Thirty-four: A Weird Obsession and a Slippery Slope
Chapter Thirty-five: Monkey Glands and a Diamond Necklace
Chapter Thirty-six: The Storm Gathers
Chapter Thirty-seven: Happy Families
Chapter Thirty-eight: A Home from Home
Chapter Thirty-nine: Fire in the Heart of the City
Chapter Forty: Becky Tells a Sad Story
Chapter Forty-one: A Tricky Mission
Chapter Forty-two: More Skeletons in the Family Cupboard
Chapter Forty-three: Women Who Spell Trouble
Chapter Forty-four: Moments of Bliss
Chapter Forty-five: Behind Closed Curtains
Chapter Forty-six: An Unexpected Denouement
Chapter Forty-seven: The Land of Real Pasta
Chapter Forty-eight: Busy Time for the Grim Reaper
Chapter Forty-nine: An Unlikely Fairy Godmother
Chapter Fifty: A Detective from Rome
Chapter Fifty-one: An Awkward Funeral
Chapter Fifty-two: Confusion Reigns
Chapter Fifty-three: A Surprise and a Dilemma
In the ragingly racist South Africa of the 1950s it was unthinkable for the train stewards who served early-morning coffee to white female passengers in the sleeping cars to be black. The country’s vast railway network extended into the neighbouring countries, and there was a shortage of stewards. Whites considered the job beneath them. So the Minister of Transport, Ben Schoeman, decided the place to get them was Italy, where waitering was a profession. He had had Italian prisoners of war on his farm and knew they were good workers.
Encouraged by the Italian government, which was keen to find work for post-war Italy’s numerous young unemployed men, he launched a major recruitment mission. In Milan alone more than a thousand applied. Few could speak English. But they were all desperate to leave. Eventually a hundred and ten young Italians arrived in South Africa.
It was a project that had unexpectedly favourable consequences for South Africa. When their contracts ended, many left the Railways to open restaurants that introduced Italian cuisine to people who had never heard of lasagne and ravioli, whose main experience of pasta was tinned spaghetti often eaten on toast or leathery macaroni and cheese baked by their ‘servants’, and whose dining options were limited to hotels and colonial-style clubs that served depressingly predictable British food.
Buzzy little trattorias full of glorious aromas of garlic and tomato popped up all over South Africa. Whether the recruits came from cities or country villages, they had all grown up in a home where the cook had an instinct for getting the best flavour out of the raw ingredients that go into a meal. They would familiarise South Africans with a variety of new foods that would become part of the national diet.
Yet, for these young men, mostly in their teens and often village boys, adjusting to a land whose increasingly racist laws were alien to everything they knew would prove to be a challenge.
Pigs, Love, and a Bride Bereft
Two basic life principles become as clear as consommé to Pistola one steamy afternoon during the long summer holidays of his last high-school year. He’s watching his grandfather slaughter two geese for Teresa Faccincani’s wedding when the first principle strikes him. It’s the notion that happiness is really all about food.
The second comes a little later when he discovers that the bridegroom of the girl he has loved for as long as he can remember has run off forty-eight hours before the wedding.
Nothing, he then gratefully realises, is forever.
As it happens, ‘all is flux’ is an idea he became acquainted with in his Greek philosophy class at the Liceo Classico. Heraclitus is Professor Orvieto’s favourite thinker, and Pistola’s fertile mind has no difficulty relating to the concept that you cannot put your foot into the same river twice. It’s never the same water.
What he cannot know at this point of his still-budding existence is that the waters of his life will take him far away from this village to a country foreign to everything he has grown up with, a country that will intrigue and stretch him and ultimately chastise him.
Right now, though, all that matters is that Teresa is no longer about to become the wife of the despicable Aguinaldo Bersella.
Water is forever moving on in the village of Campino where Pistola was born shortly before the conflict into which Mussolini dragged his reluctant countrymen. This land, flat as a pizza, is all canals, rivers, and rice paddies. Narrow streams run beside fields of fruit and vegetables. Small fish play in the dark-green streaming weeds that once nearly dragged Pistola to a dark-green sodden death.
This September is hotter and more humid than usual. Nonno Mario has been fattening the geese in the pen under the cherry tree in his back garden. He slaughters them neatly and quickly with the help of his brother-in-law, Zio Umberto the butcher. Zio Umberto has arms like Parma hams and does a lot of shouting.
‘Hey, Mario! What you feed these beasts? Porca Madonna! They’re as big as whales!’
Though Pistola feels a certain sadness for the geese, he’s mainly aware of anticipated euphoria in the taste buds. He has eaten Nonno Mario’s roast goose only once. Those few titillating mouthfuls snatched at the stove were a revelation. Nonno Mario is short-fused and sharp-tongued but the dishes produced in his stifling kitchen are worth a crack over the head.
Soon the birds
