not? The eel was Italy’s most popular fish in the Middle Ages. Bred in freshwater tanks.’
Even though it might alert his grandfather to his hidden hostility, Pistola can’t resist a dig, ‘Poor Teresa doesn’t need any more slimy creatures at the wedding. Bad enough the one she’s marrying.’
But Nonno Mario isn’t listening; he’s dreaming up a new wedding sauce for the eel dish.
They’re still in the throes of debating the wedding menu when an episode takes place that will involve Pistola in a chain of events with far-reaching consequences.
It begins when the news reaches Campino that Luchino Visconti is making a movie in the next village and looking for male extras. Just about every Campino male who can walk rushes to sign up. Fortunately, it’s still the summer holidays and there’s no school.
Pistola wants to be in the film as much for the glory as for the money. He wants to get close to Italy’s adored stars of the silver screen, Massimo Girotti and Alida Valli, the leads in this box-office epic.
The movie is called Senso. The scandal magazine Oggi describes it as a film ‘in the romantic realism style of Gone with the Wind’, set during the Italian War of Independence against the Austrians. Thanks to Oggi, the whole of Italy knows Visconti’s first choice was Marlon Brando and Ingrid Bergman but that Bergman’s husband, Roberto Rossellini, put pressure on her to withdraw so Brando withdrew too.
The extras must be on location in Valeggio at 8 a.m., dressed like peasants of a hundred years earlier. Not a requirement that takes much effort for most Campino villagers, who still haven’t got over the hardships of war. But all Pistola’s pants are narrow, following the fashion. Nonno Mario learned to sew in the army, so he gets out his late wife’s ancient Necchi and takes in the waist of a pair of his old pants. The legs still catch on the wheels of Pistola’s bike, though. He has to roll them up over his knees.
‘Yar! Yar! Circus clown! Where’s your red nose?’ The Galetti boys shriek with laughter as he cycles by on his way to pick up Fiorenzo and another friend, Donato. Even Fiorenzo’s sickly father, Pino, laughs so much he has to hang on to the doorpost.
One irritating aspect of the movie is that Aguinaldo has landed himself a substantial speaking role and managed to make friends with the male lead, Massimo Girotti. Now he gets fetched every morning by Girotti’s chauffeur in his white Lancia convertible. Pistola and his friends have to cycle for an hour to get to the location and arrive sweating like pigs in the muggy heat.
The Battle of Custoza, one of the war’s epic struggles, is being shot in these dusty fields in the region where they actually took place. It’s a mass of soldiers, horses, dust, and shouting people. No sign of either Massimo Girotti or Alida Valli. To Pistola’s surprise, none of the extras appears to have the slightest idea which historic skirmish is being enacted, or whom it is they are supposed to be trying to kill, Italians or Austrians.
History is his passion. He has relived in his head many times the endless battles of this region. He’s mesmerised by how much blood flowed through the Mincio valley during those twenty ferocious years when the kings of Piedmont and Savoy tried to drive out the Austrians and unite Italy. He knows exactly how many thousands of soldiers died on both sides. He has seen all their bones carefully arranged on the packed shelves of the ossario at Custoza where they were taken after being piled into mass graves. Those eternally grinning skulls, some with bullet holes and some with names written in careful ink on small cards, are lined up above their neatly stacked arm and leg bones. How anyone can put a name to a skull years later is something he always wonders about.
One thing he’s grateful for. Unlike Donato’s great-great-grandfather, none of own his ancestors has ended up there for the world to gawk at. For some reason, Donato is unaccountably proud of that ancestral lieutenant whose left eye socket was bashed out by some belligerent Austrian.
It’s not through Donato’s ossario connection though that he gets the part of a soldier, but the fact that he can ride a horse. Since Pistola and Fiorenzo can’t, they’re playing peasants. In Pistola’s case it’s a small acting role. He has to run, grab one of the children, and put him on a haycart, repeating it over and over until Visconti is happy.
Happy is not an apt word for this morose film director. Black-eyed and heavy-browed, he stomps around in a straw hat, an eternal cigarette in his mouth, looking as if he’d rather be in his family castle, away from these common village folk. On a far friendlier stretch of movie turf altogether is his attractive young assistant director, Franco Zeffirelli, who, in his jeans, boots, and cowboy hat, appears not much older than Pistola and his mates. He’s the one who moves into action when Visconti shouts, ‘I need thirty peasants down here on this side.’ His pleasantly perfumed, smiling blond presence puts them all at ease.
Generally, however, the shoot appears hopelessly disorganised. Hundreds of extras dressed as soldiers mill around. They run off to war when one kind of whistle blows, and then run back again at the sound of another. Most of the time nothing much happens.
Still, being in a movie in glorious Technicolor made by Italy’s most famous director is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to Pistola. His only regret is that the electrifying love scenes between Italy’s two heartthrobs that he expected to see are not being shot there at all. Only the battle scenes.
On the third day of shooting, he spots his hero reclining in his chair labelled ‘GIROTTI’ with a cigarette and a bottle of Peroni. This, Pistola decides, is the day to get his autograph. But the star is elusive. He keeps vanishing into the dusty killing fields and disappearing among piles of corpses covered with tomato sauce. At lunchtime he goes off with Zeffirelli to the restaurant below the stone bridge at Borghetto Castle. This is Pistola’s chance. With Fiorenzo for moral support, he follows them, positioning himself behind a tree as the two movie men make suggestive jokes with the blushing waitress about the local stuffed pasta speciality, agnolini.
Finally, Pistola plucks up courage and approaches the table. It’s nowhere near as scary as he feared. Girotti gives him a smile that creases his cheeks all the way up to his famously photogenic eyes, and after signing the photograph Pistola has torn from Zia Andromaca’s Oggi, the film star looks up at him and announces, ‘You know, you’ve got the kind of face they’re looking for at Cinecittà. You should go to Rome and try your luck.’ Glancing across at his colleague, he says, ‘Eh, Franco? Che pensi?’
Zeffirelli glances for a moment at the large dark eyes set in the perfectly shaped and proportioned features that Pistola inherited from his mother, gives him an equally charismatic smile, and says, ‘Why not? He’s certainly got the bones.’
Pistola manages to mutter his thanks and back away covered in confusion, aware of the envious sniggering of his friend whose bones have gone unnoticed. Not that he knows whether he’s good-looking or not, or feels in any way gratified by the attention. The film world is not a career he has ever considered, and there’s no way he would ever dream of heading for Cinecittà. Right now, all he’s aware of is how pathetic he must seem, unable to produce even the smallest witty crack in response. A rural idiot of the rawest kind, self-conscious and out of his depth.
The reality is that they terrify him, these beautifully dressed, gloriously smelling movie types from Rome. They’re as foreign as Martians. They inhabit
