The speaker made no attempt to lower his voice to prevent me hearing. Nor did he show any sign of outrage or even unease that in this case a concorso was more a question of complicity than an exam. He might have been talking about a patch of dull weather, or the difficulty of finding fresh tortellini in the late afternoon, some irritating contingency. His colleague at the wheel drove on at great speed between the cement walls beside the flood ditches, stabbing at brake and accelerator as we hurtled through the narrow stretch where, if a bus or truck comes the other way, there is no room.
I moved back down the bus to the door. Two old women were knowledgeably comparing their blood sedimentation speeds as exhibited on the familiar health-service printouts. A group of fourteen-year-olds discussed whether horsemeat was nicer than beef, whether polenta was better with melted cheese or without. Then they argued about what kind of car Ruud Gullit drives. I climbed off. A bulldozer had been having a go at the old factory at one end of Via Colombare. A notice announced the construction of a complex of flats and shops. Reassuringly, the Madonnina was still in her place at the other end of the street, promising to protect us. Electric light gleamed on the more tangible security of iron railings. Simone’s car was outside the gate at number 10, come for an abundant dinner: baccalà, polenta, Valpolicella. An electricity bill addressed to Patuzzi was in the postbox. The cassonetto had been pushed down toward number 8. Vega was barking, the TVs were on, and all was apparently well with the world.
22. Mussulmani
ONE OF THE sharpest images winter conjures up here is that of dry sticks. It will be hard, perhaps, to sing the beauties of dry sticks, but I shall try.
Maybe the fact that these sticks are seen against a blue sky is the first thing that need be said. For, after the autumn rains, much of winter in the Veneto is dry, bright and very blue: a crusty, colourless, cold ground under brilliant sunshine.
The leaves finally fall in late November. They fall from the vines, leaving strong, gnarled shapes behind. They fall from the fruit trees, the peach and cherry orchards. There is no wind and the thin dark branches are perfectly still against the heavens with an almost shiny blackness of polished bark. Often, tin cans and strips of plastic have been tied among the twigs — to scare the birds when there was fruit. Now they look like decorations for a ragman’s ball. Along the edges of the fields, or winding along by ditches and streams, the fiercely cropped plane trees take on the despondent monumentality of surviving columns from some ruined portico.
In the smaller farms on the hill slopes above, the rows of vines are often supported by the cherry trees. A horizontal wooden slat is strapped to the tree; four or five wires are stretched from one slat to the next, one tree to the next, and the vines, twisting and splintery, cling on between. When winter comes and the luxuriant summer foliage of pergola and cherry leaf is gone, the rude peasant mechanics of these slats and wires is left stark in the bright light, like the tangled rigging of some beached clipper. There are the complex twists and turns of natural growth, branches and twigs curving back on each other, then the sharp manmade angles of sawn wood, and the graceful physics of sagging wire swooping from slat to slat, to end in small unused coils round the last cherry bough. All of which is seen against the terraced climb of the hill, the silver green of olives higher up and the sombre vertical dark of the cypresses.
Everywhere the contadini are cutting sticks. They prune the vines, moving slowly along the rows, arms constantly raised with knife and secateur. It must be tiring work. They bring out the year’s now reddish brown tendrils, hardening into sticks, and burn them in low bonfires in the fields. At the bottom of the hill, along the ditches, they cut the young branches from the nobbly heads of the plane trees and tie them into bundles such as old women carry in fairytales, then leave them to soak in streams or big water tanks sunk in the ground. Kept pliable, they will do for tying up next year’s vine shoots.
And they prune the fruit trees and the olives, sawing off whole branches, dragging away huge tangles of wood in their tractor trailors to be cut up for firewood on the powersaw in the farmyard. As we walk, the hills echo monotonously with the squeal of steel discs slicing through wood. There is something mournful about it, a lament for the lost summer, for last year’s growth.
They cut longer sticks from poplar and birch trees, poles three metres long perhaps, and these they strip and leave standing in clumps in their farmyard, to serve as fence posts and railings, vine supports, shafts for pitchfork or shovel. Tall, leaning at an angle against a barn whose two main beams are themselves resting on the cleft branches of two ancient cherry trees, the birch wood is a smooth blue grey in winter sunlight. The walls of the barn are old packing cases, boards, strips of corrugated iron, an assortment of planks which once served other purposes, a sheet of pink plastic, an iron bar. On the other side of the building, a cable is taut between the tarpaulin roof and a concrete post driven into the hill. Unlike the thriving cemetery, there has been only token observance of such notions as perpendicularity here. Why doesn’t the thing fall down, you wonder? Why doesn’t it blow away? I stand and stare: the winter branches, the canes and cut sticks poking at the sky, the beams resting on the cherry tree, the tracery of crisscrossing wires; such a tangle of man and nature, the antique and the provisional, the old seasonal rhythms and the shamelessly makeshift. When the leaves are gone it’s so clear.
We are in the farm, not far from Via Colombare, where we pick up our eggs. A big German shepherd strains at the end of a chain which slides along a wire strung from barn to cowshed. Sixty plus, the farmer’s wife is in her slippers and dark woollen stockings. She speaks good Italian and is bright and witty. Her husband is in the office, she laughs, and her thumb indicates the cowshed, which forms one side of the ‘L’ of the house. We go in to chat for a moment. In fact, there are two farmers here, brothers, pushing seventy. Their lease runs out in a few years and then the land will most probably cease to be a farm and the builders will move in. A builder bought the place some years ago and is pulling all the strings he can to get permission to put houses here. Sooner or later some contact he has, some favour he has done for priest or politician, will prove the winning card. For, although the regional plan designates the land as agricultural ‘in perpetuity’, no one has any illusions. After all, the surveyors are already marking out the orchard at the bottom of Via Colombare.
The cowshed is ancient, dark, with swallows’ nests in the beams and soiled ropes knotted to iron rings in the stone wall, polythene over the windows. The smell of the eight cows standing in their straw and shit is overpowering. Here they stand and sit all year. They are never let out. The terraced land with its fruit trees, vines, and strips of wheat or maize is not suitable for grazing. The men go out to mow grass for feed in summer, and in winter there is the hay in the ramshackle barn. They have one milking machine and the two urns they fill stand in a little stream behind the shed to await collection. Perhaps this sort of arrangement explains why in summer the milk here sometimes goes off almost as soon as one has bought it.