Love and War in the Apennines (29 page)

The trees were some kind of oak, possibly holm oaks, and they were no more densely planted than those in the forest below the Colle del Santo, which they could scarcely be, but although there had been some brambles in that forest it was nothing compared to what was growing in this one which was one vast entanglement of bramble, and once I had embarked on what I had hoped would be a swift glissade downhill between the trees, there was no hope of turning back.

The brambles were anything up to twenty feet long and when they were twisted together in two or three strands, as they usually were, they were as unbreakable as a rope. At first I tried to cut my way through them with a knife but it was hopeless, and I soon lost it; then I tried lying on my back on my rucksack and kicking my way downhill. At first I tried to spare my clothes; but no such finesse was possible. All the time I was held at a hundred different points by brambles and to tear oneself away from one lot by brute force was only to become hung up on another, destroying Luigi’s almost indestructible suit in the process. Then I tried holding the rucksack, which was an infernal nuisance, in front of me and pushing it downhill with my feet but then I felt the seat of my trousers beginning to go. At one point I found a dry watercourse full of stones which was slightly less overgrown than the rest of the hillside, but it soon ended in a vertical drop of twenty or thirty feet and I was forced to abandon it. And all the time I dared not stop, although I was drenched in sweat, because I had no idea how much progress I was making, a hundred feet, two hundred feet an hour, there was no way of knowing. I could not even get at my watch because I had carefully wrapped it up and put it inside the rucksack.

The forest was eerily silent and there was not a breath of wind. Under the trees alone it would have been dark enough; beneath them and what was really one enormous bramble bush I was in perpetual twilight. I felt as if I was entombed. If I broke a leg here no one would find my bones for years and years, perhaps never if the charcoal burners did not come again to this particular forest, and perhaps not even then, if the tracks they cut down through it passed me by. And now I remembered Francesco’s words about the woods that I had listened to and then instantly forgotten, ‘They’re the thickest in the Apennines, on both sides of the ridge. You wouldn’t do it in a week. You’d drop dead first.’

After what seemed many hours I could hear the river far below and I was filled with despair because I had buoyed myself with the hope that by now I must be very near the bottom; and now I began to be really afraid at the thought of being benighted in the wood, enmeshed in the brambles, unable to stand or lie down or even sit on such a slope except with my legs wrapped round a tree. Finally I could bear it no longer. I had to know the time and I succeeded in extracting the watch from the rucksack. It was nearly half past three. There was little more than half an hour of daylight left and the thought gave me renewed strength; at the same time the going became slightly easier, the sound of the river grew louder and finally I came out above it on the edge of a sheer cliff, devoid of any foot or handholds, which fell fifty feet or so to the rocks below. Upstream there was a high, unscaleable waterfall which was making all the noise. There was not much water in the stream itself.

The only way out was downstream along the edge of the cliff which was even more difficult and much more dangerous than going straight down the mountainside had been, but after a hundred yards or so I came to a less steep place where a number of rather rotten-looking, contorted juniper trees sprouted from
the rocks – a piece of Chinese landscape rather than Italian – and swinging down from one to another I finally reached the river bed. I had been in the forest for four hours.

I set off downstream, floundering in the pools which were only knee deep; fortunately there were more rocks than water, otherwise it would have been impossible. I had no choice of direction. Upstream was the waterfall which was impassable, and the other bank was as steep as the one I had just descended. I expected a long and arduous journey with further falls to negotiate and having to spend the night in the gorge – anything was better than the claustrophobic horror of the bramble forest; but after a couple of hundred yards the gorge opened up revealing an enchanting vista. The cliff on both banks ran away high up the sides of the valley and the gorge became a gently sloping green vale with groves of ancient chestnut trees growing in it through which the river purled, and on the right bank a path descended through some neglected fields to an old stone farm house which was half-hidden among the trees.

I was in no state to care whether the owner of the house was a friend or foe. I splashed across the river and went up towards it and as I did so a small, wizened man who even at a distance had something somehow familiar about him, emerged from a dilapidated out-building and stood there watching me as I squelched up the path towards him, laughing in the way that I remembered so well: ‘Heh, Heh, Heh!’

It was the old man who, long ago now, had travelled with me in the doctor’s motor car on the famous journey from the plain to the mountains.

The remainder of that day and the following one were like a dream which it is now difficult for me to believe ever happened – perhaps it didn’t. That the old man existed and that he lived in the way
he did is undoubtedly true, but there was something so strange about his life in this loneliest of places and so much that was unsaid by him about it, and so many questions that I might have asked him if I had been in the mood to act as an interrogator, which I wasn’t, that will never be answered now because he is dead and gone. And even if I had asked them he was so very deaf, which accounted for him never answering any of the questions the doctor had asked him when we were travelling together in the motor car. As it was I had to shriek in his ear if I wanted to communicate with him in a voice that must have been audible a mile away. And because he was toothless it was difficult to understand what he said.

Seeing him now for the first time standing up, I realised how bent he was from a life spent working in the fields. He wore very baggy blue trousers, an old fawn-coloured jacket and a large cap to match which, as he had a very small head, looked as if someone had dropped a large pancake on it.

He was not at all surprised to see me and he gave no sign now, or at any other time, of having met me before. He was not even surprised by my appearance which by this time was wild and extraordinary. My suit which before had been a collection of holes, now hung in ribbons about me, one leg of my trousers had been completely shorn off below the knee and I was bleeding from innumerable long scratches on my face and hands and my one bare leg.

Then, without speaking, he indicated a stone trough in which I could wash and while I was doing so I could hear him mumbling to himself ‘
Vediamo un po’
(‘Let’s see a bit’), as if he was wondering what to do next with what was for him a rare visitor. Then he took me in to the kitchen, or rather he went into it, and I followed him anxiously, afraid that the wash in the trough might be the extent of his hospitality and that he might be going to shut the
door on me. It was a huge door, with a great iron lock and a key almost a foot long, a door made of horizontal slabs of pale, silvery wood, great, thick pieces of timber that had probably been split out of one of the giant chestnuts, some of which must have been two or three hundred years old, and from which the leaves were now drifting down.

The kitchen was very dark and filled with cobwebs and an extraordinary collection of objects, almost all of them including the furniture obviously made on the premises – the table being exactly like the door but with legs on. Perhaps most remarkable of all were the mousetraps, blocks of wood with three holes in them each of which had a sort of miniature portcullis raised over the entrance until the mouse gnawed its way through a piece of thin twine to get at the bait inside when – as he now demonstrated gleefully – a spring was released and the portcullis clanged shut, decapitating the creature. And there were huge bradawls, two feet long, medieval-looking lanterns, shallow iron pans with long handles that had been beaten out by hand and wooden plates.

A very small fire was burning on the hearth, and we sat down in front of it together on two minute stools which were less than a foot above the ground for a long time while he just looked at it, occasionally making ‘Heh, Heh, Heh!’ noises and saying to no one in particular
‘Vediamo un po’
, unless he was addressing an old mongrel bitch with fleas, or the cat which lay down side by side with it, like the lion with the lamb.

Then, when it was quite dark, he stirred up the fire and heated up a
polenta
made from chestnuts, of which he had an enormous store, and with it we ate some sort of bitter salad which was very good, mixed with a generous dollop of oil and vinegar which he poured from a strange, fragile glass vessel with a long spout, rather like an alchemist’s retort. Then he arranged the fire again so that we would not be plunged into total darkness, talking to himself
in a conversational tone all the time, not as a madman but as someone who was working out what to do next and had got into the habit of talking to himself because there was no one else to talk to. He didn’t feed the animals now or at any other time while I was there, presumably they drank water from the river and shared the mice.

We were sitting on the dolls’ house chairs in the semi-darkness when, without any warning and without asking me if I wanted to hear it or not, he embarked on a long story. He spoke loudly and as clearly as anyone can without any teeth, and he told it beautifully with all the different intonations of the various characters, of which there were many, all carefully enunciated. It lasted twenty minutes. He never hesitated, except when he got to some amusing part of the narrative when he would stop for a moment to utter a few ‘Heh, Heh, Heh!’s as if he was the audience as well as the story-teller, in which I joined without having the slightest idea most of the time what I was laughing at. This was the gist of it.

‘
C’era una volta.
Once upon a time,’ he began, ‘there was a man called Master Giovanni, and one day he went hunting with forty hunters. They found very little to shoot and Master Giovanni shot the only bird – but it was not like any sort of bird he had ever seen before. It had feathers of real gold, and when he got back to the palace he gave it to the King.

‘Now the other hunters were jealous of Master Giovanni, and they told the King that he knew the secret of finding living things that were made of gold and they encouraged the King to order Master Giovanni to bring him a golden hen which would lay golden eggs, and this the King did, saying that if Master Giovanni did not do so he would cut off his head. Master Giovanni was very worried because he had no idea where to find a golden hen and he did not want to have his head cut off; but while he was
walking in the woods feeling very miserable and trying to think where he might find a golden hen, he met an old woman who asked him why he was looking so miserable, and Master Giovanni told her the reason. “Ask the King for a golden cage to put the golden hen in and I will find it for you,”she said.

‘So Master Giovanni did what she said, asked the King for the golden cage, and the King gave him the golden cage and then the old woman told Master Giovanni where he could find the golden hen; and he did find it, and he took it to the King in the golden cage.

‘The forty hunters, who were also courtiers, were very displeased at this because they had hoped that Master Giovanni would have his head cut off, and they persuaded the King to order Master Giovanni to find for him a girl with golden teeth and golden hair as a bride and this the King did, also on the same condition – that if he did not find the girl with the golden teeth and the golden hair he would have his head cut off, and Master Giovanni went away again and was very miserable.

‘But that day, while he was walking by the river, he found a large fish on the bank in distress, and when Master Giovanni offered to put it back in the water the fish, in gratitude, gave him a box of powder with the word
Hell
written on it which the fish said might be very useful to Master Giovanni some day. “All you have to do if you want to get rid of anyone, is to sprinkle some of the powder over them and they immediately burst into flames,”the fish said, and swam off.

‘But Master Giovanni was still very miserable because he had still not managed to find the girl with the golden teeth and the golden hair, but by good fortune he again met the old woman who had helped him to find the golden hen, and she told him to ask the King for a golden ship with a golden cannon and golden cannon balls and the best generals and captains and then sail away
to Turkey where he would find the girl with the golden teeth and the golden hair.

‘So the King gave him all these things, even the golden cannon and the golden cannon balls, which was not difficult now that the golden hen was laying so many golden eggs each day, and the best generals and captains, and they sailed away to Turkey and there Master Giovanni declared war on the Sultan and the guns were fired POOM, POOM! and the Sultan surrendered and gave his daughter who had golden teeth and golden hair to Master Giovanni to take back to the King as a bride.

‘But, unfortunately for the King, Master Giovanni had himself fallen in love with the girl with the golden teeth and the golden hair and he decided to get rid of the King and so, when the golden ship reached home, he sprinkled the King with the magic powder which the fish had given him and the King started burning with big flames and was consumed, and Master Giovanni married the girl with the golden teeth and the golden hair and they lived happily ever after.’