Lucilla and Vittorina had years ago asked Lovato to remove this vergogna (one is tempted to translate this as ‘eyesore’, but literally the word means ‘shame’, which is what they felt Lovato should feel). Lovato refused. Giampaolo more diplomatically referred to the fence as ‘antiestetico’. Lovato played deaf. He would not take the thing down. At which Giampaolo had suggested that the ladies buy a hedge which would grow up and cover it all. Yes, all three metres high of it, thus protecting the aesthetic qualities of number 10’s cemetery. The hedge was duly planted. This had apparently infuriated Lovato, who claimed it would eventually rob all light from his small patch, although it’s possible he was equally concerned about losing his pensioner’s view of our miserable garden (which must have provided considerable entertainment). He would go to court, he said. There was a law about blocking other people’s light. Giampaolo politely remarked that his ramshackle garage of breeze block and corrugated iron located to one end of the fence had surely not been erected with the appropriate building permission. Since this was where Lovato’s son-in-law kept the Lancia Prisma of which the whole family was rightly proud, it seemed unlikely they would be willing to pull it down just in order to embark on uncertain litigation against number 10. When Rita and I arrived in Via Colombare the hedge was a metre high with everything still to play for.
To straighten out your topography then, we have the threatening hedge and nosy Lovato diametrically opposite the northern (and lateral) wall of the condominium which includes our living-room window where I sometimes stand beneath the elaborate, if dim, chandelier to look out on the world. To my left (and west) as I look out, is the long ironwork railing along Via Colombare, and to my right (never forgetting the mobile triffids in the garden between of course) Negretti’s tall windowless wall. And here’s a curiosity. Negretti’s wall has a cinema screen on it, a huge rectangle of white, for before number 10 was built the present garden area had been a cinema. Yes, rural Montecchio had once had a cinema, albeit tiny. Now of course the screen was no more than cracking white paint surrounded by broken brickwork where the cinema had been demolished and Negretti’s wall reinforced. Not a little of Negretti’s intransigence with his dog, we discovered, his almost relishing the disturbance it caused, was the result of his having wished to buy the cinema himself, only to be outbid by these two old ladies, who then ignored building regulations to stick their own palazzina rather too close to his. In revenge he refused to do anything about the unsightly wall, the yellowing screen, the broken bricks. Lucilla and Vittorina offered to go halves to have it stuccoed, but Negretti, like Lovato, refused. And the more they showed that the wall bothered them, the more stubborn he would be. The ornamentality of number 10’s garden was thus irretrievably compromised; for whereas Lovato’s fence might one day be covered by that hedge, no ivy could really get a grip on the smooth white of that cinema screen. As for myself, wandering around in stifling heat, hosepipe in hand, doing my bit for the lawn, the snail-sad lettuce, the scorched earth beneath the terraces, I would look up at the screen and wish with all my heart that the cinema could have remained.
10. Il palo della cuccagna
MONTECCHIO MORNINGS LATE September. Seven o’clock. The tiles under bare feet are beginning to feel more than pleasantly cool. You go through to the kitchen, heave up the heavy plastic roll-down shutter, all the rage in the late seventies, but spurned now in the general return to natural materials. You have to be careful not to pull too hard or the thing will roll away through the slit and into its little box above the French window, to be retrieved only after hours of fiddling. On the outside, the plastic is peppered with holes where the wind hurled big hailstones in an August storm.
You step out on to the balcony, air fresh and glass clear. Number 10 is exactly half-way along the street. In a lacquered morning light you see the Madonnina in her niche with fake flowers a hundred metres away to the right, the derelict bottle factory the same distance to the left. Opposite, above the houses, rise two more, rather nobler nineteenth-century mills, likewise derelict, one with an attractive design of little pillars and arches just beneath the cornice some six floors up. Both buildings have been listed, their empty windows staring, innards gutted. And behind these again rises a low ridge of hills pushing south into the plain, with Il castello di Montecchio on top: a square tower, a wall, a taller tower, a wall, a third tower the same height as the first: Austrian defences. The Communist Party want to turn it into a sports and community centre. The Christian Democrats don’t seem to be able to find the money, or the enthusiasm. At present, amid banks of blackberries going to waste, it’s used only by the so-called emarginati: drug addicts, homosexuals, immigrants.
But what a splendid sight on a bright morning, with the larks still twittering high in the air, the most delicate fleecy clouds (pecorelle the Italians call them, little sheep) curdling in milky blue above, and the light green horizontal flow of the ridge beautifully pointed up by the sombre verticality of cypresses winding serpentine towards the sharp silhouette of the castle.
Down in the street, the old man who lives opposite slithers off his muddy bike. Giobatta Marini. Pushing eighty, hunched, flat-footed, fishing gear slung over his shoulder, he has his dawn catch in a plastic bag under his arm. The stout wife, who bore him all those table-tennis playing children, comes out in apron and slippers to meet her patriarch and whisk away the fish. An early lizard creeps between railings along the wall. And, leaning on the cool marble of the parapet, still in your pyjamas, you breathe deeply, as your father used to whenever he got a chance to be out in the country. ‘How marvellous, what air!’
A boy in overalls, with bedraggled hair and pasty face, roars by on an ancient and deliberately unsilenced motorino. Leaving a cloud of oily blue behind. Well, OK. It’s all part of the happy scene, not unpleasant really and he does boast the name of Raffaello. At the end of the street he revs quite violently — a bit of frustration, unsatisfied libido to burn up. Fair enough. He works in the mechanic’s at the corner. But now he’s turned the thing off, the cloud of exhaust has dispersed, and you can relax again, breathe in this beauty, and breathe deep: aah!
Until, quite suddenly, the whole marvellous morning is corrupted, tainted, transformed, by the most unpleasant smell.
It’s sudden and overwhelming. One moment you didn’t notice it, the next the whole picturesque scene — castle, fisherman, Madonnina — has become a deception, an enamel over something that reeks.
Words and smells don’t go well together, but perhaps I could describe it as a corpse smell, a smell of something wrong, an abusive, acrid, clogging smell, and certainly a smell that one shouldn’t be smelling at seven o’clock in the morning in a village in northern Italy. The chemical factory in the small industrial estate is letting off the fumes from its storage tanks. Go in, close the door and all the other windows too. Look at the fine morning through the glass you really ought to clean. And get the espresso pot on to drown that stench.