Via Luigi Caprini.
Dessert was the one course Nonno Mario had already decided on. As his grandfather Vittorio used to tell anyone who’d listen, the most delectable way to end a good meal is to eat a few pieces of the firm juicy flesh of a pear along with a few chunks of nutty, sweet Grana Padano, the hard grainy cheese created by monks of the region. The two flavours are sublime together.
And he would quote a proverb: ‘Al contadin non far sapere quanto è buono il cacio con le pere.’ Don’t tell the farmer how good cheese is with pears (or he’ll put up the price).
When Nonno Mario told the bride that was how he was planning to end the meal, she clapped her hands. ‘Bravissimo!’ she announced. ‘It will be the best wedding feast any girl ever had!’
Whenever he visits his friend Fiorenzo, Pistola bumps into his hated rival. Not that Aguinaldo is even aware that Pistola thinks he’s the one who should be marrying Teresa. Aguinaldo would find the notion hilarious.
Though Pistola is always at the Bersella house, he’s grateful he’s not Fiorenzo. Not many families in Campino are well off, but at the bottom of the heap are the Bersellas. Take the matter of shoes.
Only when Italy’s economic miracle eventually takes place, and pig farmers make fortunes exporting prosciutto, will everyone in Italy have more shoes than they know what to do with. Right now, they don’t. While Pistola is fortunate enough to have two pairs – ‘No child in this house goes barefoot, even if we have to do without butter,’ says Nonno Mario – the two Bersella brothers have only three pairs between them.
As the elder one, Aguinaldo has two in the latest fashion – two-tone with pointed toes. Fiorenzo has a pair of school lace-ups he uses as little as possible to avoid wearing them out. The person Pistola feels most sorry for, though, is Fiorenzo’s father, Pino. He’s a yellow-faced chap who always tries to be kind, and who Pistola fears won’t make it through the summer.
Pino Bersella works hard for little money. He’s determined to educate his boys so they can lift themselves out of the peasant rut. Raising silkworms is not a lucrative occupation, but he and Sandrina are willing to make sacrifices to send Aguinaldo and Fiorenzo to the Liceo along with the sons of the wealthy of Mantova. The Liceo is a high school that opens doors.
So every year Pino makes huge bamboo structures filled with trays to house thousands of munching worms. Since they have to be kept in the shade, they’re all over the house. In the attic. The back garden porch. The woodshed. There’s even a silkworm installation as high as the ceiling in the corner of the Bersellas’ living room.
As the silkworms grow bigger, the house in Via San Salvador becomes filled with the dank smell of their rotting mulberry leaf extrusions and the noise of their voracious chewing. It sounds like the sea. When the time comes for them to pupate, Fiorenzo and Pistola help Signor Bersella fill the trays with branches for the silkworms to make their golden cocoons in. Then the busy silk-buyers come around to buy sack-loads to take to the textile factories of Milan and Como. They depart, leaving Signor Bersella looking forlornly at the few miserable lire in his hands.
Sandrina is never there, always away in the rice fields up to her thighs in stagnant water. Aguinaldo is never at home either.
‘Where’s your maledetto brother?’ Pistola invariably mutters to Fiorenzo as the two of them struggle down the steep stairs from the attic carrying buckets of silkworm debris. ‘Why doesn’t he help?’
One day, they punish Aguinaldo by pouring some of the buckets’ contents into his fancy two-tone shoes. When later he comes after Fiorenzo with a belt, his younger brother easily outruns him in spite of his bare feet. Yelling taunts and curses as he races away down the street towards Pistola’s house, Fiorenzo is safe in the knowledge that when eventually he gets back home, his mother’s strong bronzed arms will protect him. He’s her baby, though not smart like his elder brother. That extraordinarily handsome black-eyed son who was once her treasure has become Sandrina’s black sheep. His brothel escapades have made her the laughing stock of the rice fields. He shows no shame or remorse. Worse, he’s home so little that she and her husband suspect he’s in with bad company.
Their only hope is that Teresa will get him on the right track once they’re married.
Fiorenzo gleefully describes to Pistola his regular visits with Sandrina to the village graveyard to unburden her woes on her mother.
‘The sooner he’s out of this house, the happier I’ll be,’ Sandrina tells her mother, gazing into the calm eyes of the tombstone’s porcelain portrait in the vain hope that this woman, such a force to be reckoned with in life, might in death have some power over the living. ‘Such a sweet little boy when he was young,’ she sobs. ‘How he loved his mother! What happened to change him, Mama? Where did I go wrong?’
The intriguingly fertile subject of Aguinaldo tends to exercise the mind of Fiorenzo. He tells Pistola that, as he lies sweating at night between the sticky sheets on his lumpy mattress full of wool offcuts, he can hear his mother next door, muttering to herself in her bed beneath the sad-faced Christ on the cross on the wall, while beside her Pino snores quietly and dreams of silkworm moths mating.
Even though Pistola accepts that Aguinaldo’s film-star looks might have made him one of the most desirable single males in the valley, he can’t comprehend how a smart girl like Teresa could fall for someone so self-obsessed and mean-spirited.
He and Fiorenzo debate it one hot Saturday afternoon in the golden maize fields of the Valetti farm where they often go to smoke and discuss Juventus’s chances. It’s their favourite place on a hot afternoon. The maize grows as high as two metres in rows wide enough to run flat-out in. A great place to hide from a farmer whose watermelons you’re eating.
Pistola has come up with a theory.
‘He’s had so much experience in the brothels, he thinks he’s now some kind of superhuman lover. He’s told her no one will be able to satisfy her as well as him. Bet he’s told her he’s got a huge one.’
‘Ma va là! Do me a favour!’ Fiorenzo is almost paralytic with scorn. ‘It’s not even as big as your thumb. No, I bet he tells her he’ll be a rich man one day. You know what girls are like about money.’
To Pistola, the idea that Teresa could ever be a gold-digger is inconceivable. In his indignation, he inhales a burning mouthful and has a coughing fit. They’re smoking the cheap, rough, black, thin Alfas that Fiorenzo steals from his father. The Alfas smell like cheroots and are only a cut above the ghastly throat-searing imitations they used to smoke here as small kids, made from dry beards of corn packed loosely into Nonno Mario’s cigarette papers.
‘All the females in this village just want to get out of this place,’ Fiorenzo says. He’s lying on his back, gazing upwards and indulging with his free hand in an erotic experiment that feels natural under the wide blue sky. ‘They want to go and live in Milan. Ask any of them. Ask my mother.’
Pistola is not in the habit of having meaningful conversations with females. He doesn’t know many. Zia Andromaca, his aunt, the baker, is the only one he has ever spent much time with, which was once when he had to help her bake bread after her bakery assistant broke his leg. One thing he’s sure of is that with her hairy legs and moustache,
