‘Who said Switzerland was an Earthly Paradise? It’s a terrifying place.’
To make matters worse, the horse was stung by those ravenous bees, got excited, neighed as though preparing for a lance-at-the-ready charge, pawed the ground twice and set off at full gallop! Uncle did his best to restrain him, but who could restrain the bees? They came after us as far as they could but after a time had to give up, allowing our champion to slow down, even if he still kept his neck arched and trotted like a great victor.
I would never have expected such warmth of greeting from my cousin who was standing waiting in the front of the church with some friends and … Bedelià and several other girls. Almost all splendid girls but — needless to say — none who could stand comparison with her!
‘Why are we going to church?’ I asked.
‘It is a very special church, where they give concerts, and there are some Italian musicians there. Come and I’ll introduce you. They are all exiles.’
‘Exiles. What does that mean?’
‘It means they all had to flee Italy to escape imprisonment.’
‘Ah, just like the men who hide in the carriages at Pino. Refugees, in other words.’
‘Exactly. The very same. These particular ones are all anarchists.’
Obviously I had no idea what ‘anarchist’ meant, and that was not the time to ask for explanations. We were late, and the concert was about to get underway. I took my seat in the best place in the world — Bedelià’s lap, where the chair back and headrest were her breasts!
The musicians were warming up, and Bruno was seated at the piano. There were guitars as big as a man (called double-basses), great twisted trumpets (the saxophones), drums with plates and metal tambourines (percussion), and then trumpets more or less identical to those in the gendarme band. The musicians also included two black men with a curious guitar and a woman with a violin. Bedelià explained to me that that the violin was called ‘hot’ and that the round guitar was a ukulele.
‘When are you coming back to see me on the other side of the lake?’ I asked her.
‘I’m afraid it’s going to be a bit difficult. The Fascist government has made our government withdraw Bruno from the embassy because of his somewhat subversive ideas.’
I was on the point of asking her what ‘subversive’ meant, but the concert was beginning, so silence and attention.
I had never heard music like that before. At first, it seemed to me like an off-key racket, or like the high-pitched trumpet sounds that clowns make, but then I found myself beating my hands to keep time. A ramshackle harmony was emerging from it all, and I was enjoying it.
‘What do you call this music?’ I asked Bedelià.
‘Jazz, and the one they’re starting is the blues. They’ll start singing in a minute.’
The two black men got to their feet and sang a few notes in a voice as powerful as a trumpet, then launched into a rhymed routine, waving their arms about and doing a few shuffling dance steps. The girl on the violin joined in the song, and Bruno, not to be outdone, produced from somewhere an incredibly guttural, mellow, black man’s voice.
In no time, everyone in the stalls was swept along by the singing. Gradually, even those highly reserved Swiss folk were raising their arms and swinging them about in imitation of the gospel singers in the transept: they were clapping their hands, stamping their feet and singing along to the various refrains. I certainly had no idea at the time, but I was present at one of the first jazz and blues events in Europe.
They say that as children our senses are as receptive as photographic plates: every colour, every tremor of emotion is imprinted with unbelievable depth and precision. That event must have affected my way of hearing music, leaving it inscribed not merely as a sequence of notes and rhythms but as a ritual gesture and collective action.
* * *
When, a week later, I returned to Pino, my mother asked me what had happened to me. I launched into an account of what I had seen — of my song in German, the horse enraged by the bees, and when I got to the jazz concert I tried to reproduce the sounds by shaking my arms and legs like a grasshopper.
‘My little darling,’ my mother said in genuine concern, ‘are you sure they didn’t drug you? Were you bitten by a tarantula or bewitched in some way? Calm down, take a deep breath and above all don’t tell a soul around here about the anarchist exiles who were playing and singing with the Negroes. It’s dangerous!’
* * *
It is 1932, I am six years old and have to go to school. My brother Fulvio was two years younger than me, but it was unanimously agreed that he gave proof of extraordinary intelligence. At four years, he could read and write like a child twice his age. In addition, he was liable to come out with witticisms and observations that left people gasping.
The primary school in Pino was nothing speciaclass="underline" there were only three classes, and to carry on with their schooling, pupils had to go to Tronzano, some six hundred metres higher up. In Pino there was only one teacher in charge of ten boys and seven girls. Her name was Sister Maria, a nun in the order of Saint Vincent, and she wore a white headdress tied under her chin. For me, she was like the Great Earth Mother: generously built, majestic, gentle and filled with tenderness towards everyone. She never raised her voice nor her hand to any of us, not even when we fully merited a slap on the cheek or a kick on the backside. I was bewitched by Sister Maria, the more so since I was her favourite, even if she concealed it. Perhaps I behaved like a real teacher’s pet, always turning up with some flowers which I had picked on the hillside. Once I arrived with a little rabbit which I had dragged out of the compound, but on another occasion I went right over the score: I brought in an ugly, filthy stray dog.
On each occasion Sister Maria let out squeals of joy, and seemed as delighted as a little girl. And let us say nothing about her expressions of amazement when I showed her one of my paintings. She frequently encouraged me to draw or paint in class, and did her best to get all my classmates involved.
Our school was housed in the old, medieval town hall. Outside, in the corridors, they were freshening up the paint on the walls, and the painters had left tins of oil paint in a cupboard. One of the girls happened to bring a couple of brushes and one of these tins into the classroom and, while Sister Maria was briefly out, she started to do a painting on a wall. The rest of us were shocked. ‘Messing up the walls like that. You’re going to catch it when Sister Maria gets back!’
Sister came in just at that moment, took one look at all those smug faces and said: ‘Not a bad idea! Why don’t we paint the whole room?’ We looked at her dumbfounded. ‘Dear, dear, Sister Maria has gone off her head.’
The first girl, with a look of triumph, got on with splashing colour on the classroom wall. A moment later, each and every one of us, like crazed ants, attacked the walls, brandishing brushes dipped into the paint tins we had thieved.
* * *
That winter, it snowed more than usual, so to get to school we had to put on skis. My brother Fulvio and I had learned to use those contraptions fairly quickly, but these were not the kind of skis that people are familiar with nowadays. They were wooden boards, roughly cut and attached to the boots with belts and rudimentary fasteners. They were not intended for sporting purposes, but only to allow us to move about without sinking in the snow. The ski poles were staffs of ash with two little circles of wickerwork fixed onto the bottom.
It took real talent to move with skis like those, but all of us in the valley must have had an abundance of it, since we managed to hurtle down some of those breathtaking slopes without breaking our necks.