breasts as cosily as Silvana Mangano’s rice- field shirt. Pistola notices Nonno Mario’s jaded old eyes instantly widen at the sight.
He’s surprised to see so many mourners in his friend’s little house in Via San Salvador. All Pino’s old rummy mates at Bar Da Cinto are here, including Giacinto himself, who’s left his quick-lipped female glass-washer in charge. In the kitchen, Cremonini is telling this small group of unusually silent men the thrilling story once again of how, as the blood poured from his chest, he was carried unconscious under heavy fire to safety on the back of this small unassuming man who has now been taken from them so abruptly.
Sorrowful women fill the living room. They include a posse of glossy, gold-bedecked female silk buyers all the way from Milan, and several village widows, all wearing brilliantly coloured silk scarves in honour of the man whose worms produced them.
‘Dear Pino. So generous,’ Signora Galetti tells Nonno Mario when he remarks on her colourful neck attire. ‘The company presents their suppliers with gifts every year, and he couldn’t really give all those scarves to his wife, could he?’
‘Such a lovely man,’ adds Signora Pacchioni, wife of the doctor.
‘I must say,’ says Signora Galetti, ‘you could never imagine that a man with so many terrible burdens’ – she glances in the direction of Pino’s buxom blonde widow – ‘would manage to remain so cheerful and good-tempered in spite of it all. He was a saint.’
Lying there, serene and dignified in the glow of the flickering candlelight, the dead man appears far more contented in death than in life. As Pistola stares at his waxen face, its skin the smooth alabaster of the Roman statues in his history book, he wonders if dying is such a bad thing when your only future is an endless succession of years filled with the dank smell of rotting mulberry-leaf extrusions.
At this point, one of the shiny ladies in the silk buyers’ contingent approaches the coffin, and he moves to let her get close. Bending over the dead man, she puts out a plump pink hand covered with rings, and affectionately pats the pale bony fingers under which Sandrina has tucked a plastic rose and a small Bible.
‘For years you were one of our most loyal and reliable suppliers,’ he hears her murmur. ‘You will be sadly missed, Pino Bersella. We can never replace you.’ She leans close and kisses his pale stiff cheek.
This is the first corpse Pistola has ever got close to, and in his eyes such unashamedly intimate contact with someone no longer of this world is weird and horrifying. Worse, he suddenly detects the glimmer of a grin on the dead man’s pallid features. Or is it just his lower jaw slipping slightly?
Appalled and unnerved by the entire scenario, he edges away, gazing back unhappily at the man he has always considered a person of no great shakes in the general scheme of things. He’s suddenly aware that other people have a much greater opinion of this man for whose death he now feels partly responsible.
Then Teresa Faccincani arrives. He watches along with everyone else in the room as she makes her way stiffly through the mourners towards Sandrina and embraces the woman no longer fated to be her mother-in-law. They collapse into each other’s arms, their sobbing muffled.
His instinct is to rush up and comfort Teresa but it would mean putting his arms round Sandrina too. Instead, he stands there staring uncomfortably at the back of Teresa’s dark head. How do you deal with such raw public emotion?
Nonno Mario knows exactly how. And since he’s not a small man, he can comfortably get his arms round both these women who have lost the men in their lives. His reassuring consolatory murmurs and Sandrina’s adoring looks of gratitude make Pistola wince. He hopes no one else has noticed, but Fiorenzo is at his side instantly, growling in his ear: ‘Horny old bugger. With my father not even cold in the next room!’
It’s clearly the other way round. Yet Pistola is not about to stir things up. Instead, he waits for a while and then makes his way towards Teresa, bracing himself for a stream of vitriol.
‘It’s my fault, isn’t it?’ he says in a low desperate voice. ‘You told him?’
It’s not anger but wretchedness he sees in her eyes and it goes straight to his heart.
‘Yes. I was stupid. He was furious. We’d been having fights. That was the final one.’
‘Sorry,’ he says, though he isn’t.
Her eyes fill with tears. ‘And he doesn’t even know his father’s dead.’
‘Where’s he gone?’
‘Vanished.’
‘I’ll go and find him. Nonno Mario knows where.’
‘Won’t bring Pino back.’ She gives a deep quivering sigh.
‘Well, he can give back his grandfather’s watch for starters!’
Her sharp look feels like another slap. ‘Maybe you should just stay out of it!’
‘You’re right. I’ve caused enough damage.’
Still, he knows what he has to do. He has to try at least to put right some of the mess he has created. Zia Andromaca will know where Aguinaldo is.
Ever since he helped out in the bakery when her assistant broke his leg, Pistola has been Zia Andromaca’s special favourite. He’s fond of her too, this lumbering maverick cousin of Nonno Mario’s who’s as strong as a horse. Not a woman to marry and raise a family, her independence and large hairy ungainliness intimidates most people. He’s the child she’ll never have, and she always uses the protective diminutive with him.
Baking bread with her for the whole village was a unique experience. Hard work. Since her house has no running water, Pistola had to pump up endless buckets of water with the yard hand pump in the evening, carry them to the bakery, and fill the mixing tanks. Then early in the morning he helped her make the fire, knead the dough, and shovel the bread in and out of the oven until dawn, when the Galetti boys would arrive to start their bicycle rounds.
In that gloomy hole he always felt like an apprentice in an important labour, revelling in the feel of the satiny elastic mass under his hands and the satisfaction of creating the loaves, each a work of art.
Now when he arrives at her house unexpectedly at lunchtime she’s delighted. He finds her in the kitchen in her food-stained apron, pressing potatoes through a ricer to make gnocchi.
‘Good starchy potatoes so they’re fluffy, Pistolino. Not waxy and compact. Always use a schiacciapatate so you don’t squash the air out.’
Then, with a questioning glance in his direction, ‘So, poor Pino. We hope this sick man is happy where he is now. And poor Teresa. Not a nice thing … All right, now they’re cool we can put in the flour. Not too much, or they taste pasty. An egg and salt, and then we knead …’
He sits down at the table beside her.
‘I think being abandoned before your wedding could scar a person for
