But it’s only seven in the morning now and we’re not here to eat, but to catch our food for lunch and dinner. Another notice on the side of the shed announces: AZIENDA AGRICOLA ITTICA— Ichthyic Agricultural Venture — which is the pompous way they have now discovered for saying fish farm. Beneath, it says: ‘Sale of Live Trout and Sports Fishing’. Whenever I see that notice, I always think that the only good sports in all this are the trout…
You park on a rise above the pools and dash for a place. Italians are nothing if not early risers, and the bank is already more than half full. The pit to the left is reserved for a competition, and here the men are thick as maggots in a bait box, standing elbow to elbow, their lines admirably parallel, unshaven faces tense with concentration. In the right-hand pit, where we’re going, things are a bit more relaxed, though even here there are already a dozen and more men and boys scattered around the twenty by twenty metres of still black water. Immediately, Michele is frantically anxious, flustering with nets and tackle box and rod. ‘Hurry, Papà, hurry!’
There’s a mud path through wet grass and trodden camomile, with the water on one side and a barbed-wire fence on the other, or where there isn’t the fence there’s a steep bank rising to wet fields above. You pick your way round people mainly fishing in threes and fours, since even this solitary sport is never quite solitary here. The men set out their rods — most have at least two — and then they go and sit together with their friends and speak softly — so as not to disturb the fish from their task of finding the hooks — and they smoke, since smoke doesn’t disturb fish, and they eat crisps, or sandwiches, or pre-packaged croissants, and drink water or wine, or even a slug or two of grappa, and keep the corners of their eyes on their floats, occasionally pulling out a big farm-bred fish, twisting and sparkling in the bright morning air. We pick our way past them and the mud is littered with cigarette stubs and abandoned tangles of fishing line, and every two metres or less there is a little concrete block you can sit on, with a deep hole in the side of it where you can rest your rod once you’ve cast.
We seize one of the last blocks on the far side. ‘Grazie a Dio,’ says atheist Michele and, borrowing the gesture from Stefi, crosses himself. Having successfully found a place, he immediately relaxes. Indeed, I’m amazed at his confidence as he sets up the rod as Stefano has taught him. At least four fish, he promises himself. As on the first occasion, I’m now afraid for his imminent disappointment. In my pockets I make the sign of the corna, though I’m not sure it works if made in pockets. I reflect that whereas that first time in the lonely ditch any failure would have been limited to the business of catching, or rather not catching, any fish, here there is the further danger that we will fare una brutta figura, figure badly, look ridiculous in front of a score of other fishermen. Myself especially. For very soon it will be evident to everybody here that I have no idea at all about fishing. Doubtless one of the things that draws people to come to places like this, rather than setting off to find some isolated stream or deep-running river, is that here they can watch everybody else, learn from them, perhaps, or, better still, laugh at them.
A man appears to our left, taking up a position between our concrete block and the next. Which is rather too close for comfort. By the time Michele’s boyish fingers have fumbled through all the tackle, the fellow has already cast twice with a determination not presently being shown by the other anglers, two or three of whom are actually reading the paper. Funnily enough, I find the complacence of the paper readers and the businesslike manner of the newcomer equally unnerving. Each seems so sure of what he knows, while I only know that I know nothing.
Then Michele refuses to hook on the maggots because he’s squeamish. He may have la passione, but he won’t touch a maggot. So I have to do that. As their white bodies squish and pop under the barb and their yellowy blood or sap or pus or whatever it is oozes out of them, I am seized by the conviction that they are dying in vain. There is no way I and my son will ever catch a fish. Meanwhile, on his fourth cast, for he seems to be trawling without a float, the man to our left catches a large trout. It’s the first since we’ve arrived. So expert is he at playing the thing in and gathering it in his net, so dexterous and skilled is he at wrapping it in a floor cloth to whip out the hook before dropping it in a second net, which he secures to a peg banged into the bank, that he has cast yet again, a fifth time, before we are ready for even our first attempt. The newspaper readers raise their eyes from the pink print of La Gazzetta dello Sport, consider this solitary diligence, and return to their chat. Their floats are motionless on a glassy surface, their lines beautifully curved in parallel as the sluggish current draws them ever so slowly from left to right.
Michele goes for a really big cast in an attempt to get his hook right in the middle of the pit, but he misses his timing and the float falls ignominiously a couple of metres from the muddy shore. Still, I tell him, you’re as likely to catch a fish there as elsewhere, and I suggest he hang on to the rod while I nip into I Laghetti to pay for our right to fish.
‘Papààààà!’ I’ve got about halfway down the cigarette stubs and bursting tackle boxes when a huge voice calls me back.
‘A bite! A BITE!’
Conditioned now into believing myself forever wrong and my son forever lucky, I race back to deal with this unexpected and frankly alarming eventuality. The float is indeed bobbing. Foolishly, I insist on striking myself, which I have never done in my life before. The line flies out of the water and way back over my head to tangle on the barbed-wire fence behind. There is no fish on the end of it and no maggots either. Some minnows have merely nibbled the things off. Copies of La Gazzetta rustle. Faces stare. The efficient man to our left turns and frowns to show displeasure at all the noise we are making. For Michele is shrieking: ‘Diobon, Papà, Diobon non così!’ Not like that!
Michele is convinced there was a fish and I lost it. ‘Porco Giuda, Papà!’ he screams. Pig Judah! It’s seriously bad language and he’s loud enough to frighten off every trout in the Veneto. Humiliated, I lose my temper and tell him with my now sharp eye for a possible ricatto that if he shouts at me again he can forget any more fishing adventures. Ever! But all at once I’m aware of the fact that my speaking in English can only rouse the others’ curiosity and most probably their desire to find me incompetent. An Englishman who doesn’t know how to fish! With all the water they have! Then I’m furious with myself for caring what these people think, which it suddenly seems to me is a peculiarly Italian anxiety. I never used to worry so much in London, I never used to tie myself in knots over situations like this.