Loves & Miracles of Pistola. Hilary Prendini Toffoli
cynicism? His audacious confidence and pig-headed determination to put the rest of the world down? His eyes, which to Pistola look like those of a lunatic?
Aguinaldo’s father, Pino Bersella, is so sickly that all he can do is raise silkworms, poor fellow, while his wife, Sandrina, has a particularly poor deal in life. She’s a mondina, a weed-plucker in the rice fields. She gets up at four every morning and spends all day bent double under the baking sun, arms and legs immersed in stagnant slimy water, bitten by horseflies and scratched to glory by the vicious rice plants.
Every morning she cycles past Pistola’s house with the other rice-field workers. All of them wear the wide-brimmed straw hats worn by Silvana Mangano in the movie about the seductive mondine that not a single male in Italy has missed seeing – Riso Amaro.
Straw hats are where the comparison ends. While Silvana Mangano sizzled on the lamppost posters that were solemnly drooled over by Pistola and his friends, none of Campino’s rice-field workers do their weeding in dripping shirts that cling to their shapely breasts. Pistola has given up searching for Silvana Mangano’s ripe lips and flaring nostrils among the women cycling dolefully to work every morning. They’re mostly the age of his friends’ mothers, faces and forearms tanned the rich amber of honey and skins as rough as the thigh-high thick knitted leggings they wear as protection against the spiking weeds. Of them all, it’s only Aguinaldo’s mother with her dyed blonde hair and well-endowed figure who has any charm whatsoever.
The rice fields have been in the valley ever since the Duke of Milan sent sacks of rice to his neighbour, the Duke of Ferrara, a hundred years earlier to plant in the marshes drained by the Gonzagas. Weeding them is a tough job that provides a backbreaking but desperately needed income. Sandrina spends eight to ten hours a day with her backside in the air and her dress tucked into her pants. Along with the heat and the insects, she and the other mondine also have to contend with their male supervisors walking up and down on the bank behind them, gazing slyly at the tantalising strips of milky-white flesh between their leggings and short shorts.
To their faces, though, no one dares mess with them. They have loud voices and tongues that can fly. Pass some clever comment about their legs and they let you have it.
‘I’m telling your wife, you filthy bastard!’
‘Get it chopped off, you crazy pervert!’
‘Look at you! I’d never go out with that face! Ugly as mortal sin!’
The only time they’re silent is in the early mornings on their way to a gruelling day’s work on their bikes. In the evening when they’re riding home you can hear them singing and shouting and laughing on the other side of the village.
Pistola can still remember the first time Sandrina appeared one evening at the front door of the house in Via Luigi Caprini clutching a jiggling stocking filled with fat green spotted leaping frogs she’d caught in the rice fields. The thick knitted stocking made an ideal bag, stretched with the weight of the frogs going crazy at the bottom.
Initially, Nonno Mario kept saying, ‘Grazie, ma no’, until Pistola, eternally curious, persuaded him to buy some. They ate them for supper, skinned, tossed in flour, and deep-fried.
‘Eat the whole thing, bones and all, tutto,’ Nonno Mario told him as he crunched his way through the crispy pile that tasted a bit like chicken and a bit like fish.
In summer, they often eat Sandrina’s frogs, and afterwards, as the long hot evening turns to dusk, they sit outside on chairs on the pavement, relishing the cool air. It’s the time of day people stop to chat. Nobody stops to talk to their neighbour, Squarcione, though, who’s usually cooling down the pebbles outside with a watering can. He’s a miserly money-lender, a man in Nonno Mario’s opinion ‘with about as much spark as a potato’, who they all know has haemorrhoids and who they all think deserves them. Over time, Squarcione has sold just about everything Nonno Mario has pawned with him, including a silver canteen of cutlery acquired during the former chef’s more lucrative pre-war years in a little Verona trattoria.
Cremonini the coffin maker lives on the other side. A cherub in comparison. His coffins are custom-made and he never leaves the house without his folding wooden tape measure. Anyone who looks a bit off-colour can be sure some friend will mutter, ‘Is it time to send Cremonini for the measurements?’
Cremonini also sits outside his house in the evening, gazing at the heavens where his last client must be. When he switches off the lights to discourage the bugs, Pistola can see the stars shining in the inky sky as brightly as the headlamps of Bepi Faccincani’s Fiat Balilla. The only sounds filling the night are the millions of frogs in the rice fields. Raaargggk! Raaargggk! Raaargggk!
Though he enjoyed playing with these frogs when he was little, his relationship with them has changed. Now he takes his fishing rod to the rice fields and ties to the end of the line a cork that bounces like a fly in the light of his torch.
The first time he fried a bucketful of his own frogs, his grandfather suggested they should amaze everyone at Teresa’s wedding with a risotto con le rane as the second course. At that stage the marriage was still weeks away, the bridegroom had not disappeared, and the wedding feast was an ongoing daily discussion in the kitchen at Via Luigi Caprini.
Dessert was the one course Nonno Mario had already decided on. As his grandfather Vittorio used to tell anyone who’d listen, the most delectable way to end a good meal is to eat a few pieces of the firm juicy flesh of a pear along with a few chunks of nutty, sweet Grana Padano, the hard grainy cheese created by monks of the region. The two flavours are sublime together.
And he would quote a proverb: ‘Al contadin non far sapere quanto è buono il cacio con le pere.’ Don’t tell the farmer how good cheese is with pears (or he’ll put up the price).
When Nonno Mario told the bride that was how he was planning to end the meal, she clapped her hands. ‘Bravissimo!’ she announced. ‘It will be the best wedding feast any girl ever had!’
Whenever he visits his friend Fiorenzo, Pistola bumps into his hated rival. Not that Aguinaldo is even aware that Pistola thinks he’s the one who should be marrying Teresa. Aguinaldo would find the notion hilarious.
Though Pistola is always at the Bersella house, he’s grateful he’s not Fiorenzo. Not many families in Campino are well off, but at the bottom of the heap are the Bersellas. Take the matter of shoes.
Only when Italy’s economic miracle eventually takes place, and pig farmers make fortunes exporting prosciutto, will everyone in Italy have more shoes than they know what to do with. Right now, they don’t. While Pistola is fortunate enough to have two pairs – ‘No child in this house goes barefoot, even if we have to do without butter,’ says Nonno Mario – the two Bersella brothers have only three pairs between them.
As the elder one, Aguinaldo has two in the latest fashion – two-tone with pointed toes. Fiorenzo has a pair of school lace-ups he uses as little as possible to avoid wearing them out. The person Pistola feels most sorry for, though, is Fiorenzo’s father, Pino. He’s a yellow-faced chap who always tries to be kind, and who Pistola fears won’t make it through the summer.
Pino Bersella works hard for little money. He’s determined to educate his boys so they can lift themselves out of the peasant rut. Raising silkworms is not a lucrative occupation, but he and Sandrina are willing to make sacrifices to send Aguinaldo and Fiorenzo to the Liceo along with the sons of the wealthy of Mantova. The Liceo is a high school that opens doors.
So every year Pino makes huge bamboo structures filled with trays to house thousands of munching worms. Since they have to be kept in the shade, they’re all over the house. In the attic. The back garden porch. The woodshed. There’s even a silkworm installation as high as the ceiling in the corner of the Bersellas’ living room.