When Savino’s father-in-law began complaining of a heart ailment, Savino was put in charge of the administration of his properties. He started out by making a number of improvements in the farm setup and in the irrigation system, and bought a couple of new vehicles, including a fifty-horsepower single-cylinder Landini tractor with a hot bulb engine and a deep-trench plow. Fabrizio went crazy when he saw them drive the tractor up, shiny and brand new, straight from the factory. When the dealer showed them how to start it up, the heavy flywheel began turning swiftly, overcoming the resistance of the big single cylinder. The only thing he wasn’t crazy about was its dull gray color, he would have preferred red or orange.
All the day laborers had gathered around it, along with the two farmhands and the cowherd, to take part in this extraordinary event. In their eyes, the roaring machine was a wonder of technology, capable, they thought, of any endeavor.
“You think it could pull down that oak?” asked one of the men, pointing to a century-old tree.
“I say no,” replied another.
“I say it would,” shot back the first. “Why don’t we try?”
Savino was obviously against it, but had he consented there was no doubt that the tractor would have been powerful enough. The men would have willingly uprooted a century-old oak tree just for the pleasure of seeing a technological force win out over a natural one. Some launched into an academic discussion as to how many pairs of oxen it would take to provide equal power, and others wondered whether it really had the strength of fifty horses, something that was a bit difficult to believe. The next day, anyway, Savino was going to plow a couple of furlongs of stubble and they’d see just what that steel horse was capable of.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to do it himself because his father-in-law had another attack and he had to go fetch the doctor with the carriage.
When Munari reached the patient’s bedside, he used his stethoscope to listen to the man’s chest in several places. When he was finished he prescribed an aspirin a day and a shot of brandy when he needed it, and then walked outside with Savino.
“He won’t last long,” the doctor told him. “A year, two if he’s very lucky. He has severe heart failure and there’s no cure for it.”
“Pardon my asking, doctor, but if he’s so badly off, how will one aspirin and a half-glass of brandy help him?”
“Ahh, ignorance!” sighed the doctor. “Do you know why your father-in-law is so unwell? Because he’s eaten too much his whole life. The time comes when the heart can’t pump blood to all the parts of that huge body of his. So water begins to accumulate in the lungs and . . . ” he made the sign of the cross with his middle and index fingers united, “amen. The aspirin will keep his blood fluid and the alcohol in the brandy will dilate his arteries so the heart doesn’t have to work so hard. That’s why it’s called a ‘cordial,’ from the Latin word for good for your heart.”
“I see.”
“Good. And so he might last two years instead of one, but no more than that, I’m afraid.”
Savino and his wife Linda followed all the doctor’s instructions to the letter and his father-in-law lived exactly two more years; this inspired them with a faith that might have been more rightly placed in a prophet than in a town doctor.
But it wasn’t the same everywhere in town. Many said that the doctor only went to examine the rich, those who could afford to pay him, and not the poor. It wasn’t true, because he even treated the children of gypsies, who certainly had no money, but people believe what they want to believe and sometimes even deny what is evident.
Fonso often brought his little daughter Eliana to the doctor’s house; they treated her as their own and she adored being pampered by the doctor’s signora, as everyone called her. At home, besides her mother who was always scolding her, there were her nonna, her father’s mother, and her spinster aunt as well, and all of them were always ordering her around. Do this and do that and learn to sew and learn to roll out the pasta. Sometimes, the signora would even give her a banana to eat, an exotic fruit with an intense fragrance that was totally absent from the tables of ordinary folk.
“Eat it here,” the signora told her. “If you go out, the other little girls will see you and they’ll feel badly because they can’t have one.”
Every now and then she took a photograph of little Eliana and this was a real luxury. The signora would comb her hair and put a big bow in it and have her sit on the banister on the outside staircase or on the swing, and the doctor would take her picture.
Eliana knew how privileged she was and she knew what a good heart the doctor’s wife had; every year, for the Epiphany, she would play la befana and give little gifts to all the poor children: an orange, a tangerine, some peanuts and, for the girls, rag dolls that she bought in the city.
The doctor had the impression once that Eliana’s shoulders were becoming stooped and he asked to see Maria. “I don’t like the look of this,” he told her, “the girl’s back isn’t straight; it must be corrected immediately. You must do exactly as I say if you don’t want her to turn into a hunchback.”
Maria widened her eyes in terror.
“If you listen to me, everything will be fine. Now pay close attention: every morning, as soon as she wakes up, strip her down and wrap her in a sheet soaked in cold water. She’ll cry and scream, she’ll ask you to stop torturing her, but you pay her no mind. Just keep doing it for as long as I tell you it’s necessary. She should also skip rope for at least half an hour a day and drink at least two glasses of milk, every day. Plus a spoonful of cod-liver oil.”
“She hates it,” replied Maria, “but I’ll make sure she takes it.”
“Excellent. In a couple of months’ time, she’ll straighten out, you’ll see.”
The doctor’s instructions were followed to the letter and the outcome was perfect in this case as well. The consideration that Fonso and his wife had for Doctor Munari increased incommensurably.
And so Eliana approached her adolescent years fortified by cod-liver oil, freezing baths, soaking sheets glued to her young body, and shoulders as straight as those of any princess. After having brought her little sister, Tommasina, into the world, her mother Maria went back to enjoying her favorite pastimes. She hated inactivity and couldn’t stand the grumbling of her mother-in-law. The old woman never spared her any criticism: dinner was either too raw or overcooked, the sheets of pasta she rolled out for tagliatelle had tears in them. They couldn’t even leave the door open, the old woman complained, because just imagine if someone looked in and saw, what a disgrace!
Maria didn’t let herself be annoyed by any of it. She’d been allowed to run pretty wild as a girl, in the middle of seven brothers, free to roam the fields and climb up and down trees looking for nests. The house she’d come to live in, although cozy and comfortable, was too small for her. As soon as she could, she’d slip out, get on her bicycle and take off. She especially liked going around to help the farmers’ wives. Milking the cows, patching a pair of their husbands’ old pants, or just sitting and chatting. She never came back empty-handed: she’d have a loaf of freshly baked bread to show for her efforts, a piece of pancetta or prosciutto, or a jar of lard for frying crescente.
The women knew they could confide their secrets in her; Maria was so discreet she would never breathe a word of anything they told her, not even to her husband or daughters. At times, riding her bicycle down the little country lanes in the hottest hour of the day, when the men were taking a snooze in their bedrooms facing north, she would happen to see their wives seeking another kind of distraction in the middle of the hemp or maize fields, or under the shade of a mulberry tree.
Even when her friends in town would start bringing up certain stories about so-and-so who was going to bed with such-and-such, all they would hear from Maria was: “I don’t know about any of that. And even if I did, I don’t talk behind anyone’s back.” As if to say that gossiping and slander were worse sins than the weakness of the flesh.
As the years went by and her habit of enjoying a nibble with the neighborhood ladies became more and more frequent, she began to put on weight, partly because she was letting herself go and partly because she slept so much, a lingering aftereffect of her Florentine lethargy. Fonso never made her feel badly about it, and showered her with the same attention as he had when she was a slender, shapely girl.
Her husband was the backbone of the family, but Maria did lots of seasonal work like picking cherries, showing surprising agility, despite the kilos she’d added to her figure. Her special talent was in reaching the longest, most difficult to get to branches, which produced the ripest, most unblemished fruit. The problem was that these branches were too slender to support the weight of a ladder and the person climbing it. Unwilling to leave all those delicious tidbits to the birds, the men would string up a couple of ropes from one trunk to the next, one to walk on barefoot, the other, a bit higher, to hold onto with your hands and hang the basket from.
Very few pickers managed to do this, and they were much sought after. Not only did you have to capable of walking the tightrope, you also had to have quite a lot of nerve, because you’d often be suspended at a height of ten meters from the ground. It was a piecework job, they were paid so much per basket, and the supervisor wanted to see them filled to overflowing because that way for every three baskets he got a fourth. Maria was always careful to clip her skirt closed with a safety pin because she knew the men would be looking up from underneath. Others didn’t care a whit: they didn’t mind at all showing their underwear; on the contrary, they were looking for any opportunity that came their way. One in particular, a buxom brunette who came from the mountains, was said to not wear any underwear at all if she was interested in one of the men below, but Maria had never bothered to find out if it was true, because it didn’t concern her and anyone can show her own stuff to whoever she likes.
Although daily life still followed the rhythm of the same age-old, consolidated traditions, public life was one military review and parade after another; black uniforms were present everywhere and the radio broadcast bombastic, warmongering speeches. As time went by, the adults in town felt increasingly fearful that another war would break out. Most still had vivid memories of the last war and what it had meant for each of them, their families and their friends. Many of them had lost a son, a brother, a husband. In the square in front of the town hall there was a monument representing a soldier with a cloak and helmet, his hand on his rifle. Behind him, on a marble slab, were the names of all of those who had not returned. There were dozens of names, too many for such a small town.
They were most afraid of the man who had come to power in Germany. A small fellow, with a moustache sticking out from under his nose the size of a postage stamp, who would set himself up and shout like a maniac in front of endless formations of soldiers moving like a single man. At the town cinema, before the movie began, there would always be a short newsreel that showed how Germany was the strongest of all the European countries and Italy came right after them. Not many of the people in town believed such a thing, but were careful not to say so if they didn’t want to be tagged defeatists.
Eliana was growing up and she wanted to go out dancing in the evenings, but Maria would not hear of it: “It’s better for you to stay home and help nonna with the housework; you’ll be happy one day that you did. You’ll find a fiancé who will give you nice presents and marry you. Sure, men go crazy over those girls who go out dancing and let themselves be touched, if not worse, but they won’t marry them. They want to marry the kind of girl that no one talks about.’
“Mamma! All of my friends are going, why must I be the only one to stay home?”
“Let them go. Tomorrow morning you’ll wake up feeling exactly the same as those who went dancing, even better. And your father doesn’t want you to go out, either.”
Maria had become so jealous of her daughter that whenever she saw her leaving the house, she’d ask immediately: “Where are you going?”
“Mamma! I’m just going to Rina’s house to have a chat. It’s ten feet away.”
“Then the two of you can stay right here and talk,” she’d reply.
Eliana couldn’t take it anymore and she started to wish that she had a fiancé; he would at least take her out, to the cinema, even, or to stroll in the square on Sunday afternoon. And for Easter he’d give her a chocolate egg with a surprise inside, like the ones her friends got. But with the way her mother was, who knew when that would ever happen.
The next year, her friend Rina started seeing Eliana’s cousin Vasco, who had become very handsome, and was very nice and funny besides. He must have gotten it from Zio Checco, or even Zio Armando, who always got everyone to laugh with his jokes. Vasco sometimes came by with a couple of boys a little older than himself. One was called Nino and the other one’s name was Alberto, but for some reason everyone called him Pace. They were nice, but she had just turned sixteen and they seemed much too old for her.
Every evening on his way home from work, Fonso had a dip in the Samoggia if the weather was fine, or washed in the tub. Then he sat down to dinner served like a king by five women: his wife, mother, sister and two daughters. Before going downstairs to eat, he’d stop in the bedroom, lean on the chest of drawers and read a book out loud, starting from where he’d left off the evening before. And so the house rang with the words of Dumas or Tolstoy or Cervantes. He would only read softly if the book was prohibited, like those by Carolina Invernizio. When they called him down because dinner was ready, he’d take his seat and tell them how things had gone during the day. Or about what he’d read in the newspaper if he’d stopped to see Bastianino, the tailor: bad news, and always worse.
“If this keeps up, we’ll soon be at war,” he said. “Thank God our own family won’t be at risk. I have bad eyesight so they won’t be calling me up again and I don’t have a son, but when I think of the others . . . those poor families. When times are bad, they’re bad for everyone, even the rich. Bombs can’t tell the difference. We’re still paying the consequences of the Great War! How is this possible, I ask myself.”
When they’d finished eating, clearing the table and putting the kitchen in order again, they all went to bed, to save on electricity.
That following spring, Eliana was approached by Vasco’s friend Nino as she was returning home on her bicycle after having done the shopping.
“Can I escort you home?” asked Nino, pulling up alongside her in the saddle of a shiny black-and-chrome motorcycle. He cut an elegant figure, in his jodhpurs, shiny leather boots, white shirt open at the neck and leather jacket. His hair was wavy and had been tousled by the wind and was going a bit white at the temples. His eyes were green.
“I can get home perfectly well on my own,” replied the girl, following her mother’s instructions. But he had definitely caught her eye with that devil-may-care air of his and that dazzling motorcycle that smelled of gasoline and raw leather.
“I bet you can,” replied Nino, keeping the bike in first gear so he could stay at the same speed as her bicycle. “I just wanted to keep you company for a while.”
“But how old are you?” she asked, struck by the salt-and-pepper hair at his temples.
“Twenty-two,” he answered.
She pulled up short. “I don’t believe you.”
“Let’s make a bet. If I can prove that I’m twenty-two, you’ll let me walk you home. I’ll leave the motorcycle here and we can go on foot, but I’ll take you for a ride one day if you like.”
“No, I believe you,” she said now that she was close up to his bright eyes, his smooth, freshly-shaved skin and his muscular chest. “How fast can it go, full speed?”
“A hundred, but if I hug the gas tank and the road is asphalted, even one ten or one twenty. It depends on the road.”
I did it, thought Nino. He’d managed to pique her interest and he was sure she’d accept to go out with him. What woman had ever resisted?
For Eliana it wasn’t just a question of his looks and his brand new motorcycle. It was the way he had with words. Free and easy, crackling with wit. He could carry on a whole conversation without ever getting stuck, without ever running out of things to say. And in perfect Italian.
“You do speak well,” said Eliana. “Where did you learn?”
“At school, like everyone else. It’s just that I didn’t stop at elementary school, I went on to the ginnasio. Then I had to leave.”
“Why?”
“Why? Oh, I’d get into trouble, I wasn’t well disciplined and then, I didn’t like it that my sisters were out working in the fields and I was being raised to be a some kind of a gentleman . . . But . . . won’t you tell me your name?”
“You’re quick to get personal, aren’t you?” replied Eliana with a smile.
“I asked you nicely, didn’t I?”
Eliana was getting hooked. Then her eyes fell to his hands. Working man’s hands, used to laboring in the heat or frost, with wood and with iron. The hands of an honest person, one who didn’t hold back and faced whatever tough job the new day had to offer him.
“I’m going to go home alone now, because if I come home with someone like you, and on that motorcycle, my mother will have a fit. I know you’re friends with my cousin Vasco; his girlfriend is a friend of mine. Maybe if we all go out together, my parents will give me permission. Unless you have someone else, that is.”
Nino realized that this girl deserved some serious attention and that this wouldn’t be just another fling for him. “I’d like that,” he said. “There’s a fair on Sunday, they’ll be setting up amusement park rides and all the rest. We’ll have fun. Ciao!”
He turned the motorcycle around and disappeared down the end of the road at full speed. In one month’s time, Fonso and Maria had given him permission to come to the house and court their daughter.