‘The fish are f-furbi!’ Giovanni shouts. They’re smart! ‘F-furbi, furbi, furbi! You’ll never catch them!’
‘Shush!!’
‘Sometimes you don’t catch anything at all,’ Silvio warns him. Then he adds seriously: ‘What matters is la passione.’ It’s a word he uses when I compliment him on his extraordinary gardening achievements and confess my own incompetence. You have to have la passione, he says. If you have la passione you will be willing to make any sacrificio, and even if things don’t come right first time you will go on till they do. But la passione is a mystical thing. ‘Either you have it or you don’t,’ Silvio warns.
‘I know, I know,’ Michele whispers. ‘Presto!’
Silvio casts with a delicacy and grace you would never expect from his thick, muscly forearms. He then hands the rod to Michele and begins to sort out his own. ‘Watch the float all the time,’ he says sternly. ‘If it starts to bob, tell me and I’ll show you what to do.’
The light is dying. It’s bleeding out of the sky where dark branches are suddenly darker, evergreen leaves bereft of their gloss. Already the float has a slightly fluorescent look to it. And with the dusk comes a smell, or awareness, of damp and stagnancy. There’s something dreadfully inauspicious about this situation: five people huddled around a filthy, weedy ditch. Deep in my heart, I know nothing can come of it. Then, in a low whisper Michele cries: ‘It’s bobbing!’
Silvio doesn’t even look up. He’s straining his eyes over loops and twists of line in the half light. After all, barely a minute has passed since he cast.
‘It’s bobbing!’
‘No, it isn’t.’ I hardly bother looking myself. I’m thinking how the place at least looks a bit more picturesque now the shadows have wiped out the wheelbarrow tyre and the beer cans on the other side.
‘Porca vacca!’ Michele screams. ‘It’s bobbing!’
‘O la Madonna!’ Stefi crosses herself.
Giovanni yells: ‘Pesce, ha preso un pesce!’
And sure enough, Michele had caught a fish. Silvio grabbed the rod, struck, and reeled it in with his fingers round the boy’s. It was a muddy-looking fish, somewhat tubby and far from graceful, perhaps eight inches long, but undeniably a fish. In the distance Don Guido’s recorded bells began to chime, È l’ora che pia…
Over the next hour seven fish were caught, four on Michele’s rod. Oh, the fish in that ditch were far from furbi. Either that, or they’d been a long time without seeing canned sweet corn. And I thought how deeply an experience of this kind could affect one’s character. It would be like getting one’s first novel published by the first publisher you sent it to and becoming famous overnight. Or having the very first girl you ever approached fall immediately into bed with you. Michele is surely in danger of becoming a wildly optimistic, ingenuous fellow. And I know nothing could keep him away from fishing now, not even a nest of vipers.
Not even mother’s fury when we get home plastered in mud and with seven fish to clean, since Silvio claims they already have a fridge full of fish. Not being a fisherman, come si deve, I have no idea how to clean the things. But both children are adamant that we have to eat them.
‘What are they called?’ Rita asks.
‘He said some dialect name. I can’t remember.’
‘They certainly stink enough.’
Grilled, these fish turn out to be greasy and infinitely bony, and they taste exactly the way the water they lived in suggested they would. Putrid. Had the kids been fed such food in the normal way of things they would surely have thrust away their plates in disgust. Had the scuola materna served up such fare, the rappresentanti di classe would have been overwhelmed with telephone calls and a protest meeting immediately arranged. But on that particular evening Michele and Stefi gobbled the whole lot down. Without even a drop of ketchup. Later I learnt from Silvio that no inspector would ever go to that ditch, precisely because there are no fish there that anyone would want to eat.
‘I do think though,’ he added grinning, ‘that your boy has la passione.’
Diobon
So that was the year I got to know the anglers’ shop in San Michele Extra. The place has the air of one of those farm goods stores they used to show in old Westerns, where an elderly father and three willing sons serve a rough-and-ready clientele in a cluttered ambience of bristling tools, sagging open-mouthed sacks, and large dogs that sniff at everybody and each other, or lie asleep between two barrels and a dustpan. The shop is narrow and long, its walls lined with rods and tripods and nets and wading boots, then stacked to a high ceiling with nondescript boxes and arcane equipment of every variety. At the far end, people in overalls who all seem to know each other jostle at the counter for the attention of the men serving, or the advice of the old patriarch who stands to one side discussing finer technicalities, the rarer experiences, occasionally deigning to satisfy someone’s curiosity on such routine matters as float shapes, line weights, spinner sizes. All things I know nothing about.
The men are all talking in dialect, with absolutely no exception, and amongst men dialect always seems to go with a booming timbre, an extravagant, effortless, candid loudness. The older men are the same one might see playing bocce at the Centro Primo Maggio or transporting demijohns of rough wine in Fiat 128s with straw hats tipped back on white hair and a hunting dog in the boot. The younger men are their sons, but here the variety is greater, ranging from those who spend all day at polished desks choosing which phone to answer, to those who create complications at the counters of state offices and those who labour from morning till night in their workshops or at the wheel of their trucks.
Inevitably, given the social nature of the occasion, someone is performing. One voice booms louder than all the rest. I recognise its owner as the man with the bodyshop where I got my car fixed when it was run into from behind, a mishap he turned into something of a bonanza at the expense of the insurance company.
He has come to pick up a rod he’s had repaired. The thing is so monstrously long that when he opens it out to examine what they’ve done, he has to do so lengthwise down the shop, so that two people are holding the base at the back of the queue while the tip has disappeared into the storeroom behind the counter.
Carlon, I remember they call him, which is to say, Big Carlo…
And he is big. Perhaps not even thirty, Carlon has the swaggering bravado and huge barrel chest of the kind of testosterone-stuffed fellow you imagine taking part in arm-wrestling competitions to win an evening’s free beer. But there’s something self-consciously flamboyant and almost camp about him, too. His overalls are blue, as no doubt his father’s were before him, but his shirt is a neon pink unbuttoned on a froth of blond chest hair, and from under a battered bush-hat more long blond curls fall freshly shampooed onto his shoulders. His big moustaches are likewise blond, idem his goatee, while the tattoos on thick forearms show, not anchors or naked girls, but two very large and colourful butterflies. The final touch comes with the sunglasses: Carlon has blue mirror shades with silver frames which he has hooked over the thick gold chain around his neck. The crucified Christ at the end of that chain is thus reduced to a silhouette behind winking reflections of heavy-duty waterproofs in a V of blond-fringed pink.