fields as a hideout. As they lie dazed by the heat and the nausea inevitably provoked by a bout of black tobacco, they hear a commotion. Bounding down the row towards them comes a pretty, skinny gypsy girl with her petticoats bunched up as she runs, carrying a bundle. Only when she’s almost on them does she see them and in her fright trip and fall, dropping the bundle, which immediately goes hopping away, long ears bouncing. Without a word, she picks herself and her petticoats up, and is gone before they can say, ‘Ciao, bella!’
When they emerge later they spot the carabiniere’s bicycle lying on the ground a few rows down. He must be stomping up and down the field looking for the girl, but by now she’ll be safe in the camp outside the village that the gypsies put up every summer, coming here from Montenegro with their multicoloured caravans, bony horses, and thieving fingers.
That night while Nonno Mario is stirring the polenta, Pistola tells him about the pretty gypsy girl.
‘So why didn’t you nab the rabbit?’ is his grandfather’s response. ‘We could’ve had a delicious coniglio cacciatore.’ He pours the thick maize meal on to a wooden board to cool before cutting it into strips to grill over the stove’s embers. ‘Don’t let me hear you going on about pretty gypsy girls. That tribe is evil.’
Disagreeing with Nonno Mario usually opens the door to a bout of righteous indignation. Instead, as he waits for the crust on the sides of the pot to cool so he can pick at it, Pistola contents himself with spooling seductive visuals through his mind of brown legs glimpsed briefly under bunched-up petticoats.
‘And why the smile, Sifolin?’ asks Nonno Mario, using the nickname he employs when he’s feeling affectionate. Pistola’s real name is Ettore, but as a toddler he was so obsessed with the little pistol between his baby legs his grandfather had called him Pistola. Nonno Mario, however, chose to give his grandson his own dialect name for that important little appendage. Sifolin. Little whistle. He continues to call him Sifolin even though that little whistle is more prone nowadays to become a little flute, as it is now, with the alluring images of those brown legs flitting through its owner’s mind.
‘I want to ask you something.’ Pistola picks at the cooling polenta crust. ‘Why do you think Teresa is marrying Aguinaldo?’
Long silence. Then, ‘Who else is there in this village smart enough to marry her?’
‘But doesn’t she deserve—’
Nonno Mario’s shrewd blue eyes give him a quick exploratory once-over. ‘Is she so special because she’s rich? Is that why he’s not good enough? Who’s been gossiping? And why do you care?’
Pistola carefully heads his grandfather off in another direction. ‘Tell me again about the British airman Valetti shot down …’
His grandfather bangs his wooden spoon on the table. ‘When Giacomo Valetti catches you fooling about in his precious maize fields, it won’t be funny. Mark my words. That man is capable of anything. You’re playing with fire going into his maize fields.’
‘Tell me, Nonno! Was he covered with blood?’
‘That maledetto blackshirt!’ Now the flesh crinkles ferociously around his grandfather’s blue eyes. ‘Giacomo Valetti has the soul of a Mussolini medallion. I hope one day he rots in hell. Any of us who saw that tiny figure floating down like a thistledown seed would’ve hidden him …’
‘So why did he shoot him?’
‘He’s another breed. He could’ve just handed him over to the Germans. But no! Pam! Pam! Pam! We all went rushing out into the fields. But we couldn’t save him. Dead as a dodo. Draped all over the mealie plants. We wanted to string Valetti up by the balls.’
In Pistola’s mind the dead airman has the wavy blond locks and noble features of Leslie Howard in Gone with the Wind.
‘Not many women married to a violent bastard like Valetti would dare do what Liana did afterwards,’ says Nonno Mario. ‘But then my niece has always been a far more decent human being than her husband. It took spirit to go and get that dead airman’s clothes, wash the blood off, and wrap them up with his identity documents so she could send them to his family after the war.’
He starts cutting the polenta into strips, then, glancing at Pistola through shrewd eyes, says, ‘So, is Aguinaldo Bersella up to something?
‘Like what?’
‘Smart, that one. Doesn’t intend to end up living off mulberry leaves like his father. Saw him today with that small-time crook Ignazio. Wouldn’t have thought he’d have much time for that man.’
Ignazio is Zia Andromaca’s brother. He has never wanted to join her in the family bakery and instead moved to Rome. ‘Your classic low-rent conman trying to be a high-rent conman’ is how Nonno Mario describes him. Whenever he comes back to Campino, he swaggers around weighed down by his gold chains and his thick-framed sunglasses, telling everyone he’s involved in something a lot more lucrative than baking.
‘Guess what’s on the menu tonight?’ Nonno Mario is suddenly excited. ‘That big stream down by the rice fields is being drained and there are only a few pools of mud at the bottom. Catch the eels with your bare hands …’
Fishing is one of Nonno Mario’s many passions. When he spots a prize fish in a Campino river – a hump-backed gobbo, for example, that can reach five kilograms – he stalks it for days. He and Pistola will be sitting out on the pavement and Nonno Mario will suddenly put down his grappa and say, ‘He’s still there, that big one. Saw him again. I’ll get him.’ And he does.
But eel is another story. With its snakelike body and soft sticky freshwater flesh, it doesn’t appeal to Pistola. The only way he can get it down his throat is with large amounts of the wine with water that his grandfather sometimes gives him at mealtimes. Regrettably, however, Nonno Mario regards eel as a delicacy and can’t understand how anyone can resist it, especially after it has been submerged for hours in his own special sweet and sour agrodolce marinade – he doesn’t use recipe books – which he makes accompanied by a running commentary, ‘Should of course be using capers. But who can get capers? So we’ll use mint. Or what about sage. Or …’
He rolls up the eel like a cartwheel, pins it together with crossed skewers so it looks like some exotic Eastern treat, and then grills it over the embers, all the while singing arias in a perfect soprano, like his favourite, ‘Amami, Alfredo’.
Tonight it’s a bigger eel than ever. He’s beside himself with delight.
‘Bet the Queen’s not eating this tonight!’
‘What queen?’
‘Any queen. The English one whose uncle-in-law doesn’t want the throne.’ He pops an eel eyeball into his mouth and begins chewing on it with noisy delight. ‘Poor woman. What she gets to eat is not fit for human consumption. Rubbery pink sausages and smelly boiled cabbage.’ He has recently heard about the horrors of the English diet from Zio Umberto’s son, Eros, who spent a holiday there on the profits of his new open-air cinema. ‘They can only eat what’s on the plate when they’ve smothered it in some brown goo from a bottle on the table.’
He slyly pops the other eyeball into his mouth, observing Pistola’s horrified face out of the corner of his eye. ‘No wonder so many of them come to Italy for real food.’ Then, after a pause, he says, ‘Bepi Faccincani caught a sack full of these. Everyone wanted to know if he was going to serve them at the wedding.’
