I’m not ill. I made a vow to the Madonnina of Civitavecchia that if you got married I wouldn’t speak for a month. The Madonnina in her infinite mercy has answered my prayers and now I mustn’t speak for a month.
Graziano read the note and threw himself disconsolately onto a chair. ‘But Mama, this is ridiculous. Don’t you see? How are you going to work? And what am I going to do about Erica? What’s she going to think, that you’re raving mad? Stop it. Please.’
Gina wrote:
Don’t worry. I’ll explain to your fiancée. When’s she coming?
‘Tomorrow. But do stop it, now, Mama, please. We haven’t fixed the wedding day yet. Pack it in, please.’
Gina suddenly started rushing round the kitchen like a hysterical goblin, yelping and digging her fingers into the voluminous perm on her head. She was a small, round woman, with bright eyes and a mouth like a chicken’s sphincter.
Graziano ran after her, trying to catch her. ‘Mama! Mama! Stop, please. What the hell’s got into you?’
Gina sat down at the table and wrote again:
The house is a mess. I must clean it from top to bottom. I must take the curtains to the laundry. Wax the living room floor. And then I’ll have to go shopping. Go away. Let me work.
She put on her mink coat, hoisted a bag full of curtains onto her shoulder and went out.
No operating theatre in the local hospital was as clean as Gina’s kitchen. Even if you’d examined it with an electronic microscope you wouldn’t have found a dust mite or a speck of dirt. You could eat off the floors of the Biglia household and safely drink from the toilet. Every ornament had its doily, every shape of pasta its jar, every corner of the house received a daily check and vacuuming. As a child, Graziano had been forbidden to sit on the sofas because it spoiled them: he’d had to walk around in overshoes and sit on a dining chair to watch TV.
Mrs Biglia’s first obsession was hygiene. Her second, religion. Her third and most serious of all, cooking.
She would prepare industrial quantities of gourmet food. Maccheroni timbales. Three days’ supply of ragù. Game. Aubergines alla parmigiana. Rice sartùs as high as panettoni. Broccoli-cheese-and-mortadella pizzas. Artichoke and béchamel pies. Foil-baked fish. Stewed calamari. And Livornese cacciucco. Since she lived on her own (her husband had died five years earlier), all these delicacies were either stored in the freezers (there were three of them, all crammed full) or given away to her customers.
At Christmas, Easter, the New Year and any other festival that merited a special meal, she would go berserk and shut herself up in the kitchen for thirteen hours a day, ladelling, greasing baking-tins and shelling peas. Purple in the face, with a crazed look in her eyes and a bonnet to keep the grease out of her hair, she would whistle, sing along with the radio and whisk eggs like a woman possessed. During the meal she would never sit down, but gallop back and forth like a Burmese tapir between the dining room and kitchen, sweating, panting and washing dishes, and everyone would tense up because it’s not pleasant to eat with a madwoman who watches every expression of your face to see if you like the lasagne, who refills your plate before you’ve even finished eating and who you know, in her condition, is liable to have an apoplectic fit at any moment.
No, it’s not pleasant.
And it was hard to understand why she behaved like that, what the nature of this culinary frenzy that tormented her was. The guests, by the time they got to the twelfth course, would ask one another under their breath what she was trying to do, what was her purpose. Did she want to kill them? Cook for the whole world? Feed the starving millions on risotto with cheese and grated truffles, linguine al pesto and ossobuco with purée?
No, Mrs Biglia wasn’t interested in that.
Mrs Biglia didn’t give a damn about the Third World, the children of Biafra and the parish poor. She vented all her pitiless fury on relatives, friends and acquaintances. All she wanted was for someone to say to her: ‘Gina, dear, nobody makes Sorrento-style gnocchi like you do, even in Sorrento.’
Then she would go all shy like a little girl, stammer out her thanks, bow her head like a great conductor after a triumphant performance and take a container full of gnocchi out of the freezer, saying: ‘Here you are, mind you don’t put them straight in the water or they won’t be good. Take them out at least a couple of hours beforehand.’
She would stuff you mercilessly, and if you begged her to stop she’d think you were just being polite, and wouldn’t take no for an answer. You would stagger out of her home, groggy, with your flies unbuttoned and feeling in need of a trip to the health spa at Chianciano for a detox.
Every time Graziano came home he put on at least five kilos in a week. His mother would make him sautéed lamb’s kidneys with garlic and parsley (his favourite!) and since he had a hearty appetite she would sit in ecstasy and watch him eating. She had to ask him, she’d die if she didn’t. ‘Graziano, tell me the truth, how are the sautéed kidneys?’
And Graziano: ‘Delicious, Mama.’
‘Is there anyone who makes them better than I do?’
‘No, Mama, you know that. Your sautéed kidneys are the best in the world.’
Deliriously happy, she would return to the kitchen and start doing the washing-up by hand because she didn’t trust machines.
You can just imagine what kind of banquet she was preparing to cook for her future daughter-in-law.
For waif-like Erica Trettel, who weighed forty-six kilos and said she was a horrible fat lump and who when she was feeling cheerful ate cottage cheese, spelt and Energy Bars and when she was depressed devoured Algida Viennetta ice creams and takeaway chicken.
6
Graziano spent the morning feeling at peace with himself and with the world.
He went out for a walk.
The sky was overcast. It was cold. The rain had stopped but some big black clouds boded ill for the afternoon. Graziano didn’t care. He was glad to be home at last.
Ischiano seemed more beautiful and welcoming than ever.
A little old-fashioned world. An unspoiled rural community.
It was market day. The vendors had put up their stalls in the car park in front of the bank. The village women with their baskets and umbrellas were doing the shopping. Mothers were pushing prams. A van, which had pulled up in front of the newsagent’s, was delivering bundles of magazines. Giovanna, the tobacconist, was feeding some obese, pampered cats. A group of hunters had gathered in front of the war memorial. The hounds on the leash were shifting about excitedly. And the old men sitting at the tables outside the Station Bar were trying, like arthritic reptiles, to catch a ray of that sun which was so reluctant to come out. From the primary school came the shouts of children playing in the playground. The air was filled with the delicious smell of burned wood and of the fresh cod laid out on the fishmonger’s stall.
This was the place where he’d been born.
Simple.
Ignorant, perhaps.
But real.
He was proud to be part of that small God-fearing community and proud of his own humble occupation. And to think that until recently he had felt ashamed of the place, and when asked where he came from had always replied: ‘The Maremma. Near Siena.’ It sounded cooler. Nobler. More sophisticated.
What a fool I was. Ischiano’s a wonderful place. A guy should be happy to have been born here. And at the age of forty-four he was beginning to understand this. Maybe all that globe-trotting, all those discotheques, all those nights spent playing in clubs had helped him understand, restored his desire to be a true Ischianese. You have to go away from a place in order to find it again. Peasant blood flowed in his veins. His grandparents had slaved their lives away working that hard barren soil.
He passed his mother’s haberdashery.
A modest little shop. Tights and knickers neatly arrayed in the window. A glass door. A sign.
This was where his jeans shop would be.
He could see it now.
The
pride of the village.
He must start thinking about how to furnish it. Perhaps he would need an architect, someone from Milan or even America to help him create the best possible effect. He would spare no expense. He must discuss it with Mama. Persuade her to take out a mortgage.
Erica would help him, too. She had very good taste.
After these positive thoughts, he got out the Uno and drove it to the carwash. He ran it through the brushes, then vacuumed the inside, removing stubs of joints, receipts, left-over French fries and other assorted rubbish that had collected under the seats.
He looked at himself for a moment in the rear-view mirror and realised that he hadn’t obeyed the first law: ‘Treat your body as a temple.’
Physically he was a wreck.
The months in Rome had affected his looks. He had stopped taking care of his appearance and now resembled a caveman, with that stubbly beard and that bristly mop of hair. He really spruced himself up before Erica arrived.
He got back into the car, drove out onto the Aurelia and after seven kilometres stopped outside the Ivana Zampetti Beauty Farm, a large concrete building by the side of the road, between a garden centre and a store that sells handmade furniture.
7
Ivana Zampetti, the owner, was a large woman, all curves and bosom, with black, Liz Taylor-like hair, a zip of a mouth, gappy incisors, a remodelled nose and greedy eyes. She went around in a white coat which allowed glimpses of firm flesh and lace, and a pair of Dr Hermann sandals. And she was constantly enveloped in a cloud of sweat and deodorant.
Ivana had moved to Orbano from Fiano Romano in the mid-Seventies and got a job there as a manicurist in a beauty parlour. Within a year she had succeeded in marrying the old barber who owned it and had taken over the running of the place. She had turned it into a hairdressing salon, renewing the furniture, stripping off that ugly wallpaper and replacing it with mirrors and marble and adding washbasins and perming hoods. Two years later, her husband had died in the middle of Orbano high street, struck down by a heart attack. Ivana had sold the houses he had left her in San Folco and opened two more hairdressing salons in the area, one in Casale del Bra and the other in Borgo Carini. One summer in the late Eighties she had gone to visit some distant relatives who had emigrated to Orlando and there she had seen the American fitness centres. Temples of health and beauty. Superbly equipped clinics that treated the whole body, from the tip of your toes to the topmost hair of your head. Mud baths. Solar beds. Massage. Hydrotherapy. Lymphatic drainage. Peeling. Gymnastics. Stretching and weights.
She had returned with her head full of grand ideas which she immediately put into effect. She had sold off the three hairdressing salons and bought a warehouse on the Aurelia that sold agricultural machinery and turned it into a multi-specialised centre for the care and health of the body. Now she had a staff of ten, including instructors, aestheticians and paramedics. She had become immensely rich and much sought after by local bachelors. But she said she was faithful to the memory of the old barber.
8
When Graziano entered, Ivana welcomed him joyfully, hugged him to her large perfumed bosom and told him he looked like a corpse. She would put him to rights. She drew up a programme for him. First a course of massage, bath in toning seaweed, total sunbed, hair-dying, manicure and pedicure, and, to round it all off, what she called her recreative-revitalising therapy.
Whenever Graziano returned to Ischiano, he always liked to undergo Ivana’s therapy.
A series of massages of her own devising, which she performed only after hours and on people she deemed worthy of the privilege. Massages which tended to revitalise and reawaken very specific organs of the body and which left you feeling, for a couple of days afterwards, like Lazarus when he rose from the grave.
On this occasion, however, Graziano declined the offer. ‘I’m sorry, Ivana, but I’m about to get married. You know how it is.’
Ivana gave him a hug and wished him a happy life and lots of children.
Three hours later, he emerged from the centre and drove to the Scottish House in Orbano to buy a few items of clothing that would make him feel more in harmony with the country life on which he was preparing to embark.
He spent nine hundred and thirty thousand lire.
And here he was at last, our hero, outside the doors of the Station Bar.
He was ready.
His hair, glossy, frizzy and savannah-coloured, smelled of conditioner. His shaven jaw smelled of Egoiste. His eyes were dark and bright. His skin had regained its melanine and at last had that colour, halfway between hazel and bronze, which drove the Scandinavian girls wild.
He looked like a Devonshire gentleman fresh from a holiday in the Maldives. Green flannel shirt. Brown wide-cord trousers. Scottish short-sleeved pullover with the tartan of the Dundee clan (the shop assistant had told him that). A tweed jacket with elbow-patches. And chunky Timberland shoes.
Graziano pushed the door open and took two slow, measured, John Wayne-type steps towards the bar.
Barbara, the twenty-year-old bartender, nearly fainted when she saw him appear. Just like that, on an ordinary day. With no trumpets or fanfares to announce him. No heralds to warn of his impending arrival.
Biglia!
He was back.
The ladykiller was back.
The sex symbol of Ischiano was here. Here to rekindle never-extinguished erotic obsessions, to reignite jealousies, to set tongues wagging.
After his performances in Riccione, Goa, Port France, Battipaglia and Ibiza, he was here again.
The man who had been invited on to the Maurizio Costanzo Show to talk about his experiences as a Latin lover. The man who had won the Casanova Cup. The man who had played on Planet Bar with the Rodriguez brothers. The man who had bedded the actress Marina Delia (the page torn out of Novella 2000 with photographs of Graziano on Riccione beach massaging Marina Delia’s back and kissing her neck had hung beside the pinball machine for six months, and still reigned supreme in Roscio’s workshop among the nude-model calendars). The man who had beaten the great Peppone pulling record (three hundred scores in one summer, the papers said). He was here again.
More flourishing and in better shape than ever.
His contemporaries, who had become husbands and fathers, worn out by a dreary, humdrum life, resembled mangy, greying bulldogs, whereas Graziano …
(What on earth can his secret be?)
… grew more handsome and attractive by the year. How well that hint of a pot belly suited him. And those crow’s feet round his eyes, those wrinkles at the sides of his mouth, that slightly receding hairline, gave him a certain je ne sais quoi …
‘Graziano! When did you get b …’ said bartender Barbara, going as red as a pepper.
Graziano put his finger to his lips, picked up a cup, banged it on the counter and shouted: ‘What’s wrong with this place? Aren’t you going to welcome back an old villager? Barbara! Drinks all round.’
The old men playing cards, the little boys at the videogames, the hunters and the carabinieri, all turned round together.
His friends were there too. His bosom pals. His old fellow-roisterers. Roscio, the Franceschini brothers and Ottavio Battilocchi were sitting at a table doing the football pools and reading the Corriere dello Sport, and when they saw him they jumped to their feet, hugged him, kissed him, ruffled his hair and gave him a chorus of ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’. And other more colourful and ribald songs which are best passed over in silence.
That is how people celebrate, in those parts, the return of the prodigal son.
And here he was, half an hour later, in the restaurant area of the Station Bar.
The restaurant area was a square room at the back of the bar. With a low ceiling. A long neon light. A few tables. A window overlooking the railway track. On the walls, lithographs of old steam trains.
He was sitting at a table with Roscio, the two Franceschini brothers and young Bruno Miele, who had come along specially.
The only one missing was Battilocchi, who had had to take his daughter to the dentist’s in Civitavecchia.
In front of them were five big steaming dishes of tagliatelle in hare sauce. A jug of red wine. And a plate of cold meat and olives.
‘This is what I call living, boys. You’ve no idea how much I’ve missed this stuff,’ said Graziano, pointing at the pasta with his fork.
‘Well, what’s it to be this time? The usual lightning visit? When are you off again?’ asked Roscio, filling his glass.
Since childhood, Roscio had been Graziano’s best friend. Back then he had been a skinny little boy with a helmet of carrot-coloured hair, slow of tongue but quick as a ferret with his hands. His father had a junk yard on the Aurelia and sold stolen spares. Roscio lived among those mountains of metal, dismantling and reassembling engines. At thirteen he was riding round in the saddle of a Guzzi one thousand and at sixteen he was racing on the viaduct at the Pratoni. At seventeen, he had had a horrendous accident one night, his motorbike had stalled and bucked at a hundred and sixty kilometres an hour and he had been launched off the viaduct like a missile. Without a helmet. They’d found him next day, five metres below the road, in a drainage outflow from the sewers, more dead than alive and looking like an ant that’s had a dictionary dropped on it. He had been in traction for months with twenty bones either broken or dislocated and more than four hundred stitches on various parts of his anatomy. Six months in a wheelchair and six more on crutches. At twenty he walked with a pronounced limp and could no longer bend one arm properly. At twenty-one he had got a Pitigliano girl pregnant and married her. Now he had three children and after his father’s death he had taken over the business and set up a workshop as well. And probably, like his father, he did some shady deals. Graziano hadn’t found him so easy to get on with since the accident. His character had changed, he’d become edgy and was given to sudden fits of anger, he drank, and the word in the village was that he beat his wife.