had made him look older than perhaps he was.
The first time had been at the end of September when he had been the mysterious third man in the car decorated with a red cross in which an heroic Italian doctor had been driving me to the Apennines along the Via Emilia, what was then the main German line of communication with the battle front to the south. In Parma, which was stiff with Germans, the car, a Fiat propelled by gas, had broken down in Piazza Garibaldi, the main square of the city. There we had been surrounded by German Feldgendarmen armed with Schmeisser machine pistols telling us to hurry up with our repairs and be gone. While the doctor and I had been trying to get it going Attilio, if that was who he was, had sat in the back seat, dressed in a garment called a tabar, a voluminous cloak, cackling away at them completely unafraid.
The second meeting I had with this mystery man was later that winter when he literally saved my life after I had become hopelessly lost in a thick forest and got soaked to the skin in a river. He had put me up for the night in what must have been one of the loneliest houses in the Apennines. The front door of that house was almost exactly the same as the one here, at I Castagni. I wondered if it reminded him of it too.
It was Attilio (or was it?) who, later that same evening in the house in the mountains, told me the extraordinary story of what happened after Maestro Giovanni shot the Bird with the Golden Wings and gave it to the King; and it was he, the following morning, who put me on the right track back to the cave in which I had been living, and from which I had strayed like a lost sheep.
But it was impossible that he and Attilio could be the same man, if for no other reason than that of age. The man I had known in the autumn of 1943 must have been long since dead.
‘What we’ve got to do, before we buy the house, is to talk to him,’ Wanda said; but trying to interview Attilio proved to be like trying to interview a will o’ the wisp.
As we went up the hill with Signora Angiolina we had a last, fleeting glimpse of the little house through a break in the trees. Smoke was coming from the chimney which meant that Attilio had emerged from his place of refuge in the bedroom and was about to start preparing his evening meal. I wondered what it would be: perhaps some magic potion that would render him invisible.
A little later, sitting in Signora Angiolina’s cavern-like kitchen, eating cake and drinking the white wine made with long-ripened grapes, of a sort that was always produced for honoured guests, she told us what she knew about Attilio. We, ourselves, decided to say nothing.
‘Attilio is a very good little man, un ometto molto bravo,’ was how she described him for the second time that afternoon, as though we hadn’t taken it in. ‘He can do anything, repair anything, make anything. Some people think he is a bit strange, because he talks to himself more than he does to other people but he does this because he is really rather timido and some people make fun of him.
‘When he was young,’ she went on, ‘he learned the work of a blacksmith, and of a wheelwright. He can still work anything in iron or wood and he can make spades and hoes and the handles for scythes and for any other tools that are needed.
‘And he can make ladders, the triangular sort called tramalli, and he makes the oil lamps you saw in the kitchen.
‘Once he made a merry-go-round for the children hereabouts, and paid for a band to play while he made it turn.
‘He also made a cinema in which you looked through a sort of telescope – [what she probably meant was a magic lantern] – at coloured pictures, while a gramophone played music.
‘He even made an aeroplane and launched it with him inside it from a high place on the way to Fosdinovo, but the machine fell to the ground and he was injured. He doesn’t like to be reminded of this.
‘But his greatest skill, because he has such a good memory, is as what we call a narratore di fiabe, a teller of tales. Attilio inherited this skill from his father, who learned it from his father. There were also women who told stories, narratrice, they were called.
‘He knows many stories, Attilio – L’Uomo Verde d’Alghe [The Green Seaweed Man], L’Uomo che Usciva Solo di Notte [The Man who Only Went Out at Night], L’Oca con le Penne [The Goose with the Feathers], Il Drago e la Cavallina Bianca [The Dragon and the Little White Mare], and many, many more. Some are very old, from the time of the Saraceni.’
I knew. I had already heard whoever the old man in the mountains was tell two of his stories, the one about Maestro Giovanni, the other Il Figliolo del Re Portoghese (The Son of the King of Portugal) back in 1943, in the course of the second of which, being very tired, I had fallen asleep, but when I woke up he was still telling it.
‘Now,’ said Signora Angiolina, ‘Attilio is the last narratore in these parts and when he goes that will be the end of the fiabe.
‘He is also very religious,’ she went on. ‘And however difficult things are for him, he never complains,’ she concluded. ‘The other night it began to rain very heavily and I was worried about him. So I went down the hill to the house – he was already in bed – but there was a light shining through a hole in one of the shutters covering the window of his bedroom. I looked through it and there he was, sitting up in bed reading his breviary with his umbrella open while the rain came pouring through the ceiling. The next morning he went up on the roof and repaired it.
‘Of course I didn’t tell him about seeing him in bed with his umbrella. He would not have liked it.’
With what, in card-playing circles, amounted to a full house, it seemed unlikely that Attilio was in any imminent danger of losing his pied à terre, at least not for some time. Somehow we were going to have to reconstruct the house around him, as if he were an Emperor in a Ming Tomb.
As soon as we got back on the Via Aurelia we telephoned Signor Vescovo and told him that we would like to buy the property and asked him how much the owner, Signor Botti, wanted for it. We didn’t dare use the telephone at the shop or down the hill at the Arco at Caniparola. If we had done so the news of what was happening would probably have been broadcast over the entire neighbourhood.
‘He isn’t asking anything at the moment,’ Signor Vescovo said. ‘As I already told you he hasn’t yet made up his mind whether to sell or not.’ Signor Vescovo was not the sort of man who liked having to repeat himself and he was repeating himself now. ‘If he does decide to sell,’ he told me, ‘the price will be, two and a half million’, which was then the equivalent of about £1500. ‘Will he take less do you think?’ Wanda asked, who dearly loves a struggle.
‘I think,’ said Signor Vescovo, ‘that the price is not negotiable.’
‘How long do you think it will take him to make up his mind?’ I asked, being of an impatient disposition.
‘It is difficult to say. It could be any time. The only thing you can do now is to wait. When he does decide I will let you know and then you must come instantly in case he changes his mind. And you must bring the money. You may have to pay in ready cash. It is probable that he may not know anything about cheques. I don’t think it’s wise to bother him with such matters. They would only upset him.’
‘Where do we get two and a half million in cash?’ I asked Wanda when she hung up.
