A Small Place in Italy (14 page)

It was a memorable
merenda.
Almost everything was homemade and of the best. There was
pecorino
cheese brought down by a shepherd whose flock was in the high pastures beyond a place called Campocecina; there was the same sort of
mortadella
we had eaten at lunch on Easter Sunday; and there was
coppa
, a
salame
made from pig’s head, the neck, muscles and rind, which comes from around Parma. And there were great loaves of bread baked in the Dadà oven, and lots of last year’s wine, red and white, and glasses to drink it from, and sharp knives to cut the bread, which
some people did, sawing towards their chests or bosoms in what appeared to be a highly dangerous fashion.

As always at a picnic there was a certain amount of holding back among those invited to take part, but not all that much, and very soon everyone was tucking in and talking away while the bottles began to circulate.

The conversation was difficult to follow as it was conducted for the most part in dialect and the speakers had their mouths stuffed with gobbets of
pane nostrano, mortadella, formaggio
and
coppa
, just as ours were, or else were knocking back the
vino
, just as we were too.

To some extent the talk concerned itself with ancient rights and wrongs, particularly differences of opinion about boundaries and rights of way which one could see, only by looking at the terrain, would be about as safe to get involved in as entering a minefield, as we would one day discover for ourselves.

But much more popular as a subject of conversation with everyone were the current scandals – about what happened when her doctor had sent Signora A. off from Sarzana to Montecatini Terme for a fortnight’s spa treatment for arthritis and she had returned home after completing the course with her arthritis cured, but
incinta
, in the family way. All because a newly hired masseur got lost on the way to give a male customer the treatment and had ended up in a cubicle with the Signora in the ladies’ wing.

And how a similar fate, if that is how it could be described, had recently befallen a priest’s housekeeper at the ripe old age of forty-one, who had presented Don Whatever-His-Name-Was with a living and breathing male ex-voto.
‘Un miracolo’
was how the mother had described it.
‘Un’ospite inatteso’
was how one of the female grape pickers described the infant, ‘An unexpected guest’.

And about Signor C. and his wife who had a modest but thriving
bar/ristorante
on the Via Aurelia that had recently been closed
after a raid by the police because it was alleged that it was also being used as a
bordello.
And why no further action was going to be taken in the matter because Signor C.’s wife, who also did the accounts for her husband’s
bar/ristorante/bordello
, was the daughter of a police inspector, which was why Signor C. got away with a not very large fine, for using his premises as a twelve-bedroomed hotel when it was only licensed as a
bar/ristorante
. The following year, Signor and Signora C.’s enterprise found itself included in a list of recommended hotels.

And about how a postman from a place in the valley of the Magra had found himself running into danger when he delivered a registered letter to a lady from her husband who was supposed to be far away in a tanker in the Persian Gulf; but walked in just as the Signora, who was of an ample size, had invited the postman in for a quick glass of wine while she signed for it.

‘For a
“brindisi”,
a toast to my husband’s safe return,’ was how she described it.

‘He would have needed one of these
tramalli
to get on top of her, that
postino
would,’ someone said.

‘It’s not true that he would need a ladder,’ one man said. ‘He’s got such a big
cazzo
that he could have done it lying on his back on the floor, and she could have been on the bed.’

‘How do you know,’ several people asked, ‘about his
cazzo
being so big?’

‘I was at school with him, I saw it when I was in
scuola media
. He showed it to me in the
gabinetto.
He was very proud of it. Anyone could have a look, but if you weren’t a friend you had to give him a sweet.’

‘Would he let you touch it?’ an elderly lady, who looked a pillar of propriety, asked.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but you had to give him a lot of sweets and I never had enough. Besides, I was never a close friend.’

The only boring conversations were the ones directed at the two of us by people we had never met before. How many children had we got? Only two! And why was the weather so
brutta
in
Inghilterra
? And were we friendly with
la Regina
and if so did we see her often; and did we like
l’Italia
– ‘
Bella l’Italia, non è vero?’
And did we have wine in
Inghilterra
and
caccia
, and what was the food like, and were either of us
Protestanti
? (Great relief when Wanda announced that she wasn’t; a lot of sympathy for me – frequent use of the word
poveretto!
– for having been born one.) And what did we think of Pope Paul VI? Whereas all we wanted was to hear more about the lady whose husband was supposed to be on a tanker in the Persian Gulf, or whatever it was that was under discussion at that particular moment.

It was a happy scene; the women and girls with their short skirts and aprons and their headscarves – the big straw hats they wore in the open fields when the sun was high were no good under the
pergole
as they kept on getting knocked off by the branches overhead. With their scarves on they looked like participants in an Italian version of
The Pirates of Penzance.

And the men were in their oldest but not dirtiest clothes, the more elderly wearing corduroy trousers and waistcoats, the younger ones in jeans; clothes that had been cobbled together with infinite patience by wives and mothers and grandmothers with the leftovers from other clothes, so that some of them looked like patchwork quilts.

Then, after we had finished eating, we lay on our backs for a few minutes, looking up at the sky through the now autumnal leaves, listening to the drone of the insects, not all of them of a friendly disposition; listening to the now diminishing conversation which had become a drone also, carried on now by only the most determined gas-bags. There was not the sight or sound of a bird. To anyone coming here from England their absence from the
countryside was uncanny. The following year a nightingale settled in the wood above I Castagni, thrilled us with its song for a while, then departed, came back the next year and the next, and then was never heard or seen again.

But it was not for more than a couple of minutes, this business of lying on one’s back, in my case still thinking about the postman, and gazing at the sky. Then we were on our feet picking up our various cutting implements and our baskets; Rina and the other two girls were packing up the remains of the
merenda
; Tranquillo was starting up the tractor; and we all set off together up the hill to the next
vigneto
, this one of the more modern, open-cast sort, exposing the grapes, mostly red Trebbiano and red Sangiovese and red and white Malvasia and white Vermentino, to the full heat of the sun, and the pickers, both male and female, also.

As we stripped vine after vine rather like locusts, we began to identify things that we would remember the next year and in the following years; but this first
vendemmia
was a journey of discovery: a hollow tree with vines and wild roses climbing up it, only the roses reachable, even with a ladder, the grapes blooming mockingly overhead; a secretive-looking barn without a single window in it; a grass-grown crater made by one of the enormous projectiles fired from the gun on Isola Palmaria in 1945.

As we advanced uphill from one
vigneto
to another with what seemed infinite slowness, rather like a band of beaters at a shoot, more and more enfilades of
pergole
opened up ahead of us on either hand, stretching away into the distance, new worlds that up to now we had not known existed. It was like a voyage of discovery through some uncharted, arcadian archipelago in a tropical sea. There was no doubt about it being tropical. The sun resembled a huge gold medal suspended by an invisible ribbon high overhead in a sky that appeared to be incandescent, and the wind that had caressed us while we were eating the
merenda
now
two long hours ago had died away. Everyone was sticky and stained with grape juice, and thirsty, but the wine in the wine bottles left over from the
merenda
was by now too warm to satisfy anyone’s thirst, though some of the men, including myself, still had an occasional swig at it. Any water available was lukewarm. Everyone was longing for a wash, a cool drink and a chance to sit down and eat the promised midday meal, about which the two of us knew nothing. We thought the
merenda
was lunch.

In fact it was long after midday, about a quarter to one, before we reached the main road by Signor Giuseppe’s house from which we had set out originally, and went up into the Dadà farmyard.

There, the last of the morning’s gathering of grapes was being fed into the grape crusher, a job which, even more than I had appreciated earlier on, I now recognized as being one I had up to now been incredibly fortunate to avoid being involved in.

Then the clattering noise made by the crusher suddenly ceased and there was nothing but the rumble of voices of the people in the yard. But these were almost immediately obliterated by a succession of ear-splitting noises emitted by the klaxon of the local bus as its driver, a young man with ginger hair, took it up through the bends from Caniparola to Fosdinovo, depositing two other Dadà kinswomen armed and dressed for the
vendemmia
at the bus stop, ‘Just in time for the lunch’, as one of the men who had been emptying
bigonci
into the grape crusher all the morning rather unkindly put it.

A tap in the farmyard fed a deep, oblong marble trough the size and shape of a sarcophagus which, until recently, had been used to store olive oil, a receptacle much in use for this purpose in these parts where marble was commonplace; and there we queued up for a wash after taking a long cool drink from the tap.

Because it was such a hot day, instead of eating indoors as we would normally have done, two long trestle tables had been set
up end to end in the open air under a very old pergola. Heavy with black grapes which, sometime the following day, we would be picking, it gave shade to the whole of the southern side of the house. Down below the valley was lost in haze. The freezing wind and rain that had buffeted us on our way through the streets of Fosdinovo in the procession on Good Friday and the similar conditions that had prevailed even longer ago when we had acquired I Castagni now seemed not just a few months ago but a whole age away. It was difficult to believe that those days had ever happened, just as it was difficult to believe that we had eaten a
merenda
only about two and a half hours previously. Now all we could think of was lunch.

We each sat where we could find a place. There was no established order. No drinks were offered before the meal, just as they weren’t at anyone else’s
vendemmia
, apart from the wine we had drunk at the
merenda
and the occasional swigs we had taken from the bottles down in the fields during the morning. And now, when they did begin drinking, most people drank either red or white, rarely both. To drink both at the same meal was thought to be injurious to health,
‘Fa male allo stomaco’
they all said.

For lunch we were given
brodo
, a clear soup made from beef and chicken stock, followed by
manzo bollito
, boiled beef, stuffed with a mixture of spinach, egg,
grana,
and then
mortadella
, the real
mortadella
from Bologna, the pink sort with peppercorns and squares of white fat and goodness knows what else in it, a sort of sausage I never really liked, although Wanda was crazy about it.

After this there was
pollo arrosto
and
pollo bollito
, roasted and boiled chicken that had been chopped up with a murderous-looking chopper and the bones broken. The chickens killed for these dishes were the sort that up to now had spent their entire lives scratching a living in the Dadà farmyard, the same sort we had already eaten on Easter Sunday.

And there were more of the wonderful potatoes we had also eaten on Easter Sunday, and the bitter green salad called
radicchio
eaten with oil and vinegar, and plates of tomatoes to be eaten with oil, salt and pepper but without vinegar which would make them too acid, and as much wine as anyone felt like drinking. Then there was coffee, but no
grappa
or cognac, and no five minutes’ rest afterwards, either. These were reserved for the evening. By now it was conceded, even by Tranquillo, who usually took a rather pessimistic view of anything growing, that this was going to be a good year for wine.

‘Vorrei chiederle un piacere’
(‘I want to ask you a favour’) said a deep voice from behind me which I recognized immediately as being Tranquillo’s. I knew what was coming next:
‘un po’ di aiuto coi le bigonci’
(‘a bit of help with the
bigonci
’).

He was wearing the peaked cotton cap with the maker’s name on it with which the agents for the tractor had graciously presented him when he bought it. It was an early version of one of those long-peaked platypus caps that US presidents wear when trundling around golf courses in little electrically propelled carts instead of walking and then wonder why they have blood pressure problems.