so disturbs him, he leaps into the bath and scrubs himself till his skin is raw, splashing soapsuds all over the stone floor till it’s running with water, and Nonno Mario comes rushing in, shouting: ‘Trying to drown us all, cretino?’
That night, his miserable dreams are all of Teresa and Aguinaldo rolling around in ecstasy in gondolas. Which is probably why, the next morning, while he’s doing the monthly washing of the bed linen in the same wooden bathtub – soaking the sheets between layers of soap shavings and chlorine, and putting wood ash on top so that the lime can bleach them – he finds himself day-dreaming about where he would take Teresa for a honeymoon. Lago di Garda, he decides. The long stretch of blue water not far from Campino where he often goes on his bicycle with Fiorenzo and Donato. He would take her for a granita, as many as she fancies, at one of the bars that line the lake, and then to Sirmione at the end of the strip of land stretching into the water. There, they’d lie in the shade of the gnarled old olive tree by the remains of Catullus’s Roman villa, the most romantic place he knows.
Afterwards, they’d go to the garden of Gabriele d’Annunzio’s villa high above the lake, his other favourite spot, and he’d recite D’Annunzio’s poetry to her. Love poetry so seductive he’s convinced it had to be how that unattractive little flamboyant gnome managed to seduce so many legendary beauties. It’s a notion he has pilfered from his Italian teacher, who pointed out to the class that D’Annunzio’s expertise as a lover was rooted in his ability to charm a woman’s mind with words. A lesson not lost on Pistola.
As an illustration of this, the class was instructed to take note of the suggestive stance chosen by D’Annunzio to describe Lago di Garda in the morning: Everything is blue, like a sudden rapture, like a head bowing to receive a deep kiss …
Professor Spagnoli also explained that it helped to be a famously courageous World War I daredevil, always making headlines, like the time the Italian government gave Fiume to Yugoslavia, and D’Annunzio decided to march there with two thousand volunteers and claim it back, thrilling his female fans who lined the streets blowing kisses.
As it happens, Nonno Mario has his own personal memento of the man, acquired when he was a soldier. It’s a note handwritten with a fountain pen, featuring D’Annunzio’s curlicued signature above the simple message: Hand the bearer the documents as requested. There were no documents with the note, and Nonno Mario has always been exasperatingly vague about its origins. But he keeps it along with his most precious possessions, even though he has always disparaged D’Annunzio, describing him as ‘a cocky little depraved southern fool’ since he came from Pescara, which, though not very far south, is not in the north either.
D’Annunzio is not the only reason Lago di Garda has over the years become a significant part of Pistola’s erotic geography, inextricably bound up in his mind with bare flesh and pretty women. Its blue waters and pebble beaches are a magnet for female visitors from further afield. They come loaded with Deutschmarks and sunblock, to bake themselves on the pebbles until they resemble bronzed goddesses. Even though there’s rarely much flesh visible outside of their modest bathing costumes, they’re the only girls over whose bare skin Pistola has ever let his feverish eyes roam.
Once, when he was ten and beginning to develop an academic interest in body parts, he managed to get a brief but tantalising eyeful of Gianna Galetti, sister of the boy with the performing penis. Gianna is older than all of them, a big blonde beauty whose mother famously made her a dress out of the parachute silk that carried the British airman on to Valetti’s farm. Pistola once saw her in that dress strolling down Campino’s main street with a friend during the evening passeggio. Even to eyes still in the innocent stages of this intriguing newfound thrill, she looked ravishing.
When Pistola congratulated Giancarlo on having the best-looking sister in Campino, the young entrepreneur-in-training invited him for a viewing, hoping no doubt to capitalise on another lucrative body sighting. It turned out disappointingly short-lived. As Pistola peered through the smudgy panes of the glass door at the Amazon soaping herself in a steamy tub in the kitchen, the only body parts he could make out before his left ear was grabbed hold of by Signora Galetti and he was agonisingly removed, were two giant rosy-pink nipples.
The boy-girl scenario is fraught in Campino. When boys tell each other they have a girlfriend, the girls in question often have no idea they’ve been singled out. Even if a girl suspects a boy fancies her, the boy rarely gets a chance to get near her since she’s always chaperoned by elder sisters or brothers.
Pistola has always been envious of the girlfriend Fiorenzo once had briefly before her family moved away. Franca was thirteen and pretty, and her family watched her like a hawk. Her mother was a tiger, and so were her two fully grown brothers. The only time she and Fiorenzo ever managed to get together was one cold evening after a school choir performance when they succeeded in having an illicit squeeze huddled upright in an unlit corner of a building, with the sleet coming down. Unluckily for Fiorenzo, a passer-by who couldn’t see them in the dark came and pissed against his leg, and there was nothing Fiorenzo could do but keep quiet and let the warm liquid trickle into his shoe.
Deprived as they are of female contact in a village where the girls’ movements are constantly monitored, Pistola and Fiorenzo are drawn to the potential thrills of Lago di Garda. Donato’s father has a bar there in Sirmione, and so naturally he has had more chances to exploit the boy-girl situation than his friends. Slightly older and more assertive, he’s a small bony charmer with the brazen cheek of one of those waifs who run off with your purse at Rome’s central station.
His trick is to zero in on girls who speak a bit of Italian, and walk them to his father’s bar to eat granita. Then he walks them to the edge of the lake. Magical at twilight.
Girls find granita very sensual, this finely crushed ice the consistency of snow, covered with syrup that comes in a range of indecently brilliant colours. When describing the taste of each different syrup – peach, tamarind, pistachio, almond – to one of them, Donato becomes as poetic as D’Annunzio. The girl is invariably mesmerised. Pistola and Fiorenzo sit listening on nearby bar stools, torn between resentful envy and bitter fits of sniggering. By the end of the tasting session, the girl and Donato will be licking the syrup off each other’s fingers. It works every time.
The seduction that gave Pistola and Fiorenzo the biggest laugh happened one evening when their friend picked up a German girl at the campsite and went back late to her tent, having had a few vinos along the way. Crawling in after her, he tripped over a guitar at the entrance. The loud bonggggg! woke her boyfriend in the tent. Fortunately, he was so drunk he merely turned over. The next night, Donato was back at the bar, hair slick with brillantina, inviting another German girl to taste his granita.
Pistola is aware that Donato’s success has nothing to do with his looks, and everything to do with his honeyed words. What makes this realisation even more galling is the fact that, as everyone knows, Italian men are supposed to be world experts on seduction. It was an Italian, Ovid, who wrote the world’s first sex manual, his Ars Amatoria, years before Christ – or Rodolfo Valentino – was born.
Even though Pistola is good at putting words on paper, he’s agonisingly conscious of the fact that he doesn’t have a silver tongue. Would he ever have been able to charm Teresa’s heart? Even if Aguinaldo had never existed?
A Devious Bridegroom’s Last Trick
He’s hoping he’ll get a chance to talk to Teresa, and beg her to forgive him, when he and his friends go to press the grapes in Bepi’s yard. There’s no sign of her. Instead, her mother
