Loves & Miracles of Pistola. Hilary Prendini Toffoli
went rushing out into the fields. But we couldn’t save him. Dead as a dodo. Draped all over the mealie plants. We wanted to string Valetti up by the balls.’
In Pistola’s mind the dead airman has the wavy blond locks and noble features of Leslie Howard in Gone with the Wind.
‘Not many women married to a violent bastard like Valetti would dare do what Liana did afterwards,’ says Nonno Mario. ‘But then my niece has always been a far more decent human being than her husband. It took spirit to go and get that dead airman’s clothes, wash the blood off, and wrap them up with his identity documents so she could send them to his family after the war.’
He starts cutting the polenta into strips, then, glancing at Pistola through shrewd eyes, says, ‘So, is Aguinaldo Bersella up to something?
‘Like what?’
‘Smart, that one. Doesn’t intend to end up living off mulberry leaves like his father. Saw him today with that small-time crook Ignazio. Wouldn’t have thought he’d have much time for that man.’
Ignazio is Zia Andromaca’s brother. He has never wanted to join her in the family bakery and instead moved to Rome. ‘Your classic low-rent conman trying to be a high-rent conman’ is how Nonno Mario describes him. Whenever he comes back to Campino, he swaggers around weighed down by his gold chains and his thick-framed sunglasses, telling everyone he’s involved in something a lot more lucrative than baking.
‘Guess what’s on the menu tonight?’ Nonno Mario is suddenly excited. ‘That big stream down by the rice fields is being drained and there are only a few pools of mud at the bottom. Catch the eels with your bare hands …’
Fishing is one of Nonno Mario’s many passions. When he spots a prize fish in a Campino river – a hump-backed gobbo, for example, that can reach five kilograms – he stalks it for days. He and Pistola will be sitting out on the pavement and Nonno Mario will suddenly put down his grappa and say, ‘He’s still there, that big one. Saw him again. I’ll get him.’ And he does.
But eel is another story. With its snakelike body and soft sticky freshwater flesh, it doesn’t appeal to Pistola. The only way he can get it down his throat is with large amounts of the wine with water that his grandfather sometimes gives him at mealtimes. Regrettably, however, Nonno Mario regards eel as a delicacy and can’t understand how anyone can resist it, especially after it has been submerged for hours in his own special sweet and sour agrodolce marinade – he doesn’t use recipe books – which he makes accompanied by a running commentary, ‘Should of course be using capers. But who can get capers? So we’ll use mint. Or what about sage. Or …’
He rolls up the eel like a cartwheel, pins it together with crossed skewers so it looks like some exotic Eastern treat, and then grills it over the embers, all the while singing arias in a perfect soprano, like his favourite, ‘Amami, Alfredo’.
Tonight it’s a bigger eel than ever. He’s beside himself with delight.
‘Bet the Queen’s not eating this tonight!’
‘What queen?’
‘Any queen. The English one whose uncle-in-law doesn’t want the throne.’ He pops an eel eyeball into his mouth and begins chewing on it with noisy delight. ‘Poor woman. What she gets to eat is not fit for human consumption. Rubbery pink sausages and smelly boiled cabbage.’ He has recently heard about the horrors of the English diet from Zio Umberto’s son, Eros, who spent a holiday there on the profits of his new open-air cinema. ‘They can only eat what’s on the plate when they’ve smothered it in some brown goo from a bottle on the table.’
He slyly pops the other eyeball into his mouth, observing Pistola’s horrified face out of the corner of his eye. ‘No wonder so many of them come to Italy for real food.’ Then, after a pause, he says, ‘Bepi Faccincani caught a sack full of these. Everyone wanted to know if he was going to serve them at the wedding.’
‘Eel? At Teresa’s wedding? Never!’
‘Why not? The eel was Italy’s most popular fish in the Middle Ages. Bred in freshwater tanks.’
Even though it might alert his grandfather to his hidden hostility, Pistola can’t resist a dig, ‘Poor Teresa doesn’t need any more slimy creatures at the wedding. Bad enough the one she’s marrying.’
But Nonno Mario isn’t listening; he’s dreaming up a new wedding sauce for the eel dish.
They’re still in the throes of debating the wedding menu when an episode takes place that will involve Pistola in a chain of events with far-reaching consequences.
It begins when the news reaches Campino that Luchino Visconti is making a movie in the next village and looking for male extras. Just about every Campino male who can walk rushes to sign up. Fortunately, it’s still the summer holidays and there’s no school.
Pistola wants to be in the film as much for the glory as for the money. He wants to get close to Italy’s adored stars of the silver screen, Massimo Girotti and Alida Valli, the leads in this box-office epic.
The movie is called Senso. The scandal magazine Oggi describes it as a film ‘in the romantic realism style of Gone with the Wind’, set during the Italian War of Independence against the Austrians. Thanks to Oggi, the whole of Italy knows Visconti’s first choice was Marlon Brando and Ingrid Bergman but that Bergman’s husband, Roberto Rossellini, put pressure on her to withdraw so Brando withdrew too.
The extras must be on location in Valeggio at 8 a.m., dressed like peasants of a hundred years earlier. Not a requirement that takes much effort for most Campino villagers, who still haven’t got over the hardships of war. But all Pistola’s pants are narrow, following the fashion. Nonno Mario learned to sew in the army, so he gets out his late wife’s ancient Necchi and takes in the waist of a pair of his old pants. The legs still catch on the wheels of Pistola’s bike, though. He has to roll them up over his knees.
‘Yar! Yar! Circus clown! Where’s your red nose?’ The Galetti boys shriek with laughter as he cycles by on his way to pick up Fiorenzo and another friend, Donato. Even Fiorenzo’s sickly father, Pino, laughs so much he has to hang on to the doorpost.
One irritating aspect of the movie is that Aguinaldo has landed himself a substantial speaking role and managed to make friends with the male lead, Massimo Girotti. Now he gets fetched every morning by Girotti’s chauffeur in his white Lancia convertible. Pistola and his friends have to cycle for an hour to get to the location and arrive sweating like pigs in the muggy heat.
The Battle of Custoza, one of the war’s epic struggles, is being shot in these dusty fields in the region where they actually took place. It’s a mass of soldiers, horses, dust, and shouting people. No sign of either Massimo Girotti or Alida Valli. To Pistola’s surprise, none of the extras appears to have the slightest idea which historic skirmish is being enacted, or whom it is they are supposed to be trying to kill, Italians or Austrians.
History is his passion. He has relived in his head many times the endless battles of this region. He’s mesmerised by how much blood flowed through the Mincio valley during those twenty ferocious years when the kings of Piedmont and Savoy tried to drive out the Austrians and unite Italy. He knows exactly how many thousands of soldiers died on both sides. He has seen all their bones carefully arranged on the packed shelves of the ossario at Custoza where they were taken after being piled into mass graves. Those eternally grinning skulls, some with bullet holes and some with names written in careful ink on small cards, are lined up above their neatly stacked arm and leg bones. How anyone can put a name to a skull years later is something he always wonders about.
One thing he’s grateful for. Unlike Donato’s great-great-grandfather, none of own his ancestors has ended