aunt bakes bread for the village every morning.
Preparations for the wedding are prodigious. Teresa Faccincani’s father is a pig farmer which means copious antipasti. Everyone has a healthy respect for the valley’s sows. Not only because they taste so good in their various culinary incarnations but, as Pistola has found out, when they come at you full tilt it’s like being run down by a small Fiat.
There have always been twice as many pigs as people in the valley. Male pigs are smaller than females and have to perform miracles.
‘If God in a moment of genius hadn’t given them sexual equipment shaped like corkscrews, things would have gone badly for the entire species’ is Nonno Mario’s opinion. Worse, the valley would never have known the record-breaking piglet litters that provide some of the world’s great taste sensations. Salami, coppa, pancetta, cotechino, and the sublime prosciutto.
Except during the war, there has always been enough to eat in Campino, even though it’s a poor village. ‘This land is like the mother pig,’ Nonno Mario is always telling Pistola. The Po Valley is unstinting in its nourishment, the ground so fertile that if you throw a seed on it, it sprouts in a few days. Pistola has his own small vegetable patch in the back garden of the tiny house where he lives with his grandfather on Via Luigi Caprini.
For the seven-course wedding feast, no effort will be spared. It’s an opportunity to show off your talents in a part of the world where each day is devoted to the pleasures of eating. Life is all pasta, glorious pasta. Here the normal midday village greeting is not the cheery ‘How are you doing?’ you might hear in any other part of the world. Instead, Campino villagers greet one another with the words, ‘So have you had a good meal?’ Even at funerals you can be sure to hear some gnarled fellow muttering as the coffin disappears, ‘Ah well, no more tagliatelle for that poor sod.’
Half the village has been invited to Teresa’s wedding. She is Bepi Faccincani’s only child, and Bepi has asked Nonno Mario to take charge of the food, not only because Nonno Mario worked in a trattoria in Milan when he left the army, but because getting him to cook the wedding feast is one way of making sure he’ll sing at the party afterwards.
Nonno Mario and Bepi Faccincani are second cousins, famous for the spontaneous duets they perform when fuelled by enough carafes of good vino rosso. Bepi does the tenor role and Nonno Mario the soprano in a contralto voice. Nonno Mario is so good at the woman’s role he can even do Violetta succumbing to TB. His rendition of ‘Addio del passato bei sogni ridenti …’ is like a sigh from a frail soul, and he accompanies his performance with a wide range of what he believes to be classic female facial and body language, much to the delight of the entire village.
He and Bepi limit themselves to the catchy duets from Verdi’s grand operas that everyone has seen at the old Roman amphitheatre not far away in Verona. La Traviata. Aida. Rigoletto.
When not singing soprano, Nonno Mario has a chainsaw voice so loud that if he shouts, which is often, Pistola’s ears whistle for ten minutes. His voice comes booming out of a large head the shape and size of that of a Roman senator. But Nonno Mario is not from the city. He’s a down-to-earth countryman, most at ease speaking the dialect of his village. So he struggles a bit with the ornate Italian of the operas, the Italian of Victorian times, and tends to chew up the fancy words so they come out sounding like his village dialect. Yet he puts such heart into it, his arias always get rousing choruses of ‘Bravo!’
What he will never sing are Neapolitan songs, as a German visitor having a caffé next to him once at a bar discovered, when she asked him to sing ‘O Sole Mio’ after hearing him toss out a snatch of opera. Naples is for Nonno Mario a city somewhere near Africa with an incomprehensible dialect, and Pistola heard his grandfather announce, ‘I don’t know that song’, with ice in the blue eyes his clan inherited from the Austrians who on and off colonised the Italian north over the centuries. ‘We sing our own songs here,’ he told her. ‘Not silly love songs. We sing the mountain songs of the Alps with words we understand, and rousing choruses.’
In looks, Pistola is like his grandfather, but not in personality. Sensitivity and introspection are Pistola’s major traits, coupled with a certain charming reticence, unlike Nonno Mario, who in his youth was an irrepressible extrovert and hasn’t changed much. Tall and lean with a tanned muscular jaw, a million flashing white teeth, and loads of tumbling thick black hair that he combed back over his head like Rodolfo Valentino, Nonno Mario was the cliché Casanova. Now his hair is grey but still thick. His teeth are still strong and white. The light in his blue is eyes undimmed, even though he has buried both his wife, Isabella, and his daughter, Peppina – Pistola’s mother – in wartime circumstances so sorrowful they would have killed a lesser man.
A complicated man who’s a force of nature, once a soldier in Italy’s elite high-mobility Bersaglieri, he indulges all his passions with gusto. They’ve kept him buoyant through a variety of relationships with women whom he hoped might take the place of the sadly irreplaceable Isabella.
To the relief of his grandson, however, none was able to survive living with this explosive being after initially being blown away by the warmth of a man whose appetite for all the sensual pleasures is large, and who has the classic farmyard approach to love. A tendency to fancy all women indiscriminately, provided they’re not too thin, and to prefer them to smell strongly of female rather than of perfume. A graspable handful of meat on the bone and a tantalising whiff that sets his olfactory senses racing can lead to endless amounts of flesh contact – patting, pinching, squeezing, stroking – even when he’s still nowhere near the really serious stuff.
His women have discovered that in his lovemaking Nonno Mario is much like that other Italian force of nature who famously enraptured his lovers with his unbridled sensuality, and followed the moment of culmination with tender music. Whereas Mussolini’s choice was the violin, in Nonno Mario’s case, it’s the sweetest aria in his repertoire, sometimes preceded by a few passionately tearful moments. Though this is simply his way of dealing with emotion, some of his women have been extraordinarily gratified by the idea that their lovemaking can move the beast to tears.
It has been some years, however, since Nonno Mario was moved to tears by passion. The last woman departed after ducking a thrown plate of pasta Nonno Mario had declared unfit for man or pig – ‘Una schifezza! Disgusting!’ – even though he’d cooked it himself, experimenting with a new sauce.
By now he and Pistola have learned to fend for themselves. As Nonno Mario puts it, ‘Chi dice donna dice danno.’ Say woman, say trouble.
Archaeology has replaced the pleasures of the flesh for Nonno Mario. Pistola occasionally joins him and Campino’s other amateur archaeologist, the postman, Gamba Mischi, digging up ammonites and trilobites on fossil sites all over the area. The two old fossil fans recently launched the Campino Archaeological Society, with Nonno Mario as the president and Gamba the secretary. They’re its only members.
On one trip, they investigated remnants of Etruscan settlements nearby. On another, they dug up chipped flintstone. All tangible evidence for Nonno Mario that human beings have thrived in this valley since the Stone Age.
‘Just shows you people have been flourishing in this part of the world for thousands of years,’ he told Pistola over a bowl of his own homemade tagliatelle, following a successful archaeological expedition. ‘This valley might be muggy and flat and full of mosquitoes, but we were born here and we won’t ever leave, unlike those wretched fools in the south who gave the grateful United States the Mafia.’
Pistola knows from his professore of history, Signor Neri, why those southerners fled from Italy. What they went in search of was food. Stories of desperate people dying of starvation at the foot of the Italian boot are required reading for him and his classmates. It’s all there
