Carlon is talking — perhaps with the excuse of his newly repaired rod extending through the crowd — to the whole shop, and the whole shop is listening; and every other word Carlon says is ‘Diobon’, the dialectal version of ‘Good God’ and the most common and irritating blasphemy in the Veneto.
‘Rascal was so big, Diobon, so big, and me that’s not used to sea fishing, Diobon, Diobon, I was determined to work him, because the line was too light, Diobon, see what I mean, I mean, Diobon, if I’d waited and played him like I might another time, Diobon, that fellow would’a chewed through the whole tackle, Diobon.’
His dialect is so thick I’m having to invent half of what I’m hearing. The others in the shop are laughing and throwing in suggestions, and they know he’s hamming it up, he’s lying, and that anybody who breaks a great big expensive rod like that must have made some kind of stupid mistake, but they’re enjoying it anyway, and the man behind the counter is assuring him the rod is fixed so well he could catch a whale with it now. A whale he could catch, Diobon! The shopkeeper is winking at everybody else and Carlon has seen him winking and shouts, ‘Diobon, if nobody believes me I’ll break all your heads, Diobon!’ And it’s clear of course that they’re all old friends and probably spend every Friday evening telling tall stories like this. Because Friday evening is when everybody comes to stock up on bait for the weekend.
Halfway down the queue, Michele is all ears, doubtless understanding Carlon far better than I do, or at least the content, if not perhaps the context. ‘That big!’ he whispers to me, innocent eyes wide. ‘A fish that big!’ (That is, as big as himself.) In wonder he adds, ‘Diobon’, which starts me wondering how in all conscience I can stop him using this language when my own is hardly impeccable in English, if somewhat less repetitive.
We’ve come to buy bait and a variety of other things for our first fishing trip alone. We’ve been to a gravel pit now three times with Stefano and Beppino. It’s one of the places where you pay to catch trout bred in a fish farm. Stefano is an expert fisherman, operating, as no doubt he does his accounts, with a sort of routine, well-informed cunning. He knows when you have to arrive, which are the best places, what time they throw the fish in, and when the creatures will want to start eating. He even knows when you can afford to take time out for a cappuccino in the bar since none of the fish are biting any more. ‘Sai com’è?’ he says, very pleased that you don’t. So when you go fishing with Stefano you always catch at least six fat trout, something that can only have served to reinforce Michele’s passione, especially since nobody has yet asked him to contribute any pocket money to the entrance fee.
But there are problems. Despite his evident familiarity with the gravel pits, Stefano claims to despise them. He only goes, he says, because he and Marta feel it would be too dangerous to take Beppino to a river, because he might fall in and drown. (It’s interesting that Stefano never mentions the hang up of the licence.) Of course, the boy might perfectly well fall in the gravel pit, too, but it’s the nature of gravel pit fishing that there are lots of people around and hence someone would be able to pull him out. Stefano couldn’t do it himself because like many Italians of his age he can’t swim; he never learnt. Ironically, Beppino can swim very well, having been to swimming courses (as he can likewise ride a horse and pitch a baseball), but this doesn’t stop Stefano from having a nervous breakdown every time the boy goes near the water, and going near the water is something that does tend to happen when fishing.
Perhaps as a result of this nervousness on his parents’ part, Beppino shows no sign of developing the passione now raging in Michele’s boyish breast. He skips around by the water’s edge, his long ponytail dangling; he leans over to see what other anglers have in their nets; he deliberately crouches with his nose almost in the water and thus keeps Stefano in a state of constant tension. ‘Don’t fall in! What will Mamma say!’ As always what Stefano really means is, ‘What will Mamma say to me.’ And as always he knows perfectly well what she will say. She will say, ‘I told you the boy should have stayed home!’
Discouraged, denied any initiative or responsibility, Beppino ends up lying down on the grass with a copy of Topolino, alias Mickey Mouse, a comic that borrows all the Disney figures but is entirely written and produced in Italy. He brings three or four with him. Then, rather than leaving well alone, Stefano will protest: ‘You wanted to come fishing, and now you’re not even watching your float. It wasn’t worth bringing you!’ (Read: risking your mother’s wrath.) In reply Beppino shouts rudely, Zap! or Wroom! or Snap! or Gulp! (pronounced goolp). For although Topolino is written and drawn in Italy, kids are so used to the English exclamations buried in the pictures of translated comics that these have been kept, though somewhat domesticated here — Tlack! Sgrunt!
When Stefano gets quite furious on one occasion, Beppino giggles and starts saying something that sounds like ‘Moombeley, Moombeley!’ Laughing, Michele joins in. ‘Moombeley, Moombeley, Moombeley!’ Stefano is beside himself. It’s only later that I realise that this is how the children pronounce those little balloons in comics that say ‘Mumble, mumble.’ They have mistakenly imagined the words are some kind of awful mockery. ‘Moombeley, moombeley!’
To cap all these difficulties with the ultimate insult, Marta will not allow Stefano to clean the fish (caught in such trying circumstances) in her gleaming kitchen sink (they haven’t as yet installed a sink in their garage), as a result of which he insists at the end of each expedition that we keep all the fish he has caught, something that can only serve to increase Michele’s enthusiasm and dampen Beppino’s. So I have decided that if Michele insists on fishing, then we should go alone from now on. And here we are at the angler’s shop in San Michele to buy bait.
We get the maggots, the worms, the white polystyrene foam balls to attract the trout’s attention and a landing net. Only as we’re leaving does it occur to me that we’ve forgotten the gadget you use to pull the hook out of their mouths. It’s something Stefano has always done so far. Then I reflect that without Stefano we probably won’t catch anything anyway, so it hardly matters. Outside on the main road Carlon is trying and failing to start a bright red, open-topped Golf.
The gravel pit is flatteringly called I Laghetti, the little lakes. Like that ditch where Michele landed his first fish, it is drearily unattractive. But this only makes one aware of how little children care about the aesthetic quality of such experiences. They don’t even notice. They don’t see. All Michele is thinking of is fish, Diobon…
You get up at six-thirty and drive away from the hills towards the bassa, past Michele’s old nursery school where they used to write due bene and make him sing ‘The Bells of Bovolon’. The horse in the red coat has apparently died since we used to make this trip years ago.
In San Michele you cross the main Verona — Venice trunk road and head off down the bypass toward the autostrada. Then just when a landscape of heathland and provincial decay has made the idea of fishing almost unimaginable, seems fit only for fast roads streaking to better places, you take a sharp right turn along a narrow track and tumble over an embankment to where a series of erstwhile gravel pits have been allowed to fill with water. Between two of these pits, as the car slithers down a landslide of slime and sharp stones, you see a long, low, wooden shed with a tarpaulin roof and smoking iron chimney. There is a veranda at the entrance, and the windows have the unusual (and hence ominous) accessory of mosquito screens. Above the door a sign says: I LAGHETTI, RISTORANTE, TRATTORIA, PIZZERIA. It’s a description that would appear to cover every preference, yet I suspect this may be the only restaurant in the whole of Italy where no foreign tourist has ever penetrated. I remember going to I Laghetti one winter night to find every one of its hundred-odd tables occupied and every diner wearing an overcoat, and in some cases even a hat. Wooden, damp and above all primitive, the place has only a couple of old paraffin heaters. Clearly, the owners felt the mosquito screens were a more urgent investment.