Loves & Miracles of Pistola. Hilary Prendini Toffoli
he visited her on a debt-collecting mission for Ignazio, telling her that her brother now wants a payout for his half of the house left to them by their parents.
Talking about it again enrages her.
‘Where must this fool think I find the money? I must sell this house?’
When her tirade subsides, Pistola tells her he wants to go in search of Aguinaldo. She’s horrified. ‘No, Pistolino! You don’t go near him! My brother has got himself up to his neck in dangerous stuff.’ She rises and puts a bowl of grapes and pears on the table. ‘Happily you have no brother,’ she says. ‘They break your balls!’
‘I’d love to have a brother. Or better still, a sister.’
She looks thoughtful, takes a bunch from the bowl, and says through a mouthful of grapes: ‘Well, maybe you do have a brother. Or even a sister.’
He stares at her.
‘Yes, Pistolino, it’s possible. Maybe you just don’t know it.’
He shakes his head. ‘How is it possible, Zia?’
‘Non lo credo!’ She throws both hands up in horror. ‘What is it with this stubborn grandfather that you have? Will he keep silent until the grave?’
She rises and comes over to his side of the table, pats his cheek, and gives him a hug so tight that his nose pressed against her brown apron can smell a lifetimes of salsas and pastas and polentas and risottos. He can’t help wondering if she’s been at the grappa.
When she says, ‘Some of this is sad, Pistolino’, his heart sinks. ‘That is why your grandfather does not talk about it. But this is your family history.’
The only family history Pistola’s ever heard Nonno Mario talk about are the days when he was a dashing young army officer with the Bersaglieri, the craziest division of the Italian army, who fought their battles in hats decorated with ridiculous cock feathers and were irresistible to women. Pistola knows it all. He has heard endlessly the stories of how Nonno Mario couldn’t wait to sign up and fight in World War I’s lice-infested trenches against the Austrians, and how on his return four years later, with shrapnel in his back and awards for bravery, he came home to find both his parents dead.
He has also been told the facts of that magical night when, on Christmas leave from the army, his grandfather fell in love with his grandmother, Isabella. And how, because he was constantly soldiering all over the place in his Bersaglieri cock feathers, they only succeeded in producing one child. Pistola’s mother, Peppina.
That’s where Nonno Mario’s stories always stop.
Now she disappears and returns with a photograph she gives to Pistola with the words, ‘This is your father, Giacomo. My good brother.’
It’s a tiny blurry snapshot of a thin dark man in an Italian army uniform and aviator sunglasses. He’s leaning up against a tank, smoking. He has Pistola’s abundant curly black hair tumbling over his forehead, and on his lips the confident smile of a movie star. Pistola thinks he looks simpatico.
‘My brother, he adored your mother.’ Zia Andromaca’s voice has dropped down an octave. ‘And she too was madly in love with him.’
It’s a saga the details of which even Zia Andromaca is unaware. How Pistola was conceived under a full moon in a maize field, and how, as his mother lay waiting for him to be born in a bedroom above her grandmother’s trattoria, she was secretly yearning for Giacomo away in Abyssinia with Mussolini’s army. He knew nothing about his baby. This was Peppina’s own private tragedy. After a raging fight over his unwarranted jealousy, she had let Giacomo go off to Africa without knowing she was expecting his child.
‘Peppina forbade me to tell Giacomo that you are his son,’ she tells him, ‘even after they sent him to a prisoner-of-war camp. She had a strong head, your mother.’
And now she tells him the story from start to finish, how her brother stopped writing to her from South Africa after telling her he was working on a wine farm and had married a girl who reminded him of Peppina. She doesn’t even know if he’s still alive. His friend in Rome who was in prison with him has told her Giacomo wants to cut ties with the past.
‘Even when your mother died in that air raid, your grandfather wouldn’t let me tell Giacomo about you. Your grandfather must always do what this daughter wants. He adored her.’
She emits a heavy sigh. ‘Your grandmother Isabella also adored this daughter. I think Peppina’s death is what killed Isabella. I still ask myself why the parents didn’t stop this child going to Brescia when we all of us knew how dangerous it was, that big German base.’
‘What was she doing there?’
‘She never told us. We don’t find the truth. Something that happened in the war. Such a strong brave woman, your mother. Everyone loved her …’
He goes home downcast, having totally forgotten the reason for his visit to Zia Andromaca in the first place. When at supper with Nonno Mario, when Pistola wonders aloud what kind of a man Giacomo Casagrande was, his grandfather throws a pot of ragù at the wall and threatens to go and give Zia Andromaca a piece of his mind. It’s clearly not a subject worth pursuing.
After cleaning the wall, Pistola goes miserably up to his bedroom and sits staring at the photograph of his father until the image of that smiling soldier is engraved on his mind. He likes this bright-eyed man. He looks the sort who’s not too old to remember what it’s like to be young, and won’t get totally enraged if you do something silly when you’re out together fishing. He looks like someone who has done things and knows things and would enjoy a bit of fun and fooling around. Who would understand why you might want to come home after midnight and why you don’t want to always wear the same old shirt and pants that no girl will look at twice …
He takes out the photograph of his mother and puts it next to the one of his father. They look good together. Why, he silently asks the woman sunning herself under a tree, were you so cruel to my father? Why didn’t you tell him about me? How could you not think it was his absolute right to know? How could you, my own mother, be so stupid and so heartless?
A wave of anger rises as he begins to realise the wrong she did not only to his father but also to him. He tries to control his rage but suddenly finds himself hating her. Overcome by a desire to tear up the photo, he restrains himself with an effort. Instead, he lays it face down in the drawer and tells her he will never forgive her.
Teresa’s sadness has retreated to the back of his mind. He’d rather not think about it. He’s more concerned with the mysteries of his own existence, weighed down by his own sorrowful secrets.
Yet, as his old friend Heraclitus might remind him, all is flux, and the waters of his daily life are about to carry him in a new and more intriguing direction.
The question is: how much has their course been influenced by his decision to go to the annual Festa de l’Unità, the Communist Party fete whose posters the hunchback Gobbetto has put up all over Campino? It’s not an event he normally attends. Yet for some reason the universe is trying to get him there.
Nonno Mario does not approve of the Communists, even though the days have long passed since Campino’s Communists and Fascists would break one another’s legs whenever they happened to meet on a dark night. That struggle is over. Those who still regard themselves as Fascists have by this stage reinvented themselves under another name and become insignificant, while Italy’s Communist Party has developed into the biggest in the Western world, thanks to the country’s massive working class, all desperate for the better living conditions they think Communism will provide.
The fathers of several of his friends are Communists. Right until his