their engagement was announced. He thought he would die.
The whole affair is an agonising mystery. He can appreciate that his rival has Johnny Weissmuller’s straight-jawed looks and chest-beating confidence. But in Pistola’s down-to-earth country boy’s eyes, Aguinaldo’s behaviour and general being falls considerably short of the accepted standards of decency. He’s a loudmouth bighead, a know-it-all who, before he left school, where he was a few years above Pistola, was regarded by most Liceo students as nothing but a smartarse with a rapier tongue, who enjoyed fixing his malicious eyes on the priests and talking them into red-faced distraction with puerile questions they were too embarrassed to answer, like, ‘Can you explain more clearly for us the Immaculate Conception?’ He famously managed to offend his entire class during a discussion about the priesthood by telling Don Pollini, the one priest all the boys had a lot of time for, ‘Well, in my opinion, you fellows are simply parasites of society.’
Worse than any of this, though, is Pistola’s suspicion that what attracted Teresa to the despicable Aguinaldo is his determination to scandalise the village. It’s a notion that has privately tortured Pistola ever since he detected admiration in her voice one day in the school corridor when he overheard her telling a friend that Aguinaldo’s reputation as a wild fellow was ‘something he’s quite proud of’.
There’s not a kid in the village who hasn’t heard the story of how Aguinaldo and his professore of philosophy once bumped into each other in a casa di tolleranza in Mantova not far from the Liceo. Aguinaldo was over eighteen by that stage and it was common knowledge that he’d visited both of the area’s two state-run bordellos.
It was at one of them, the Villa delle Rose, not far from the church of Santa Anastasia, that he walked straight into his professore. The professore, true to his philosophical vocation, was an eccentric who went around with grease spots on his lapels and dandruff on his collar. Naturally, no woman would look at him; he had to pay for one.
So there they were, schoolmaster and school student, unable to avoid each other. What could Aguinaldo do but greet his teacher?
‘Buona sera, Professore.’
The professore looked Aguinaldo straight in the eye and said without a smile, ‘Don’t bother with the title, Bersella. Here we are all animals.’
Considering the family Aguinaldo comes from, this nonchalant sardonic upstart is something of an intriguing phenomenon. Even Pistola has to admit that. Where does this product of one of the poorest homes in the village get his superior airs and graces? His sharp-talking cynicism? His audacious confidence and pig-headed determination to put the rest of the world down? His eyes, which to Pistola look like those of a lunatic?
Aguinaldo’s father, Pino Bersella, is so sickly that all he can do is raise silkworms, poor fellow, while his wife, Sandrina, has a particularly poor deal in life. She’s a mondina, a weed-plucker in the rice fields. She gets up at four every morning and spends all day bent double under the baking sun, arms and legs immersed in stagnant slimy water, bitten by horseflies and scratched to glory by the vicious rice plants.
Every morning she cycles past Pistola’s house with the other rice-field workers. All of them wear the wide-brimmed straw hats worn by Silvana Mangano in the movie about the seductive mondine that not a single male in Italy has missed seeing – Riso Amaro.
Straw hats are where the comparison ends. While Silvana Mangano sizzled on the lamppost posters that were solemnly drooled over by Pistola and his friends, none of Campino’s rice-field workers do their weeding in dripping shirts that cling to their shapely breasts. Pistola has given up searching for Silvana Mangano’s ripe lips and flaring nostrils among the women cycling dolefully to work every morning. They’re mostly the age of his friends’ mothers, faces and forearms tanned the rich amber of honey and skins as rough as the thigh-high thick knitted leggings they wear as protection against the spiking weeds. Of them all, it’s only Aguinaldo’s mother with her dyed blonde hair and well-endowed figure who has any charm whatsoever.
The rice fields have been in the valley ever since the Duke of Milan sent sacks of rice to his neighbour, the Duke of Ferrara, a hundred years earlier to plant in the marshes drained by the Gonzagas. Weeding them is a tough job that provides a backbreaking but desperately needed income. Sandrina spends eight to ten hours a day with her backside in the air and her dress tucked into her pants. Along with the heat and the insects, she and the other mondine also have to contend with their male supervisors walking up and down on the bank behind them, gazing slyly at the tantalising strips of milky-white flesh between their leggings and short shorts.
To their faces, though, no one dares mess with them. They have loud voices and tongues that can fly. Pass some clever comment about their legs and they let you have it.
‘I’m telling your wife, you filthy bastard!’
‘Get it chopped off, you crazy pervert!’
‘Look at you! I’d never go out with that face! Ugly as mortal sin!’
The only time they’re silent is in the early mornings on their way to a gruelling day’s work on their bikes. In the evening when they’re riding home you can hear them singing and shouting and laughing on the other side of the village.
Pistola can still remember the first time Sandrina appeared one evening at the front door of the house in Via Luigi Caprini clutching a jiggling stocking filled with fat green spotted leaping frogs she’d caught in the rice fields. The thick knitted stocking made an ideal bag, stretched with the weight of the frogs going crazy at the bottom.
Initially, Nonno Mario kept saying, ‘Grazie, ma no’, until Pistola, eternally curious, persuaded him to buy some. They ate them for supper, skinned, tossed in flour, and deep-fried.
‘Eat the whole thing, bones and all, tutto,’ Nonno Mario told him as he crunched his way through the crispy pile that tasted a bit like chicken and a bit like fish.
In summer, they often eat Sandrina’s frogs, and afterwards, as the long hot evening turns to dusk, they sit outside on chairs on the pavement, relishing the cool air. It’s the time of day people stop to chat. Nobody stops to talk to their neighbour, Squarcione, though, who’s usually cooling down the pebbles outside with a watering can. He’s a miserly money-lender, a man in Nonno Mario’s opinion ‘with about as much spark as a potato’, who they all know has haemorrhoids and who they all think deserves them. Over time, Squarcione has sold just about everything Nonno Mario has pawned with him, including a silver canteen of cutlery acquired during the former chef’s more lucrative pre-war years in a little Verona trattoria.
Cremonini the coffin maker lives on the other side. A cherub in comparison. His coffins are custom-made and he never leaves the house without his folding wooden tape measure. Anyone who looks a bit off-colour can be sure some friend will mutter, ‘Is it time to send Cremonini for the measurements?’
Cremonini also sits outside his house in the evening, gazing at the heavens where his last client must be. When he switches off the lights to discourage the bugs, Pistola can see the stars shining in the inky sky as brightly as the headlamps of Bepi Faccincani’s Fiat Balilla. The only sounds filling the night are the millions of frogs in the rice fields. Raaargggk! Raaargggk! Raaargggk!
Though he enjoyed playing with these frogs when he was little, his relationship with them has changed. Now he takes his fishing rod to the rice fields and ties to the end of the line a cork that bounces like a fly in the light of his torch.
The first time he fried a bucketful of his own frogs, his grandfather suggested they should amaze everyone at Teresa’s wedding with a risotto con le rane as the second course.
