My First Seven Years (Plus a Few More)

by Dario Fo

  Instead, to my surprise, they intoned a low, almost tearful, tune to take their leave of the lake and of the friends who had come to say goodbye. There were people from the Ticino, but also others from further afield, from other cantons. The moment the lorries and the coach moved off, they waved their hands in the air and some even applauded. I was about to applaud as well, but Bruno grabbed my arm to stop me. ‘Don’t move a muscle. There are policemen here from Italy in plain clothes. It’s better if they don’t find out who we are.’

  Many years later, after the war, I heard time and again that song of the anarchists, which goes:

  Addio Lugano bella,

  Oh dolce terra pia.

  Cacciati senza colpa

  gli anarchici van via.

  Farewell fair Lugano,

  Gentle, blessed land.

  Expelled without guilt

  The anarchists take their leave.

  I have sung that song many times myself, but I have never managed to get to the end. At some point, my voice always turns hoarse, and I can only pretend to be singing. Each time, I find myself back there, on the quay, a boy once more, attempting to applaud while my cousin holds me back: ‘Let’s try not to stand out.’

  CHAPTER 3

  The French Friend

  Years later, in the summer of ’44, as the Second World War was drawing to a close, a man came from France to visit us, and he embraced my father with incredible affection … they had been friends since their early youth and had got to know each other in Montpellier where my father had emigrated to find work on a building site. As maguts, that is boy-masons, they had every day climbed together up the scaffolding of big houses under construction.

  In those days, in 1913, bitter disputes were underway to secure workers’ emancipation, to win rights, a decent salary and above all safety in the factories and yards. The strikes and accompanying demonstrations were invariably broken up with unthinkable ferocity. The workers were charged not only by the police but also by the army and cavalry. However, at the end of it all, the trade unions had managed to obtain some advantages.

  On the very day they went back to work on the building site, the whole scaffolding collapsed and around fifteen workers, including my father, were thrown to the ground. Ten survivors, some dying, were rushed to hospital. My father was one of the more fortunate ones: he had broken his leg in several places and a blow to his back had left him semi-paralysed.

  On his release from hospital, he was taken home by Andres, as his fellow magut was called. Andres’s mother looked after him as though he were her own son. My father often said that he owed his life to that woman.

  When he was well enough, he moved to Germany, still in the company of Andres. They found employment in a site in Hanover, just as the First World War was about to break out. Andres went back to France, my father to Lombardy. Two years later, Italy entered the conflict and, still not yet nineteen, my father found himself in the front line on the Carso.

  From their conversation, I discovered that the letter sewn into my jumper which I had brought to the anarchists at Bellinzona was to be handed over to him in France. Andres was then in charge of the Association for the Aid of Political Refugees, whom France had ‘welcomed’ in such large numbers. Naturally my father had requested Andres and his organisation to give asylum to the fugitives and to help them find work and accommodation.

  Both my father and Andres had been active in the Socialist Party (obviously each in his own country) before and after the war. In those days, the workers’ movement had found its raison d’être in solidarity with the persecuted, no matter which party or democratic group they belonged to.

  But let us go back to my boyhood in Pino.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Novice and Fulvio in the Mud

  At the beginning of my second year in the Pino primary school, an assistant named Irene arrived to give Reverend Mother a hand. She was not yet a nun, but a lay-sister, in other words a novice, so she still had all her hair, bunched discreetly inside the headdress. She wore a kind of light blouse several sizes too big to cover her delicate, harmonious body, and moved with great agility, swinging her skirts as though there were gusts of air coming from inside.

  My brother Fulvio was not yet due to be attending school, but considering the ease with which he had picked things up, the Reverend Mother had accepted him into her class. Since we were living in such a backwater, no one would ever bother.

  On 21 March, the first day of spring, it was the custom to go into the fields near the woods on a ‘narcissus outing’, that is, to gather great bouquets of scented narcissi.

  That particular day, all of us in the school went up to Arcomezzo, where the thousands of flowers growing there seemed to have painted the plains white. We had been entrusted to the care of Irene, who seemed by far the most frisky of all of us: she ran about, jumping in the air, pulling up her long skirt and waving it here and there as though she were chasing off swarms of wasps. She told us not to restrict ourselves to narcissi but to gather cornflowers, lily of the valley and hyacinths as well. After a couple of hours, we started back down with bunches of flowers bigger than ourselves. The young novice continued to urge us on, throwing tufts of musk and clumps of wild onions at us, then skipping off with all of us in her train like so many bloodhound puppies.

  The peasants had constructed low walls to prevent slippages of land, and the sister took great pleasure in leaping over them with one bound. For us it was a bit harder: cut knees, trips, tumbles.

  All of a sudden, the cry went up: ‘Fulvio has fallen into a swamp!’ My brother had attempted to leap over a dyke and, not realising that on the other side of that pile of rocks there was a deep ditch filled with slimy mud, had plunged straight in. The young novice rushed over, white in the face. Fulvio was literally sinking in the marsh and was likely to suffocate. Irene did not hesitate one moment but jumped into the quagmire as she was, fully dressed. Even though she was in the mire up to her neck, she managed to lift my brother out and heave him onto the grassy verge.

  Now she attempted to get a grip on the edge of the ditch, but each time she tried, the verges came away in her hand. There were branches lying on the ground a few metres away. We pulled the longest branch over to the ditch so that Irene could catch hold of it. All together, clutching the branch like the seven dwarves (even if there were actually twelve of us), we pulled and tugged like madmen until our novice began to re-emerge. She was caked in mud from her feet to her cheeks, and her dress clung to her body like a plastercast.

  Even today I blush at my behaviour: there was my brother stretched out on the ground, half asphyxiated, bleeding from head to toe … and I had eyes only for that prodigious blend of garment, mud and girl’s body on which all the various round and smooth forms could be made out more clearly than if she had been naked.

  After a few moments, I realised that I was not alone in appreciating that prodigious metamorphosis. One of the girls cried out: ‘Irene, you’re gorgeous! Your breasts and the little what-sits are sticking out.’

  The novice did not seem unduly worried. After all, we were only children, so no scandal. Her only concern was with the injury to Fulvio’s neck, which was cut deeply and was bleeding. She picked him up in her arms and ran with him towards a nearby farmhouse where there was a trough in the yard with water from a stream. She jumped right in with the boy in her arms and began washing him from the neck down, swaying with him from side to side, trying with this little game to get him over the shock which had left him speechless.

  Shortly afterwards, the farmer’s wife came down from the house above the stables, from where she had seen everything. She had understood the nature of the problem and so came armed with sheets and blankets. She was accompanied by a little girl whom, when she saw the blood pouring from Fulvio’s wound, she sent to the kitchen to fetch linen bandages and some alcohol. Irene then handed Fulvio over to the care of the woman and, water dripping everywhere, clambered out of the trough: with the sheets an
d blankets pulled around her, she ran over to the stables.

  My poor brother meantime was screaming like a bald buzzard as the woman disinfected his wound. A few moments later, wrapped up in the blanket, the novice emerged from the stables. My brother, with his head swathed in bandages, was parcelled up in a canvas sheet.

  That seemed to be the end of the adventure, but three days later Fulvio took a turn for the worse. He turned pale, his face the colour of a rag, and was vomiting and running a temperature. The doctor came to Pino three days a week, and had left just that morning. The doctor in Tronzano had had to rush to Luino where his mother had suffered a heart attack. My father wired a cable to the station at Maccagno six kilometres away: ‘Find me a doctor.’

  ‘There is one, but he’s out doing his rounds and we can’t trace him,’ came back the reply.

  All the while, Fulvio was deteriorating. His temperature had reached forty degrees, and there was no way of knowing what had happened to him – congestion, intestinal infection or meningitis? It did not occur to anyone to think of the injury to his head.

  Mamma continued placing cold patches on her son’s head and warm ones on his feet, but finally gave up and threw herself on a chair in despair. ‘My son is dying, and no one is coming to help us,’ she moaned between her tears. ‘We’ve got to get a car to take him to the hospital in Luino.’

  ‘Here’s the butcher coming in his van,’ said my father, trying to reassure her.

  She paid no heed, but sat uneasily in a trance-like state, as though listening to someone talking to her, then gave a serene smile. She turned to my father: ‘You can calm down now, it’s going to be all right. Someone will be here in a moment to save him.’

  ‘Who’s coming?’

  ‘A very good doctor, on his motor-bicycle.’

  ‘Motor-bicycle!’

  ‘Yes, my grandmother has just told me. She was here a moment ago.’

  My father patted her cheek. It was clear that despair was causing his wife to lose her mind.

  ‘Here he is now!’ Mamma leapt to her feet and rushed to the window. ‘It’s him!’

  A motorbike had drawn up in the square in front of the station, and a police sergeant and a gentleman carrying a small case dismounted. They hurried up the stairs, the sergeant arriving first. ‘A stroke of luck! Here’s the doctor from Mugadino. I’d gone into the chemist’s to ask if they knew where the general practitioner lived, and I met the man himself just as he was leaving.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, we were expecting him,’ said my mother with total naturalness, ‘but from my grandmother’s description I had no idea you were so young. Please come in. It’s my son. His temperature has gone up to forty degrees.’

  The doctor examined him, sounded his chest, tapped him all over his body. When he touched him on the skull, Fulvio gave a groan and shook his head. The doctor took a pair of scissors from his bag and began snipping the boy’s hair. In no time I saw my brother with a tonsure, like a monk! The doctor disinfected the bald patch with red liquid, picked up his scalpel and cut into the wound. Fulvio gave a scream like a train coming out of a tunnel. A few moments later, the doctor took his temperature, which fortunately had dropped considerably. He was out of danger.

  ‘It was a very serious infection,’ was the doctor’s comment. ‘There was the risk of pernicious septicaemia, and maybe even worse. I’ll be back tomorrow to change the medication. I have left some gauze in the wound to clean it out. Give my good wishes to your grandmother. I’m really sorry but I don’t seem to remember where I met her.’

  ‘Nowhere,’ replied Mamma.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She died three months ago, and she’s never been here.’

  The doctor fell silent … at that moment, he believed he had a mad woman on his hands. My mother went on with her explanation: ‘You see, I was on this seat, and my grandmother was sitting over there, on the bed, near my son. She spoke to me with a smile on her lips. “Pinin, Pinin, it’s me … don’t worry. Stop crying. A doctor will be along shortly, an excellent doctor, a professor of surgery … he’s travelling by motorbike, and in next to no time he’ll have your son as right as rain.”’

  My father tried to wave the whole business aside. ‘Poor thing, she’s been hallucinating.’

  ‘It is odd,’ said the doctor. ‘Surgery is indeed my specialism. I am not the general practitioner, I was in Mugadino to visit my own father … it’s him who is the local doctor there. I am doing my specialism in Milan, at the Fatebenefratelli hospital, and I do hope to go into teaching. It is curious that your wife, even granted that she was in a state of trance, could have got all these details right. Very curious, worth researching, I would say.’

  ‘Not as a fairground attraction, I hope,’ laughed my mother. ‘To tell the truth it’s not the first time this has happened to me. Before my grandmother died, I received news from a sister who died in childhood, and at other times from a great-grandfather whom I have never known.’

  ‘Let the doctor get on his way. We’ve already put him out enough, getting him to rush round here.’

  ‘My husband’s right. You must think I’m paranoiac, the way I’m buttonholing you, but I’m not mad.’

  ‘That’s what all mad people say,’ Papà cut in.

  CHAPTER 5

  My Grandparents

  I had two grandfathers. The first, my father’s father, was a giant of a man, almost one metre ninety in height. By trade he had always been a stone mason, like his father, grandfather and great-grandfather before him. In his village, he was known as Maister, in the sense of ‘master builder’. My father, too, as I have already mentioned, started life as a mason, and only after the 1915–18 war did he enrol at a technical institute and take up work on the railways. ‘We can drift into the most outlandish professions in this world,’ my father often remarked with ill-concealed pride, ‘but come what may we will remain a race of stone masons.’ His word for stone mason was comasin, which does not mean masons from Como but comes from faber cum macina, that is, workers who operate using machines – scaffolding, mobile frames, cranes, winches and so on. Perhaps mechanical thinking has insinuated itself, alongside a story-teller’s taste for paradox, into my DNA, so that I constantly find myself torn between rational rigour and the most weird surrealism.

  When I was a boy, this predisposition manifested itself in the enjoyment I felt in taking hold of a stone and trying to modify its shape with chisel and club. I got the same sensation from kneading clay.

  The many moves that my father was forced to make brought us to Oleggio, near Novara. Nearby there was a kiln alongside a brick and tile factory, and that’s where Fulvio and I spent a large part of the day. We won the confidence of the manager, who not only taught us the techniques of mixing and baking but also let us work on the potter’s wheel used for shaping vases. It was a truly magical game: the wheel was not only for vases, flasks and bowls, but if you had the technique to manipulate it correctly, you could adapt it to produce more complex forms, like a head or even a torso with chest, stomach and buttocks.

  However, to my enormous distress, we had to move on from Oleggio as well. In fact I had to go by myself since my mother was expecting another child (who turned out to be a girl), and could not cope with both Fulvio and me. So, to give my mother peace during her pregnancy, I was dispatched to my other grandfather in Lomellina, in Sartirana.

  The nickname of the Sartirana grandfather was Bristìn, which means ‘pepper seed’. It did not take me long to find out the reason for that ‘title’: my grandfather’s comments and jibes stung the tongue and stomach of anyone who had to swallow them.

  I was really annoyed at having to stay who knows how long in that flat land without so much as a hill in sight … swarms of insects that bit you, clouds of midges that got up your nose and a huge marshland that they called rice fields.

  But when I got to Grandfather’s farm, my mood changed instantly. The first thing that met my eyes was a spacious portico
skirting the wall of the house, where bunches of fruits and vegetables by the thousand hung from the arches. The whole thing looked like majestic decorations for a major feast. A huge cart horse stood in the centre of the yard. I had never seen a horse of such dimensions, one which could have easily passed for an elephant. Next to him an agile and graceful mare was performing caracols by herself, to the annoyance of a donkey which was kicking out, although more as part of a game than in anger.

  An orchard with vegetable patches and an incredible variety of fruit trees opened out on the far side of the canal which cut through the farm. Grandfather Bristìn took me by the hand and together, astride the donkey, we crossed the wooden bridge over the canal. The first thing that came into view was a plum tree but, incredibly, different coloured plums, yellow, red and blue, were hanging from each branch. My grandfather explained that it was a ‘multiple transplant’, and was his own work.

  I had never seen the like! It could have been an enchanted scene in a fairy story. A long ladder was propped against the trunk and Grandfather encouraged me to climb up: ‘Go on, climb up and try one. See how each one has a different taste from the one next to it.’

  And it was true. First I bit into a dark plum, and beautifully scented, red juice squirted over my face. When I tried others on other branches, I found that the yellow plums had a delicate, sweet pulp, the red ones seemed to have been dipped in rosolio, while others again were swollen and fatter with a harsh, bitter flavour. The most succulent were the tiny yellow ones which hung in bunches and had a soft stone that you could chew. I was astounded when I came across a large branch with reddish-yellow fruit … incredible: an apricot transplant on a plum tree!

  ‘You’re a magician, Granddad! When I tell them all at school, nobody’s going to believe me. They’ll tell me I’m a fibber, although they’ve already stuck that title on me millions of times!’