to behave like a stallion? Try your luck with every woman who crosses your path?’
‘You’re not every woman, Teresa!’
‘You’re my cousin, you idiot, who’s about to be married! Where are your brains?’
‘I just think you should be with someone who deserves you.’
She laughs. ‘You, for example?’
‘What if he has a secret life you know nothing about? Other women?’ He knows he’s on dangerous turf but can’t stop himself. ‘Maybe other men. I saw him getting very friendly with those men who like boys on the set of Senso.’ The deadly comments just pop out of his mouth by themselves. ‘You wouldn’t have liked it if you’d seen what I saw. He was …’ He shakes his head as if too disgusted to mention what he’s seen. ‘You don’t know—’
Her eyes flame, and quick as lightning she slaps him, a hard stinging blow that leaves a vicious red weal across his cheek.
‘Stay a moment longer and I’ll kill you!’ She speaks with teeth gritted in fury. ‘Out! You miserable insect! You cockroach! You revolt me! You’re repellent!’
He immediately tries to apologise. Tries to explain he doesn’t know what crazy beast possessed him. That what he said isn’t true. That he invented it.
But he can see she’s so consumed by rage there’s nothing he can do but go slinking out.
In the street outside, he curses himself. He’s handled things stupidly. Now she hates him. He has turned himself into a loathsome person, the sight of whom now fills the girl he adores with disgust. How could he have been such an idiot? Worse, so cruel?
Maybe, he wonders as he stands outside feeling like a criminal, he can go and explain when she simmers down. Do it when he goes to press the grapes. Go down on his knees. Ask her to forgive him.
The small resilient optimist that quivers deep down in the heart of the generally shaky creature that is Pistola somehow manages to convince him that she’s too nice not to.
As time will tell, however, niceness and forgiveness will not come into it.
Honeyed Words to Charm a Woman
‘Fighting?’ Nonno Mario’s eyebrows raise as his grandson walks through the back door at Via Luigi Caprini, sporting Teresa’s rage on his cheek. It’s more a comment than a query. His mind, his grandson knows, is really on the day’s collection of trilobites and ammonites now displayed on the kitchen table after a few hundred million years in the earth. ‘This one’s certainly worth a report in the Gazzetta.’ An ancient relic rests in his large veined hand. But already Pistola is in the bathroom putting ointment on his face.
Later, over risi e bisi made with peas from the garden, his grandfather announces that he and Teresa have decided on the main course for the wedding. Bollito misto. A gargantuan treat involving an arsenal of meats that includes a pig’s trotter and a calf’s head, served with an accompanying salsa verde that’s a giddy mix of anchovies, capers, egg yolks, vinegar-soaked bread, parsley, garlic, and rivers of olive oil.
Nonno Mario eats a forkful of the risotto and then gives a quiet chuckle. ‘Teresa reminded me of the time you stuffed yourself with salsa verde at Zio Umberto’s birthday party and then got violently sick. You were about four years old. Already you loved anchovies and garlic.’
‘Teresa has a damn good memory,’ says Pistola. And if he was four, he wonders, would his mother have been alive? ‘My mother was there too. I remember,’ he says, lying.
Nonno Mario is silent.
Pistola persists: ‘Teresa says she was the kindest woman she’s ever met.’
‘Course she was.’
‘Was she like you?’
Nonno Mario always answers a question with another question: ‘Are we talking what she looked like?’
‘Well, was she like me at all?’
‘Are we talking facial features?’
‘I’m asking what kind of person she was.’
‘A very special human being.’
‘Did she make sfrappole with me every Easter?’
‘Suppose she did. Don’t remember.’
‘What was she doing in Brescia in that air raid?’
An enigmatic look crosses his grandfather’s face. He shrugs. ‘Working. Living there.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Never really knew. It was war. Nothing was normal.’
‘You never asked her?’
‘Ma va là! Come on!’ Nonno Mario’s patience is notoriously limited. ‘Your mother was a law unto herself. If she didn’t want to tell you something, that was it.’
‘She couldn’t have cared about me if she just left me with you.’
‘War was a funny time for everyone. And then when it was over, we had lost her.’
‘Where do you think she is? In heaven?’
‘Heaven is a fairy story.’ To close the question once and for all, Nonno Mario slaps the table. ‘Why believe in something just because the Pope wants you to? Heaven is an idea invented by witchdoctors in caves to make people feel better about dying. Man’s ideas about God and eternity make no more sense in relation to what lies beyond their understanding than the cheeping of Sandrina’s canary in its cage outside her front door.’
He gets up to help himself to more risotto, and carries on from his position at the stove, banging the wooden spoon on the pot: ‘How much sense can you make of the fact that the God who gives meaning to the lives of these so-called believers encourages them to wipe out people who believe in other gods?’
But Pistola is relentless. ‘Why are you so mysterious about my mother, Nonno?’
‘Mysterious?’
‘Why don’t you ever talk to me about her?’
‘You want my heart to break all over again?’
Before Pistola can say, Nonno, it’s not your heart this is about, his grandfather says in a murmur so soft Pistola can barely hear him: ‘Children are not meant to die before their parents. It’s against the laws of the universe.’
He says it with such utter sadness that Pistola feels tears springing into his eyes. For the first time in his life it strikes him that his grandfather is an old man.
Later, as he boils water for his weekly bath in the wooden bathtub in the kitchen, a heartbreaking
