The grounds are large though, perhaps thirty or forty acres sloping steeply downward away from the house. Once laboriously terraced and cultivated, they are neglected now, like so much of this countryside. The vines are overgrown, the support walls crumbling, so that here and there a terrace has collapsed, showing how chalky white the soil is beneath. Bepi takes us down to his dog kennels, a low concrete building a good fifty metres long and full of big, black, barking dogs. Our host, apparently — he tells us himself — is the foremost breeder of Belgian Shepherds in the Veneto, if not in Italy. His neighbour, despite being out of sight and earshot of the dogs, has started a court case about the kennels because he is resentful that Bepi outbid him for possession of the house. The same old story. Bepi thus stands accused of having built them without planning permission. In typically belligerent fashion Bepi has turned the case on its head, sueing the local authorities for being so slow over granting permission that he was ‘forced’ to go ahead without in order to accommodate his business.
He releases a couple of dogs and lets them come with us. Disconcertingly, as we walk along, he barks at them in German. I ask him which language he prefers for his girlfriends. With touching honesty he tells us he hasn’t as yet found the language that girls respond to best. I assure him it is not English.
Before going in for lunch, he takes us up to a ridge at the edge of the property where we have a breathtaking view northward up the Valpolicella to the Alps, their rocky peaks barely visible for the haze. Deep deep below in the valley a huge irrigation canal leaves the River Adige and disappears into a tunnel under the hill. Disused marble quarries now converted into mushroom farms are dotted all about. The vista is vast, open, inspiring. I remark rather banally that it seems out of this world, fuori del mondo. To which, quite naturally, Bepi replies that, yes, UFOs (Oofoes as the Italians call them) used to visit here quite often, but have now ceased to do so, ever since people became too violent. The Veneto, he says, along with parts of Russia, boasts the highest frequencies of UFO sightings in the world. He used to see the lights himself further up the valley. I feel it isn’t the moment to say that the Veneto also shares with Russia one of the highest consumptions of alcohol in the world.
Returning to the house we find Bepi’s delightful ‘father’, Vittorio, who has come out to the country for the day with his wife. Strong, squat, of great girth and irrepressibly merry, Vittorio is just the kind of jolly chap one tends to see interviewed in the local paper after a UFO sighting. Now he presides over the big wooden table in the kitchen, where he has lined up five or six bottles of wine and seems intent on opening all of them at once. Meanwhile, his wife, Gina, buxom, retiring and embarrassed about her poor Italian, has prepared the most wonderful lasagna from scratch. Oceans of it.
We sit down. Vittorio begins to describe the qualities of each of his bottles at considerable length. Since he speaks only dialect and, unlike his wife, isn’t at all embarrassed about it, I can’t understand. I pick up half of a jolly joke about a dog that only went for dead birds. ‘Don’t let him come near me then,’ is the punchline. Bird in Italian also means John Thomas.
Midday. The abundant lasagna. The labelless wine bottles. The smoke from an unnecessary fire in the huge limestone grate. Big thick steaks, which of course Bepi gets through a friend of a friend who would never give him anything but roba buona — good stuff. Then tiramisù, again abundant, creamy, calorie-rich, cholesterol-rich, splendid. Alongside a treacly Recioto. And, finally, a score of different grappas to choose from after, or with, your espresso. Vittorio makes the grappa himself, with what’s left after making the wine, flavouring it with such things as lemons, peaches, oranges, even coffee. The different brews are arrayed before us in the kind of tall, greasy, nameless bottles one expects to find in the garage with a couple of inches of brake fluid in the bottom. I try two or three and make a toast to the UFOs.
Going back in his greengrocer’s van, Bepi tells me that what he’d like to do is study theology. The Church and the Masons still hold on to many of the deepest secrets of this world; only the initiated will ever be allowed to know anything worth knowing. He has applied to join a lodge and is studying the cabbala in the evening when he can stay awake. Vaguely it occurs to me that this is all part of the P2 mentality. And I wonder if Bepi isn’t the closest I am ever likely to get to a Renaissance man.
13. Troppo gentile
TO BE EARTHQUAKE-PROOF, modern Italian buildings are legally required to be constructed around a reinforced concrete frame. In the event of tremors, the whole structure should thus shift as one unit, rather than crumbling into its separate parts. And, indeed, as one walks about the outskirts of Montecchio and on into the surrounding hills, builders are eagerly pouring cement into columns of roughly nailed planks, in a hurry to get things done before the November rains.
Concrete the columns and the beams, where shortly before were olive trees; concrete the roofs, too, of these new palazzine and case a schiera; and likewise concrete the floors, all wires and plumbing laid forever inaccessible in the cement. Gaunt frames take over a vineyard. Up go the walls between one beam and the next. The roof is then topped with terracotta, the living-space inside tiled with ceramics: sombre colours and smaller tiles in the seventies, brighter gloss-finish colours and much larger tiles in the eighties.
It makes for some rather curious acoustics. With no wood, you are saved the creaking board, the moaning stair. If you want to sneak in to check on a sleeping baby, or, God forbid, sneak out on wife or husband, there is no danger of the floor betraying you. In stockinged feet you are soundless. On the other hand, a hard object dropped on that ceramic-on-concrete floor, even a coin, will be heard in every room in the building, volume and intensity depending on the vicinity to a loadbearing beam or column. Patent leather soles clicking across the tiles will thus click across all the floors and ceilings of the condominium. A lavatory flushing in the dead of night is an explosion, an act of terrorism. And if you should take a drill to the wall and, after penetrating the plaster, happen upon one of those steel-reinforced columns, then all over the building, from taverna to solaio, it will seem that the eventuality for which the structure was designed is in full swing. The air vibrates. Soundwaves oppress the ear. It is as if one were caught inside a guitar with some naughty Brobdingnagian child incessantly twanging the bass string.
We did experience a couple of small quakes in Via Colombare. The palazzina shuddered and sang. Patuzzi’s wineglasses tinkled on their shelves. Apparently, columns of trucks were passing in the night, or ships’ engines starting up in the basement.
Lying down to sleep of an October evening, thankful that we can now close the windows against the TVs, accordions and ping-pong of the velvety dark outside, we hear instead an unmistakeable fierce trickling, coming, well, presumably from below us. At eleven-thirty every night. Trickle trickle trickle, dribble dribble, drop, drop, stop. We hold our breath. But there is no explosion of flushing, for unspoken condominium etiquette requires that the toilets tacciono — fall silent — after eleven o’clock. It’s a special kind of intimacy this concrete brings.
Trying to sleep again after being woken by Vega in the early hours, I begin to hear footsteps going back and forth in our solaio under the roof above. This is alarming. Slow heavy footsteps, back and forth, back and forth, above our heads. Rita confirms, they definitely come from our solaio, supposedly an empty attic. And in the dead of night one believes in fantasmi. Vega has been moaning rather than barking this evening, howling and wailing at the moon.