Big Italy

by Timothy Williams

  Trotti lowered Anna Maria’s bag on to the airport floor and he took his cousin in his arms. There was a jerky movement and Anna Maria began to sob behind the round glasses.

  Overhead, a speaker announced the delay of a British Airways flight to Manchester.

  17: Autostrada

  (PIERO TROTTI WAS nearly sixty-five years old and it was a beautiful day in December. He felt healthy and before long, he would be retiring to the hills far, far above the fog of the valley. To the hills where the sky was always a pure blue.)

  They had left the airport and Trotti was surprised at the ease with which he had got on to the Venice autostrada. The morning fog had lifted and the afternoon traffic was fast.

  It was rare that Trotti drove, but now with his cousin beside him he realized that he enjoyed driving more than he cared to admit. He rarely left the city and when he did, he normally took the train. He sat with his eyes on the truck in front, while the hired Fiat Panda ran smoothly along the newly resurfaced autostrada.

  “You knew Sandro was ill, Piero?”

  Trotti shook his head.

  “You weren’t in touch?”

  “Not for some time.” Trotti took his eyes off the truck and glanced at his cousin.

  Anna Maria’s skin was grey and wrinkled; she looked old. Not enough sun and too much Dutch coffee. She was a lot heavier than he remembered her.

  Trotti said, “I’ve been busy lately.”

  “Not enough time to phone your cousin?” There was reproach in her voice and Trotti realized it was not necessarily directed at him.

  “Sandro was supposed to contact me three weeks ago, but he never rang. The last time we spoke was over a month ago. It was about the house at Santa Maria.”

  “That’s where you want to retire to, Piero?”

  “You don’t intend to leave Holland?”

  “Don’t worry about me.” She laughed without feeling. Her round spectacles reflected the sky’s light. “I told Sandro a long time ago I didn’t need a share of it. Provided I can always stay at Santa Maria when I come back to Italy.”

  “Of course.”

  “Not very often, I should think. My three grandchildren are in Holland and they can’t speak a word of Italian.” She was still wearing the black pillbox hat with its strange veil. Anna Maria turned her broad face away to the countryside beyond the flashing parallels of the crash barrier. “It’s all so different—all changed so much. This isn’t how I remembered Lombardy.”

  “It’s nicer in the hills—away from the pollution.”

  “I no longer belong here.”

  “How’s Tazio?”

  “Tazio?”

  Earlier the fog along the autostrada must have been thick. Several damaged vehicles, Audis, Mercedes, Lancias, lay littered along the verge of the road, the densest highway in Italy. Orange ACI pickups, lights turning, cranes dipped, were removing the crumpled cars.

  “My son doesn’t write. As stubborn as Sandro. Doesn’t even write to his own children.”

  The Panda went under the bridge of the restaurant on the edge of Bergamo Airport. Here, many, many years earlier, Piero Trotti had been kidnapped by a Sardinian. The place was no longer called Pavesini but Ciao, the red letters astride the road visible from a couple of kilometers away.

  The old BP service station was now called IP and sold Q8 petrol.

  Again he glanced at his cousin. She had fallen silent, preoccupied with her private thoughts.

  With age, Anna Maria had grown to look like her brother Sandro, but harsher and broader. Trotti now found it hard to associate this Dutch woman with the girl he had known and admired and loved, with the lively young woman famous in Santa Maria for her bicycle and her appetite for polenta.

  (The intense days of late childhood, when they had been together: Sandro, Anna Maria and Piero Trotti. Anna Maria always in charge, already a woman and waiting for her fiancé to return from Albania; Sandro eternally excited with a new idea, a new challenge to his sharp intelligence; and the younger cousin, Piero Trotti tagging along, glad to be sharing in their special, privileged world.

  The fiancé had never returned and in 1947 Anna Maria had left with Piet van Dijk for a new life in Holland.)

  Trotti turned his eyes back to the road and watched the truck ahead, labeled TRASLOCHI PETTERLE, SUZZAGA (MN). The driver was exceeding by at least ten kilometers the ninety-kilometer-per-hour limit of the white plaque. Beneath the ropes, the blue tarpaulin flapped angrily.

  Sandro was dead.

  Sandro, who had slept in the same bed as Trotti; Sandro, who had been grazed by a German bullet in the last weeks of the war and who had returned to the village with his arm heroically in a sling—Sandro was dead and Trotti felt strangely dispassionate. He should be grieving, but he told himself that would come later …

  “I didn’t know there was anything wrong with Sandro—I don’t understand it. Last time I saw him he seemed well enough. Excited at the idea of getting the house done up. I think Sandro hated Brescia as much as I—”

  “Of course they said heart attack.” Anna Marla turned the broad, wrinkled face, the glasses perched on her nose. “I know Sandro committed suicide.”

  18: Canal

  SANDRO’S VILLA WAS at the end of via Naviglio Grande, a three-story building that had been constructed by a local industrialist at the end of the previous century. Constructed in a garish Liberty style.

  From the outside, it was ornate. Balconies and intricate stonework that looked like concrete. There was a small garden at the front, more gravel than grass, behind an iron fence.

  After Bergamo, Anna Maria had scarcely spoken in the car.

  It was now getting late and in the wan light of the winter afternoon a woman from the clinic was waiting by the front gate for Anna Maria. She had brought the key, but Anna Maria sent her away. Anna Maria had her own key that she removed from her inelegant handbag.

  They entered the house.

  It was a long time since Trotti had been there. In fact, it was a long time since he had been in Brescia. Now with the ring road, he avoided the city whenever returning home from Lake Garda. On those occasions he had needed to see Sandro, he had always gone directly to the clinic up in the hills overlooking Brescia.

  Trotti wondered whether Anna Maria was offended by his cheerfulness, by his apparent indifference to the news of Sandro’s death.

  Trotti did not feel indifference. Simply he could not believe that Sandro was dead. Sandro had always been part of his world, a fact of life, like the sun and the rain, war and marriage, birth and death.

  It had long been one of Trotti’s more pleasant expectations that together he and Sandro were going to retire to Santa Maria. Each other’s company and a lifetime of anecdotes to relate.

  Trotti carried Anna Maria’s heavy suitcase upstairs. She said she needed to wash. She busied herself settling into the empty villa.

  The interior of the house had been recently redecorated in a style that was an amalgam of late Renaissance and European high technology. Digital barometers, sound-triggered lighting and dark Venetian furniture.

  There were several photographs on the walls and on the shelves. Photographs of Sandro. Some had been placed in brass frames, others were set haphazardly beneath a broad sheet of glass. Trotti looked at the photographs. There were one or two pictures of close relatives, the rest were of people he did not recognize.

  In his thirties, Sandro had bought a collection of wigs to hide his premature baldness. Later he had grown to accept his lack of hair.

  There was only one photograph of Sandro and Trotti together.

  It had been taken at Santa Maria, on the steps of the church. Trotti looked at the camera while his cousin, in white pleated trousers and two-tone shoes, threw his bald head back to laugh.

  Pioppi, a little girl with black pigtails and a frown of concentration, sat on Sandro’s lap.

  Trotti found the villa depressing. It reminded him too much of Sandro and of Sandro’s tastes. Trotti w
as wondering whether he had time before the funeral to go up to the Villa Ondina on the lake. Get a good night’s sleep.

  He allowed himself to slump on to a leather couch and he closed his eyes. Perhaps he dozed.

  “You haven’t asked me whether I’m hungry, Piero.” Anna Maria looked at him reproachfully. She had bathed and changed from out of her black clothes into slacks and a sweater. “I didn’t eat anything on the plane,” she remarked as a proof of fortitude.

  “You’d like to go and eat?”

  “Why not?” His cousin’ shrugged and for the first time since he had seen her at the airport, Anna Maria allowed herself a small smile. “Something light.”

  “A pizza, perhaps?”

  She nodded. “Go and get ready, Piero. And you’d better take one of Sandro’s shirts. You can’t wear that awful thing.”

  At the airport Anna Maria had reminded him of the women in the hills; now she was like those aging actresses in the American films who choose to dress and behave as adolescents. The slacks were bright red. The sweater was a russet color. He did not know whether to admire her or to be irritated. She wore high heels and she had broad hips. She held the capacious handbag against her body.

  Piero Trotti went upstairs.

  He washed, and in Sandro’s bedroom he discovered he had to clap to turn on the light.

  Trotti tidied his hair with one of Sandro’s brushes. A brush that was clogged with artificial hair.

  19: Brewery

  THEY LEFT THE villa at seven o’clock.

  The air had turned very chill, and above the lights of Brescia the stars had come out in numbers.

  Many, many years earlier, Trotti had eaten at the Birreria Wührer with his wife and daughter. They were coming back from the lake and were waiting for the evening train to Bari. Sandro, accompanied by a buxom German woman, had picked them up at the station (“The only Habsburg station in Lombardy,” Sandro pronounced knowingly) in his red Spider and had taken them to the Birreria Wührer and the beer gardens beneath the steel cowled chimneys.

  In those days, the air was heavy with the malt used in the brewing of beer. Now the air was cold with the penetrating damp of the plain and the smoke from the factories that had not yet closed with the recession.

  Trotti and Anna Maria entered the wooden restaurant. There was no longer any malt in the air because the production of beer had been relocated south to Rome and Naples. Wührer beer, once the pride of Brescia, was now brewed in the South and could only be bought in cans.

  They sat down and Anna Maria looked around her, at the wooden furnishings, old, bogus-Alpine in style, and at the empty tables and white tablecloths.

  “How was he when you last saw him, Piero?”

  “Sandro?”

  She nodded. In the neon light of the birreria, the broad face appeared drawn.

  “You know Sandro.” Trotti shrugged. “Always cheerful, always the same.”

  “That didn’t stop him from killing himself.”

  “You’re joking.”

  She shook her head. “He phoned me a couple of weeks ago. I knew he had debts but I never thought …” The corners of her mouth turned downwards but she controlled her face as the waiter approached their table. They ordered pizza and beer.

  “Debts?”

  “He never mentioned anything to you, Piero?”

  “Sandro always had money. Money and admiring women.”

  “That’s what comes of growing up poor. You can never get enough. And I don’t think I’m any different. Now that it’s all over and done with, I realize it was to get away from the poverty of Santa Maria that I married a foreigner.” She turned to look through the window. “And spent my life in exile.”

  Trotti followed her glance. Past the checkered curtain and the square window frame. Beyond the empty beer garden, now hidden by the dark, beyond the gate. On the far side of the road, he could make out the lights of the Pastori agricultural school. He turned back to look at her.

  “What debts could Sandro have had?”

  “He spent his money like a sailor.”

  “A villa here, the clinic and the cars. Everything was paid for years ago. When we spoke, Sandro and I, over the phone, it was about the house up in the hills in Santa Maria. His architect friend Alberto was going to restructure the place.”

  She shook her head.

  “Sandro wanted a swimming pool but the mayor wouldn’t give him building permission.”

  “You’ve been there lately, Piero?”

  “Santa Maria? I went up for the festa padronale in August. Sandro was supposed to come, but in the end he phoned to say he couldn’t get away from work. I went to look at the house.”

  “Sandro always put his work before everything else.”

  “The place is in fairly good shape, but there’s at least a hundred million lire to be spent on it. That’s what I told Sandro on the phone. He seemed to think I’d be able to do some of the work.” Trotti smiled wryly. “We were going to share the cost of restoring. I’ve got some money put aside. And there’s my pension.”

  “You don’t prefer your house up on Lake Garda?”

  “My wife’s house,” Trotti corrected her.

  “And how is Agnese?”

  “I’m not from Gardesana. It’s a nice place, it’s where I’ve spent many happy moments. Pioppi and I spent a fortnight at the Villa Ondina this summer and it was a joy to be with her and the little girl.”

  “Francesca?”

  He nodded. “Like you, Anna Maria, I’m from Santa Maria. From the OltrePò. That’s where I grew up—poor, stubborn and proud, And that’s where I’m going to spend the last days of my life.”

  “Still poor, stubborn and proud.”

  “I’ve worked hard. I could have retired several years ago but I stayed on in the Questura for … for various reasons. Now I want to relax. I’ve been under pressure for far too long. I’ve seen too many things I need to forget. Even in my quiet, provincial city.”

  “Tell me about your wife, Piero.”

  “What I need is my livestock. And to go looking for mushrooms in the autumn. To drink good wine. And to taste chestnuts. It’s time to smell wood smoke. Time that I forgot the city. Time I got back to nature.”

  “I have no desire to return to Santa Maria. Not now. I always hated the poverty.” She shook her head. “It’s nothing to do with me, Piero Trotti,” she said, and the wrinkled face formed a weary smile.

  “What, Anna Maria?”

  “There’s no house in Santa Maria.”

  “Of course there’s a house in Santa Maria.”

  “Sold it.”

  Trotti could feel a coldness in his veins. “What?”

  “To pay his debts. I’m afraid Sandro had to sell it. I thought he’d told you.” She held her napkin to her lips as the waiter brought the pizzas and beer. “I now see he never consulted you.”

  20: Daughter

  Wednesday, 1 December

  TRAMPS, LONG-HAIRED AND apparently still young, sat on the steps of the Teatro Civico, huddling round a shared bottle of wine, while an African, probably from Senegal, watched a clockwork soldier crawl across the plastic sheet of his wares—matches, beads, counterfeit cassettes. The vu comprà’s black skin had turned grey with the cold.

  Piazza della Loggia.

  (Once Sandro had excitedly taken Trotti to see the Carlo Scarpa guardrail. Fascinated by architecture, Sandro could not understand Trotti’s indifference before the memorial to the victims of the terrorist bomb.)

  Trotti stepped into the telephone booth outside the COIN department store, and as he inserted the card into the slit, he saw that he had a credit for three thousand eight hundred lire.

  “Pioppi, is that you?”

  “Papa?”

  “Pioppi, are you all right? And my little Francesca?”

  “Where are you phoning from, Papa?”

  “Brescia.”

  “Why Brescia?”

  “I couldn’t phone any earlier. How’
s Nando, Pioppi?”

  “Nando’s with me now.”

  “How’s the pregnancy coming along?”

  “What’s wrong, Papa? Why are you in Brescia? You’re going to the lake? I thought you were coming here for Christmas.”

  “I’ll try. Perhaps I won’t be retiring next year, after all.”

  “Papa, tell me what is wrong.”

  “I’d like to come to Bologna for Christmas but I don’t want to impose.”

  “You never phone during the day, Papa. Why are you phoning now? Why don’t you want to retire? What’s happened? And whoever said anything about you being an imposition?”

  “Sandro’s dead.”

  “Who?”

  “Your Zio Sandro. I’m in Brescia with Zia Anna Maria. She flew in from Holland yesterday. I picked her up at Linate and this afternoon we’ll be driving up to Santa Maria. For the funeral tomorrow morning.”

  “Zio Sandro’s dead?”

  “I thought it best to tell you.”

  “How did he die?”

  “His heart. He was in intensive care for nearly a day in his clinic. There was nothing the doctors could do.”

  “Zio Sandro was young.”

  “Nearly seventy.”

  “I’ll catch the train first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “There’s no need. You’re pregnant, Pioppi, you must rest …”

  “Have you told Mamma?”

  “Agnese’s got better things to worry about.”

  “Mamma’s in California on holiday. I’ve got a number somewhere. I’ll try to phone. Mamma’s very fond of Sandro.”

  “Give your mother my best wishes.”

  “I’ll catch the six o’clock train for Turin.”

  “That’s absolutely stupid.”

  “I’ll be in Voghera by tomorrow morning. What time’s the funeral?”

  “Why are you so stubborn, Pioppi? You’re five months pregnant. You shouldn’t tire yourself.”

  “You’re my father. I want to be with you.”