The following morning, if the pressure is suddenly low and fine mercurial clouds are thickening over the castello, it could well be a chicken-dung smell rolling down from the factory farms which have taken over the surrounding hills as the contadini beat their long retreat. An all-pervading smell which may last half the morning.
And the next day, if we imagine a rare breeze is flowing from the north after rainfall, it will be the smell of intensive pig farming further up the valley. Is this the worst? Or should pride of place go to the synthetic-fabric factory to the south whose methylated fumes, thank heaven, come only with the sirocco? But they’re all bad. They all add to that constant threat of encroachment which typifies these villages. They all have to do with making money fast on territory which is cheap because it’s being abandoned, territory which once provided a living, and little more. Unless perhaps a culture.
The evenings are more pleasurable. There are no particular smells. Your wineglasses are perched on the marble parapet of the balcony while from Patuzzi’s abandoned armchair you watch huge moths whirr about the street-lights hanging from wires which run zigzag between the houses. The sound of Giampaolo’s stubborn hose hisses from under the balconies, the old ladies call to each other up and down the stairs over the babble of their televisions: ‘Cilla!’ ‘Rina!’ Tock tock tock goes the Marini tribe’s ping-pong. And a blackbird whistles quite beautifully at twilight. Over a period of a couple of months we get to know his call. We stand on the balcony and whistle. There is a pause, perhaps a minute. To tease you. Then he whistles back. And again. And again. ‘Lest you should think he never could recapture …’ but that was a thrush of course. The blackbird whistles, we answer him. It’s upsetting to discover later that he sings so well because Giobatta has blinded him. For on the mornings he doesn’t go fishing, old Marini will take the creature out into the country in its tiny cage, to attract other birds to the muzzle of his shotgun.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be upsetting. This kind of thing has always gone on. This is the old way. Why am I so squeamish? Yet whenever I whistle to the bird now I can’t help imagining the moment of its blinding, and I both want and don’t want to know how it was done.
Giobatta, of course, is short for Giovanni Battista. When a friend of mine recently took his child to be baptised and said, ‘Giovanni’, the priest immediately came back, ‘Evangelista or Battista?’ There was no other choice. You would have thought with his namesake ending up the way he did, Giobatta might have been a shade more mindful about taking sharp instruments to creatures.
Night falls. But the gently swinging lights keep the street quite bright. In the glow, little girls are playing something like hopscotch. There is no bedtime here. They dodge about their chalk squares and shrill and argue. Comes the sound of clashing gears and a car scatters them, driving recklessly fast in the narrow space. Their parents playing ping-pong under the pergola do not seem concerned. A red light goes on above the Madonnina. Or perhaps it is always on but only noticeable in the dark. From the window below we can hear the ladies giggling together over their television. Comes the portentous sound of the pips. A woman’s voice announces that it is 10.04 precisely, then the strain of the tune introducing the evening news programme. It is an endearing characteristic of Italian broadcasting that they are not overly concerned about starting programmes on the hour.
One Sunday, after a morning of particularly unpleasant smells, we walked to Montecchio’s industrial estate to check the situation out. It lies just the other side of the cherry orchard behind the Madonnina. Sadly, the orchard is closed off by a ten-foot-high dry-stone wall some hundreds of years old. You skirt around this barrier and go by way of the bus terminus, where the driver is enjoying a few minutes in a bar before his return trip to Verona (termini always coincide with bars, which is as it should be). The road here is straight and narrow with tall ivy-bitten walls either side. A first iron gate on the right leads into an avenue of cypresses and the cemetery. Then, after a large tarred area, which trucks could presumably park in but never do, you turn into the industrial estate.
And are immediately surprised. For what you see is: attractive villa, followed by long low prefab; then, salubrious three-storey palazzina, followed by grubby factory; then, green-stuccoed terrace with cascading geraniums, followed by woodyard; and again, lavishly funereal garden, chemical plant; gnomed patio with barbecue, print-works; and on and on: expensive house, business, expensive house, business, expensive house, business for three hundred metres. All the local padroni live here with their factories and factory smells. How can we complain when they get the worst of it? Circulars from the Communist Party will later explain that the land was more or less given away allowing imprenditori to build cheap villas for themselves, their children, their grandchildren. ‘Not a single job more was created,’ they protest. Perhaps erroneously.
But as industrial areas go, and when the early morning smell of lucrative enterprise has subsided, this is not an unpleasant place. Well-dressed families are eating ice creams on balconies. There’s a sound of chatter and children. A fat man in fashionable tracksuit is clearing up his toasting forks. The chained guard-dogs are asleep in the shade.
Then on our way home we stumbled upon il palo della cuccagna. In passing I might say that everything I have discovered in Montecchio I have stumbled on. It seems in keeping with the spirit of the place. And perhaps it was only because we saw them both on the same day that it occurred to me that this amusing celebration was not entirely unconnected with the mentality that produced the industrial zone.
We had planned to walk back a different way so that we could lounge on the Roman stones by Laghetto Squarà for a while, something that was becoming a favourite pastime: just sitting and watching, in the heat, by the water, with the sound of the spring gurgling across pebbles from under the broken church door. But the banks of the laghetto were packed this afternoon. A hundred and more people were shouting and cheering. As we approached, the cheering grew louder and louder, then a great splash. And more cheers, or jeers, before somebody called a name on a megaphone.
We climbed up on a stone. Into a drain hole in the bank, the trunk of a fir tree, perhaps twenty metres long, had been fixed so that it stretched out horizontally just above the water, supported half-way by a spike driven into the lake bottom. A small red flag fluttered right at the end where the pole was no more than four or five inches thick. On the bank, above the base of the trunk, stood a small gaggle of boys and men in swimming costume, shivering under towels. Beside them, on a high stool, sat the umpire.
The umpire calls out a name. The boy who serves me my prosciutto crudo in Brandoli’s, the supermarket, lets himself down gingerly over the weedy stone on to the base of the pole, and begins to walk. All he has to do is reach the other end of the pole and grab the flag. This feat will transport him into the land of Cockaigne, that is, he will get a reward. In the event, despite the thickness of the pole at its base, he manages no more than three metres.
Because the whole pole has been thickly greased with soap.
There are about fifteen contestants and they go again and again in turns, slipping and slithering clownishly on the soap. If you refuse to go when it’s your turn, you’re out. And since the water rises right here from under the hills, it is not exactly warm. An older man, in his sixties perhaps, is shivering violently as he lifts his stomach on to the bank. A muscly exhibitionist clutches his crotch. There’s a clammy weed in his hair. At each attempt, each contestant dissolves a little more of the soap, and then for four turns each is allowed to carry a handful of sand which he spreads in front of his feet. Thus some kind of progress is made, pushing further and further towards the flag, amidst the screams of girlfriends and mothers, and the chuckling of those men wise enough to appreciate that this is definitely a spectator sport.