Emptying her own rubbish, Orietta heaves the heavy container with rubber-gloved hands back toward number 8. Emptying hers, the mongol-looking woman at number 8 rolls it back toward number 10. Back and forth. Back and forth.
Don Guido drives by in his battered car to bless a house restored without building permission. He will also do exorcisms and disinfestations. On San Biagio’s day he blesses the village’s children so that they won’t get sore throats. Just this week, though, he has installed the first two black people to arrive in Montecchio in one of the flats the church keeps for the poor. A gesture of true charity in racist Veneto.
‘WE SAY NO TO A MULTIRACIAL SOCIETY’ appears on a wall by Laghetto Squarà near the flat. Other graffiti complain about pollution from chicken factory farms. A truck from Germany has parked behind, come to pick up the things that stink so much in the chemical plant, whose owner is prominent in Don Guido’s congregation …
And so one could go on and on. Rambling back and forth through Montecchio, dodging the fast cars and wobbling bicycles. For everything links to everything else: the priest, the sanitaria, Bepi, the political parties, the cassonetto, the mopeds and the huddles of youths in the night …
There is no one characteristic which makes Montecchio Montecchio, Italy Italy, or the Italians Italian. And yet, as in any place, the slow accumulation of details does gradually form a sort of mesh or matrix. There is this constant entangling, as though in the weaving of a tapestry or net. And the more entangled and connected it all is, the more inevitable it comes to seem. It takes on the weight, the impenetrability of a dense contingent world. Yes, you tell yourself, it had to be so, because this is what this place is like. The barber believes himself a faith healer, but never gives you a receipt. You open an account at the bank and ask what the interest rate is but, instead of telling you, they say, what interest rate do you want, what do you do, who is your employer? Health is desperately, desperately important, but the air is laden with industrial smells every morning. Everybody likes the Pope, and racism thrives. But of course. What did you expect? This is Montecchio. And perhaps the best test of initiation is whether, on being presented with some new element, you immediately have a sense of its belonging here, of its being a new manifestation of the same matrix, rather than just another alien fact, another surprise.
On a mild autumn morning you see a young woman in a seal fur climb out of a sky-blue Panda and start to fight with her remote control driveway gate which won’t open. And you understand why she has a fur and why she has a Panda and why she paid more for her coat than her car. You also understand why she has a huge iron remote-control gate outside a modest house. You even have a fairly good idea why it’s not working. She salutes you with a friendly smile. She’s nice. You help her. She curses in dialect. Finally, the thing starts rolling and she drives off the few hundred metres to church.
Then toward the end of October, as I morti, the Day of the Dead, approaches, flowers appear in one of the village’s back streets decorating a little stone plaque in a wall, behind which a chained dog laps water from an old bidet. You hadn’t noticed the plaque until the flowers appeared. It says: ‘Qui, sotto piombo nemico, caddero due patrioti.’ ‘Here died two patriots, slain by enemy lead.’ And you think of the old men in the Communists’ office behind their two-litre bottles, of Lucilla begging on the streets of Vicenza, and Tosi counting out his bread rolls for acres of land: ‘Un panino, due …’
19. I morti
TO PUT YOUR car in the garage under Via Colombare 10, you inch along a crazy-paved drive the opposite side of the palazzina to the garden, then down a steep ramp behind the building and sharp sharp left into the garage. Among the many early morning sounds, as I sit at my desk translating sales forecasts for marble granulates, comes the roaring of a small motor, tackling the ramp from the garage. Suddenly, the roar dies; instead there’s a sharp whine, then a puttering, almost immediately beneath my window. Then the whole noisy business repeats itself.
I don’t normally go out on to the back balcony above the ramp. I don’t go out because, directly opposite, across Negretti’s garden where Vega tugs her chain, is a thin, tall crooked house like something from a children’s book; the witch’s house: flaking stucco, battered shutters, grubby lace curtains awry. And at the window exactly on a level with mine, an old old woman with long face, skin shrunken on to her cheekbones, and black shawl pulled tight about her hair, is constantly looking out, so that if I step on to the balcony my eye inevitably meets hers. Upon which, a ghost, very definitely a ghost of a smile will cross her face. My salute is hollow. The experience is not unlike seeing Don Guido’s photographs of the recently dead. And, in fact, today is All Saints’ Day, or as the Italians more commonly call it, I morti, the dead.
But the unusual sound of this car — roar, whine, putter, putter, putter, roar, whine, putter, putter, putter — is too intriguing, and I head for the balcony, studiously avoiding that ancient gaze.
It is the first time in the four months since we came to Via Colombare that Lucilla has got her car out. From above I can just see that the back seat of the tiny Fiat is full of flowers. She has a fair few cemeteries to visit today.
If she can get the car up the ramp.
On the flat patch at the bottom outside the garage she revs it furiously. With the choke full out, the air turns Fiat blue. The engine is racing. And off comes the clutch with a jerk. The car shoots up the ramp. But at the top she must turn sharply right to fit in between the railings and the wall of the house. Racing up so fast, she loses her nerve and hits the brake. The car stalls and comes whining back down the ramp, careering about dangerously close to the outer wall that shores up the garden, coming to rest askew on the patch at the bottom. Immediately, she turns on the engine again, putter, putter, putter, and is presumably getting up courage for the next attack.
After watching the show through two or three times, I go down to help. The car isn’t warm enough, she explains. I nod in agreement. Would she like me to try? Troppo gentile, Signor Tino, troppo gentile! Although the car is not old, the white paintwork is dull and cracked. Giampaolo has explained to me that this is because she uses some old industrial cleaning fluids she has to wash it. Lucilla’s approach to cleaning is nothing if not radical. Only a few days ago we saw her wash out the canary cage by simply holding it under the garden tap. With the canary inside. Flapping about terrified.
The Fiat 126 is a minuscule car. Lucilla has the problem of reconciling the physical needs resulting from short legs and great girth. If she moves the seat too far back she can’t touch the pedals, if she moves it too far forward she is squashed against the steering wheel. I telescope myself to about half my normal height and climb in. There is a fresh smell of crysanthemums: flowers for her dead husband, flowers for her dead child, flowers for her dead brother, Vittorina’s husband, flowers for il professore, flowers for Maria Rosa. I waggle the gear stick. In the centre of the driving wheel she has stuck a crucifix, in the well of the speedometer, completely obscuring it, a Madonna.
When I’ve got the thing out on the street, like a teacher giving a good boy a reward, she says she’d been meaning to tell me that if I want to, I can start using the professore’s place in the garage now; yes, I can tuck in between the heap of firewood for taverna evenings and the pillars with their memorials of the dead. I am duly grateful. Vittorina arrives in a very sombre black coat with velvetty tassles and the two elderly women set off on their lugubrious rounds.