A Small Place in Italy (22 page)

But there were still shepherds who had big flocks of sheep; and the shepherds still sold the cheese, but nobody sold the wool any more; and no one spun it; and very few people wore black; and the place was full of teenagers, mostly students. In fact it was all much more
allegro
than it had ever been.

As the years passed death claimed many of the people in the countryside round about I Castagni whom we had got to know so well.

The first to die, of what country people always call
un brutto male
(it was never called cancer), after a long and painful illness, was Signor Dadà Modesto, Signora Maria’s husband, a loss she bore with a stoicism which one would have expected of her. Her elder son, Tranquillo, then became head of the family and Rina assumed her mother-in-law’s role in the hierarchy of this
famiglia reale
.

When his father died, Valentino, Tranquillo’s younger brother, returned to Italy from the Middle East where he had been working for an English engineering firm, and subsequently he married Gloria, a good-looking, intelligent local schoolmistress with a will of her own. Valentino then acquired an agency for the sale and servicing of tractors and bulldozers in the area. They had a daughter called Francesca.

Meanwhile Tranquillo’s eldest son, Paolo, who had come to stay with us in Devon – at that time he was still a schoolboy and was much impressed by the treelessness of Dartmoor, the mist and the prison – married Doriana, a lively red-headed girl. They opened
a food shop in Fosdinovo but people were already beginning to desert their village shops, preferring to travel to Sarzana where there was a bigger selection and lower prices, and their venture failed. Subsequently an enormous
supermercato
opened at Ponte Isolone and a number of other small businesses failed too.

Meanwhile, with the aid of their parents, Paolo and Doriana had built a house on the way down from I Castagni to Caniparola where the shops and the communist cell were. There, as the Cani boys had done, he acquired a tractor and hired it out with himself as driver, and with this he was more successful. They, too, had a daughter.

Paolo’s younger brother, Michele, had the great misfortune, soon after leaving school, to damage one of his eyes very seriously when a splinter of metal entered it while he was welding and, in spite of being taken by his parents to see two of the foremost eye specialists, one in Spain, the other in Britain, neither of them was able to save it.

The next to die was Signor Dadà Settimo. His son-in-law, Signor Orfeo, became head of the family, and soon afterwards retired on pension from the dockyard at La Spezia to cultivate his piece of land.

After him it was Signor Cani, one of the so-called foreigners who came originally from Castelnovo ne’ Monti, the father of Alice who made dresses for Wanda, and of her two brothers, the ones who drove tractors.

Another who died was the husband of Signora Zaira, herself the last in the neighbourhood to keep a cow. They lived in one of the picturesque but primitive Malaspina houses, the sort with a plaque on its façade stating which Malaspina had erected it and when. He was a blacksmith but when the demand for handmade agricultural instruments such as spades and forks declined, he went over to making ladders. He also made clogs and he had been
the last to make sledges, for which there was no demand any more. Signora Zaira loved her cow and she used to make wonderful cakes using the cream from the milk.

The next to die was Signor Bergamaschi, the plumber, who installed our Velodoccia, the one he blew a hole in.

And then, at long last, someone we hardly dared to think of dying, because she was so much a part of our lives, Signora Angiolina. She also had the
brutto male
and her sister Signora Fernanda and her brother-in-law Signor Giuseppe took her in to their house and she slept, that is when she slept at all, on a couch in their best room. She was very brave and when the time came for us to return to England she told us that if anything happened to her we were not to come; and that she would always think of us with love, and that the times when we had been at I Castagni were amongst the happiest of her life.

When she died, although Signora Fernanda had promised to let us know, she didn’t do so because Signora Angiolina had begged her not to, and it was not until a week after she was dead and buried that Signora Fernanda sent us the news. It was good to know that Attilio had represented us at the funeral.

As a result of this Silvano, the son of Signor Giuseppe and Signora Fernanda, together with his wife and young daughter came to live up the hill and built a house next door to them. Silvano could do anything from re-wiring a house to making shoes, both skills that he had learned professionally.

The cruellest losses of all were reserved for Renato. His wife suffered a difficult death, also from the
brutto male.
His daughter, Fiorella, who at that time must have been about sixteen, volunteered to go down on her motor scooter, to collect a further supply of morphia for her mother from a chemist’s shop, and was run down and killed on the Via Aurelia by a drunken lorry driver, who was never sent to trial. Her mother died a week or two later.

Renato was a survivor. There was no doubt about that. He had survived the SS massacre at San Terenzo and now he survived the deaths of his wife and daughter; but neither of us dared to think of what went on in his heart. It was at this time, too, that another of our near neighbours died of Alzheimer’s disease.

Another casualty, again a fatal one, was the young priest whom everyone liked so much who had come to bless our house and had worked so hard to cheer up the interior of his church at Fosdinovo. He fell in love with a girl who was a schoolmistress and was excommunicated and forced to leave the priesthood. They were subsequently married and had a child, and then, he was never very strong, he died.

And then we lost Attilio. One spring he began to complain of pains in his stomach –
‘non mi sento molto bene
’ (‘I don’t feel very well’) was about all we could get out of him – and when the local doctor was consulted he gave Attilio a letter to take to the hospital at Carrara. When we arrived there with him he was admitted as suffering from some complaint of the kidneys, which was causing them to fail. Apparently it was not possible to operate.

Sitting up in his hospital bed, dressed in a white nightshirt, for the first time we were seeing him without his cap, he looked like a schoolboy in a dormitory, and chattered away like one. Every time we came to see him he was very pleased, especially to see Wanda,
‘la mia padrona’.

By now he was getting thinner and thinner and more quiet, and then one evening he simply faded away. One moment he was there, the next he was gone, just as he had so often been in life, just as he disappeared outside the Church of San Remigio on that first Good Friday that now seemed, and was, so long ago.

And as these
contadini
we had known so well departed this life, so the little world they had inhabited also began to die and was supplanted by one that would have been difficult for them to comprehend, as difficult as it was for those who survived them, such as ourselves. This radical change in their way of life began to become apparent about the time when, long after the death of Signor Modesto, the Dadà demolished their old farmhouse and built a new one on the same site.

It was far more comfortable than the old farmhouse. They divided this new one into two separate apartments on the upper floor, with balconies that gave a magnificent view of the Magra and the sea. One was for Tranquillo and his family, the other for Valentino and his, each with a bathroom and separate kitchens. Meanwhile Signora Maria still continued to use the original kitchen and her bedroom on the ground floor that had been incorporated in the new building. This led, inevitably, to the family becoming more dispersed (Paolo and his wife already had their own house down the hill) and it became much more rare to see them
en masse
, although on some days of
festa
we still made excursions with Tranquillo and Rina to other parts of Tuscany, and also had midday and evening meals on Sundays with them, either in Tranquillo’s or Valentino’s place where the entire family assembled for the event.

It was at this time that Rina gave up milking her cow, Bionda, as, soon after, did Signora Zaira down the hill, giving up her black cow, Mora; and from now on their two sheds were sad and empty.

This was also a sad moment for us as the twice daily visits to Rina to get the milk, hear all the latest news, and have a few words with Signora Maria and Tranquillo were now much reduced as we couldn’t continue to visit them twice a day without any excuse for doing so. Another result of the reduction in the number of
quadrupeds in the area – mules, horses and cows – was that it became almost impossible to find real manure.

What was now very noticeable, with the discovery of television by the
contadini
, was the decline in conversation. At meal times people previously noted for their animation and powers of repartee could be seen trying to keep one eye on their plates and the other on the screen.

Now most families had cars and there were far fewer people passing our front door, such as Anselmo, fortified with
grappa
, shooting up the hill beyond the torrent on his way to his Monday morning shave, although we still had our daily visits from Orfeo and his wife, Maria, and Signor Giuseppe and Signora Fernanda and also Franca, Nino’s wife. As people walked less, the footpaths gradually became overgrown and forgotten.

By now, people from Sarzana and further afield were beginning to build houses up the hill along the road from Caniparola to Fosdinovo – some of them pseudo-Alpine constructions which looked a bit odd. Their owners surrounded them with high metal fences which, now that no one walked anywhere any more, were often erected across rights-of-way (a subject in which we were no longer interested), without anyone protesting. Within these enclosures, which had electrically operated gates, savage guard dogs roamed untethered. The hillside was rapidly becoming suburbanized, as Caniparola and other such places down in the plain had already been long since. At the Festa di San Remigio the drinking booths with the long tables at which the farmers sat eating and drinking had disappeared a long time ago, although the midday meal at the hotel in Fosdinovo where Wanda had worked as a waitress for so many years was still served.

Now children were going to Elba and Sardinia on holiday, and wearing bikinis. None of the men, except the aged ones, wore suits when working in the fields any more. No one grew wheat. What
really held the rural life in one piece was the
vendemmia
and the harvesting of the olives, both of which still had to be done by hand.

And for us there was the problem of I Castagni. Every autumn after the
vendemmia
we used to set off for England, returning the following spring, leaving the vines and the olives in the hands of Signor Giuseppe, who continued to do the work of pruning the vines, racking the wine during the winter, spraying the grapes throughout the summer and doing all the other work that was necessary, except digging and manuring, jobs that were in my province. And even so I subsequently hired a tractor to do the digging, having discovered that to do something by hand when you can find a machine to do it is just sentimental nonsense. I had already employed one long before this to make a new
vigneto
after the gargantuan efforts Attilio and I had made in digging the first one.

Then one day Signor Giuseppe intimated that he felt that he could no longer continue the task of looking after our
vigneto
and pruning and spraying the vines and harvesting the olives any more; and Signora Fernanda said
‘mosca!’
several times in succession, something we had never heard her do before. She was very sad. Signor Orfeo from up the hill offered to carry on with the work and did for a time but we finally decided, with terrible heart-searchings, to give up. There is a time in everyone’s life to leave a place, however much you love it, and this was it.

We finally left I Castagni in the winter of 1991. The pleasure of having lived in it all those years and meeting all those people who had become associated with it, the survivors of whom we now had to bid farewell to, was incalculable.

As they always had been, the farewells were said the previous evening, and as always we left the following morning before anyone else was up and about, that is except for Rina whose years milking
Bionda at this time of day had made it impossible for her to rid herself of the habit of getting up at first light, and Tranquillo who was already far away with his tractor and trailer in the woods.

As usual when anything of importance happened at I Castagni it was pouring with rain and the last memory we had of it when we turned to look down on it was rather a sad one, of something we had lost for ever.

It has taken us a long time even to begin to realize that we aren’t part of the life of I Castagni any more, and I don’t think we ever will realize it completely as long as we live.

To Wanda and Sonia who
remembered so many things that I had forgotten,
to Lucinda McNeile and Rebecca Lloyd at HarperCollins
and Hazel Orme at Picador for all their help.