A Small Place in Italy (6 page)

Some windows were draped in funereal Lenten black, others were less lugubrious with white lace curtains and some were positively jolly with flowers displayed in them. We passed an ancient Malaspina theatre that was no longer a theatre and a Malaspina Mint that was no longer a mint. It only minted fifty genuine coins in its entire history. The rest, which were exported to Genova and France, were all false.

And there were shops, some of them minute, also illuminated
with candles. Shops that sold wine, spades, handsaws and other ironware, hand-knitted socks with the natural grease still in them, and magazines giving the latest low-down on what was currently going on with the Grimaldis in the Principality of Monaco, events on which all Italy was hooked.

And we passed a
caffè
from the windows of which some of the male occupants looked out on the procession with the curious, slightly derisory air with which men in Italy look out of the windows of
caffès
at religious processions. That is if they are agnostic, communist, or simply not taking part in the procession for their own private reasons, keeping, as it were, their cards close to their chests.

That is also if they hadn’t got wives or mothers or grandmothers taking part in these processions. If they had, and if they had any sense and wanted a quiet life, they would keep a much lower profile and get on with watching TV, or playing
briscola
, a sort of whist, and not start looking out of the window with that superior expression on their faces.

By now the wind was tremendous. At one point we came out on some ramparts below the Castello and there a savage blast caught the crucifix, bringing the bearers to their knees and almost throwing it the ground, which would have been a
malaugurio
– and forcing the men carrying the banner to furl it.

Now we were rounding the foot of the keep of the Castello, a huge fortress in which Dante had been put up in 1306, while he wrote some stanzas of the
Inferno
, as he had apparently been, that same year, in the castle at Castelnuovo di Magra, the one we had seen the first time we had driven up the road from Caniparola, before making one of his mysterious disappearances from circulation. And as we were following this trench-like alley which ran between the dwellings and the walls, we could see the castle domestics looking down on us from overhead.

From now on most of the processional route was downhill. The first and last stop was at the Church of San Remigio in the middle of the town, the principal church of Fosdinovo.

Here the Crucified Christ was taken in, together with the now unfurled banner and followed by the rest of us, for the Adoration of the Cross.

Now the priest sang
Ecce Lignum Crucis
(Behold the Wood of the Cross), removed his shoes and adored it, prostrating himself three times and finally bending down and kissing the feet on the crucifix. Immediately after this the rest of the congregation went up to the crucifix two by two and prostrated themselves, while a number of
Improperia
, tender reproaches of Christ to his people, were sung, such as
Popule meus, quid feci tibi? aut in quo contristavi te? Respondi mihi.
(My people, what have I done to thee? or in what have I grieved thee? Answer me.)

The interior of the church was painted in a cold, bluish-grey colour, as cold as the air inside the church, and our breath smoked. Originally a Romanesque church, it had been destroyed by fire in 1600 and rebuilt as a baroque church by the Marchese Pasquale Malaspina with large numbers of magnificent side chapels, ornamented with alternating smooth and twisted Corinthian columns. It also had a barrel roof decorated with an abundance of frescoes but these were all destroyed in the fighting for the Gothic Line in the last year of the war when the town was bombarded.

In it under a Gothic arch, high up to the left of the altar, near the presbytery, was the tomb of Galeotto Malaspina, feudal lord of the region – the Malaspina acquired the castle in 1340 – and he died in 1367. Wearing armour his effigy reclined on a marble tomb chest, its panels ornamented with bas-reliefs.

Much higher still above the altar there was another marble effigy, carved by an unknown sculptor in the fourteenth century,
the seated figure of San Remigio, patron saint of Fosdinovo, otherwise St Remigius, Bishop of Reims. Said to be the greatest orator of his age, on Christmas Day AD 496, he baptized Clovis, King of the Franks in the cathedral there, with the greatest imaginable pomp and ceremony, and the words, ‘Bow thy head meekly, O Sicambrian. Adore what thou hast burnt and burn what thou hast adored.’ (The Sicambrian cohort of the Franks was raised by the Romans on the spot where Budapest now stands.) Some of the bones of the saint were kept in the church at Fosdinovo in a silver reliquary ornamented with branching candlesticks.

For us this was the end of the procession. Now Christ was dead. We were all wet and cold but when I turned to offer Attilio a lift down the hill to I Castagni, he was nowhere to be seen and although I drove down several bends looking for him I failed to find him. He had simply melted away.

The following morning, Holy Saturday, the world had a more cheerful aspect – cold, clear and almost cloudless, everything wet and sparkling after the rain.

There were even a few bold, migrant birds, some of which had the temerity to sing, making what would be, if they had any sense, only a brief touchdown in Italy before setting off for countries in higher latitudes whose inhabitants were more friendly to wild birds than the Italians who could only visualize them impaled on skewers and cooked.

Good Friday had been winter, with foul weather, black vestments for the clergy and altars stripped of everything, including the Host.

By comparison Holy Saturday was spring. Even Lent had lost much of its severity, with the clergy in violet and white vestments, white linen cloths spread on the altars in the churches, and grains of fresh incense set fire to by the priests with a flint outside the main door of the church, a fire that would subsequently be used to light the candles inside the building that had previously been extinguished.

We ourselves got up at six o’clock to start mobilizing helpers in the work of reconstructing I Castagni.

We got the keys of the house from Signora Angiolina who was already up long since, happy now that she knew that we were going to be, as she put it,
sempre con noi
, always with us, using the regal ‘we’, although we had made it clear that the most we could hope for would be a visit two or three times a year, and possibly a flying one while on the way to somewhere else. That is, unless I got the sack, in which case we would probably have to stay for ever.

We were really quite glad that she didn’t offer to come down to the house with us but she did give us some eggs, some green salad, a bottle of wine and a loaf of delicious, newly baked bread.

But before all this we asked what news there was of Attilio, now playing one of his innumerable roles, this one his disappearing-into-thin-air-Attilio-the-Houdini-of-I Castagni act. She said she hadn’t seen him since the previous day, just after midday, when he had set off to take part in the procession, which was why she had had no idea that we had arrived in Fosdinovo. ‘You did well,’ she said, using her immortal phrase, ‘not to have attempted to spend the night in the house in such weather. It might have ended badly.’

‘Today,’ she said, ‘Attilio has gone to do
giornata
, and he may not be back here now for some days as the farm where he has gone to work is some distance beyond Fosdinovo, at a place called Foce il Cuccù [the Cuckoo’s Mouth], but of course he won’t work on Easter Day.’

Giornata
meant that he had gone to work for someone and was being paid on a daily basis, either digging or hoeing or doing some other sort of farm work, or else repairing various agricultural instruments, making new handles for those which were broken, sharpening scythes and doing any other jobs Attilio was capable of performing. These, as we already knew, could be almost anything at all, providing that they weren’t connected with engines,
and he would probably even be able to deal with these, if the need arose.

‘Attilio is one of those few people who will do a
giornata
any more,’ Signora Angiolina said, ‘because the pay is so bad. He should be paid much more. People take advantage of him.’

The most important item of news, however, that Signora Angiolina had to impart was that although Attilio was still sleeping in his little bedroom, and could continue to do so, so far as we were concerned, he had moved out of the kitchen. A neighbouring farmer had offered him the use of the kitchen which had its own water supply on the ground floor of one of his barns, while we were in residence at I Castagni.

‘You know what he calls you now, Attilio?’ Signora Angiolina said to Wanda as we got into the Land Rover to go down to the house in it for the first time,
‘la mia padrona’,
my boss.

The descent to I Castagni round the bend below Signora Angiolina’s house turned out to be fraught with difficulty, even with a short-wheelbase Land Rover. It was a very tight and narrow bend with a tree on its inside edge which stood in relation to the bend itself as the central support does in a spiral staircase, while the outside edge of the bend overhung a steep bank about twenty feet high. At the foot of it there was a
vasca
, a common object in rural Italy, a large rectangular basin lined with cement, used for rinsing clothes, with an inclined marble slab at one end to squeeze and wallop them on. Its water supply came from a spring and was brought to it by a pipe in the bank which had a cork in it to conserve the supply. Whether it belonged to Signora Angiolina or someone else was not clear; but at this time, so far as we were concerned, nothing connected with I Castagni was clear.

On this first descent to the house in the Land Rover, trying to keep as close as possible to the inside of the bend, I contrived to get the rear hubcap hooked on to a stump on the side of the tree
which made it impossible for me to go either backwards or forwards, or to open the door on the driver’s side sufficiently for me to get out. A ludicrous mishap, of a sort I am peculiarly prone to, but not so ludicrous as the one that befell me the time I was driving from Milan to Venice in a jeep in thick fog and the accelerator pedal fell off.

‘What has happened?’ Wanda demanded in her best Slavonic imitation of the Marx Brothers’ Margaret Dumont, one that for me always spells trouble.

‘We’re hooked on a tree,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to get out, otherwise I can’t get out either.’

She got out, rather reluctantly, I thought, as if she was doing me a favour.

‘What I need is a saw,’ I said, after a closer inspection of what had happened.

‘You can’t cut it down, it may not be ours.’

‘I don’t want to cut it down,’ I said. ‘I just want to cut a small bit off it.’

‘Well, ask Signora Angiolina for a saw.’

‘I don’t want to ask Signora Angiolina for a saw,’ I said. ‘If it’s anyone else’s tree it’s probably hers. It would be the worst possible thing to do, tell her I want to cut a bit off one of her trees, especially when we’re getting on so well. You know what
contadini
can be like. Anyway we’ve got a saw of our own.’

‘Where is it?’ she said.

‘I put it behind the front seat, the one you’ve been sitting on. You remember you told me not to bring it so I hid it.’

‘I never told you not to bring it.’

‘Well, that’s what I thought you told me.’

‘The trouble with you is,’ Wanda said, ‘you never listen.’

So I cut the offending protuberance off the tree with our saw and covered the scar with a bit of damp earth that was handy.
Then, in what looked like unpropitious circumstances as far as our personal relationship was concerned, we drove on down to claim our property across the torrent, by which time the old I Castagni magic had re-asserted itself and we had become friends again. It had been a close thing as to whether we had a row – what Wanda calls a ‘rowl’ – or not and I promised myself that I would make it a priority to reinforce this crumbling outside curve by driving stakes into it with a sledge hammer and ramming in some hard core.

‘Remind me to buy a sledge hammer and a crowbar when we go shopping,’ I said to Wanda.

But of course she didn’t and I never did reinforce the curve even though, although I didn’t know it, there were already a number of hammers, some of them sledge, and a selection of crowbars on the premises. More urgent matters were to claim our attention, anyway, without bothering about a lump of stump the size of a matchbox.

When we arrived at the house a large frog was sunning itself on the wet grass in front of it, completely unafraid. It seemed to us at the time a good omen for the future.

When we finally managed to get the door of the kitchen open with the twisted key, the door which opened itself whenever there was a south-westerly wind of force 6 or above, we found that Attilio had done a great deal of work in the kitchen in anticipation of our arrival.

He had demolished the wattle-and-daub partition which had been infested with woodworm and carried it out behind the house and burned it. From now on, whenever we were at I Castagni, a fire burned almost all the time to dispose of the vast quantities of more or less inflammable material that had to be got rid of.

He had then swept the whole room clean, and the bedroom on the upper floor, and had sawn up an old, dead, iron-hard olive
tree into logs of a manageable size for firewood with a primitive saw in which the tension of the blade was maintained by a twisted cord, and a double-bitted axe, a dangerous weapon with which one edge can be used for cutting, the other, more bevelled, for splitting providing the user doesn’t embed the top blade in his skull when raising it into the air. And he had collected a lot of dead chestnut branches and cut them up too, as well as providing a couple of bales of dried vine shoots which he had pruned after the previous
vendemmia
, the grape harvest, and which would make excellent kindling. There was even a sack of charcoal for the
fornello a carbone.

Not only all this but somehow, using a couple of ladders, with what must have been, for one so small, a superhuman effort, he had managed to haul a huge old green tarpaulin over the most ruined part of the roof of the loft and secure it with ropes at the four corners.

But what expressed Attilio’s sensibility more than anything else was that he had taken a saw to the wooden seat of the lavatory and had enlarged it to a size more suited to our adult proportions. What was clear was that Attilio would have to come on the payroll without delay.

‘It’s a bit difficult to know where to begin with the house,’ I said. ‘We need help, a lot of help.’

‘The best thing we can do,’ Wanda said, ‘is to have something to eat and some of Signora Angiolina’s wine. Then we’ll go and look for a bricklayer and try and get a roof on the place.’

It was still only seven o’clock in the morning but we were terribly short of time. The next ten days were all we had at our disposal before we returned to England. In a moment of fantasy I wondered what would happen if I cabled the Editor of the
Observer
, and asked him if I was being missed, and if not, could I stay on for a bit longer; but I didn’t wonder for long.

What we were in urgent need of were drains, a septic tank for them to gurgle their way into, and an inside lavatory. And where was the waste water from the mini-sink in the kitchen going at the moment? These were the sort of problems with which we were currently tormenting ourselves and which made it difficult for us to sit down and contemplate the rural scene.

In the loft we needed a completely new roof, apart from the tiles, the majority of which were sound but could fall and be shattered at any moment, but they didn’t. It also needed a new floor or ceiling, according to whether we were upstairs or downstairs, with all the necessary beams and planking. We also had to have, as a matter of urgency, unless we were resigned to him dying of rheumatic fever, or some such similar complaint, a new roof for Attilio’s room.

To do all these things we urgently needed the services of a plumber, a carpenter, and a
muratore
, a man who was both a bricklayer and a stonemason, each of whom would have to be fit enough to crawl all over this mouldering, highly dangerous structure without falling off it.

We were also going to need quite soon, if we were not to be electrocuted on the present amazing system in which an electric light bulb was soldered to the main, the presence of an electrician.

The upper part of the loft was going to be a bedroom with access to it from the outside door at the back, the one in mid-air to which the only access at the moment was by a rickety ladder. The lower part was going to be a combined bathroom, lavatory, dressing room and storeroom.

It was the need to have the lavatory on the ground floor below what was going to be the bedroom in the loft that meant that it was going to be impossible to leave the ladder and the trap door where they were at present, giving access to the loft from inside
the building. In future anyone residing in the loft wanting to use the bathroom would have to descend a ladder at the rear of the building and make a journey round two sides of it in the open air.

Perhaps we should have thought of this before we bought the house, but we didn’t. What we now had to do was to render the floor/ceiling between the bathroom and the upper bedroom sound and smell proof. Eventually we were successful with the smells, with the sounds less so.

Now, in readiness for our first night on the premises, we blew up our airbeds and unrolled our sleeping bags, as we had done in many an uncomfortable spot throughout the world – the worst being a rat-infested railwaymen’s institute on the banks of the Ganges. Remembering this Wanda elected to sleep on top of an old chest in case there were any mice in residence, the mice in these parts, according to Signora Angiolina, attaining the size of small cats.

We also tested the crazy electric light system which Signora Angiolina had told us how to switch on at the main and which, to our surprise, worked, but only in the kitchen.

After this we set off to drive a few bends up the hill to where the carpenter lived.