IT SITS LIKE Picasso’s horseman in a terraced field of maize. Around the rider’s neck is a blue saddlebag, which is quiet now. For a while Bruno stood there, like a condemned man beneath a tree, grieving the silence.
I have known Bruno for almost as long as I have known Italy. He is one of the last to make charcoal in an earthen kiln, La Carbonaia, a natural source of energy that goes back millennia. He is as thin as a grasshopper and has worked his Tuscan farm since II Duce’s day. This is not classic Tuscany; the terrain is rugged and harsh. Umbria is just over the ridge, and the spurs of the mountains interlock in such a way that their sweep and acoustics are dramatic. When the late summer storms come, bringing swollen thunderheads and great arches of lightning, the echo is similar to that of heavy artillery. When Mita, who is Bruno’s wife, delivers her early morning monologue, all of us in the valley are informed of her wishes.
Bruno’s father, Agostino, whom I met when I first came here twenty years ago, was a commanding presence in what he called la valle segreta: the secret valley. His snap brim hat was always straight, his collarless shirt buttoned to the neck. He bought his farm with his demob money following the First World War and got it for a good price, he claimed, because he agreed to marry the daughter of the owner, a priest. He and Mario Rossi, the great accordion player, and the young Gianfranco Valli, were the patroni then – although Gianfranco was a part-time patrone. He was a veterinarian who served Cine Città, the movie studios in Rome, and who was described as ‘the vet to the stars’. He had a wonderfully dry wit, delivered imperiously; he would declare, ‘It was I who saved the life of Elizabeth Taylor’s poodle!’
But I digress. Gianfranco is dead, crushed in his small vineyard when his jeep rolled over him three years ago this week. So too is Mario Rossi, who played the Mexican Hat Dance through the night at the festa that welcomed my friends and me, and our families, into the valley; so too is Agostino Antolini. And so is Diamanta, Agostino’s widow.
Bruno is patrone now. He is not a model farmer of the kind approved in Brussels. He has a confusion of wheat, olive trees and trellised vines, with tobacco as the only cash crop. In 1974, the year the electricity came, he and Mita were still living by barter. In 1981, the year they got the phone on and the bathroom with bidet was built above the stables, they were fully fledged consumers. I remember seeing for the first time the strange, flickering blue light of television in the silhouette of their fifteenth-century house. Directly behind and above them is the Monte Maggio, with its forest wall of beech, oak and chestnut. It was on these slopes that Mita’s family, who were landless peasants, worked as share-croppers. So it is not surprising that she, not Bruno, is the most ambitious consumer; there is a second bathroom downstairs now, with gold taps and lights around the mirror.
As for Bruno, well, these days he is under siege from i cinghiali, the wild boar that come down from the Monte Maggio. They come when he leaves the fields and they eat the maize until he reappears at sunrise. They respect his authority, clearly. He carries only his ancient zappa, a heavy steel mattock balanced on a long wooden handle. So it made sense that he should make the scarecrow look like himself, or how he wished to look. It is mounted on a wooden steed, ever vigilant, an heroic figure. It even wears his best blue cap.
But the wild boar don’t give a damn. They come and eat the maize anyway. I doubt if they would be as bold were Diamanta, Bruno’s mother, alive. Like the boar, she would prowl the fields in the pre-dawn light, appearing in doorways and windows, motionless, hollow-eyed and swathed in black, scaring the wits out of bambini and unsuspecting foreigners.
So Bruno thought of something new. On my first night back in the valley, just before midnight, when all sound is limited to the plop of falling fruit, Bruno brought up his own artillery. For seven straight sleepless hours the valley was blasted by rap, heavy metal, Motown, Madonna, Kylie Minogue, Elvis and none other than Richie Benaud. Now Richie is normally a soft-spoken bloke; but here he was at four in the morning bellowing an old Test score to non-cricketing fans from Teverina to Seano. Richie, inexplicably, was on the tape that Bruno had made and which was broadcast at multi-decibel level from an outsized speaker in the saddlebag of his wooden Don Quixote. When I pleaded for a respite the next morning, he said, ‘Wild boars hate music,’ though he failed to explain why they should have it in for cricket.
Had I not realised this was a Bruno plot, I might have taken action similar to that of the miscreants who, in understandable desperation, shot out the speakers of the Miracle Nun of Teverina. The Miracle Nun lived nearby, in a hilltop fortress guarded by Filipinos. She claimed to have been blind and to have had her sight restored by a vision of the Virgin. This was fine; but there was a sinister and pecuniary air about her sect, like that of the Moonies; and she herself was seldom seen. But she was heard. At night three-foot speakers dispensed her diatribe to a local population that, while respectful of the Church, has a history of anti-clericism. One night there were four shotgun blasts and silence was restored. The Miracle Nun has now gone, owing, it is said, many millions of lire in unpaid tax.
Italy was the first country I came to from Australia thirty years ago. I got off the ship at Genoa and lived here for most of that year; and the civilisation, kindness and sardonic way of the Italians have enriched my life ever since, and once again offer a future. In the early days, I travelled with two compatriots, one of whom bore the fine name of Bernardo Giuliano and was a distant relative of the Sicilian gunman, Salvatore Giuliano. Bernie, a gentle taciturn man who spoke with an Australian country drawl, managed to perplex everyone he met by not understanding a word of Italian. We three ran a small freelance organisation, grandly called INTEREP. Our offices were in numerous pensioni, youth hostels and fields. We wrote about pasta, opera and cars; and no one paid us.
My favourite city then was Siena in Tuscany; and some years later I was introduced to the rib of mountains that runs eastward from the vast plain of the Val Di Chiana to the upper valley of the Tiber. This is where the hill tribes are; the Antolinis and Rossis and Vallis. The beauty of the place is announced by Cortona, an Etruscan town that, inside its walls, is Renaissance Italy in every modern sense. For as long as I can remember, the comune at Cortona has routinely provided art and music, scholarship and politics from all over the world, as a public service. The municipal library is world renowned. Last week, in the Piazza della Repubblica, the mayor, Ilio Pasqui, made Alexander Dubček an honorary citizen; almost everybody came.
Like most of Tuscany, Cortona has been communist-run for years, and the Italian Communist Party (PCI) emblem is fixed to the wall opposite the clock tower. The PCI, which recently changed its name to the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS), today holds half the thirty seats in the comune, with the Socialists providing a majority. Those at present issuing blanket inanities about communism might reflect upon the achievements of this decidedly non-Stalinist variant in Italy, where mass support for ‘Eurocommunism’ has helped modern democracy to flourish where it matters most to people: not in central government but in the regions, cities and towns.
An American writer and friend, Nancy Jenkins, who used to live here, once described the time of year when the Tuscan summer ‘seems to turn and settle on itself like a tawny country cat curling in the warmth of the sun . . .’ That is the time now. Along from Cortona, just before you come to the Miracle Nun’s place, the swimming pool owned by the local parish sits deserted in a saddle of the mountains like a Hockney painting superimposed on countryside. The last of the Rossi brothers, Guido, stands on his balcony at Teverina, a handkerchief around his throat where he had an operation for cancer, rendering him silent. Beneath him is the Virgin lit up in her place on his facing stone wall. His wife, a jolly woman, died last year; and I sometimes think about him alone in that cavernous place.
This is the time when assorted feuds come to a head as the grapes ripen; and much of the wine will be terrible as usual. (Once, I said to a visitor, ‘See that wine you’re drinking; it comes from the vines just over there.’ To which he replied, ‘Doesn’t really travel, does it?’)
As for Bruno, he is inspecting the threshing machine, whose duplicate is in the museum of folklore in Cortona. He’ll soon hitch it to his old tractor and will it into action. But now it is Sunday, and he is sitting with his cronies outside the local bottega, where they are fixtures every week. He is wearing his new brown suit; his shoes are polished, his jacket over his shoulders, a glass in his hand. ‘Wild boars’, he mumbles as a greeting, ‘hate music.’