by Norman Lewis
Besides binoculars I was carrying a camera and was implored by the hunters to photograph them holding up the little bundles of blood-splashed feathers, averaging, they said, 150 grammes in weight, which the morning’s sport had yielded. The migrants which had chosen this precarious route to the safe havens of Africa were almost all small, speckled, unremarkable birds of the bunting family, although mixed in with them an occasional goldfinch or a warbler dangled from its tiny claws. Separate were the water wagtails shot from cunningly prepared ambush along the river bank, and the perquisite of a sporting syndicate having some affiliation with a charitable group known as ‘The Drop of Milk’.
I was called away at about this time to deal with the first garbage collection from the house. This was remarkable for the livery worn by the two men employed on the job, and the grandeur of their vehicle. I took it at first to be a fire engine, except that it had an electrically raised and lowered top. Resplendent in scarlet paintwork, it was lettered in bold black initials SPQR, standing for the Senators and People of Rome, and was clearly some miles off course at this point. Annunziata, the maid we shared with the Count, who had arranged the collection, explained that the villagers themselves simply threw their rubbish and unwanted objects into the nearest field, and that this service was only available to the upper crust of La Storta and the castle of Isola Farnese. ‘That’s the way it is here, sir. The rich and the poor. If you’re rich you do nothing. If you’re poor you work for nothing. Take the case of the Count. With respect, what does he do? He grows parsley and when it’s ready the priest’s horse jumps over the wall and gobbles it up.’
At round about six in the evening the shooting started again, and although Annunziata warned me that most of the guns would still be drunk I wandered down the garden to see what was going on. There were fewer birds than in the early morning, but they were larger and more important by local standards, many of them being starlings whose small, mangled corpses would attract admiration and command a high price when they hung among the dishevelled bunches of sparrows on the stalls of the local markets in the days to come. The starlings foolishly congregated in the hope of roosting in the trees of the wooded ravine to the north-east of the house, and here the hunters blazed away at them as soon as they settled, but with little success. While studying this action through the binoculars I was suddenly aware of the presence of the Roman garbage lorry stationary in the road running along the ravine. It would shortly be dusk and the blatant scarlet of the municipal lorry was dignified and enriched in the waning light. Now only rarely was the sound of a stray shot to be heard, and it was evident that the day’s sport was at an end; cars’ horns bleating impatiently summoned the last of the laggards from the slopes. With that, faintly, I heard the lorry’s engine start up, watched it manoeuvre into position with its back to the ravine, saw a door lift and the following cataract of black sacks and broken furniture go over the edge.
Back in the Via Baronale I was lucky enough to witness an extraordinary ritual. A kingfisher had fallen to one of the guns, an event of extreme rarity likely to happen once in a season, and at the moment of my arrival a crumpled handful of feathers, still glistening in the half light, was being passed from hand to hand amid cries of astonishment, congratulation and delight. The custom in such cases was for the successful sportsman to swallow the eyes, and this he did, washed down in a glass of brandy, to the sounding of car horns and shouts of applause.
The shooting party departed, watched in silence and with on the whole expressionless faces by the men of the village, whose only voiced criticism was that 300 lire could be spent on a single cartridge required to kill a sparrow offered for sale in the market for one sixth of the price.
Annunziata was on her way back to her house carrying the Countess’s personal garments to be laundered at home where she could keep an eye on her children. Her wash-house was fitted with the laborious Victorian equipment her employer insisted be used in this case. She had been a beautiful girl, but was now greying, with a distraught expression, and over-muscular arms, and carried with her an inescapable odour of soap.
Staring after the departing cars, she said, ‘Good riddance to the sods.’
‘Don’t you like them?’
‘Well, who would? Did you hear them down by the river? They ran out of birds, so they shot all the frogs. Can you wonder we vote Communist?’
I brought up the matter of garbage being tipped into the ravine. She seemed surprised. ‘Naturally,’ she said. ‘It’s the easy way.’
‘They’ll fill up the ravine in the end,’ I said.
‘Not in our time.’
Chapter Twenty-Five
IT CAME AS A RELIEF that bombardments did not follow on a strictly daily basis. The report was that bad weather sometimes held up the migrants in their passage round the Western Alps, so there were peaceful mornings when scouts posted by the syndicates along the migrant routes telephoned in with the depressing news that no flights had been sighted making for Rome. When the weather lifted and the passage cleared it was natural that a more than average number of birds was to be expected, and the shooting continued almost without pause throughout the day. Following these intervals of glut Di Stefano’s, the smart restaurant at the end of the village, put out a placard announcing that ucellini were on the menu. Four of these per portion were served grilled on skewers and patrons were provided with pretty porcelain receptacles painted with pasque-flowers into which osseous remnants could be surreptitiously spat. It was an expensive course; nevertheless, the rumour spread through the village that the ucellini were not buntings, skylarks or pipits that had fallen to the guns but in reality were no more than sparrows netted in the Pontine marshes.
The house was separated from the castle by a small but dense shrubbery. In this, inexplicably, scorpions congregated among the leaves in quantities I have never seen before or since. It was an attraction in consequence for weary and famished birds, in particular warblers, who seemed by some extraordinary instinct to detect the presence while in flight of the succulent morsels awaiting them below. Inevitably the birds caught the eye of the marksmen and a few days on in the season a close-quartered early morning fusillade awoke me once again. From the window overlooking the street I saw that two men had placed themselves behind the garden wall from which they fired into the bushes. Soon after, they moved off and another arrived in a car from which he alighted carrying a most elaborate and costly looking gun which he set up on a tripod. He adjusted the sights, took aim and fired just at the moment when the Count, followed by Hannibal, came through the castle gate. With that he dismantled the gun, climbed back into the car and drove off. The Count had stopped to watch these proceedings before joining me, while Hannibal limped away for his morning visit to a stone projecting from the base of the wall bearing an obliterated Etruscan inscription. ‘Anything wrong?’ he asked.
‘I wish these people wouldn’t shoot into the garden,’ I said. ‘I have children to think about.’
‘All the same, it’s better to grin and bear it,’ he said. ‘If you complain you’re likely to make enemies, which is something to avoid. I’m off to my garden to collect some rather special parsley. Why don’t you lock your family away in a safe place for an hour or two and come along?’
Chapter Twenty-Six
LIFE FOR THE PUPILS OF St George’s was pleasant. Relations with the teaching staff were informal and relaxed. The older children dressed as they or their parents pleased and in the top form first names for all concerned was the order of the day. The midday meal was something to look forward to — spaghetti in one of its innumerable forms, followed by meat or fish, then a sweet of an exciting and inventive kind, usually based upon some regional models. Students in the top form could ask for a glass of local wine if they wished, despite its tendency to produce a scaliness of the lips. In the afternoon juniors like Kiki and Gawaine dozed gently through readings of the poetry of Petrarca and Leopardi by which it was hoped to introduce them to the Italian language. At wee
kends they were offered sailing instruction on Lake Bracciano, and there was a promise of skiing in the Gran Sasso D’Italia when the first snows fell.
The village satisfactions to which the children were returned by the school bus at the end of the scholastic day were of a solid but different kind. This was a community devoid of onward and upward pressures. The villagers saw themselves as guided by destiny into the paths they trod, and this they accepted with a sort of spirited calm. Take no thought for the morrow, the Bible adjured, and had they been able to read it they would have agreed. Apart from a short repertory of obscure oaths the expression most frequently in their mouth was ‘pazienza’ usually accompanied by a weary smile. An absence of ambition in childhood had its advantages. The young of Isola Farnese could live for the day, because there were no future summits to be climbed. Within reasonable limits they were left to their own devices, and the village school released them in the afternoon to something close to absolute freedom.
Boys and girls formed separate groups with little contact with each other. In the evenings the girls took over the doorsteps of the village, escaping to fairyland in little rustic soap operas of the imagination. The boys fought down their huge reserves of energy with endless activity in mock wars. Unlike the girls, who were companionable and democratic, the boys chose a leader who exercised stern discipline over the rank and file, and demolished the silences of Isola Farnese with their outcry that persisted long into the night. It was a scene the Count very much enjoyed, and to foster it he had installed powerful lighting throughout the village which was not switched off until midnight — or even later on demand. ‘Let them play,’ he said. ‘Why shouldn’t they? I like to see it, and how much I wish I could join in.’ To complaints from village adults who were being kept awake, he would say, ‘I have ear-plugs for you. Wear them as I do, and you will sleep well.’
Our arrival in Isola Farnese gave rise to a curious breach of custom among the children. After a few weeks a scattering of Italian words they had picked up provided the open sesame to the tribal life of the young. At this point Kiki would normally have taken her place among the little coteries of girls on the village doorsteps, but after a discussion among the leading boys it was decided that she was to become an honorary male. This may have been no more than the highest compliment that could have been paid, or it might have resulted from some local fallacy on the subject of Anglo-Saxon competence. Following a brief speech by the leader, nothing of which was understood, the boys pressed forward to congratulate her and shake her hand. ‘Adesso sei uomo come noi altri (now you’re a man like the rest of us),’ she was told, and invited to take part in their energetic and sometimes dangerous games. Apart from simulated warfare from which Kiki was excused, the most popular game was nascondino — hide and seek, for which there was endless scope in a landscape full of Etruscan tombs.
This freedom of the streets granted to the children might have caused doubt in a similar environment in northern Europe but the Count assured us that the crime of mugging, so far, was unknown in these parts and that child molestation was exceedingly rare. We had heard through Annunziata a garbled account of an assault on a child said to have taken place in or near the town of Viterbo, some thirty miles to the north, and followed by a lynching of the culprit. ‘I heard some mention of it,’ the Count said, ‘although it may be no more than a rumour. I’m afraid we suffer from a tendency to take the law into our own hands. In this case there was talk of the man being hung by a hook through his throat, but whether there’s any truth in it I can’t say. Such punishments can be barbarous.’
The juvenile military campaigns of Isola Farnese provided Kiki with a splendid opportunity for exploration of the countryside and the innumerable secret places in the fields and woods. At first it struck her friends as strange that their honorary boy would want to poke into dark and uninviting places that they had previously overlooked, but in the end she managed to enthuse them in the search for pottery collection, and while the craze lasted we were showered with coloured fragments, most of which lost all trace of decoration within days of disinterment. A special interest in my case when I was allowed to accompany some of these trips was the autumnal flora of the area which was remarkable. The country people stripped this landscape of everything that was edible, from the tiniest snail lodged in a crack in a wall down to the most insignificant nut. On fine days families streamed out from Rome and went over the fields yard by yard cutting out dandelion plants by the thousand for incorporation into salads. Flowers — apart from a few known to have edible bulbs — they seemed to regard almost with distrust. At most they bought chrysanthemums in the market, but the wild variety they left alone. It was through this indifference that all these fields in autumn were enamelled with countless cyclamens, colchicums and crocuses, some species being of great rarity elsewhere.
Our most exciting find in the matter of archaeology was quite accidental, arising from a quest, for once, not for fragments of Etruscan pottery but for rare flowers. The Count had suggested a location some three miles away and Kiki and I went there in the car. It was a field under a steep slope with flowers sprouting everywhere from among the rocks. Followed by a white cow full of amiable curiosity, prepared to wait while we botanized and then move on with us to the next outcrop of flowers, we began to explore the area, soon discovering a cave. Pushing through the ferns at its entrance we saw to our amazed delight a marble sarcophagus, in perfect condition and missing only its lid. It was empty apart from a deposit of the finest chalky dust.
On returning to the car and trying to drive away we promptly stuck in the mud and seeing that there was nothing to be done we left it and set out to walk back to Isola Farnese. The grocer’s shop seemed the best place to enquire where to look for help. We went in and the grocer, Antonio, vacant-faced as ever looked up from a customer he was serving, ‘Eh?’
I explained the predicament, asking if Antonio knew of a garage in La Storta where they would be prepared to come and pull the car out of the mud. ‘There’s a festa on, they’re shut,’ he said. I thanked him, turned round to go, and he called after me, ‘Wait.’
He finished serving the woman, and then came to the door with us. A notice hung on the glass door panel facing the street. This said ‘Open’, and he turned it round so that despite the early hour he was now shut. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.
He gestured to us to get into his Land-Rover parked outside, and we set off. I started protestations about putting him to trouble, and he said in a flat voice, ‘This happens all the time. Where is it?’
We drove off in silence, leaving the road for the cart track I’d originally followed, and thence after crashing through numerous potholes, into the field.
‘What sort of car is it?’ he asked.
‘Fiat 127,’ I told him.
‘For going to the beach in,’ he said. ‘For this road a car needs to have entrails. You’re lucky. The garage at La Storta doesn’t come out to a place like this.’
We ploughed into the field where, guarded by our white cow, the Fiat leaned over in the churned-up mud. ‘Sticky,’ the grocer said.
He hitched the tow-rope he had ready over the front bumper and pulled us clear with a single jerk and I followed him back to Isola Farnese where a small collection of customers waited at the door of his shop. A little ironic cheering was silenced with a glance as he unlocked the door and turned the notice round. I stood at the back of the customers at the counter trying to mouth my gratitude and he held up his hand in acknowledgement without raising his eyes from the rice he was weighing. A grumbler was put in her place by pazienza — a wry acceptance of the frustration of life in another village mouth, but in this case a stern command.
We were turning away to leave the shop when he called after us ‘Buon giorno’. The incident brought us closer together. From this time on we became almost friends and for the important Feast of Befana, immediately following Christmas, he presented us with a bottle of Asti Spumante, a salami and a jar of excellent o
lives from his own trees and pickled by himself.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
ONE OF THE ATTRACTIONS of Isola Farnese was that apart from our own intrusion and the conspicuous idleness of the Count and his family, this was a working village devoid of parasitism. The doctor came from La Storta, there was no policeman, a single shopkeeper, a taciturn couple who ran the bar, and a baker who turned out enough fresh bread every day to go round. The local wine came from a tiny triangle of vineyard on a hillside. It was doused with sprays from time to time, and when harvested the grapes still carried a bluish veneer from the spraying and were tossed into a vat without any attempt to remove this or sundry foliage snatched up by the machine that did the picking, before the wine-making took place.
The thin and acidulous white wine of Isola Farnese was sold in the local bar, but bottled with an impressive label, featured also in the wine list of the Di Stefano restaurant, the sole enclave in the village of the outside world. Di Stefano remained a bit of a mystery to the locals, because only the village women who were called in to clean the place up after business was at an end on Sunday had ever been allowed to put their noses inside its inner rooms. Di Stefano’s opened on Saturdays and Sundays only, and Sunday lunch was the great event of the week for middle-class Italy, here as elsewhere. Every table for this meal was always booked, and occupied in the main by men in dark suits who arrived in black Alfa Romeos. These customers who travelled here from Rome and consumed enormous amounts of food in the hours between midday and four were supposed to be members of the Sicilian Mafia known to have established itself in the capital. They were highly popular with the staff for their courteous and considerate behaviour and the generosity of their tips.
