Umberto turns to Pistola.
‘Then why don’t I take you instead, ragazzo? You’ve never even been to Rome and you’re seventeen already! It’ll help you decide what you want to do with your life.’
It doesn’t take Pistola very long to accept this generous offer. The summer holidays are not yet over and he has two very good reasons to go to Rome, he realises in a flash. One has to do with Teresa and the other with the father he has never met.
On top of which, Zio Umberto is one of the few men in the village he actually admires. A huge man with a deceptively sleepy gaze in his large heavy-lidded eyes and an eternal toothpick in his mouth, Zio Umberto has cheeks as ruddy and firm as one of his fillet steaks, and hands so strong that when he pinches Pistola’s cheek, it hurts for two hours. He’s someone all the boys in the village are seriously in awe of. Yet, like a lot of strong men, he’s guileless and sincere. There’s always a good clean smell of fresh meat hanging about him, and he approaches food like an animal himself, chewing and talking at the same time in his deep rolling bass. He married Nonno Mario’s younger sister, Zia Dalia, after his first wife, Nonno Mario’s elder sister, Zia Norma, died from the bite of a stray rabid dog she was giving water.
Pistola is glad they kept Zio Umberto in the family. As a kid, Pistola and his gang would play Tarzan on the walnut tree in the communal back courtyard where his uncle has his tiny slaughterhouse. Whenever a cow was delivered, they’d all rush to the door of the slaughterhouse. Zio Umberto would push them out of the way, press his little Beretta to the creature’s forehead, and shoot. It would all be over in a brief humane minute. Nothing would be thrown away. The cowhide would be salted and sold to the tannery, the hooves turned into glue, the horns sold to the bone merchant to make into combs, and the intestines blanched and sold for trippa. Afterwards, the contents of the animal’s guts would fertilise Pistola’s tomatoes, as happens with the contents of cow guts all over the Italian countryside.
‘No wonder Italian tomatoes are the best in the world,’ is Nonno Mario’s opinion.
Now Zio Umberto raises his glass to Pistola, whose eyes have lit up, drains it, winks and stands up.
‘Okay then! Andiamo! We leave Tuesday. You got two days to pack, then we go to Verona to get the big train from the north.’ And before his bolshy brother-in-law can object, he’s gone.
That night, Pistola has his first major row with his grandfather.
‘Why do you want to go?’ asks Nonno Mario as he stirs his ragù. ‘The food is terrible. You’ll starve. Can’t cook, those Romans. And they’ll steal your money. They’re all criminals.’
‘It’s part of my education.’ His grandson has no intention of revealing his reasons. ‘I’ve never even seen the Fontana di Trevi.’
‘What? Where the urchins fish out your coins as soon as you turn your back?’
‘The Colosseum. Professor Orvieto says—’
His grandfather bangs the spoon loudly on the edge of the pot. ‘Stronzi! Sell you all sorts of shit in the streets. Cigarettes full of sawdust …’
‘It’s part of my education—’
‘And Umberto is no help. Can’t even make a good ragù. Oh no, always on that bike. Determined to be the great damned cycling champ of the world.’
‘I’m going, Nonno. Can’t stop me.’
‘Okay, va via! Leave me here like a dog!’ He turns his back and continues muttering into his ragù.
As soon as Pistola finishes supper, he’s off to speak to Zia Andromaca. She’s the one person who can help him track down the two people he needs to find in Rome. It turns out both Ignazio and his father’s friend Romeo Battisti live in a section of the city called Trastevere. Zia Andromaca, an avid reader of newspapers and Oggi magazine, tells him Trastevere is the oldest and cheapest part of Rome to live.
‘Founded by the Etruscans is what it was,’ she announces with a gleam in her eye as she wraps up one of her delicious brittle sbrisolona tarts for his journey on the train, ‘on the other side of the Tevere River.’
The night before his departure, he visits Teresa. She looks haunted, and still hasn’t told her parents. Their hurried low-voiced conversation in the street outside her house begins with her furiously telling him to mind his own business and ends with her begging him to bring Aguinaldo back home.
That night, Nonno Mario relents and cooks him a special farewell meal. A lean and tasty leg of wild boar he has marinated in herbs and a full-bodied Bardolino from the shores of Lago di Garda, while adding to the pot half a glass of Recioto late harvest towards the end for sweetness. He got the boar from Cecco Santangelo, secretary of Campino’s hunt club, who shoots for the pot, sometimes as far away as Yugoslavia, and considers the British extremely weird because they dress in funny red clothes to go leaping over hedges after some terrified little bony creature not even good enough to eat.
Pistola has never tasted boar before. He tells his grandfather he loves its deep dark unforgettable flavour.
‘Face it, my boy, you’re not going to get anything as good as this past your lips for a long, long time.’ Nonno Mario rolls his eyes. ‘You’re going to starve. I won’t sleep a wink while you’re away. Hope I’m still alive when you get back …’
Pistola’s rare trips to Verona have always been with his Liceo class, visiting historic Verona landmarks. He and Fiorenzo and Donato usually trail along on the fringes searching for girls among the numerous tourist groups visiting this medieval city. In their narrow cords and Monty duffle coats, they don’t look like schoolboys and often manage to get their pictures taken with the girls, smiling sweetly on the ivy-covered balcony of the Capulet house where Romeo seduced Juliet.
It’s not a school bus that takes Pistola to Verona this time, though. It’s Zio Umberto’s rummy-playing movie mogul’s son Eros in his snooty long-nosed royal-blue Alfa Romeo Giulietta.
Unlike Campino’s little one-horse set-up, Verona station is a major junction, deluged with passengers in this overwrought and undersupplied post-war era. Just finding the right platform and the right train for Rome is a military operation. Boarding it is a full-on offensive even for a colossus like Zio Umberto.
The first things Pistola notices are the Wagons-Lits. An aristocratic blue like Eros’s Giulietta, their doors bear an impressive coat of arms with two rearing lions picked out in gold above the majestically intertwined initials ‘WL’. The blinds are rolled down on most of the windows. Rich Austrians making the journey to Rome.
‘Poor things!’ Zio Umberto growls as he and Pistola hurry past. ‘Even when they occupied the country, they were terrified they would catch some nasty Italian disease. Why in hell do they still keep coming?’
Since there’s no limit to the number of tickets sold, by the time the train gets here from Austria, the second- and third-class compartments are invariably full. Zio Umberto can’t afford the first-class tickets that would buy them seats on red flocked velvet alongside the politicians and high-up bureaucrats. Instead, their
