A Small Place in Italy

‘Once he made a merry-go-round for the children hereabouts, and paid for a band to play while he made it turn.

‘He also made a cinema in which you looked through a sort of telescope – [what she probably meant was a magic lantern] – at coloured pictures, while a gramophone played music.

‘He even made an aeroplane and launched it with him inside it from a high place on the way to Fosdinovo, but the machine fell to the ground and he was injured. He doesn’t like to be reminded of this.

‘But his greatest skill, because he has such a good memory, is as what we call a narratore di fiabe, a teller of tales. Attilio inherited this skill from his father, who learned it from his father. There were also women who told stories, narratrice, they were called.

‘He knows many stories, Attilio – L’Uomo Verde d’Alghe [The Green Seaweed Man], L’Uomo che Usciva Solo di Notte [The Man who Only Went Out at Night], L’Oca con le Penne [The Goose with the Feathers], Il Drago e la Cavallina Bianca [The Dragon and the Little White Mare], and many, many more. Some are very old, from the time of the Saraceni.’

I knew. I had already heard whoever the old man in the mountains was tell two of his stories, the one about Maestro Giovanni, the other Il Figliolo del Re Portoghese (The Son of the King of Portugal) back in 1943, in the course of the second of which, being very tired, I had fallen asleep, but when I woke up he was still telling it.

‘Now,’ said Signora Angiolina, ‘Attilio is the last narratore in these parts and when he goes that will be the end of the fiabe.

‘He is also very religious,’ she went on. ‘And however difficult things are for him, he never complains,’ she concluded. ‘The other night it began to rain very heavily and I was worried about him. So I went down the hill to the house – he was already in bed – but there was a light shining through a hole in one of the shutters covering the window of his bedroom. I looked through it and there he was, sitting up in bed reading his breviary with his umbrella open while the rain came pouring through the ceiling. The next morning he went up on the roof and repaired it.

‘Of course I didn’t tell him about seeing him in bed with his umbrella. He would not have liked it.’

With what, in card-playing circles, amounted to a full house, it seemed unlikely that Attilio was in any imminent danger of losing his pied à terre, at least not for some time. Somehow we were going to have to reconstruct the house around him, as if he were an Emperor in a Ming Tomb.

FIVE (#ulink_f1aede8e-52dd-5a95-a003-e20ed796e759)

As soon as we got back on the Via Aurelia we telephoned Signor Vescovo and told him that we would like to buy the property and asked him how much the owner, Signor Botti, wanted for it. We didn’t dare use the telephone at the shop or down the hill at the Arco at Caniparola. If we had done so the news of what was happening would probably have been broadcast over the entire neighbourhood.

‘He isn’t asking anything at the moment,’ Signor Vescovo said. ‘As I already told you he hasn’t yet made up his mind whether to sell or not.’ Signor Vescovo was not the sort of man who liked having to repeat himself and he was repeating himself now. ‘If he does decide to sell,’ he told me, ‘the price will be, two and a half million’, which was then the equivalent of about £1500. ‘Will he take less do you think?’ Wanda asked, who dearly loves a struggle.

‘I think,’ said Signor Vescovo, ‘that the price is not negotiable.’

‘How long do you think it will take him to make up his mind?’ I asked, being of an impatient disposition.

‘It is difficult to say. It could be any time. The only thing you can do now is to wait. When he does decide I will let you know and then you must come instantly in case he changes his mind. And you must bring the money. You may have to pay in ready cash. It is probable that he may not know anything about cheques. I don’t think it’s wise to bother him with such matters. They would only upset him.’

‘Where do we get two and a half million in cash?’ I asked Wanda when she hung up.

‘Don’t worry, we’ll get it,’ she said.

‘You’re in the wrong business, stringing along with a writer, a sorry scribe,’ I said.

‘I know,’ said Wanda, ‘you’re doing your best.’

I was thinking about Signor Botti and Attilio, and tried to imagine either of them with a cheque book and a current account at the Monte dei Paschi di Siena, Sarzana Branch, but failed.

The following day, cutting what had been our holiday short, we drove 900 miles to Le Havre and caught the midnight boat to Portsmouth. If we were going to have any time at all at I Castagni, that is if we succeeded in buying it, which we were both set on doing, then I was going to have to hoard any holidays owed to me like a miser.

Some three weeks later we received a telegram from Signor Vescovo. The message consisted of four words: ‘Vieni subito prezzi lievitano’, ‘Come instantly prices rising’, in the sense that dough rises.

Two days later we set off on the road back.

By now the weather had deteriorated dramatically. There was snow at the mouths of the Mont Blanc Tunnel on both the French and Italian sides and when we reached I Castagni rain was falling steadily with occasional violent gusts of wind from seawards.

The subsequent meeting eventually led to us becoming the owners of what, in the prevailing conditions, contrived to look a somewhat less attractive property than it had done formerly. It took place, not as we imagined it would, indoors in the kitchen out of the way of the elements, but on an exposed piece of high ground at the rear of the premises from which a fine view could be obtained of its various ruined rooftops, with the rain belting down on them.

Other amenities, of which we had so far been ignorant, included a well lined with masonry which subsequent sounding proved to be about fifty feet deep, and a very rickety lavatory (in this case an outside earth closet without a roof) with a seat so small that it must have been hewn out by Attilio for his own personal use. It hung over what appeared to be a bottomless rift in the earth’s surface.

I knew a good deal about this sort of lavatory, fenced in by canniccio. They give whoever is seated within an entirely false impression that he or she is invisible to those in the world outside. During the war in Italy I had helped to rescue a buxom contadina named Dolores from a similar one in the Apennines, when the seat on which she had been perched had given way, precipitating her into its unspeakable depths, and a very unpleasant job it had been getting her out.

Present on this historic occasion were Signor Botti, the vendor – or was he going to be a non-starter? – and Wanda and myself, the buyers. Signor Vescovo was to act the part of mediatore, intermediary or mediator for the deal. Without the intervention of a mediatore no deal could be concluded, and in many places still cannot be concluded, in rural Italy, whether it involved the sale of a flock of sheep or the construction of some unsightly building for which no planning permission existed.

Signor Botti was a man of about sixty-five. He was very thin and had a long, melancholy face which rarely, if ever, betrayed any emotion, a face hewn by a Mayan from some dark, brownish stone. He had been involved in a terrible accident when one of his legs had been run over by a tractor, which had left it in the shape of a bow. He was obviously in constant pain but endured it with great fortitude.

He spoke to us in what was an almost completely unintelligible dialect, which even Wanda, who could understand but not speak Parmigiano, the dialect of the Province of Parma on the other side of the Apennines, could make little of. It was fortunate that Signor Vescovo was fluent in it.

Signor Botti’s rather grim appearance belied his nature which was that of a nice, rather timid man who was not very well off and was, with good reason, terrified of being taken for a ride by two foreigners over what was, almost certainly, his most valuable asset.

He was dressed in a dark brown suit and a waistcoat with a heavy, silver watch chain draped across it, a white shirt without a tie, a snuff-coloured felt hat and mountain boots.

For this meeting all four of us had elected to bring umbrellas; and there we stood with them straining to turn themselves inside out while the rain hissed down, the lightning flashed and the thunder rolled and reverberated in the marble quarries above Carrara and recurrent blasts of what was the scirocco from Africa endeavoured to remove us from the hillside. Why this meeting had to take place in the open air in such apocalyptic conditions remained unclear, until Signor Botti proceeded to march us round the boundaries of the property, which were identified by small stones almost invisible to any but the most practised eye, rather like the choirboys who once a year beat the bounds of the Church of St Clement Danes.

But this was not the end of it. He then took us on a conducted tour of the various interior parts of the house, all of them, in order, as he said, that we should be absolutely sure that what we were getting was what he was selling.

‘That is,’ he said, looking thoroughly pessimistic, ‘if we are able to conclude something,’ which, at this moment, seemed highly improbable.

This second conducted tour led to the discovery of an amazing room at the back of the premises, at the far end, yet another part of the domain of Attilio. It was a room roofed with stone slabs and it had a door which could be only opened by inserting a hand in a hole in a wall and groping around until you could grasp a baulk of timber which acted as a lock, and pull it from left to right.

This room extended the whole height of the building and had originally been constructed for the purpose of drying chestnuts. They were laid out and dried over a fire that had a chimney which extended up to the height of the roof. When they were dry they were ground into a pale, brownish flour and used to make a rather sickly, sweetish sort of bread called castagnaccia which, until long after the last war, was a staple food in many parts of mountain Italy.

It contained a great collection of tools, a forge with bellows, several ladders, a couple of wine barrels, rather the worse for wear, some of the heavy tubs called bigonci, from which the grapes were poured into the grape crusher, various agricultural instruments, wooden mousetraps that looked like miniature lockup garages and were fitted with a sort of portcullis made of tin that would come down on the necks of the unfortunate mice if they tripped the trigger, axes, hammers, crowbars, scythes and sickles, leather clogs with wooden soles, boxes of hand-forged iron nails and racks of empty wine bottles of ancient manufacture, very heavy and black – all this to enumerate just some of the contents. Miraculously, it was as dry as a bone.

And even after all these preliminaries, getting Signor Botti up to the starting line, so far as selling his house was concerned, was about as easy as bringing a reluctant bride to the altar. Although he had, apparently, agreed to accept two and a half million, which was what he asked for in the first place, he was not going to do so before the whole business had been gone over again with Signor Vescovo.

There followed what turned out to be an entire hour of rumbling, rambling dialogue conducted between Signor Botti who, I regret to say, I was beginning to have a desire to strangle, notwithstanding his disability, and Signor Vescovo whom we were both beginning to admire profoundly for his almost inhuman self-control. In the course of these exchanges Signor Botti, rather like the Grand Old Duke of York, at one moment advanced to take up a certain position, the next retreated from it, then advanced again to re-possess himself of it, while we all got wetter and wetter, having re-emerged for no apparent reason into the open air.

Then, suddenly, their dialogue ceased and Signor Vescovo seized Signor Botti’s right hand, at the same time contriving to bring our two right hands together with his, with the words, ‘Dunque, siamo d’accordo!’

It was done. At least we thought it was done. Nothing was as I had imagined it would be: no repairing to some snug hostelry, such as the Arco, for drinks all round, while we dried out. Only the four of us on an only too convincing Italian equivalent of a blasted heath. No sign of Attilio, whom I would not have been at all surprised to find lying in state in his bedroom, waiting for the weather to improve, or for that matter of Signora Angiolina, either.

What became only too apparent immediately, and something that put an additional damper on the proceedings, was that, as Signor Vescovo had predicted, Signor Botti didn’t like the look of Wanda’s cheque, or rather it was Wanda’s mother’s (she was paying for it), one little bit.

He took it gingerly in both hands as if it might have been about to explode and after holding it up to what light there was, getting it nice and damp in the process, and generally behaving as if it was something the cat had brought in, rejected it.

We were in a spot. We needed the money in cash, not next week or the week after, but now, if we were going to be sure of getting I Castagni. If we didn’t produce it Signor Botti might quite likely succumb to another attack of the dithers and we would be back where we came in.

It was at this moment that Signor Vescovo who, so far as we were concerned, was getting nothing out of all this, showed himself worthy of his name and offered to cash a cheque himself for two and a half million and give the money to Signor Botti, which we didn’t want him to do.

But first there had to be a meeting with Signor Botti’s notary in Sarzana to finalize everything.

So we all tramped across the bridge over the torrent which was in spate, up the hill past Signora Angiolina’s place in the hissing rain, from which she waved encouragingly when we gave her the thumbs up sign, piled into the Land Rover and set off for Sarzana.

There in the office of the notary in the main square, we were told that a declaration would have to be made that Wanda was the only surviving child of her parents’ marriage. She was, in fact by now, the only survivor of a family of eleven children, only two of whom, Wanda and an elder brother, had survived beyond birth.