We press on. Then, in the twilight of this beautiful day, hurrying down the hill paths, Lucilla begins to sing. She sings a sickly hymn tune: Tu scendi dalle stelle, o re del cie-e-elo! Then, more merrily, a grating old pop tune: Ciao ciao bambina, un bacio ancora … She is very loud, with a cracked, witch’s voice, and completely tone deaf. The others join in, if only to drown out Lucilla. Then Rita and Giampaolo launch into some of the famous songs of the Alpini, the Italian mountain regiment. They are all First World War songs from when the regiment won a notable victory, turning back the Germans in the mountains with very great loss of life. There’s a sort of spirited mournfulness to tune and words that reminds me of traditional Welsh singing. And the occasional refrain tells alclass="underline" ‘That long train that went to the frontier …’; ‘On the bridge at Bassano, we’ll hold hands’; ‘Don’t get yourself killed, soldier’; ‘They are shelling Cortina’; ‘Ta-pum, ta-pum, ta-pum’.
Italian friends tell me these old songs are corny, and yet I always find them desperately moving: the young men marching into the mountains, ill-equipped, to death and glory, for undoubtedly a certain sad glory there is to be had in such situations: ‘But if I fall amongst flowers,’ they sing, ‘I don’t care if I die.’ ‘Ta-pum, ta-pum,’ go the guns. It always brings tears to my eyes. I must be hopelessly sentimental. And I can’t listen any more. So I fall back a few paces to walk beside Orietta, who immediately asks me if I think it’s wise of them to let Lara do so much volleyball. She’s such a big girl already. Isn’t there a danger she might get thick ankles, muscular legs …
We’re still walking when night falls, although Montecchio isn’t far below us now, the castle sharp against the glow of Verona behind. The radios have fallen silent. Ghostly among the hills, long thin lines of light flicker on. For the chickens its always fluorescent daytime. They produce more. I take Lucilla’s arm as we negotiate our way along the last stretch of dirt track. She tucks my hand tight under her elbow. And so back home, after what must surely have been our most successful day as a condominium.
To hear, through the fence, from a hovering Lovato, the momentous news that il professore’s wife, Maria Rosa died today. During our scampagnata. The battle for the inheritance of Via Colombare 10, Flat 4, opens in earnest.
18. Un panino due …
MY FIRST MONTHS at Via Colombare I bought my bread at Tosi’s, a shop which is little more than a hole in the wall but still manages to sell every possible foodstuff in just ten square metres. There’s a cash desk at the door, the wooden shelving is chock-a-block, the floor is made of old stone conglomerate, the cheapest, and, behind a cluttered deli at the back, old Tosi himself, bald head threatened by salamis above, cuts squares of pizza in the half dark and counts out bread rolls from bins. He always counts them out aloud. ‘Otto mantovane, per favore’, you say, and he begins: ‘Un panino, due panini, tre panini, quattro panini …’ Before we learn his name, we always refer to him as ‘Un panino due’.
When he’s tucked your rolls into a brown paper bag, this lean old man scribbles something with a practised shopkeeper’s smile and you turn to the wife at the desk to pay. They don’t have a proper electronic till, which means they’re declaring a very low turnover, since above something fairly pathetic VAT-approved cash registers have recently become obligatory. The signora doesn’t have a head for sums and invariably gives you less change than she should. Meanwhile, Tosi is already counting out the next customer’s rolls: ‘Un panino, due panini …’ He has recently built a small estate of four palazzine, sixteen flats in all, opposite the petrol pump. They go for more than a million a square metre. A fortune. On the hill behind us he is building two much larger villas surrounded by elaborate iron fences for himself and his family. Rumour has it that in the hungrier years of the war he would give people bread in return for land. Certainly he now owns large areas of hillside, and is eagerly courted by the local building contractors. But for all his wealth, however gained, old Tosi continues to count out panini: un panino, due panini … And you say to his wife, ‘Mi scusi, Signora Tosi, you haven’t given me enough change.’ ‘O davvero?’ she says. ‘I am sorry.’
So when Bepi expands his greengrocery, adding a bread and deli counter, I’m happy to switch there. Which means I walk past Tosi’s shop now, my plastic bag in my hand. Perhaps the old man has come out of his cave for a moment to stand on the steps beside the ancient enamelled blue sign that says, ‘OLIO D’OLIVA. OLIO DI SEMI, ZUC–CHERO …’ He has a soiled white shopkeeper’s coat, arms folded. And to show that my betrayal is of no concern, he makes a point of smiling his scrubbed shopkeeper’s smile from around a long hooked nose. For his old customers will never betray him. Old Marini and his wife will never betray him, never go to a shop run by a parvenu like Bepi. Lucilla and Vittorina will never betray him. They’re in there. Despite the fact that everything is more expensive. Troppo gentile, troppo gentile, Lucilla says to Signora Tosi, not counting her change at the door.
Bepi is sorting through piles of paper as he takes your money at the till. Scores and scores of loose scraps of paper: green paper, yellow paper, blue paper, printed, typed, scribbled. ‘What are they?’ I ask him. ‘Scartoffie,’ he says: rubbish. And he laughs his barrel-chested laugh. In fact, they are all delivery notes and invoices from suppliers: a farmer who brings goat’s cheeses in jars of oil, an importer who sends him Swedish salmon, a processor who prepares olives and red peppers, again in oil. It’s a serious deli.
Bepi has a blunt pencil behind his ear in thick hair. I ask him if he does his accounts himself. He says yes. I ask him how he can possibly manage this with his gym, his karate, his dogs, his court cases, his occult studies, the house he is renovating. Of course he can’t, he says. But then if he can’t, they certainly never will, will they? We both know who ‘they’ are. ‘And if they bother you?’ ‘I’ll prosecute them’, he says, ‘for harassment.’ And he means it.
Rather than giving you too little change, Bepi usually rounds your bill down. ‘Five thousand two hundred and fifty? Oh, just give me five thousand.’ He has an electronic till, but doesn’t always open it. After all, I’m a friend. The government, one might mention, agreed to pay shopkeepers a percentage of the cost of introducing approved electronic tills. Mainly produced by Olivetti.
Mopeds whizz round the bend in the road as I leave the shop. One towing a bicycle. Outside Tosi’s shop there are now four or five youngsters sitting on the steps behind their bikes eating oily squares of pizza out of sheets of paper. I walk to the other end of the village to pick up my Arena, and outside the newsagents there are other youths perched on more mopeds; these ones drinking Coca-Cola and eating crisps. Moreno, the tiny halfwit in deerstalker cap, is trying to talk to them and they are gently making fun. Going past the church there are yet more youths, yet more mopeds, hanging around in the gardens there. They hang around till late in the evening, summer or winter. Generally they are well behaved, I don’t get the impression they booze at all, but occasionally a phone box, the phone box, will get damaged — or a road sign. And they catch colds, of course. Because it’s mid-October now.