‘Who are you going with now, you old letch? Still hanging around with that foxy actress … ?’ Bruno Miele was talking with his mouth full. ‘What’s her name? Marina Delia? Hasn’t she just made a new film?’
Bruno Miele had grown up during Graziano’s two years away and was now in the police force. Who would have thought it? A notorious tearaway like Miele settling down and becoming a guardian of the law? Life moved on in Ischiano Scalo, slowly but surely, even without Graziano.
Miele had idolised him ever since he’d learned of his affair with a famous actress.
But that story was an embarrassment to poor Graziano. The photographs in Novella 2000 had been very useful to him, they had turned him into a local legend, but at the same time they made him feel rather guilty. In the first place, he had never actually gone out with Delia. She had been sunbathing at the Aurora bathing establishment at Riccione and when she had seen a paparazzo from Novella 2000 prowling around on the beach searching for VIPs, she had gone frantic. She had immediately whipped off her bra and started shouting. She was alone. The minor French actor she was dating at the time was confined to their hotel with a temperature of thirty-nine as a result of food poisoning. Only a fool of a young Frenchman would pick the mussels off the mooring lines of Riccione harbour and eat them raw, saying that his father was a Breton fisherman. It served him right. But now Marina was in a fix. She had to find someone to be her beau, and quickly. She had run along the seashore looking for a good-looking male to pose with. Rapidly scanning all the beefcakes, hunks and lifeguards on the beach she had finally settled on Graziano. She had asked him if he would mind rubbing cream on her breasts and kissing her when that little man over there, the one with the camera, passed in front of them.
That was the story behind the famous photographs.
And it would probably have ended there if Marina Delia hadn’t become, after a film she had made with a Tuscan comic, one of the most popular film stars in Italy and hadn’t decided never again to reveal a single speck of skin even for a million dollars. Those were the only available photographs of Delia’s breasts. Graziano had dined off the tale for a couple of years at least, describing how he had pleasured her fore and aft, in the lift and in the Jacuzzi, come rain, come shine. But now enough was enough. Five years had passed. And yet every time he returned to Ischiano they all started going on about Marina Delia and what a slag she was.
What a bore!
‘I read somewhere that she was going out with some jerk of a footballer,’ went on Miele, his head buried in the fettuccine.
‘She ditched you for a Sampdoria midfielder. Sampdoria of all teams! Can you believe it?’ guffawed Giovanni, the elder of the two Franceschini brothers.
‘She might at least have chosen a Lazio player,’ echoed Elio, the younger.
The Franceschini brothers owned a bass farm in Orbano lagoon. The Franceschinis’ bass were instantly recognisable because they were all twenty centimetres long, weighed six hundred grams, had opaque eyes and tasted like farmed trout.
The two of them were inseparable, they lived in a mosquito-infested farmhouse near the tanks with their wives and children and nobody could ever remember which wife and which children were whose. They made enough to live on from the bass, but they certainly can’t have got rich on it since they were reduced to squabbling over the van whenever they wanted to go out for a beer in the evening.
Graziano decided that the time had come to liquidate Delia.
He wasn’t sure how much to tell his friends about his future plans. Better not mention the jeans shop. People are always out to steal your ideas. News travels fast in a village, and some son-of-a-bitch might beat him to it. First he must get everything organised and call in the Milanese architect, only then would he be able to talk about it in public. But the other news, the best part, why shouldn’t he tell them about that? Weren’t they his friends? ‘Listen, boys, I’ve got something to tell y …’
‘Let’s hear it. Who’re you screwing now? Are you going to tell us or do we have to read about it in the papers?’ Roscio interrupted him, filling his glass to the brim with that deceptively strong local wine that slipped down as easily as fizzy pop but later grabbed your head and squeezed it like a lemon.
‘I bet he’s been fucking Simona Raggi. Or, let’s see, who else could it have been?’ said Franceschini junior.
‘No, I reckon Andrea Mantovani’s more likely. Poofs are the in thing at the moment,’ concluded his elder brother, waving his hand.
And everyone roared with laughter.
‘Could you all be quiet for a moment?’ Graziano, who was getting irritated, hammered his fork on the table. ‘Stop talking crap. Listen to me. The time of starlets and records is over. It’s all in the past.’
Raspberries. Guffaws. Nudges in ribs.
‘I’m forty-four now, I’m not a kid any more. Okay, I’ve had some good times, I’ve travelled the world, I’ve slept with so many women I can’t even remember the faces of most of them.’
‘I bet you can remember their arses, though,’ said Miele, delighted with this brilliant witticism he had thought up.
More raspberries. More guffaws. More nudges.
Graziano was beginning to get really angry. You couldn’t have a serious conversation with these idiots. Right. He was going to have to tell them straight out. Without beating about the bush. ‘Boys, I’m getting married.’
There was a burst of applause. Chants. Whistles. Other people came in from the bar and were instantly informed. For a quarter of an hour there was pandemonium.
Graziano getting married? Impossible! Ridiculous!
The news flew out of the bar and spread like a virus, and within half an hour the whole village knew that Biglia was getting hitched.
Then, at last, after the kisses, the hugs and the toasts, things quietened down.
There were just the five of them again and Graziano was able to resume his interrupted story. ‘Her name’s Erica. Erica Trettel. No, don’t worry, she’s not German, she comes from near Trento. She’s a dancer. She’s coming here tomorrow, she says she doesn’t like villages, but she doesn’t know Ischiano Scalo. I’m sure she’ll like it. I want her to feel at home, at her ease. So I’m counting on you guys, you’ve got to help me …’
‘What do you want us to do?’ asked the Franceschini brothers in chorus.
‘Well … For example, we could organise something special for tomorrow evening.’
‘Like what?’ asked Roscio, bewildered.
That was one of the problems with that place, whenever you tried to do anything that was actually fun, you fell under a kind of spell, your mind went blank and your IQ dropped several degrees. The truth was that there was fuck all to do in Ischiano Scalo.
A disturbing silence fell over the group, everyone was absorbed in his own mental vacuum.
What could we do? It’ll have to be something really good, thought Graziano, something Erica would like.
He was about to say they could go to the usual shitty Old Wagon Pizzeria, when suddenly he had a vision, an intoxicating vision.
It is night.
He and Erica step out of the Uno. He in a Sandek windsurfing costume, she in a skimpy orange bikini. Both tall, both athletic, both as beautiful as Greek gods. More lissom than the lifeguards on Baywatch. They walk across the muddy piazza. Hand in hand. It’s cold but they don’t mind. There’s smoke in the air. A smell of sulphur. They enter the pools and immerse themselves in the warm water. They kiss. They touch. He slips off her top. She slips off his Sandek.
Everyone is watching them. They don’t care.
Quite the opposite.
And then they do it, in front of everyone.
Quite shamelessly.
That was what they must do.
Saturnia.
Yes.
In the pools of sulphurous water. Erica had never been there. She’ll love it, bathing by night under that boiling-hot waterfall, and remember, it’s good for the skin, too. And ho
w the others will cringe with envy.
When they see Erica’s cover-girl curves, when they compare their own consorts’ cellulitic loins with Erica’s smooth, firm buttocks, when they set their own women’s flaccid breasts alongside Erica’s marble boobs, when they contrast Erica’s gazelle-like legs with their own drabs’ stumpy pins, when they see him mount that young filly, in front of them all, they’ll feel like worms and understand, once and for all, why Graziano Biglia had decided to get married.
Right?
‘Boys, I’ve just had a great idea. We could have dinner at the Three Roosters, that tavern near Saturnia, then go for a bathe at the falls. What do you say?’ he suggested enthusiastically, in the same tone in which he might have announced an all-expenses-paid holiday in the Tropics. ‘Wouldn’t it be great?’
But the response did not come up to his expectations.
The Franceschini brothers looked dubious. Miele just uttered a sceptical ‘Hm!’ and Roscio, after looking at the others, said: ‘I don’t know, it doesn’t sound such a great idea to me. It’s cold.’
‘And it’s raining,’ added Miele, peeling an apple.
‘You’ve turned into a bunch of fucking zombies! You eat, you sleep and you work. Is that all you do? You’re corpses. Layabouts. Don’t you remember those fantastic evenings we used to have driving around the countryside getting drunk and then going to throw bombs into the artificial lake at Pitigliano and finishing up with a bathe under the waterfall …’
‘Wasn’t it great …’ said Giovanni Franceschini with his eyes on the ceiling. His face had softened and his eyes were dreamy. ‘Do you remember when Lambertelli hit his head diving into one of the pools? What a laugh. And I picked up a girl from Florence.’
‘That was no girl, that was a guy,’ his brother said. ‘His name was Saverio.’
‘And do you remember when we pelted those Germans’ minibus with stones and then pushed it over the cliff?’ Miele reminisced, ecstatically.
They all laughed, carried away by the whirlwind of happy memories of youth.
Graziano knew that this was the moment to press home his point, not to let up. ‘Well, why don’t we do it, then? Tomorrow night we’ll take the cars and drive to Saturnia. We’ll get drunk at the Three Roosters, then we’ll all go for a bathe.’
‘But it costs the earth, that place,’ objected Miele.
‘Oh, come on, am I getting married or aren’t I? You stingy bastards!’
‘All right, just this once we’ll splash out,’ said the Franceschinis.
‘But you must bring your wives and girlfriends, okay? We can’t turn up like a bunch of poofs, Erica might get the wrong idea.’
‘But my wife gets sciatica …’ said Roscio. ‘She might drown.’
‘And Giuditta’s just had a hernia operation,’ added Elio Franceschini worriedly.
‘Look, just grab your women and force them to come. Who wears the trousers at home, you or them?’
It was agreed that the party would set off from the piazza at eight o’clock the following evening. And no one could drop out at the last moment, for as Miele rightly observed: ‘Only a heel backs out of a deal.’
Graziano set off homeward, slightly drunk and as happy as a child at Eurodisney.
‘Thank God I got out of that awful city. Thank God. Rome, I hate you. You stink,’ he repeated out loud.
How wonderful life was in Ischiano Scalo and what marvellous friends he had. He’d been a fool not to keep in touch with them for all those years. He felt a tide of affection rising within him. Perhaps they had aged a bit, but he would put them back on their feet. At that moment he felt ready to do anything for that village. After the jeans shop, he might open a British-style pub, and then … And then there were lots of other things to do.
He climbed the front steps, holding on to the banister, and entered the house.
There was a smell of onions pungent enough to make your hair stand on end.
‘Christ, what a smell, Ma. What are you doing in there?’ He looked into the kitchen.
Mrs Biglia, carving knife in hand, was quartering a gnu, or a donkey, since the carcass would hardly fit on the marble-topped table.
‘Awaaaaaawaaaaa,’ moaned his mother.
‘What did you say? I can’t understand a word you’re saying, Ma. I really can’t,’ said Graziano, leaning against the door jamb. Then he remembered. ‘Oh, yes. The vow.’ He turned round and trudged off to his room. He collapsed on his bed and before going to sleep decided that next day he would go and see Father Costanzo (I wonder if he’s still around? He might be dead by now) to discuss his mother’s vow. Maybe the priest could dissolve it. He mustn’t let Erica see his mother in that state. Then he told himself that there was no real harm in it – his mother was a practising Catholic and he’d believed in God himself when he’d been a child.
Erica would understand.
He fell asleep.
And he slept the sleep of the just beneath a poster of John Travolta in his Saturday Night Fever days. Feet sticking out of the little bed. Mouth wide open.
9
Go. Go. Go.
Go, it’s late.
Go, and never stop.
And Pietro went. Down the slope. He could see nothing but darkness, but what the hell, he pedalled in the gloom, mouth open. The feeble lamp of his bike wasn’t much use.
He leaned over, put his foot on the ground and sideslipped round the bend, then straightened up and, wheels spinning free, started to pedal again. The wind whistled in his ears and made his eyes water.
He knew the road by heart. Every bend. Every pothole. He could have ridden along it even without a lamp, with his eyes closed.
There was a record to beat, he had set it three months earlier and never since matched it. How on earth had he done it that day? God knows.
A rocket. Eighteen minutes twenty-eight seconds from Gloria’s villa to home.
Was it because I’d changed the back tyre?
He had ridden so hard that when he’d reached home he’d felt sick and had vomited in the middle of the farmyard.
This evening, however, he wasn’t going so fast to beat that record or because he felt like it, but because it was ten past eight and he was very late. He hadn’t shut Zagor in his pen and hadn’t taken the rubbish to the bin and hadn’t turned off the pump in the vegetable garden, and …
… and Papa will kill me.
Go. Go. Go.
And as usual, it’s all Gloria’s fault.
She would never let him leave. ‘You can see it looks awful like that. At least help me paint the letters … It’ll only take a minute. You’re such a bore …’ she would say.
And so Pietro had set about painting the letters and then making the blue frame for the photograph of the mosquito sucking blood, and hadn’t noticed that meanwhile time was passing.
Certainly the malaria poster had come out really well.
Miss Rovi would be bound to hang it in the corridor.
It had been a wonderful day, though.
After school, Pietro had gone to Gloria’s for lunch.
At the red villa on the hill.
Pasta with courgettes and eggs. Schnitzel. And chips. Oh yes, and a cream dessert.
He liked everything about the place: the dining room with the french windows through which you could see the well-mown lawn, and further off the fields of wheat, and the sea in the background, and the bulky furniture and that picture of the Battle of Lepanto with the burning ships. And the maid serving you dinner.
But what he liked most of all was the laid table. Like those in a restaurant. The spotlessly white and newly washed tablecloth. The dishes. The basket full of rolls, focaccia and black bread. The carafe of sparkling water.
All perfect.
And it came naturally to him to eat properly, politely, with his mouth closed. No elbows on the table. No mopping up the sauce with his bread.
At home, Pietro had to fetch the food from the fridge, or the leftover pasta from t
he top of the cooker.
You take your plate and glass and sit at the kitchen table in front of the television and eat.
And when Mimmo, his brother, was there, he couldn’t even watch cartoons, because that bully took the remote control and watched those soap operas that Pietro detested.
‘Eat up and shut up,’ Mimmo would say.
‘At Gloria’s house everyone eats together,’ Pietro had told his parents once, when he was feeling more talkative than usual. ‘Sitting at the table. Like in the TV series about the Bradford family. They wait till Gloria’s father comes back from work before starting. You always have to wash your hands. Everyone has their own place and Gloria’s mama always asks me how things are going at school and says I’m too shy and gets cross with Gloria for talking so much and not letting me get a word in. Once Gloria told them how that moron Bacci stuck pieces of snot in Tregiani’s exercise book and her father told her off because you mustn’t talk about filth at the table.’
‘It’s all right for them, they have nothing to do all day,’ his father had said, as he guzzled away. ‘We’d like to have a maid too. And remember, your mother used to do the cleaning in that house. You’re closer to the maid than to them.’
‘Why don’t you go and live there, if you like it so much?’ Mimmo had added.
And Pietro had realised that it was far better to avoid the subject of Gloria’s family in his own home.
But today had been special because after lunch they had gone to Orbano with Gloria’s father.
In the Range Rover!
With the stereo and the lovely smell of leather seats. Gloria sang like Pavarotti, putting on a deep voice.
Pietro sat in the back. Hands clasped together. Head against the window with the Aurelia flashing past. He looked out. The petrol pumps. The small ponds of the bass farm. The lagoon.
He wished he could go on like that, never stopping, all the way to Genoa. Where, he had heard, there was the largest aquarium in Europe (they even had dolphins). But Mr Celani had flicked the indicator and turned off towards Orbano. In Piazza Risorgimento he had double-parked the off-roader, nonchalantly, as if he owned the whole piazza, right in front of the bank.