My poor brother meantime was screaming like a bald buzzard as the woman disinfected his wound. A few moments later, wrapped up in the blanket, the novice emerged from the stables. My brother, with his head swathed in bandages, was parcelled up in a canvas sheet.
That seemed to be the end of the adventure, but three days later Fulvio took a turn for the worse. He turned pale, his face the colour of a rag, and was vomiting and running a temperature. The doctor came to Pino three days a week, and had left just that morning. The doctor in Tronzano had had to rush to Luino where his mother had suffered a heart attack. My father wired a cable to the station at Maccagno six kilometres away: ‘Find me a doctor.’
‘There is one, but he’s out doing his rounds and we can’t trace him,’ came back the reply.
All the while, Fulvio was deteriorating. His temperature had reached forty degrees, and there was no way of knowing what had happened to him — congestion, intestinal infection or meningitis? It did not occur to anyone to think of the injury to his head.
Mamma continued placing cold patches on her son’s head and warm ones on his feet, but finally gave up and threw herself on a chair in despair. ‘My son is dying, and no one is coming to help us,’ she moaned between her tears. ‘We’ve got to get a car to take him to the hospital in Luino.’
‘Here’s the butcher coming in his van,’ said my father, trying to reassure her.
She paid no heed, but sat uneasily in a trance-like state, as though listening to someone talking to her, then gave a serene smile. She turned to my father: ‘You can calm down now, it’s going to be all right. Someone will be here in a moment to save him.’
‘Who’s coming?’
‘A very good doctor, on his motor-bicycle.’
‘Motor-bicycle!’
‘Yes, my grandmother has just told me. She was here a moment ago.’
My father patted her cheek. It was clear that despair was causing his wife to lose her mind.
‘Here he is now!’ Mamma leapt to her feet and rushed to the window. ‘It’s him!’
A motorbike had drawn up in the square in front of the station, and a police sergeant and a gentleman carrying a small case dismounted. They hurried up the stairs, the sergeant arriving first. ‘A stroke of luck! Here’s the doctor from Mugadino. I’d gone into the chemist’s to ask if they knew where the general practitioner lived, and I met the man himself just as he was leaving.’
‘As a matter of fact, we were expecting him,’ said my mother with total naturalness, ‘but from my grandmother’s description I had no idea you were so young. Please come in. It’s my son. His temperature has gone up to forty degrees.’
The doctor examined him, sounded his chest, tapped him all over his body. When he touched him on the skull, Fulvio gave a groan and shook his head. The doctor took a pair of scissors from his bag and began snipping the boy’s hair. In no time I saw my brother with a tonsure, like a monk! The doctor disinfected the bald patch with red liquid, picked up his scalpel and cut into the wound. Fulvio gave a scream like a train coming out of a tunnel. A few moments later, the doctor took his temperature, which fortunately had dropped considerably. He was out of danger.
‘It was a very serious infection,’ was the doctor’s comment. ‘There was the risk of pernicious septicaemia, and maybe even worse. I’ll be back tomorrow to change the medication. I have left some gauze in the wound to clean it out. Give my good wishes to your grandmother. I’m really sorry but I don’t seem to remember where I met her.’
‘Nowhere,’ replied Mamma.
‘What do you mean?’
‘She died three months ago, and she’s never been here.’
The doctor fell silent … at that moment, he believed he had a mad woman on his hands. My mother went on with her explanation: ‘You see, I was on this seat, and my grandmother was sitting over there, on the bed, near my son. She spoke to me with a smile on her lips. “Pinin, Pinin, it’s me … don’t worry. Stop crying. A doctor will be along shortly, an excellent doctor, a professor of surgery … he’s travelling by motorbike, and in next to no time he’ll have your son as right as rain.”’
My father tried to wave the whole business aside. ‘Poor thing, she’s been hallucinating.’
‘It is odd,’ said the doctor. ‘Surgery is indeed my specialism. I am not the general practitioner, I was in Mugadino to visit my own father … it’s him who is the local doctor there. I am doing my specialism in Milan, at the Fatebenefratelli hospital, and I do hope to go into teaching. It is curious that your wife, even granted that she was in a state of trance, could have got all these details right. Very curious, worth researching, I would say.’
‘Not as a fairground attraction, I hope,’ laughed my mother. ‘To tell the truth it’s not the first time this has happened to me. Before my grandmother died, I received news from a sister who died in childhood, and at other times from a great-grandfather whom I have never known.’
‘Let the doctor get on his way. We’ve already put him out enough, getting him to rush round here.’
‘My husband’s right. You must think I’m paranoiac, the way I’m buttonholing you, but I’m not mad.’
‘That’s what all mad people say,’ Papà cut in.
CHAPTER 5. My Grandparents
I had two grandfathers. The first, my father’s father, was a giant of a man, almost one metre ninety in height. By trade he had always been a stone mason, like his father, grandfather and great-grandfather before him. In his village, he was known as Maister, in the sense of ‘master builder’. My father, too, as I have already mentioned, started life as a mason, and only after the 1915–18 war did he enrol at a technical institute and take up work on the railways. ‘We can drift into the most outlandish professions in this world,’ my father often remarked with ill-concealed pride, ‘but come what may we will remain a race of stone masons.’ His word for stone mason was comasin, which does not mean masons from Como but comes from faber cum macina, that is, workers who operate using machines — scaffolding, mobile frames, cranes, winches and so on. Perhaps mechanical thinking has insinuated itself, alongside a story-teller’s taste for paradox, into my DNA, so that I constantly find myself torn between rational rigour and the most weird surrealism.
When I was a boy, this predisposition manifested itself in the enjoyment I felt in taking hold of a stone and trying to modify its shape with chisel and club. I got the same sensation from kneading clay.
The many moves that my father was forced to make brought us to Oleggio, near Novara. Nearby there was a kiln alongside a brick and tile factory, and that’s where Fulvio and I spent a large part of the day. We won the confidence of the manager, who not only taught us the techniques of mixing and baking but also let us work on the potter’s wheel used for shaping vases. It was a truly magical game: the wheel was not only for vases, flasks and bowls, but if you had the technique to manipulate it correctly, you could adapt it to produce more complex forms, like a head or even a torso with chest, stomach and buttocks.
However, to my enormous distress, we had to move on from Oleggio as well. In fact I had to go by myself since my mother was expecting another child (who turned out to be a girl), and could not cope with both Fulvio and me. So, to give my mother peace during her pregnancy, I was dispatched to my other grandfather in Lomellina, in Sartirana.
The nickname of the Sartirana grandfather was Bristìn, which means ‘pepper seed’. It did not take me long to find out the reason for that ‘title’: my grandfather’s comments and jibes stung the tongue and stomach of anyone who had to swallow them.