The couple were finally on dry land. I was so excited and curious to find out what the parcel contained that I almost failed to greet the splendid Bedelià. In our house, up at the station, the surprise was revealed. When the paper and packing were removed, there appeared a large, slightly curved tile, entirely of chocolate!
‘I pulled it off my roof,’ said Bruno slyly, ‘and it’s for you, little crackpot. Don’t eat it all at once.’
I was so astonished that I could hardly breathe. ‘Can I give it a lick to taste it?’ I said uncertainly, and every last one of them chorused: ‘Of course. Lick away!’
‘God bless Switzerland,’ shouted Mamma.
* * *
A full year passed before I was able to cross the lake to Brissago. I was just five, and was as excited as a grasshopper in spring. When the parish priest in Pino spoke to us in religious education classes about Adam and Eve and the Earthly Paradise, my thoughts went to Switzerland, or more precisely to the Canton of Ticino: there in the Swiss Eden lay the abode of the elect, while our side was the home of the sinners, doomed to eternal punishment!
My mother was very cautious in feeding me information about our next journey to the Promised Land. ‘Maybe … in a few days…’ was as far as she would go, ‘if they manage to get the boat back in service, then we’ll take a trip to see uncle and aunt … perhaps.’
That night I dreamed they had once again suspended the ferry service: my father was standing on the gangway in a state of uncontrollable rage, as happened to him on his bad days. He pulled around him an embroidered blanket (the one from the big bed in our house), raised his arms to heaven as though he were Moses, and declaimed at the top of his voice: ‘Cursed lake, open up and let us pass, for the Promised Land awaits us.’
And wham! A high wind arose, the waters started to bubble as though in a great cauldron and … a miracle!.. sucked upwards by the wind, the water spiralled towards the heavens and divided in two, causing the Red Sea — sorry, Lake Maggiore — to open, whereupon the entire family, followed by the people of Pino Tronzano, Zenna and Maccagno, made their way across, chanting and singing, while the customs officers shouted after them despairingly: ‘Halt! Come back or we open fire! It is forbidden to cross without passport and visa.’ No one paid the slightest heed. Even the peasants and shepherds from the uplands with their cows, sheep and goats made their way across.
‘No, no goats! That’s not allowed,’ the police yelled.
The goats in reply fired off little pellets of shit as round as bronze billiard balls, and went on their way, wagging their tails behind them. What can I say? I was already dreaming in cinematic terms.
A cry of ‘Wake up, wake up!’ from my mother stopped me from completing that biblical dream. ‘We’re late, get up. The boat’s here in a quarter of an hour.’ I was in such a state that I put my trousers on back to front, put both socks on the one foot, spilled the coffee cup on top of the cat and even forgot to stick the paint brushes and paper into my bag. ‘Hurry up, hurry up.’
The siren from the boat tying up at the mooring was answered by the whistle of a train emerging from the tunnel. The station water-pump groaned. We were at the quay.
‘Careful on the gangway. You’re OK?’
‘All aboard.’
‘Cast off.’
I went to take my place at the prow. Mamma came up to me and whispered: ‘My little darling, I’ve got a bit of bad news for you.’
‘What sort of news?’ I asked, without taking my eyes off the Swiss coast as it rushed towards us.
‘The roofs in Brissago are not chocolate any more.’
‘Whaaaaat?’ I screamed in disbelief.
‘Yes, darling. The Swiss government made them change the whole lot. The order had to be carried out at once because all the children had been chewing the tiles so furiously that they were making the roofs leak … holes all over the place. So every time there was a downpour, the houses flooded and the inhabitants got colds or pneumonia, not to mention the fact that greedy children ended up in bed day after day with shooting pains in their stomachs.’
‘How could that be? Chocolate doesn’t give you a sore stomach.’
‘It all depends. If the tiles are old and as rotten as those ones…’
‘Rotten chocolate! But the tile that Bruno brought me wasn’t old.’
‘But that was from a new house.’
‘Oh well, then, at least his roof is safe.’
‘I’m afraid not. A couple of nights ago, some thieves stole the lot.’
I burst into tears of despair. ‘Damn them!’ I called down curses in silence. ‘God damn all thieves of fresh chocolate roofs and bring down on them a landslide of old cocoa, rotten marzipan and boiling vanilla!’
I could not be consoled.
* * *
At the quay in Brissago, Aunt Maria, whom I had never seen, Uncle Iginio Repetti and my two cousins were waiting for us. I was in such a state that I did not even deign to greet them with a glance, not even a cursory ciao. ‘What’s wrong with him?’ asked Aunt Maria, genuinely concerned. Mamma made her a sign to desist. ‘A tragedy. I’ll explain later,’ she whispered under her breath.
On the way to their house, we passed a cake shop whose windows were groaning with piles of chocolate bars. Noemi, the elder of the two cousins, had gone ahead and was coming out of the shop with an enormous lump of chocolate. When she offered me some, I accepted the offer but with a severe, disdainful look which said: ‘If you think for one moment that you can fob me off with a square of dry cocoa, you’ve got it wrong.’
My uncle and aunt’s house was on the lakeside. It even had a private harbour with a long, narrow boat, a yawl. Mamma and I were given a large room with a balcony. My God, what lodgings!
I immediately asked if it was possible to go out on the boat. In Pino I had been allowed every so often onto the customs men’s motor boat, but that yawl was of a different class. To say its balance was precarious is putting it mildly. You couldn’t move an inch in the boat without it immediately rocking about crazily.
They lowered me on board first: the two sisters jumped in right after me, the yawl overturned and all three of us ended up in the water. ‘Damn it all! I’m only five and I can’t even swim.’ To make matters worse, the yawl fell on top of me and I found myself trapped inside the hull, as though under a lid. I knocked, shouted, drank in gulps of water, and somehow, I’ll never know how, managed to grab hold of the bar of the seat. I heard Noemi screaming; ‘My God, the boy! Where has he ended up?’
Her sister replied: ‘He’s not in the water. I’ll bet he’s stuck under the boat, inside the hull.’
My uncle dived in. Together they managed to get the boat upright, and I came back to the surface, still clinging onto the crosspiece. I was spluttering like a flooded engine.
My God, life is hard in bloody Switzerland!
* * *
That night I had nightmares which made me toss and turn about in bed I don’t know how often. Just as well I was in the arms of my mother, who every time I moved gave me a kiss and dried the perspiration which had soaked me through and through. ‘All right, it’s nothing,’ she reassured me. ‘Never mind these bad dreams. You’re not in the water any more, little darling, there are no more lakes or boats. Go back to sleep.’
It didn’t work. As soon as I got back to sleep, water came at me from all sides. The rain was lashing down, the rivers were overflowing and bursting their banks, the water in the lake was high and rising until it seemed ready to flood onto the shoreline and submerge the station, dragging the trains beneath the waves. My mother was fleeing, holding me in her arms, climbing up the steep path which leads to Pino and on to Tronzano. Pa’ Fo was somewhere behind us, balancing on his head the huge copper tub we used as a bath … It might come in handy as a life boat. This recurring dream, or nightmare, was derived from an experience I had lived through the previous year, when a real cataclysm had made the water rise to the highest levels ever recorded. It seemed that the water, rising inexorably, was determined to swallow us all up.