It’s interesting (and rather a shame) that no girls are competing.
At the end of the day (and we stay two hours and more), since it would be impossible to provide the winner with the real cockaigne of palazzina and family business beside, the prize, finally awarded to the lad who delivers bread from one of the village’s bakeries, is 150,000 Lire’s worth of petrol from our local petrol pump. As a vision of plenty, it says much perhaps. Though this archaic festival is obviously timed to coincide with the harvest.
11. Bepi
ORIETTA VISENTINI SAYS that in twenty odd years she has never really been accepted in Montecchio. For she was born in Peschiera, on the southern shores of Lake Garda, forty kilometres away. People’s friends here are their childhood friends, their family. Orietta sighs. They don’t even know how to make friends, because they have never had to do so, and anyway, they can’t imagine anybody being without their own circle.
What hope for me then?
Very little. I step off the bus outside the derelict bottle factory and walk down Via Colombare. I nod to people: to the grappa-scented car mechanic in his overalls whose work overflows on to the narrow street; to ancient be-capped Giobatta, the hunter and fisher, but working on his vines today along a sagging fence; I nod again to the slightly mongoloid-looking woman in black who puts her father out on a chair by the doorstep in the morning, squashes his straw hat on his head, and brings him in in the evening (surprisingly their dingy house, which opens directly on to the street, has an expensive aquarium in the window of a bare room with large table, wooden chairs, stone floor and nothing else). I salute the portly, heavy-jowled man in the light suit who finds climbing out of his Alfa 75 something of an effort, the more casual fellow who sells insurance in a Fiat 126, the stout, vigorous woman who every morning takes a twig brush to sweep the dust from the road outside her house and push it over toward her neighbour’s. My greetings, which after all follow the traditional Italian style and which all these people exchange with each other every time they cross paths — Buon giorno signora, buon giorno signore — are met at first with embarrassment, perhaps even suspicion, since clearly I am part of that world which encroaches; later with returned nods, muttered courtesies. And perhaps that is quite enough. Only in the greengrocer’s does a loud voice reply: ‘’ello, sir, ‘ow are you!’ And it is Bepi. My first friend in Montecchio.
I suppose Bepi fits into that class of Italians who are eager to know foreigners. One has to be careful not to be collected by these people. It’s a group Giampaolo Visentini belongs to in a rather different, more sophisticated way. Not that these people have in any sense ceased to believe in the supremacy of Italian cooking, Italian wine, Italian style, and so forth, just that they are sensitive to a certain provincialism, eager to be associated with anything that lies outside their narrow circle. Perhaps they have been frustrated: Giampaolo by the stifling promotion procedures in the monolithic company he works for, Bepi by the obstacles put in the way of anybody without contacts who wishes to get a licence for a lucrative shop. Both feel they have ideas bigger than the narrow mentality of the people around them. But, interestingly, they don’t feel this provincialism could be overcome by going to Rome, as a man stifled in Barnsley might head for Birmingham or London. On the contrary, Rome would be even worse, the locals would already have staked the place out for themselves. No, they look to the fairness and openmindedness of the efficient nations further north. Extraordinarily, they believe Britain to be such a nation. And can never understand what on earth I am doing here in Montecchio.
From behind his stone-topped counter, Bepi pumps my hand. He is ‘very ’appy’ to have an Englishman in his shop. He smiles broadly, he’s my own age or thereabouts, but physically a much more impressive specimen: hugely solid, with thick shoulder-length curly hair, and such a look of eagerness about him, such a presence. Green green eyes. He sticks a couple of kiwis into my bag and doesn’t want to be paid for them. Per carità!
As I turn to go, the priest walks in, Don Guido. I am thus able to witness the whole scene. In his black cassock, the priest stands there sniffing the air, a short, droll, old-woman of a man. He sniffs and sniffs, snub nose upturned as the other customers go about with their little plastic baskets picking up artichokes, peppers and what have you from the boxes around the wall. Then he lifts his shoulders sharply up and down in a gesture of impatience. The cassock has a shiny, worn look to it. ‘Something smells rotten in here,’ he announces out loud and with almost a threat in his voice.
Quite unperturbed giving or taking change, Bepi replies, ‘Must be the carrion flesh of the last person to walk in.’ ‘Carogna’ is a common insult. At which the priest calmly proceeds with his shopping.
I never managed to get to the bottom of this dispute between our greengrocer and priest, a quarrel made attractive by its combination of intense animosity and total lack of consequence. And perhaps that is the essence of the Latin quarrel, at least on this level. It is almost enjoyed for its own sake. There is no feeling of any need to make up or resolve things, because no harm is being done. The priest came every day, ritual insults were exchanged, fruit and vegetables selected, money handed over, and that was that.
In a place like Montecchio, the indigenous population are, as Orietta had said, almost impenetrable. Because self-sufficient. Thus, being a newcomer and peripheral to village life, one inevitably gets to know other peripherals, people who like yourself have been washed up here, because at some particular moment this was where the current flowed, and the place turned out to be convenient. Bepi had tried for years to get a licence to open a supermarket — anywhere in the Province of Verona would do — until finally they allowed him to rent the downstairs of an unprepossessing old house on the outskirts of Montecchio — for a greengrocery.
Invited to dinner, he sits down, legs wide apart on his seat, his powerful body straining his clothes, and immediately, before I’ve even poured an aperitivo, announces: the man I call father in the shop is not my father.
In a country where reserve and formality are usually excessive on these occasions, it is certainly a dramatic opening. And embarrassing. He proceeds to tell us that he is the illegitimate child of a woman whose family threw her out. Not wanting her baby, his mother left him with a childless sister and her husband: the man he calls father and who helps in the shop.
He then goes on to tell us how, poverty-stricken, the family sold their house in Rivoli and came to live in a meagre flat in one of the downmarket residential areas of Verona. But he swore to buy back that house for the family to demonstrate that he was more than just an illegitimate child. And last year he finally did so.
If Bepi’s abrupt, reductive autobiography is disconcerting, the obsession with family and home comes as no surprise. When an Italian leaves a place it’s almost always with the intention of returning victorious and vindicated. Even if he believes that place to be hopelessly provincial.