Love and War in the Apennines (17 page)

For instance, if Luigi needed the saw and the last person who was supposed to have used it was Armando, Agata would open the window of the kitchen and shriek out of it, in a voice that
seemed strong enough to blow down the trees on the mountain above,
‘ARMAAANDO! … DOVEEE LA SEGAAA?’
to which, if he was engaged in turning Stella and Bionda at a difficult place high up on the side of the plateau, he would make no reply. Whenever he was he never replied the first time she shouted as a matter of masculine principle but, finally he would shout
‘LEIII!’
to the bullocks and they would eventually stop in their tracks and then at last he would cup his hands around his mouth and shout towards the house
‘COSAAA?’
which in the dialect meant, literally, ‘THING?’

‘DOVEEE LA SEGAAA!’

To which his invariable reply was, whatever he was asked,
‘NON LO SOOOO!’
(I don’t know) and Agata would throw up her hands in despair and slam the window shut and a little later she could be heard shouting to Rita and Dolores from other windows and other doors in other rooms, until the saw, or whatever it was, was finally located or else she gave up and the search, so far as she was concerned, was abandoned.

Sometimes she managed to get through to Armando, Rita, Dolores and her husband all at once, and a sort of five-part ululation would go on for some minutes in which Nero the dog, annoyed by the excessive din, would join, making it impossible for any of them to understand one another. The only one in the household of whom nothing was ever asked, just as, at the early morning briefing, to whom no orders were given, was me.

At what must have been about ten o’clock, about three hours after we had consumed our
prima colazione
, the breakfast of bread and
caffè latte
, Agata would announce to all and sundry,
urbi et orbi
in the same earsplitting voice that it was time for the
merenda
, literally the picnic, and everyone dropped whatever they were doing as if it had suddenly become red-hot and
untouchable and scurried, without actually running, back into the house.

By now the inhabitants of the Pian del Sotto, having shed their early morning torpor in the fresh air of the plateau, were much more lively. This was the time when they were at their best. It reminded me of the world of commerce to which I had been an unwilling recruit for a short spell before the war. Like office workers at their elevenses who throughout the morning have been nothing but subfusc figures calling one another Mr, Mrs, and Miss So-and-So, for a brief period, they, as it were, let their hair down.

Agata and the two girls were fascinated by dreams and in the kitchen there was a dog-eared book with a crude drawing of a blindfolded female seer on the cover entitled
I MIEI SOGNI.
Every morning this was laid on the table by Agata, like a sacred book and while we all ate the hot bread that she had baked in the outside oven, the rather cloying cheese which always reminded me of a foot that had gone to sleep, and drank the awful red wine which left a feeling in one’s mouth as if someone had gone over it with a rasp, they used to talk about what they had dreamt the previous night and then consult the book to discover whether their visions were portents of good or evil. Luigi and Armando took no part in this. Whatever they dreamt, if they dreamt at all, they kept to themselves. As I did, they listened entranced, although pretending not to be. After a day or two I really began to envy Agata, and Rita and Dolores their capacity to have such an astonishing variety of dreams. For years now, apart from an occasional nightmare, I myself had enjoyed, if the absence of them can be said to be an agreeable state, a completely dreamless sleep. It was only now, after arriving at the Pian del Sotto, that I had begun to dream. I started to dream on the first night, and every succeeding night I dreamt the same dream: that I was
picking up stones on the Pian del Sotto and it seemed to me that it lasted most of the night. The only time when I was oblivious was when Agata shrieked up the stairs ‘IT IS THE HOUR!’

With such a limited dream repertoire I was disposed of once and for all on the first morning.

‘Stones,’ Agata read, having turned to the appropriate page in
I MIEI SOGNI
, in which almost every conceivable and inconceivable sort of animal, vegetable, mineral, man-made object and human being dream, except those thought by the author or publisher to be indecent, was listed in alphabetical order and its significance explained. ‘To see stones on the ground means that your way will be hard and difficult.’

‘You didn’t throw stones, did you?’ she said.

‘No, I was just picking them up and dropping them.’

‘That’s a good thing,’ she said severely, as if I had any control over what I dreamt, ‘if you had been throwing stones it would mean that you are going to behave badly towards a certain person.’

‘I dreamt of
cacca,’
Dolores said, proudly.

There was no need to look that up. They all knew what dreaming of
cacca
meant – money. In fact it would have been no good looking it up as it was presumably thought to be rude, although breasts were in (penises were out and so were vaginas). To dream of breasts meant that you would be devoured by illicit and morbid passions, unless they were full of milk, in which case it meant imminent maternity.

The next night Dolores dreamt of finding a wallet filled with
lire
, but this was awful. It meant that she was going to lose all the money she was going to acquire by dreaming about
cacca
and this threw her into a state of profound gloom for several days until she dreamt about a cemetery which presaged good health and happiness which restored her spirits.

I found
I MIEI SOGNI’s
interpretation of dreams rather baffling, except for my own which seemed logical enough. For instance, when Rita dreamt about ambulances it seemed that, on the principle which the book appeared to follow, that the more lugubrious the dream, the more pleasant the outcome for the dreamer would be; to dream of ambulances should ensure a state approaching bliss; when a cemetery meant good fortunes; a corpse, good business; someone moribund, the promise of long life; crying, good fortune and happiness. Yet when Agata opened the book at ambulances and read out, with gloomy relish, that they were the harbingers of scandal and enormous debts, it seemed absolutely crazy and unfair and I was not surprised that Rita, who was a gentle girl, burst into tears.

But the most ill-served of all by
I MIEI SOGNI
was the wretched Agata herself, who always dreamt of what one would have thought were completely innocuous things but all of which were thoroughly bad omens, such as birds, which meant terrible illness and death of next of kin; and abbots and priests, both of which had a thoroughly gloomy significance unless, as the book said, they were either confessing Agata, or giving her communion which meant felicity, happiness in the family and reconciliation with persons dear to one; but unfortunately, in her case, they were never doing so.

I always suspected Dolores of inventing her dreams, after having recourse to the book when no one was looking, but something happened to make me change my mind a few days after she had dreamt, or so she alleged, of
gabinetti
which the book said meant that ‘You have lost your direction in the darkness.’

It was towards the end of the time of the
merenda
when
I MIEI SOGNI
had been put away, that those of us who were inclined to do so repaired to the
gabinetto
which was near the edge of the cliff behind the house. It was a rickety, draughty
construction made of badly jointed planks and with a seat with a round hole cut in it which, as anyone who has tried it knows, is much less comfortable than an oval one. Below the seat a long shaft dug in the earth led to some unimaginable depths below. On the whole the
gabinetto
, like the ones in the
orfanotrofio
, was not a place to linger in in philosophical contemplation, but one in which to be about one’s business and out again as soon as possible.

One day, just before the
merenda
ended, those of us who were still in the kitchen heard a series of muffled cries for help,
‘AIUUTO! AIUUTO!’
coming from somewhere outside and we all rushed into the yard, including Agata, which was a quite exceptional thing for her to do. The cries were coming from the
gabinetto
and when the door was finally forced open it was found that the seat of the apparatus, which was riddled with wormholes and spongy with dry rot, had given way under the weight of Dolores, who was a girl who weighed all of eleven stone, precipitating her some way down the shaft where her girth caused her to become wedged in the same position in which she had been sitting when the accident occurred which was fortunate, otherwise she might never have been seen again. As it was she was only rescued with some difficulty. As a result of this disaster Armando was taken off ploughing for the rest of the morning so that he could assist Luigi in constructing another, more substantial but equally uncomfortable seat from a plank of seasoned chestnut wood and four stout stakes which Luigi had been keeping for this very purpose.

‘She must have been after the
cacca,’
Armando said, later, and we had a good laugh about this.

At
mezzogiorno
we all trooped back again for the midday meal which was invariably a thick vegetable soup, usually with beans and
pasta
in it and more bread and cheese and wine. Dreams were
forgotten at this repast, everyone was too done in to do anything but eat, and as soon as it was over and the girls had cleared away the dishes and washed up, everyone except Agata, who was knitting one of the long, sleeveless woolly vests which I coveted, fell into a coma over the table for an hour. If it was warm enough I used to prefer to go outside, prop myself against a wall out of the wind and go to sleep until Luigi gave the signal to start work again, which must have been about half past one, by which time the effects of the meal had begun to wear off and I was beginning to feel hungry again.

The afternoon was very long – there were no breaks in it and towards four o’clock my back ached, my stones began to have a truly awful quality and I began to talk to myself in order to keep going; but at long last Agata would shout from the window ‘ARMAAANDO, ENRIIICO, VIIIENEI’, and I would dump my last load over the cliff, take the cart up the hill and collect my sack from the place where I had hidden it at the edge of the wood, and Armando would deliver Stella and Bionda from the bondage of the plough, and we would go back together to the farmyard where the girls were already washing themselves at the trough. Then, when they had finished and the animals had drunk deeply from the trough, and Nando had fed them and made them comfortable, we used to wash too and when no one was looking I used to collect my
vaso da notte
from where I had hidden it, and climb the stairs to my little room where I changed into my own clothes and clean socks, and put on my boots again, from which I never allowed myself to be divorced except when I was in bed.

I would have liked to have shaved at this time but Signor Zanoni had warned me against doing so as he said I would not look the part if I was clean shaven, being
troppo Inglese
, as he put it, so that what I saw when I looked in a piece of broken mirror which
I had found in one of the barns was something which looked like a gooseberry and I envied Armando who always had a vicious blue stubble on his face, the day after his weekly shave. Luigi, on the other hand, never seemed to grow any hair on his face at all, but he certainly didn’t look English to anyone except me who was always reminded of Sergeant-Major Clegg at Sandhurst whenever I looked at him, except that unlike the sergeant-major, he never raised his voice.

It was after the evening meal that the attention of the rest of the company turned to me. If I have given the impression that I was a sort of solitary slave to whom no one else on the Pian del Sotto paid any attention then, dead or alive, I have done them all a serious injustice. I was by no means ignored. It was simply that I found myself in a very hard-working household which, at the, to me, appallingly early hour when it began to work, was as incapable of conversation as I was. At the mid-morning
merenda
the female part of it was engrossed in necromancy and at
mezzogiorno
every member of it, except Agata who had the constitution of an ox, was too fatigued to do anything but eat and snooze; and for the rest of the day we were all too dispersed and too busy with what we were doing to engage in idle conversation. I had always thought of Italian
contadini
as a race of people who sat basking in the sun before the doors of their houses while the seed which they had inserted in the earth in the course of a couple of mornings’ work burgeoned without their having to do anything but watch this process taking place. I now knew differently. These people were fighting to survive in an inhospitable terrain from which the larger part of the inhabitants had either emigrated to the cities or else to the United States and South America. Rough they might be but they were courteous, too, and whenever they did talk among themselves, as when they were consulting
I MIEI SOGNI
, they rarely forgot to conduct at least a part of the
conversation in Italian which I could more or less understand, as Signor Zanoni had suggested to them, so that I would not have to try to elucidate their impossibly difficult
dialetto.
By the time that I had come down from my room, having combed my hair and changed my clothes, it was always quite dark and in the kitchen a fire was burning, the only time it did, except on special occasions; and although it could not transform this large, austere room into the sort of magician’s cave that Signor Zanoni’s was, it at least gave it an air of homeliness and warmth which it lacked at other times.