Giuliano and Girolamo, they’re called. They wear dirty blue dungarees and brown felt hats. They speak in such fierce and garbled dialect that it is difficult to latch on to single words. One is merely left with a general impression of what has been said. Which may or may not be correct. Girolamo, the younger, but obviously the boss, is gritty and sarcastic. He likes to mock our city clothes and easy life. He scratches behind his ears, slaps a cow’s thigh, smiles the smile of the old fox. Ailing and very bent, Giuliano is sweeter, although virtually toothless. He has just had his prostate removed — his ‘prospera’ he amusingly calls it — and there are the usual detailed enquiries after health, all the more so because, before the operation, Rita recommended him to her brother who is a urologist at the hospital. Although this recommendation didn’t improve Giuliano’s lot in any significant way, a human contact is considered very important. It is a favour we have done them. Perhaps this is why they have agreed to sell us their eggs despite having an arrangement under which they’re supposed to deliver them all to a local shop. Or maybe they say that to everyone.
Giuliano frequently carries a spade or hoe or just a pole around with him so he can lean on it. He is pleased I am English because it gives him an opportunity to reminisce about his prisoner-of-war years in Scotland and Wales, which seem to have been very happy ones. He lived with local farming people and they sent him out in the fields every day to do more or less what he does here: weed vegetables, cut grass. He settled in well. But when the war was over they gave him only twenty-four hours to decide whether to stay or return. And he would have stayed but for the thought of pasta. The thought of a plate of pasta put him on the boat back to Italy. I wonder if his toothless grin is meant to indicate that he appreciates what a caricature he is offering. Girolamo, on the other hand, returned from forced labour in a German factory, near dead with starvation. Even a plate of Scottish potatoes would have been good enough for him. He scorns his brother’s sentimentality.
Because now Giuliano is complaining that the Ministry of Defence has stopped sending him his Christmas card. Every year after the war he used to get a Christmas card from the British government. Until that ‘Tachair’ came to power. She stopped it. Margaret’s cuts, we discover, struck deep all over the Continent. But it would be unkind, one reflects, to speculate out loud on what would have happened to a farm like this had she ever got her way over the Common Agricultural Policy.
It’s funny. These old farming people seem both suspicious of us and at the same time eager to take a break and have a chat. Occasionally, they invite us in for a glass of something. The big, nameless bottle with a strong dry wine stands in the middle of a long, scrubbed wooden table. The floor is bare stone, the walls powdery whitewash. There are straight-backed chairs and no armchair or sofa, but a huge colour television stands in one corner and two grandchildren are watching. It’s curious how impervious everybody is to the Rome accent of all the announcers.
Since it’s Sunday, the conversation — not at my prompting I can assure you — gets on to religion. Rita explains we don’t go to church. The farmer’s wife says brightly that their son-in-law doesn’t go either, but that he is not a Jew. This is a little disconcerting, until we appreciate that all she means is that he is a believer, but that he doesn’t go regularly, just at Christmas and Easter: i.e., the only imaginable non-believer in her universe is a Jew, and her son-in-law is not one of those. Nor, she clearly assumes, are we. Her warm smile suggests an indulgent subtext: you young people are understandably a bit lazy and selfish, but later you will go to Mass every week just as we do.
Rita, however, has an infuriating habit of being honest in conversations like this. ‘That’s not exactly the situation,’ she says.
‘You must be Protestants,’ says the well-travelled Giuliano, perhaps remembering bare Presbyterian pews in war-torn Galloway, comrades carving images of the Madonna.
‘Not exactly,’ Rita says again.
‘What then?’ Girolamo is scratching vigorously behind his ear, smiling his mocking, foxy smile. Every Sunday morning, as we make for the pasticceria, we see him and Giuliano heading off to Mass, awkward in their old smokeblue suits and dark ties.
‘Nothing,’ I finally join in. ‘We are nothing. We don’t go and that’s that.’
‘But you must be something. Everybody has some religion.’
Girolamo turns out to have a conversational manner not unlike his German shepherd’s way of straining threateningly back and forth on its chain. He begins to mock us. Everybody has some master, even if it’s only money. What am I living for? I must be living for something, and that is my religion. So what is it? He sounds disconcertingly like sermons I used to listen to twenty-five years ago. But one feels it would be churlish and above all pointless to launch into an argument. For of course we both know what we know: his world of sticks and pruning, mine of town and translations.
‘You must have some religion,’ he insists, as if having cornered his prey. And he drains his wine belligerently.
I can’t think what to say.
‘We’re mussulmani, Muslims,’ Rita solves the momentary embarrassment and raises a laugh from everybody. Although Girolamo continues to eye us darkly. Going back out into the farmyard, trying to change the subject, I ask him if he ever lets the dog loose from its chain. To which the old man casually replies with the common expression: ‘Non è mica un cristiano. He’s not a Christian, is he?’ Similarly when you rebuke a naughty child you might say: ‘So, are you a Christian, or a beast?’ For these are the only two categories of living creatures the old idiom allows: Christians and beasts. Apart from the Jews that is. I almost forgot.
And when the world is going from bad to worse you can say: ‘Non c’è più religione.’ There’s no religion left any more. As if that were the problem. And you repeat it, shaking your head: ‘Non c’è più religione.’ It’s something Lucilla, with all her Madonnas and crucifixes and sacred hearts, has been saying a lot of late. Because Marta’s lawyer has managed to have the hearing over the presumed forgery of her will postponed for another three months. For the moment, things appear to be going swimmingly for us parvenu mussulmani.
23. La tredicesima
WINTER IN VERONA means chestnuts toasting over coal braziers in Piazza Erbe; it means the crowded market for Santa Lucia where suspicious-looking gypsy folk sell every kind of candy, nougat and dried fruit from brash mobile caravans. It means shops and supermarkets full of huge, colourfully packaged panettoni with special offers on Johnnie Walker and local brandies.
In Montecchio, winter means steam on the windows of the pasticceria, swollen watercourses, mist rising thick from Laghetto Squarà on frosty mornings, polythene bags over oleander bushes and lemon trees and Christmas decorations on the big cedar in the main square.
In Via Colombare, winter means the stout woman with the twig broom sweeping away the leaves almost before they have fallen. It means old Lovato digging his square handkerchief of vegetable garden down almost a metre to let the frost right in. It means the genuine mink of the woman whose husband drives the Alfa 75 and the fake mink of the mongol-looking woman opposite who cleans offices in town.