interesting. With all the evidence that we eventually accumulated over many years there seemed to be no doubt to us that I Castagni was a place with a remarkable resistance to decay.
One in which things, whether they were doors, or vines, or main beams such as the one the adder cast his or her skin on with such regularity, or whatever they were, teetered on the verge of collapse but never collapsed completely. And now it was, in the late afternoons, together again after having been separated for so long, that Signora Angiolina and Signora Fernanda could be seen and heard coming down the hill and over the torrent, bone-dry now, to the front door of I Castagni, armed with their sickles to cut what grass and alfalfa there still was to feed their rabbits.

And when they had cut enough and bundled it up in their aprons, they used to plonk themselves down on the stone seat below the oven and have long conversations with Wanda, which always began
‘Ma sa com’è,
Signora Wanda’ (‘But you know how it is, Signora Wanda’), or
‘Ma senta un po’,
Signora Wanda’ (‘But listen a bit, Signora Wanda’), before getting down to the sometimes gory details of what was going on in the locality. What they never did, ever, nor any of the other ladies in the area, was speak badly of their immediate neighbours.