Signora Marta had said her aunt and uncle were well travelled and, indeed, the gigantic frosted glass and peeling veneer cupboard in the salotto was stacked with sufficient tourist brochures to keep an agency going for a couple of months in high season: except that these brochures dated back ten, twenty, even forty years. The oldest, in alphabetically ordered piles, for the most part extolled cheap hotels in the local mountains or on the nearby Adriatic coast, with fragile brown-and-white photographs giving ample evidence of the fifties building spree. Tuscany, Elba, the Abruzzi, Rome and Sicily followed close behind, like pieces in a rapidly expanding and now colourful jigsaw — Technicolor seas and gaudy local delicacies — until, with the sixties boom, mass prosperity and the Italians’ love affair with the automobile, here came the first price lists for hotels in Austria, Switzerland, Yugoslavia. Pile after pile of them. The most recent and lavishly seductive exhibits featured the Azores, the Bahamas, pensioners’ package trips to Florida.
Clearly there was material for a couple of Ph.D.s in this cupboard but, nevertheless, straight into our Brandoli boxes it all went. We were in a hurry. An essay on holiday destinations as an expression of Italian economic development over the last three decades was not what we had in mind. Except that here, beneath the brochures, was a photograph album. Well, who can resist at least glancing at photographs?
Such was Patuzzi’s love of the road and his motor car, he must have had the habit of getting someone, presumably Maria Rosa, to snap him by exotic road signs (as others might want to record their presence at the top of mountains). So here he is, in black and white, full head of virile hair brushed back, thin aquiline, intelligent nose, arriving in Trento with stout climbing boots round his neck and a knapsack on his shoulders; he has the confident, satisfied look on his face of someone who has just been admired for making an intelligent remark, or at the very least has eaten a good lunch. Nineteen thirty-seven, says the spidery hand. And here he is again, in colour now, balding, but still sporty, in wool trousers and green anorak, by a sign that tells us ‘Wien’. We flick through page after page of these things: mountain villages, hotel billboards, autostrada exits; until finally, most recently and most extraordinarily, here is a much older, weathered, bent Patuzzi, leaning on a stick, by black lettering on a white road sign announcing ‘Praha’, with, beside him, and even more extraordinarily, a very recognisable Lucilla. That does put a new slant on things. More a ménage than a condominium perhaps? Could she even be right about ownership of the flat? Or am I jumping the gun?
Further back in the cupboard are some collectors’ items from the war days: an army hat, a school textbook (‘Describe your feelings — of admiration and gratitude — on contemplating a photograph of il Duce’), and a stack of the macabre Signal magazines: tabloid-size, in German with Italian translations, these offer comic-strip propaganda, mainly directed against — well, against us. ‘Bombe sull’Inghilterra!’ one enthusiastic piece is entitled. Is this, I sometimes wonder, why the young men in the bar still feel such rivalry? And what had friend Patuzzi done in the war apart from reading such heady stuff (later we learned that Lucilla had been begging for bread on the streets of Vicenza).
Further back still (I said the cupboard was huge) was a rather more harmless (and more numerous) collection of magazines going under the enigmatic title of NAT. A moment’s close attention to the inside cover revealed that these letters stood for NUOVA ALTA TENSIONE, and it took only a few seconds’ leafing through them to appreciate that such tension was presumably meant to be created in the lower abdominal area by late fifties and early sixties pin-ups of Brigitte Bardot, Jane Fonda, Sophia Loren and a host of lesser names, photos of such breathtaking touched-up tameness you wondered how people managed after all the bomb-toggling excitement of wartime. Was Patuzzi slipping them in between his accountancy journals as he walked out of the tabaccheria? Did he read harmless gossip about bathing beauties between toiling over accounts on the great ugly desk in the second bedroom which clearly had a longer history than this house? At what point had Lucilla come in, if she had? Beneath a photo of a tiny, delicate-featured girl from the south, a caption was still telling us twenty-five years later that Mariangela Rainaldi, a devout Catholic, presently worked as a party hostess but was eager to become a film star.
In the drawer of Patuzzi’s bedside table we found a long shoehorn, a catechism, an Alpini hat (the famous Italian mountain regiment), a long expired tube of haemorrhoid cream, an oval, silver-framed photo of a solemn Maria Rosa, and a long piece of thick leather with a handgrip at one end and a heavy ball of lead tied to the other. What on earth for?
But there was a problem with rubbish now. Not that we felt we could throw away anything precious, like the diaries full of additions and subtractions in figures of eight and nine digits, the replies to letters Maria Rosa’s brother must have sent to a number of marriage bureaux in Paris — no, everything that should be preserved for prying eyes more patient than our own would be preserved. All the same, there was much in the way of old toothbrushes and toiletries from the early seventies that would be missed by no one. Who needed to know that il professore had cleaned his teeth with Pasta del capitano?
Unable to locate anything inside or outside the flat that remotely resembled a dustbin, we eventually tiptoed downstairs to make ourselves known to the Visentini in the flat below Lucilla’s (the one that had been meant for her daughter). Presumably they would be able to tell us what the score was.
We knocked lightly on the door. A voice asked who we might be, for nobody will ever open in Italy until identity is declared. Security, even in the remotest villages, is at New York standards. We explained. Came the sound of a heavy lock turning over once, twice, three times, and the door opened. A wispy, attractive little woman in a pink tracksuit stood before us and immediately insisted we come in.
Well, we were in the same country, the same village, the same building even, in a flat that in structural terms was a straight mirror image of our own, and yet on stepping into casa Visentini we were immediately in a different world. Everything here was modern, pleasantly styled, clean as a pin, with a light touch to the ornaments, the lithographs on the walls, the low, modern, comfortable sofa. If there was, perhaps, just one thing in common with our own accommodation, and with so many other homes I have been into in the Veneto, it was in the desire for a certain formality, a certain achieved composition in every room, ritualistic and ceremonial. Cosy is not a word one would normally apply to an Italian interior, nor would the owners be proud to hear their furnishings thus described. The briefest glance at the Visentini’s flat showed that the whole domestic environment had been most painstakingly arranged, nothing left to chance, nothing haphazard. Everywhere lines met and diverged in clean, carefully calculated, stylish angles. The exact opposite of the world outside.
And at first Orietta and Giampaolo were as guarded and rigidly polite as their furniture was attractive and composed. Yes, we were invited in, and with kindness. Indeed they insisted we come in. For this was the right thing. But it was not clear what we were to talk about. They did not want to be drawn immediately on the — for us — burning issues of a hostile Lucilla and a howling dog. Giampaolo in particular was poker-faced. The rubbish, he explained, was usually placed in a large, shared, plastic dustbin which was then put outside the gate for collection every morning. However, Lucilla had removed this bin on our arrival, making it abundantly clear she did not want us to enjoy the use of it.