Loves & Miracles of Pistola. Hilary Prendini Toffoli
strong jets are shooting from the tiny pale-yellow spout he has pulled out of the left leg of his homemade underpants, which were sewn from whatever fabric his mother could lay her hands on, as are all the village boys’ underpants in this deprived post-war era. Unlike the penises of his friends, Giancarlo’s has a second hole on the top that can spout like a whale, and he plays this extraordinary little instrument like a virtuoso flautist, varying the length of the jets depending on which orifice he holds his fingers over.
Naturally Signora Galetti is keen to have her son’s second hole stitched up by Dottor Pacchioni, but so far Giancarlo has managed to stave off the procedure. His six-year-old penis is a lucrative business. He doesn’t play it for nothing.
He has just reached the end of yet another performance when one of the enthralled gang gives a warning whistle. Someone is coming down the street. Pistola glances up and sees his adored cousin Teresa Faccincani walking fast. He greets her as she passes, ‘Ciao, Teresina!’
She doesn’t look at him. Just hurries past. She looks as if she has been crying.
Later, when he gets home, Nonno Mario tells Pistola the wedding has been called off and the bridegroom has left town. It will be a while before Pistola realises the part he has played in this.
Even though she’s a year older, and related to him, he has been in love with Teresa Faccincani for what seems his whole life. It’s a secret his heart has nurtured forever, warily unspoken for fear that revealing it will expose him to the ridicule not only of his cynical grandfather, the eternal sceptic, but the entire village. The beautiful Teresa Faccincani, daughter of the wealthiest pig farmer in the region, is considered the ultimate catch.
Half his height, she’s a tiny but spirited dynamo. Sultry, mischievous, exquisitely packaged, she has high cheekbones, arching black eyebrows over piercing black eyes, and a thick sweep of shiny blue-black hair that surges above a widow’s peak which, in Pistola’s mind, is exactly like Esther Williams’s. That’s where the similarity ends. Teresa cannot swim at all, let alone in sequins or in time to music with a gang of bathing beauties. Unlike Hollywood, there are no swimming pools in Campino, only rivers in which well-bred girls like Teresa don’t make a habit of immersing themselves.
His all-consuming passion was kindled one afternoon when he was a small boy. No moon and stars. Just a simple accident. He had been hiding under a bundle of washing on the floor of the Galettis’ bathroom during a game of nascondino with Giorgio Galetti, brother of the penile flautist, when Teresa happened to visit the house with her mother and come into the room to pee. Unlike Nonno Mario, whose toilet is in an outhouse, the Galettis are fortunate enough to have an indoor toilet.
It was the first time he had seen a girl peeing. He had always thought girls did it standing, like him and his friends.
Teresa’s temper was well known in Campino. When she lost it – which even as a very little girl was often because the boys of Campino are not saints at any age – you got out of her way. He knew that if she discovered him under the washing, she would annihilate him. So he held his breath and sat as still as Zia Andromaca’s ginger cat stalking a bird.
Straining to see through the worn fabric of the sheet, he could make out the indistinct image of a tiny figure lowering itself carefully on to the reconstituted cork seat that Valentino Galetti had put in place of the old broken wooden one. Though he couldn’t see them, the panties she pulled down were homemade like his, only hers were decorated with prettily embroidered flowers by her industrious mother. After a few moments, he heard the faint sound of liquid hitting liquid in the cracked porcelain basin that had received so many of his own bodily emissions.
Then, as luck would have it, Giorgio burst into the room shrieking, ‘I know you’re here! I know you’re here!’ Pistola saw her rush at Giorgio and slap him hard on the head, shrieking like a banshee, ‘You’ll get a big stye on your eye, you little cockroach, Giorgio Galetti, if you go around spying on girls in bathrooms!’
She was so dazzlingly indomitable in her six-year-old rage, from that day on Teresa Faccincani inhabited a special place in Pistola’s heart. There was no girl like her in Campino. No one nearly as strong-minded and smart and beautiful.
Pistola decided early on that in spite of the age difference she was the one he would marry. It was a resolution that deepened over the years, until the fiery little girl he had watched peeing had turned into a young goddess he couldn’t look at without getting a funny feeling of sick excitement.
But instead it’s Aguinaldo Bersella she has set her heart on.
The tragedy inherent in this misguided choice has tormented Pistola ever since the heartbreaking moment he first became aware of it. It’s a scenario engraved on his soul, and it took place during a showing of Tarzan Uomo Scimmia – Tarzan of the Apes – in Eros Ferrari’s yard which serves as Campino’s new open-air cinema.
Pistola was there on the same bench as the love of his life, only at the other end from her. Aware of her ever-vigilant family, he stopped himself from leaning forwards too often to gaze at her. But in the semi-dark, as the hero’s distinctive Tarzan yell set off an ear-splitting response among the audience, he craned to check her reaction and saw with shock that she was exchanging steamy glances with the cocky elder brother of his friend Fiorenzo, seated on the same bench a few bodies away from her.
A few months later, their engagement was announced. He thought he would die.
The whole affair is an agonising mystery. He can appreciate that his rival has Johnny Weissmuller’s straight-jawed looks and chest-beating confidence. But in Pistola’s down-to-earth country boy’s eyes, Aguinaldo’s behaviour and general being falls considerably short of the accepted standards of decency. He’s a loudmouth bighead, a know-it-all who, before he left school, where he was a few years above Pistola, was regarded by most Liceo students as nothing but a smartarse with a rapier tongue, who enjoyed fixing his malicious eyes on the priests and talking them into red-faced distraction with puerile questions they were too embarrassed to answer, like, ‘Can you explain more clearly for us the Immaculate Conception?’ He famously managed to offend his entire class during a discussion about the priesthood by telling Don Pollini, the one priest all the boys had a lot of time for, ‘Well, in my opinion, you fellows are simply parasites of society.’
Worse than any of this, though, is Pistola’s suspicion that what attracted Teresa to the despicable Aguinaldo is his determination to scandalise the village. It’s a notion that has privately tortured Pistola ever since he detected admiration in her voice one day in the school corridor when he overheard her telling a friend that Aguinaldo’s reputation as a wild fellow was ‘something he’s quite proud of’.
There’s not a kid in the village who hasn’t heard the story of how Aguinaldo and his professore of philosophy once bumped into each other in a casa di tolleranza in Mantova not far from the Liceo. Aguinaldo was over eighteen by that stage and it was common knowledge that he’d visited both of the area’s two state-run bordellos.
It was at one of them, the Villa delle Rose, not far from the church of Santa Anastasia, that he walked straight into his professore. The professore, true to his philosophical vocation, was an eccentric who went around with grease spots on his lapels and dandruff on his collar. Naturally, no woman would look at him; he had to pay for one.
So there they were, schoolmaster and school student, unable to avoid each other. What could Aguinaldo do but greet his teacher?
‘Buona sera, Professore.’
The professore looked Aguinaldo straight in the eye and said without a smile, ‘Don’t bother with the title, Bersella. Here we are all animals.’
Considering the family Aguinaldo comes from, this nonchalant sardonic upstart is something of an intriguing phenomenon. Even Pistola