When I got back home, I had a problem in explaining to Mamma how that disaster had come about: the two soles seemed to have been sawn in half.
CHAPTER 13. Gog
By doing portraits, I bought a dog. An extraordinary dog!
The idea of marketing myself as a portrait-painter had come to me in the last year of primary school while doing a drawing of my teacher. She was a youngish woman with a delicate face in which her almost almond-shaped eyes, thin nose and prominent lips stood out. Her neck was long, almost exaggeratedly so. I was very fond of her. When five years later I came across Modigliani’s portraits at the Brera Academy, I exclaimed: ‘Oh, he must have known my primary-school teacher!’
That first portrait brought me some success, and I set out to do portraits of several of my school-fellows, male and female. I acquired a reputation: more than one enthusiastic parent repaid me with gifts, some in cash. Next it was the turn of the mayor’s daughters, then the whole family.
A horse-breeder who had produced flat-racing and show-jumping champions at Besnate (near the lake of the same name) sent for me. I arrived at his estate complete with my brushes, paints and Fabriano albums, to be greeted by a great pawing of hooves which made the earth tremble. On the dressage ground not less than thirty horses were galloping past at high speed. Some were ridden by a jockey, others were running riderless in a pack. The breeder was very busy and did not even say hello. A girl of more or less my age, all ringlets and curls, who looked like Shirley Temple, came over to me: her name was Ornella. She then introduced Matilde, her elder sister, a mass of blonde curls: splendid! To top it all, three other sisters appeared, a total of five who, seen together, looked like the chorus of angels in a Benozzo Gozzoli painting.
Ornella introduced them one by one. I was worried and asked if they wanted me to paint them alclass="underline" ‘Yes,’ they replied in unison. ‘In order of age,’ added Ornella. ‘I am the youngest, so it’s my turn first.’
‘Don’t worry. We don’t expect you to paint us all in the same day!’ continued Ornella. ‘You can take until tomorrow, working through the night if you need to!’ With that, they burst out laughing all together.
To cut a long story short, I began by doing a sketch of Ornella’s face. Never had I felt so insecure. The pencil had none of its normal fluency; it seemed to stutter … I had to rub out, start again … then towards the end, when adding the colour, I started to get to grips with the whole thing. I heard exclamations of amazement behind me. I had succeeded, but I was literally soaking with sweat. When I completed the first portrait, I realised that the breeder was standing among the onlookers. ‘Not bad,’ was his comment, ‘very promising! If you were a colt, I would say it was worthwhile giving you a run-out on the track and keeping an eye on you!’ Not all five portraits came out as I would have wished, but Gozzoli’s angel chorus was quite satisfied.
The breeder, to let me stretch my legs and brain, took me to see the stables. As we moved from box to box, he pointed out his champions. On the round, we passed in front of a compound where half a dozen gigantic puppies were creating a din: they were all thoroughbred Great Danes. I was no great lover of dogs, but I was fascinated by that curious species of beast: the male moved around the compound with the elegance of an animal in a riding school. That evening, before I went home, the great horseman, his daughters gathered round him, was about to say goodbye, but with a certain embarrassment he blurted out: ‘I’d like to give you something, but I’ve no idea what to choose. I could give you some money, but it doesn’t seem a good idea. How about a paint box and an easel?’ I interrupted him. ‘Would one of those Great Danes cost a lot?’ The breeder, who seemed to be posing for a group photograph with his whole chorus of angels, was caught on the hop. ‘I’m sorry, but those animals are all already spoken for.’ Then he added hurriedly, evidently fearful that he would be contradicted by his daughters: ‘However, there is one, the least developed, maybe I could let you have that one…’
Another silence, then, like a high-pitched alleluia, the girls all came in with: ‘That’s it! Gog is his!’
I was jumping for joy as we went back to the kennel. ‘There you are, the grey one with the white paws and the star-shaped patch on his face is Gog, and he’s your very own!’
‘Papà says he is the worst of the pack, but it’s not true. It’s just that he’s a bit shy compared to the others, who are a gang of delinquents!’
I took my ‘beast’ home with me that very evening. Gog is the name of one of the two monsters of the Apocalypse, Gog and Magog, but my Great Dane puppy had none of the all-devouring ferocity of the biblical myth. On the contrary, he was the most gentle and timorous creature I had ever come across. He cowered under the seat in the train compartment, and to get him off I had to take him in my arms. He weighed more than me.
When I got home, Fulvio and Bianca screamed with delight, and the cat, a she-cat, sniffed at him and from the odour he was emanating, understood at once that she was facing a big, harmless bundle of terror. Mamma instantly took to him and smothered him with caresses.
Gog was continually in the company of my brother, my sister and myself, as well as of the other children in our gang, whether we were in the piazza or in the woods. He came with us when we went on fruit-stealing expeditions, and was the first to skedaddle … all it took was the sound of a dog barking from the haystack. He was literally terrified of Alsatians, or of any kind of mongrel which gave him a menacing growl … you would immediately see him make off, his tail between his legs, scraping along the walls.
That was when he was a puppy … but within a couple of months he had grown under our very eyes. He developed a leopard’s chest, paws, buttocks, neck — his whole body was enriched by the muscle structure of a powerful Great Dane, but his expression and demeanour remained the same as Walt Disney’s Pluto: puzzled and dazzled. For this reason we had no hesitation in letting him roam freely anywhere he wanted: there was no danger. He wandered around the town and into the villages in the valley. Everyone recognised him and knew that he was as meek as an angel. They called him over, fed him titbits, hugged him. The children jumped on his back as though he were a horse, and Gog put up with it all.
The only drawback was his excessive appetite: he wolfed huge bowls of meaty stew, but by the first belch the meal was already digested. As soon as we sat down to table, he would come up to beg for left-overs, and there was no way of shooing him off. Pa’ Fo did not want him ‘slobbering away’ between his feet. After a few months, all of a sudden he gave up begging. Had he learned some dignity? Not a bit of it: he had taken to stealing chickens.
Near our house, there were chicken runs in the orchards and farms. For a giant hound like ours it was child’s play to leap over wire netting around any compound: one bound, a snatch at a cockerel or chicken, and off he would race … four bites, and flesh, bones and even feathers were gone. I have no idea why, but he did respect the hen run in our garden, but no others. A quarter of an hour later without fail, the owners of the pillaged cages were at our door. We did not even allow them to finish their complaints. ‘Just go into our garden. Go over to the compound and help yourselves to any hen or cockerel you like, and accept our apologies!’ By now there was a ban in our house against eating fowl, since we needed them all to recompense the people whose poultry had provided Gog with a snack.
Soon, apart from the chicken, geese and turkeys, even the dogs, including the large hounds, got out of the way when he came along. I once saw a boxer terrier attempt to attack him and end up bleeding at the bottom of a ditch.