a carpenter’s file.
Fun is what people have come here in search of, not politics. Even though it’s a festa organised by amateurs, the food at the stalls is of an elevated standard in this culinarily conscious neck of the Italian boot. The queues are large and eager, paper plates piled high.
Sandrina’s is the first stall the boys spot. Thanks to her late husband, she’s a festa stalwart, every year dishing out platefuls of risotto con le rane as generous as her cleavage. Since the main ingredient is free, her busy stall makes the biggest profit. For days before the event, she searches the rice fields after work and arrives home with jiggling stockings full of fat green spotted frogs which join their comrades in a barrel outside the kitchen door. Their mournful croaking rends the air night after night.
Fiorenzo would like never to set eyes on another crispy amphibian again. Which is why he steers his friends in the direction of Gamba Mischi’s stall.
Gamba’s polenta con cotechino is legendary. When he isn’t collecting fossils or cycling round the village with his postbag on his back, he’s making cotechino in his kitchen with a sausage maker from the village, who brings with him his grinding machine and sausage filler. Gamba and Fifi Perracchia labour into the night. Cotechino is a traditional speciality of the region, and theirs is one of the tastiest. It’s such a succulent combination of flavourful spices and coarse-textured porky bits, courtesy Bepi Faccincani’s pigs the size of small Fiats, that cotechino lovers look forward to eating it every year at the Festa de l’Unità. These rich, sticky slices even attract diehard Christian Democrats, who under normal circumstances wouldn’t be seen dead supporting the Communists. People like Giacinto Zanetti of Bar Da Cinto, who’s here in the queue behind Pistola and his friends, getting ready to wash down his cotechino feast with the bottle of cold fizzy red Lambrusco he’s clutching.
Like all good bartenders, he automatically exchanges a few words with whomever happens to be standing in front of him.
‘Heard your brother’s in Rome,’ he says to Fiorenzo, who in response emits the unintelligible grunt he has developed over the course of endless condolence encounters. ‘Not even the Pope could clean up that corrupt city,’ Giacinto continues. ‘I’ve got a brother there too.’
The dance floor is another lively sphere of action. La Famosa Orchesta Farina has progressed from a dozy waltz to an animated boogie-woogie. In the crowd of antediluvian couples gyrating with cringe-making abandon on the wooden planks laid down on the grass, Pistola gets a horrific glimpse of his ancient uncle, Zio Umberto the butcher, making a spectacle of himself with his equally large and flabby wife, Zia Dalia.
Fortunately, there’s a distraction. In the queue are two pretty strangers in voluminous skirts and puffy petticoats. One is directing coy looks at Donato from behind her cats’-eye sunglasses as she loudly crunches her way through almond brittle.
‘My sister broke her teeth on that last year,’ Donato tells her, casually removing his aviator sunglasses.
‘Told you we should’ve got the torrone,’ the girl snaps to her friend.
Pistola instantly moves in, attempting Donato’s droop of eyelids followed by a direct gaze. ‘Be glad you didn’t get the tiramola. I know a girl who got her tooth pulled out.’
Then it’s Fiorenzo’s turn. He zeroes in on the friend. ‘Didn’t I see you at the Esther Williams movie?’
She giggles. ‘No.’
‘Gone with the Wind?’
‘No movie places where we live.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Ponte Lungo,’ a masculine voice announces. It belongs to a tall older youth who has moved up behind them, built like an oak. ‘What’s going on here?’ he growls, too young to be a Fascist militia leftover, but imbued with the same bullyboy spirit.
The girls exchange grimaces.
‘Just talking,’ says Cats’ Eyes petulantly. ‘Go away, Giorgio.’
‘You’re going to end up in a maize field with your skirts over your heads,’ he sneers.
‘Give it a break!’ she says.
He glares at the boys, repositions himself closer and snarls, checking their reactions: ‘Campino studs-in-training!’
Instantly Donato becomes the epitome of cool shrugging nonchalance. Pistola, on the other hand, resorts to some ludicrously ineffective prize-fighter shoulder-hunching while Fiorenzo goes one further and surreptitiously gives the Ponte Lungo bully the finger.
Mistake. The brute lifts him off his feet, shakes him hard, and then throws him down and kicks him. A couple of times. Against background sounds of stuck-pig squealing from the two girls.
Mindful of their Socratic Dialogue about wounded soldiers in battle, Pistola is about to leap to Fiorenzo’s defence when he’s shoved aside by a tornado of enraged maternal flesh that comes whirling across from the next-door stall, clutching the heavy metal spoon with which it has been scooping frogs from the frying pan. Drops splatter the bully’s fancy shirt as Sandrina smacks him around the head with the spoon. She then bends over her precious baby and indulges in a bout of demented shrieking, louder even than Tosca’s after her lover’s execution: ‘Murderer! He’s all I’ve got left! You killed him!’
As people come running from all directions, Fiorenzo tries to get to his feet, groaning as much from mortification as from pain. The humiliation of having your life publicly saved by your mother has to be even greater than any shame you might feel at being brutally kicked to death in front of the entire village. Pistola knows this too, though secretly he thinks he would probably enjoy an unashamed public show of maternal love.
He’s contemplating this unachievable prospect when he notices Giorgio’s friends are approaching. Judging by the expressions on their faces, they aren’t coming to smooth things over. Is an innocent chat with two pretty girls going to turn into World War III? Is he once again going to find himself involved in a death that is somehow his fault?
By now Giorgio has pulled himself together after Sandrina’s battering and is managing to laugh the kind of nasty cowboy-villain laugh that’s supposed to suggest someone is going to pay.
Into the breach steps Giacinto the bar owner, a man used to handling confrontations between irrational males. Pistola hears him quietly informing the sinister-looking group from Ponte Lungo that it might be in their best interests to retreat, a point he makes by casually indicating with his eyes Zio Umberto the butcher. The strongest man in the village has abandoned Dalia on the wooden planks and is ambling nonchalantly towards them. Forearms the size of Parma hams are bouncing gently against his massive thighs. Hands that can tear a deck of rummy cards in two are clenched. On his face Pistola recognises the same calm but intently purposeful expression it wore when he was helping Nonno Mario strangle the goose for Teresa’s wedding.
The Ponte Lungo boys instantly get the message and move off, dragging with them the ever-defiant Giorgio and his uncomfortable sisters, both girls casting longing backwards glances at Campino’s studs-in-training.
Pistola feels a hand on his arm. It’s Teresa, even more pinched and stricken than when he last saw her.
‘No worries, I think he might pull through,’ he tells her jokingly. Then, when she doesn’t smile, he resorts to Campino’s routine midday greeting: ‘Had a good lunch,
