Loves & Miracles of Pistola. Hilary Prendini Toffoli
chewing. It sounds like the sea. When the time comes for them to pupate, Fiorenzo and Pistola help Signor Bersella fill the trays with branches for the silkworms to make their golden cocoons in. Then the busy silk-buyers come around to buy sack-loads to take to the textile factories of Milan and Como. They depart, leaving Signor Bersella looking forlornly at the few miserable lire in his hands.
Sandrina is never there, always away in the rice fields up to her thighs in stagnant water. Aguinaldo is never at home either.
‘Where’s your maledetto brother?’ Pistola invariably mutters to Fiorenzo as the two of them struggle down the steep stairs from the attic carrying buckets of silkworm debris. ‘Why doesn’t he help?’
One day, they punish Aguinaldo by pouring some of the buckets’ contents into his fancy two-tone shoes. When later he comes after Fiorenzo with a belt, his younger brother easily outruns him in spite of his bare feet. Yelling taunts and curses as he races away down the street towards Pistola’s house, Fiorenzo is safe in the knowledge that when eventually he gets back home, his mother’s strong bronzed arms will protect him. He’s her baby, though not smart like his elder brother. That extraordinarily handsome black-eyed son who was once her treasure has become Sandrina’s black sheep. His brothel escapades have made her the laughing stock of the rice fields. He shows no shame or remorse. Worse, he’s home so little that she and her husband suspect he’s in with bad company.
Their only hope is that Teresa will get him on the right track once they’re married.
Fiorenzo gleefully describes to Pistola his regular visits with Sandrina to the village graveyard to unburden her woes on her mother.
‘The sooner he’s out of this house, the happier I’ll be,’ Sandrina tells her mother, gazing into the calm eyes of the tombstone’s porcelain portrait in the vain hope that this woman, such a force to be reckoned with in life, might in death have some power over the living. ‘Such a sweet little boy when he was young,’ she sobs. ‘How he loved his mother! What happened to change him, Mama? Where did I go wrong?’
The intriguingly fertile subject of Aguinaldo tends to exercise the mind of Fiorenzo. He tells Pistola that, as he lies sweating at night between the sticky sheets on his lumpy mattress full of wool offcuts, he can hear his mother next door, muttering to herself in her bed beneath the sad-faced Christ on the cross on the wall, while beside her Pino snores quietly and dreams of silkworm moths mating.
Even though Pistola accepts that Aguinaldo’s film-star looks might have made him one of the most desirable single males in the valley, he can’t comprehend how a smart girl like Teresa could fall for someone so self-obsessed and mean-spirited.
He and Fiorenzo debate it one hot Saturday afternoon in the golden maize fields of the Valetti farm where they often go to smoke and discuss Juventus’s chances. It’s their favourite place on a hot afternoon. The maize grows as high as two metres in rows wide enough to run flat-out in. A great place to hide from a farmer whose watermelons you’re eating.
Pistola has come up with a theory.
‘He’s had so much experience in the brothels, he thinks he’s now some kind of superhuman lover. He’s told her no one will be able to satisfy her as well as him. Bet he’s told her he’s got a huge one.’
‘Ma va là! Do me a favour!’ Fiorenzo is almost paralytic with scorn. ‘It’s not even as big as your thumb. No, I bet he tells her he’ll be a rich man one day. You know what girls are like about money.’
To Pistola, the idea that Teresa could ever be a gold-digger is inconceivable. In his indignation, he inhales a burning mouthful and has a coughing fit. They’re smoking the cheap, rough, black, thin Alfas that Fiorenzo steals from his father. The Alfas smell like cheroots and are only a cut above the ghastly throat-searing imitations they used to smoke here as small kids, made from dry beards of corn packed loosely into Nonno Mario’s cigarette papers.
‘All the females in this village just want to get out of this place,’ Fiorenzo says. He’s lying on his back, gazing upwards and indulging with his free hand in an erotic experiment that feels natural under the wide blue sky. ‘They want to go and live in Milan. Ask any of them. Ask my mother.’
Pistola is not in the habit of having meaningful conversations with females. He doesn’t know many. Zia Andromaca, his aunt, the baker, is the only one he has ever spent much time with, which was once when he had to help her bake bread after her bakery assistant broke his leg. One thing he’s sure of is that with her hairy legs and moustache, she’d have no desire to live anywhere near all the sharp shiny Milanese silk buyers who come to the Bersellas’ house.
He and Fiorenzo are not the only ones using the maize fields as a hideout. As they lie dazed by the heat and the nausea inevitably provoked by a bout of black tobacco, they hear a commotion. Bounding down the row towards them comes a pretty, skinny gypsy girl with her petticoats bunched up as she runs, carrying a bundle. Only when she’s almost on them does she see them and in her fright trip and fall, dropping the bundle, which immediately goes hopping away, long ears bouncing. Without a word, she picks herself and her petticoats up, and is gone before they can say, ‘Ciao, bella!’
When they emerge later they spot the carabiniere’s bicycle lying on the ground a few rows down. He must be stomping up and down the field looking for the girl, but by now she’ll be safe in the camp outside the village that the gypsies put up every summer, coming here from Montenegro with their multicoloured caravans, bony horses, and thieving fingers.
That night while Nonno Mario is stirring the polenta, Pistola tells him about the pretty gypsy girl.
‘So why didn’t you nab the rabbit?’ is his grandfather’s response. ‘We could’ve had a delicious coniglio cacciatore.’ He pours the thick maize meal on to a wooden board to cool before cutting it into strips to grill over the stove’s embers. ‘Don’t let me hear you going on about pretty gypsy girls. That tribe is evil.’
Disagreeing with Nonno Mario usually opens the door to a bout of righteous indignation. Instead, as he waits for the crust on the sides of the pot to cool so he can pick at it, Pistola contents himself with spooling seductive visuals through his mind of brown legs glimpsed briefly under bunched-up petticoats.
‘And why the smile, Sifolin?’ asks Nonno Mario, using the nickname he employs when he’s feeling affectionate. Pistola’s real name is Ettore, but as a toddler he was so obsessed with the little pistol between his baby legs his grandfather had called him Pistola. Nonno Mario, however, chose to give his grandson his own dialect name for that important little appendage. Sifolin. Little whistle. He continues to call him Sifolin even though that little whistle is more prone nowadays to become a little flute, as it is now, with the alluring images of those brown legs flitting through its owner’s mind.
‘I want to ask you something.’ Pistola picks at the cooling polenta crust. ‘Why do you think Teresa is marrying Aguinaldo?’
Long silence. Then, ‘Who else is there in this village smart enough to marry her?’
‘But doesn’t she deserve—’
Nonno Mario’s shrewd blue eyes give him a quick exploratory once-over. ‘Is she so special because she’s rich? Is that why he’s not good enough? Who’s been gossiping? And why do you care?’
Pistola carefully heads his grandfather off in another direction. ‘Tell me again about the British airman Valetti shot down …’
His grandfather bangs his wooden spoon on the table. ‘When Giacomo Valetti catches you fooling about in his precious maize fields, it won’t be funny. Mark my words. That man is capable of anything. You’re playing with fire going into his maize fields.’
‘Tell me, Nonno! Was he covered with blood?’
‘That maledetto blackshirt!’ Now the flesh crinkles ferociously around his grandfather’s blue eyes. ‘Giacomo Valetti has the soul of a Mussolini medallion. I hope one day he rots in hell. Any of us who saw that tiny figure floating down like a thistledown seed would’ve hidden him …’
‘So