The girls and boys are still round the phone. Another young maiden is calling now. She has a butterfly tattooed just above her breast. Did Iphimedeia have a tattoo? One of the boys is trying to tickle the inside of her legs with a seagull feather. MORE ENERGY meanwhile has bought an ice lolly, which has made her lips swell to bright strawberry. Then the bagnino’s girlfriend, amazingly without the bagnino, comes up to her and links arms. Ah, so they’re friends! And there is such a complicity and craft in their smiles, such female guile, can you really believe that they…
But then you see that expression in ten-year-olds sometimes, in six-year-olds even. As now, when my little daughter comes up to me, consciously flouncing her pleated blue dress, and says, ‘Papà-a, o Papà-a, wake up, Papà.’ She pops the sweetest kiss right on my lips, and immediately I know that she, too, wants an ice lolly. And that Michele has finished his game. Another morning at the beach is over. Now I must get back and make them lunch. Except that I’m overtaken by an extraordinary languor. Has the Medusa turned me to stone? It takes a heroic effort to recover such concepts as responsibility, to deny the children their lollies, to insist on salad and mozzarella back home.
‘And it won’t ferment in your stomach,’ I manage to say, when Stefi objects. ‘That’s just Zia Paola fussing too much.’ I love mozzarella. And it’s easy. As we walk past three rocking horses, past the bubble gum machine, past MORE ENERGY examining some unimaginable blemish on the bagnino’s girl’s shoulder, Michele describes with the most innocent enthusiasm how he just beat more than twenty crooks to death with a crowbar…
Lo chalet svizzero, la savana, il carcere…
The seafront road under vertical sunshine. The sense of chaos one so often gets in Italy upon leaving the ceremony of bar or restaurant for the no-prisoners anarchy of the street. We stand at the kerb. It’s dangerous. I have to point out to Michele that a man on a motorbike who has both hands behind his head to adjust his ponytail (a crash-helmet is strapped to the pillion) is in no position to stop at a zebra crossing. Even if he wanted to. Wait, Michele. Wait, Stefi. Choose the driver you’re going to challenge. A fat man in a Mercedes will not want his bumpers bloody…
Then back to the Baldassarre property, where one has to shrug off the assaults of an army of people ready to eat the children before they can eat their lunch.
How can I explain this?
The Baldassarre property covers a couple of acres of flat sandy terrain off Via Luigi Cadorna. Around the space are three buildings. One is a fairly noble though dilapidated old house overlooking Via Cadorna itself. The upstairs tenant is a mad lady. Indeed, as we approach, here comes the first thing to avoid. Having parked her ancient Seicento under the balcony, she will come out every half an hour or so and pour buckets of water over it from three metres above to keep it cool in the summer sun. The splashes reach almost across the street. They splatter the windows of the downstairs tenants, a young Persian architect and his Turkish wife, who run a late-night bar in town and hence are just getting up as we return. It’s funny how the children don’t find it funny, or sad, this business of the scrawny old woman with her plastic washing-up bowl taking aim from above. They merely repeat the indignance they’ve heard from other sources. They can’t grasp the mad poignancy of it.
You enter the property fifty yards of flaking green railings further on. All the way along Via Cadorna little stones set in the flags along the street announce that the pavement is Proprietà privata. Householders own the land beyond their fences and paid for the pavement to be laid. Notably, there is no pavement outside Nonno’s property, only coarse grass sprouting from long-broken tarmac. He didn’t pay. He wasn’t around when this group effort was made. On the green railing a big black arrow with yellow lettering announces ‘ARIANNA INFORMATICA — 100 mt.’ One day, stepping round the fast-evaporating puddles by the Seicento, Michele asks me what it means, Arianna informatica. It must be some kind of computer company, I tell him. And I suggest that since Arianna (Ariadne) helped Theseus find his way through the labyrinth to kill the minotaur, perhaps the company is proposing to offer a similar kind of assistance. Ironically, we have never been able to locate Arianna informatica. We only know that it lies or lay a hundred metres away in that direction. There doesn’t even appear to be any labyrinth it could be lost in. The sign is very old.
Likewise very old is the second house that confronts you at the bottom of the path when you get in the gate. This everybody refers to as lo chalet svizzero — the Swiss chalet — a one-storey building whose mud and stone walls were planted directly on the sandy soil with only the shallowest foundations. Perhaps two hundred years ago. Its stucco is the colour of milk spilt on a dusty floor. The shutters are bottle green.
Here Antonietta lurks. Either she sits on her chair by the door, scrawny cat in the shade beneath her seat, or she is working at her sink, a huge stone thing of the variety one generally associates with those films of the thirties and forties that sought to evoke a fast-disappearing peasant reality. For the story about the Baldassarre property is that having inherited the place shortly after the war, Nonno and Nonna then lived most of their lives abroad, directing building sites around the world, with the result that, apart from the Persian and the Turk, the tenants are still those installed forty years ago, paying rents that have barely altered since.
Antonietta has turned eighty. She used to babysit Rita and her brothers. She is squat, buxom, frail to the point of tottering on her shabby slippers with black stockings rolled down on unsightly varicosity. Her skirt is black and her shawls are black. It’s an old toothless Italy. But she’s so eager to be with the new, to have the children, to talk to them, to hear their talk, to caress them, to give them sweets. She is always waiting for us.
Today she is at her sink, powerless wrists rubbing some fabric against the rough stone, for these sinks have a sort of scouring surface built in. Immediately, she smiles, waves, hobbles round to greet us. She has a present for me and for the children. From her windowsill she takes a saucepan covered with a cloth, beneath which slops a minestrone with pasta and beans. For the children there are packets of ciunga, a bizarre phonetic derivation of those noble words, chewing gum.
Michele and Stefi aren’t sure whether they like Antonietta or not. They are frightened by the flaking skin on her face, the mottled hands. With me, despite all I tell them about respect for our elders, concern for those who are infirm, they refer to her as la strega, the witch. Her voice does have that wheedling seduction one associates with being lured into traps. The kids grab their gum and run. I stay to thank the old lady, wondering if I’ll be able to persuade them to eat the minestrone, since I know from past experience that Antonietta has a habit of cooking everything to a mush, perhaps forgetting what life was like with solid teeth.