Overture in Venice

by Hester Rowan

  I looked down again at the middle valley, trying to imagine its peacefulness before the contractors got to work. ‘A good thing for the people in the town, of course – but what about this valley, did anyone live here?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said casually, ‘a handful of families on scattered little farms. They’ve been re-housed in some new flats in the town.’

  His attitude angered me. ‘You mean they were moved out into flats – after living on mountain farms! But that’s monstrous!’

  ‘Not high-rise flats, silly,’ he said with patronizing indulgence. ‘They’re three or four-storey apartments of the kind that most Italian families live in. The people who left here are better housed than they’ve ever been, and of course there’s work available in the town. Now that there’s no more flood danger, Trevalle can begin to prosper. There are plans for new factories, schools, a medical centre … it will be a much better life for them.’

  I turned away, not bothering to conceal my dislike and disapproval. He was, I remembered Owen saying, an architect; probably the designer of some of the ugly concrete living-units that brutalize so many English towns, the accomplice of planners who seem to regard people as pawns to be uprooted and set down according to professional fashion.

  ‘Poor souls …’ I said. ‘As if it isn’t bad enough for them to be dispossessed from their homes without being compulsorily re-housed in a town. Can’t you see how dreadful it is, Guy?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’m not a sentimentalist. Perhaps I know too much about life on mountain farms. The land in this middle valley and in the small upper one used to be part of the family estate, you see. One of the Lombardis married a Trevalle girl and this was part of her dowry. And it still belonged to the estate even when I was a boy, long after the rest of the land had been sold, simply because it was so poor that no one wanted it. It was almost impossible for the people who lived here to scratch a living, let alone pay any rent. Vincente was heartily relieved when the valleys were taken over for the reservoir.’

  ‘But even if the land was poor, the farms were their homes,’ I argued. ‘I still think it’s dreadful for them to be moved to soulless flats.’

  He gave me a superior, quizzical look. ‘You do, do you? Have you ever been inside one of these mountain farmhouses – no? Well then, I suggest you don’t make judgments until we’ve been to the upper valley and you’ve seen how some of the people live.’

  He strode back to the Haflinger and swung himself into the driving seat. I followed, fuming silently; and then my concern for dispossessed peasant farmers was replaced by exhilarating anxiety as Guy engaged the lowest gear and nosed the sturdy little vehicle down what looked like a ledge scratched at a sharp angle on the almost sheer side of the mountain.

  As we neared the valley bottom, noise and dust swirled up to meet us. I tied the scarf that Guy had bought for me over my hair, holding the end of it to my nose and mouth, but just before conditions became intolerable we emerged to a newly built blessedly flat road that ran along the side of the valley above what would be the high-water mark.

  ‘Sorry about the dust,’ said Guy, changing up through an extraordinary number of gears to reach a top speed which allowed us to chunter sedately along towards the upper valley. ‘I’d thought that all the machines would have finished by now. All right, you can breathe again, we’re clear of the construction site.’

  We were approaching the top of the middle valley. The good metalled road ended at a newly built pumping station, and from there a very rough track ran steeply down to the valley floor and followed the tumbled rocks of a dry watercourse. The Haflinger descended the track with noisy ease, and then climbed through the gap between two hills that marked the entrance to the upper valley. Once through the gap Guy switched off the engine, and then we sat and looked.

  After the dust and destruction of the middle valley, this was an oasis: a small high valley, a pocket-handkerchief of daisy-starred meadowland hemmed in by mountainsides of sheer rock, a quiet and peaceful place under the sun. A group of low farm buildings, stone-built, stood in a grove of olive trees; there were two small cultivated fields edged with dry stone walls, a flock of sheep, a browsing goat. It was idyllic, a scene of simple tranquillity that must have been unchanged for centuries.

  Guy disturbed my reverie: ‘Look, you can see the course of the river snaking down from the base of the mountain at the far end. It’s really just an overflow – the river starts from a high glacier and most of it flows down through tunnels in the limestone. The engineers are going to blow part of that rock to release the water through into the reservoir.’

  ‘And then all this valley will be drowned?’

  ‘Not necessarily. The bulk of the water will be stored in the middle valley – it’ll only cover this valley when the river’s in spate.’

  ‘Can’t this valley be saved, then?’ I asked.

  He raised an arrogantly amused eyebrow. ‘Saved for what?’

  ‘You know perfectly well what I mean,’ I said evenly. ‘Saved for its quietness, for the simple life of the people who live here.’

  ‘Hardly. Even if this valley’s not flooded, the track below the pumping station will be permanently covered. In a couple of days’ time there’ll be no access from the outside world.’

  I pointed to the browsing animals. ‘What about these?’

  ‘That’s what I’ve come to try to do something about. Giorgio and his family are still here and I’m going to persuade them to move before they’re forced out. Let’s walk – I’ll leave the Haflinger here.’

  I pulled off my scarf, shaking my hair free. I was glad to walk; partly because I wanted to stretch my legs, and partly because it seemed wrong that the din of the engine should shatter the peace of the family’s last two days in their lovely valley.

  The dusty track did not go direct to the farm in the olive grove, but first meandered past another group of buildings, empty and tumbledown, their broken stone merging so inconspicuously with the mountains from which it had come that I hadn’t previously noticed them.

  ‘There were three other families in this valley, until a few years ago,’ commented Guy. ‘Did you know that there has been a massive migration from Alpine farms over the past ten years?’

  ‘A migration? You mean they’ve gone voluntarily?’

  He gave a wry smile. ‘If being driven out by poverty counts as going voluntarily, yes. It always has been a hard life in the mountains, and it’s getting even harder for them to sell their produce in competition with lowland farms. Peasant holdings like this are hopelessly uneconomic. Stop romanticizing, Clare. Look at this valley as it really is. Can you imagine yourself spending your whole life living and working here?’

  I didn’t bother to reply; but now that we were walking through the valley, seeing it from ground level, it took on a rather different appearance.

  The enclosing mountains made the valley oppressively airless. The grass was sparse, the daisies weedy, the earth cracked and dry; rocks erupted through the hard-won fields, the sad-eared sheep were scrawny. Even these occupied farm buildings were dilapidated, and the house was little more than a dark hovel.

  I was about to give Guy a grudging answer when a sudden sharp crack echoed and re-echoed through the rocks. I looked at him, startled. He frowned, stopping abruptly. Another echoing crack, and this time I heard something zip, felt a whip of air, heard a whining, saw a flake of stone from the top of a nearby rock jump, spin and slice through the grass.

  The next moment I was flat on my face on the hot earth, with Guy’s hand firmly pressed in the small of my back and his body lying tense beside mine.

  ‘Keep your head down!’ he snapped. ‘We’re being fired at!’

  Chapter Eight

  I lay there breathless, shaken, the sun beating down on my back, my cheek cradled in the dust, staring at Guy with wide-eyed alarm through a fringe of grass and moon daisies. Slowly and cautiously he raised his head, watching the farm.

  ‘It’s Giorgi
o, the old fool,’ he muttered. ‘No, don’t look up – he used to be a crack shot and I don’t know what Caterina would say if I took you back wounded. Not to mention Owen. You stay where you are until I’ve established my identity. Ola, Giorgio!’

  Slowly, very slowly, his arms spread wide, calling reassuringly all the time, Guy rose to his feet. I lifted my head just enough to see an old man, his legs bent but his bearing ferocious, emerge from one of the farm buildings with a rifle in his hands. He gestured with it, threatening. Guy approached gently. The old man wavered uncertainly then, recognizing his visitor, lowered his rifle to the ground and stumbled forward to catch Guy in a joyful embrace.

  It seemed safe to get up. I looked down in resignation at my sorry pink suit, brushed it as well as I could with a dirty hand and advanced cautiously. The old man acknowledged me with unshaven dignity, but turned back immediately to Guy and continued to pour out a tale of evident distress.

  I stood back, feeling redundant. Guy had asked me to go with him in the hope that I might hear a word that Alberto had used, but old Giorgio’s voice was so thick with emotion – and probably with dialect – that he might have been using a different language.

  And then from the corner of my eye I caught a movement from one of the tumbledown barns. A girl of about eight or nine was peering at me from the shadows, as inquisitive and shy as a kitten. I crouched down, smiling and holding out my hand in an attempt to coax her from hiding. Her big dark eyes stared back at me solemnly from under a tangle of hair. She sidled out of the doorway but kept her back pressed against the stone wall for safety, ready at any moment to bolt.

  She was wretchedly dressed. Not dirty or ragged, but wearing thick, dark, ugly clothes that had clearly been cobbled down from adult size to make an approximate fit. I smiled at her again. ‘Buon giorno,’ I offered gently in my best Italian. Her dark-eyed stare did not waver. ‘Come sta?’ I tried, scraping the bottom of my saucer of vocabulary. She considered the matter, a thumb creeping into her mouth, the other hand pulling at her ear, one bare foot rubbing the other.

  At that moment, an elderly woman dressed in the inevitable enveloping peasant black burst out of the house, seized the child’s hand and dragged her indoors, scolding vigorously. She was, I guessed, the child’s grandmother; quite probably she had been watching, too shy to appear herself, unused to strangers and sensitive about her grandchild’s appearance. It was understandable.

  But Guy had seen her. ‘Maddalena!’ he called, approaching the house with outstretched hands.

  For a moment I thought that she would refuse to appear. But then she came shyly from the house, her arms reaching to embrace him while he bent to kiss her lined cheek.

  I felt very much an intruder in this remote valley. Guy they knew, and clearly held in affectionate regard, but my presence was an embarrassment to them. I moved away, meaning to wander back down the valley, but Guy called me over.

  It would have seemed rude to appear reluctant, so I smiled and produced my ‘Buon giorno’. The woman, Maddalena, kept her eyes cast down and for a moment I felt that I had been right and that Guy was embarrassing his friends by introducing me. And then I noticed that Maddalena’s eyes were travelling upwards …

  No doubt from a distance my pink suit had given me the appearance of an alarming alien, but at close quarters the film of Trevalle dust on my clothes, overlaying the stains from the Venetian rooftop, must have made me seem reassuringly vulnerable. With growing confidence Maddalena lifted her eyes to my face and gave me a welcoming, black-toothed smile.

  She gestured to me to accompany her to a mound shaded by a gnarled olive tree, a hillock of grass kept lush and green by the presence of a spring that bubbled from a mossy rock. I sat down thankfully in the shade and we communicated goodwill with smiles and nods. Then Maddalena hurried into the house, scattering some scraggy chickens that were scratching the earth of the low doorway, and was back in a moment with – of all incongruous things in that setting – a plastic beaker. She handled it reverently as though it were a prized possession, offering it to me with pride.

  I was thirsty but not, I decided, for the strong yellowish liquid in the beaker. The goat was tethered not far away and was taking too great an interest in the proceedings for my liking. I’d never drunk goat’s milk, and the day after a bout of food-poisoning seemed no time to start experimenting; my mother has a friend who keeps goats and pronounces their milk delicious and health-giving, but I doubted that her silky pampered herd would want to acknowledge any relationship with Maddalena‘s dark and matted animal.

  But courtesy demanded that I smile my thanks and raise the beaker to my lips. The rank taste nauseated me, but my heroic effort to keep smiling seemed to convey the right degree of appreciation.

  Satisfied, Maddalena withdrew to the house. Her back was turned to me, so was the old man’s. The child was staring fascinated at Guy from a wary distance. Surreptitiously I tipped the milk on to the grass, rinsed the beaker in the spring, filled it with clear cold water and drank and drank, washing the taste from my mouth. Only the goat, glaring at me balefully through the dark slots of its eyes, had observed my ingratitude. I raised the beaker to its health and it moved contemptuously away to tear at a tuft of daisies.

  Guy was still patiently listening to the old man. Giorgio had led him to the rock face that rose steeply behind the house and was gesturing towards what looked like the mouth of a cave. From where I sat I could see that the lower part of the entrance had been blocked by massive boulders.

  I got up and walked over to look more closely. At one side of the cave mouth, as though standing sentinel, was a solitary cypress. On a ledge of rock just inside the entrance stood a wooden cross, a framed religious picture and a flickering candle; other plastic beakers, set down wherever the boulders offered a level surface, held wild flowers. Clearly it was some kind of family shrine. The old man was still explaining volubly but I could see tears glistening on his cheeks and I turned away, not wanting to intrude on his grief.

  Guy put one hand under the old man’s elbow and drew him slowly away from the cave, talking persuasively; but, from the stubborn look on Giorgio’s face, without much success. As they passed near me, Guy gave me a wry glance and then detached himself with gentle firmness from Giorgio and went to talk to Maddalena who had been hovering just outside the house.

  Her attitude seemed to be a good deal more receptive. The old man stumped away, shaking his head, to pick up and clean his rifle. The little girl, gradually growing bolder, emerged from behind her grandmother’s skirts to stare up at Guy with open-mouthed admiration.

  When he noticed her, he bent immediately to speak to her. Her hand clutched blindly for her grandmother’s, but she answered. And then, suddenly, Guy put his hands round her waist, lifted her high and whirled her round, and the valley rang with the shriek of childish laughter; a sound, I suspected, that was not heard there often.

  And then Guy embraced them all, I shook hands with Maddalena and we walked back to the Haflinger, looking back at intervals to return the little girl’s waves of farewell.

  Guy raised a questioning eyebrow at me. ‘Well, that’s how it is. What price the simple life now?’

  I sighed, thinking of what I’d seen. ‘Oh, for the child it’s wretched, of course. I can see that there’s no future for her here at all. She needs a school to go to and friends to play with. But for the old people, Giorgio and his wife –’

  ‘His wife! Maddalena is his daughter.’

  ‘Oh, well – even so, at her age –’

  ‘My dear Clare, how old do you think she is?’

  ‘Well … sixtyish?’

  ‘With a daughter as young as Lisetta?’

  ‘A daughter! I thought it was her grandchild.’

  We both turned to look back. Lisetta was still waving, a pathetic little black figure alone in the empty valley.

  ‘Maddalena’s only in her late thirties, about ten years older than I am. She married a man from one of the farms i
n the middle valley and they had six or seven children. They were desperately poor, and eventually her husband left to find work in Trento. At first he came back regularly, bringing money, but then he moved on to the Fiat works in Turin. She hasn’t seen him for several years, and I doubt if he’s sending her anything at all. The other children left the valley as soon as they were old enough to work – Lisetta’s the only one left at home now.’

  ‘Poor Maddalena,’ I said, trying but failing completely to imagine what her life must have been like.

  ‘Exactly. The trouble is that peasant life looks so simple and enviable to people who catch a glimpse of it when they’re on holiday, but they can’t possibly understand how hard and monotonous and restricted it is. It’s particularly tough on the women – that’s why they grow old long before their time. My father sometimes brought me over here when I was a boy, and I can remember how beautiful Maddalena was in her teens. I think she was the first girl I ever fell in love with. But now you’ve seen for yourself what twenty years of the simple life has done to her!’

  It seemed incredible that he could remember her as someone young and beautiful: that lined and weather-beaten face, the sunken cheeks and decaying teeth, the worn hands … and yet, when Guy had bent to kiss her and her whole face had been alight with pleasure … yes, I had caught a glimpse then of the young woman that she should have been.

  ‘But all the same,’ I argued, taking a last look at the peaceful valley, ‘surely quiet and contentment count for something? I don’t see that Maddalena’s going to regain her youth in the rush of a town. She’ll be completely bewildered, especially if she has to go and work in a factory to earn her living. At least in this valley she’s been able to keep her dignity.’