Chickens Eat Pasta Page 2

  We were on our way to a place called Narni, Mirella explained. It was famous for the Corsa all’Anello. Had I heard of it? She turned towards me as she asked the question, taking her eyes off the road. We had left the traffic behind and were heading out into the countryside, with narrow winding lanes.

  “No, I’m afraid not,” I said. Unlike the driver, my gaze was fixed steadily on the sharp bends ahead. Mirella fumbled in her bag for something.

  “Here, take this. It will explain everything. It is a race for horses.”

  The photographs on the brochure she handed me showed a procession in medieval dress, with what looked like nobles and their wives bedecked in long velvet robes promenading through cobbled streets. Another picture showed a man in a doublet astride a chestnut horse, deftly aiming a long spear at a tiny metal ring suspended at shoulder height. All around him, people in normal clothes appeared to be clapping and cheering.

  “Yes, it is so fun. You must go. Look, we are arrived. Here is the house I want to show you.”

  The property Mirella had in mind was down a narrow alleyway in a gracious little town with towers and winding streets that opened out into a piazza, filled with cafes and trattorias. I liked the feel of the place immediately. The house was a tall slender construction with thick stone walls and tiny windows. It was almost ready to move into and very charming in a picture postcard kind of way.

  “All you need is to buy some sh…, er er, the covers for the bed, and you could sleep there right away,” said Mirella. “I always have trouble with that one,” she said, reddening slightly. “My English teacher says I make it sound a rude word.”

  By now we had repaired to a nearby bar for lunch, where customers were already lined two deep, eating slices of pizza at the counter. Mirella pointed to what looked like half a British Rail sandwich sitting on a plate in the display unit and ordered two for each of us, filled with tomato and mozzarella.

  “What would you like to drink?”

  I asked for a glass of white wine.

  “Un vino bianco e un Crodino,”

  Next to the glass of wine the barman poured for me, he placed a squat bottle of fizzy amber liquid. He tipped it into a tumbler. Mirella saw the expression on my face.

  “You don’t have Crodino in England? Ah yes, you have beer. My teacher tells me. But I am habstemious.”

  She paused to attract the barman’s attention again, and order another two sandwiches, this time with tuna and artichokes. They were actually much better than they looked. We had coffee – time for another cigarette – and Mirella called the barman again and listed what we had eaten. He rapidly did a calculation and announced that we owed eight thousand lire. It sounded a fortune, but in fact it was less than the price of a beer and a sandwich back home. I moved to pay, but in spite of her bulk, Mirella proved extremely agile and slapped down a ten thousand lire note. “No, today you are my guest.” She asked the barman for a gettone, which I saw was a strange double-grooved coin that she fed into the public phone in the corner of the bar.

  “I must call Cesare. He is my husband and I will tell him I will be late,” she said. “I can see you like the house in Narni. But before you, er, make the final act, I must, er accompany you so you can rejoin another dwelling.”

  *

  The place Mirella wanted to show me was in need of some repair, she said, but it had something rather special about it. Driving along the winding roads which seemed to stretch forever, she chatted about some of the people who lived in the village, breaking into Italian when her patience ran out with her English. It was a struggle to follow what she was saying in either language, with the views of the countryside vying for my attention and often winning the battle. Blue-hazed hills rolled in every direction, with a few small stone villages clutching onto the sides at impossible angles.

  Mirella drove around the last bend on a small road that seemed to lead nowhere, and revved her Fiat Uno up a steep sloping drive. I gasped. Suddenly, I saw exactly what she meant by special. The house – or what was left of it – towered imposingly from its position on a knoll overlooking an endless vista of hills and valleys. It was built of a warm yellow coloured stone that was gradually being bathed in pink in the glow of the late afternoon sun. If you craned your neck you could just make out the rooftops of the miniscule village of San Massano a short distance away. This was the oldest inhabited settlement in Umbria. Mirella led the way up the rest of the pot-holed drive. About half-way up, the Fiat had made it clear it would go no further.

  “The village’s history goes back at least to the 10th century, and probably a great deal further,” said Mirella, who had long switched back into Italian. “As for the house, no one knows really. For generations, it belonged to the same family. But then there was some kind of a quarrel, and the house was divided into two parts.” She paused to disentangle herself from the brambles which had wound themselves around one of her legs, making a rip in her dark blue tights.

  “Porco dio!”

  The house was indeed in need of repair, with gaping holes in the terracotta-tiled roof and the outside stone walls badly crumbling. In some places they had completely collapsed. Inside, some sections of the uneven floors were missing, with dizzying drops down to the space below.

  “Careful where you put your feet,” said Mirella. She tugged at my arm to stop me from wandering into a cavernous room with hardly any floor at all. A large rat darted out between us.

  It was hard to say how many rooms there were, or how many there might one day be. The building was huge and rambling, but there were no bedrooms that could be identified as such and certainly no bathroom. There was nothing that looked remotely like a kitchen and there appeared to be no electricity. The only source of water was from a conical-shaped stone construction to one side of the main building. Leaning over to look down into the well, I could just make out the shape of a dead fox floating in the water, its body bloated but its brush still intact. Incredibly, one part of the property was still inhabited, by an old man who peered out of a small broken window as we passed by.

  Half an hour later we were seated in a village bar with a spectacular view of a tiny, shimmering lake. I touched my glass of prosecco to Mirella’s Crodino. “It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. I’ll take it!”

  Even Mirella looked a little taken aback.

  “Don’t you want to talk it over, with your parents or someone?”

  “No, it’s just what I want, really. I think it’s perfect.”

  *

  When the news got out, it would be difficult to say who was the more surprised. My two brothers, who were the only close relatives I now had, did little to hide their concern about what they said was an almost certainly unwise decision.

  “So what does your surveyor say about the place,” asked Charles, the older of the two, when I excitedly told him over a crackly phone line about the beautiful old house I had bought in the Umbrian hills. I admitted that I had not consulted a surveyor. It hadn’t crossed my mind.

  “Well what about your lawyer?” pursued Charles sensibly. I had to confess that I had not sought any legal advice at all.

  “Well, never mind. We’re still in time to stop this going through,” he said, in a tone that was meant to be reassuring. I told him that it was way too late. I had already paid for the house, writing out a cheque in Mirella’s office the previous day. It wasn’t any great sum, though it was for me, representing a sizeable chunk of the money that my parents had left me. The price I paid would not have been enough for a deposit on a flat back in Brighton.

  *

  As for the villagers, they could not begin to understand what a young woman was doing on her own, so far from home.

  “Don’t you have a mother or a father?” asked a small white-haired man when Mirella introduced me to him the following day. We had driven back to take another look at the property I had just bought, so that I could take some photographs. The man, who looked to be in his fifties, was wandering around the v
illage piazza, about five hundred yards from my house. He wore a white buttoned overall, with a thick brown jumper showing underneath.

  “What about a husband? You don’t want to end up like me.”

  Mirella had already given me a run-down on Tito the village shopkeeper, and on several of the forty two people who lived in San Massano.

  “Forty three counting you,” she said.

  “Tito never married, mainly because he spent much of his life caring for his old parents,” said Mirella, who seemed to know everything about everyone.

  “One of his sisters emigrated to Australia. His mother is dead but his father is still alive and Tito takes great care of him. You’ll see him shaving the old man on the balcony in the mornings.”

  Thin and gaunt, his pale skin pulled tightly over his cheekbones, Tito stretched out a hand to shake mine.

  “I would like to be the first person to welcome you to San Massano,” he said. “And I hope that you find a husband one day soon.”

  That was just about the last thing on my mind at present. All I could think about was the house that I had just bought, and what it would look like when it was restored. I was in no doubt whatsoever that somehow the renovation would be managed, though I had no clear idea how. I had a living to earn back in Brighton, winter was closing in on the Umbrian hills, and I knew absolutely nothing about the building trade. Nor did I have anyone to help me.

  *

  That evening, under the noisy shower back in the Hotel de Paris, I started to make plans. The money would go through from my account in a matter of a few days, so the property would soon be in my name. Mirella had said her husband Cesare could take care of the renovation work, and assured me it would not take long.

  “He doesn’t have so much work on now,” she had said. “He has his own small building firm – or at least he had before his business partner walked off with all the profits from a skiing village they were working on up in the mountains.”

  If they started quickly, as Mirella said, most of the structural work could be done by Christmas. I’d have some more time off due to me by then, and could come out and stay for a week or so. Christmas was bound to be fun here, with everyone throwing their houses open. I should organise a house-warming party of my own. It would be a chance to meet all the people who were to be my neighbours. I’d need a new dress or two. Maybe there would be time to find something in Rome before I flew back in a couple of days’ time? Or in Terni? The water in the shower was beginning to turn cold. Time to get a move on. I had been invited to dinner with Mirella and her husband and she’d be here any minute to pick me up.

  *

  Mirella’s house, when we reached it, reminded me of a hairdresser with an unremarkable haircut. Although Mirella sold houses for a living, hers was quite unremarkable. It wasn’t actually a house at all, but a three-bedroomed apartment in what looked like any other street in Terni.

  “It’s just down the road from the Church of San Valentino,” said Mirella, pushing the button to call the lift. “You know, San Valentino. He was the bishop of Terni. Then he was martyred.” Of course – otherwise he wouldn’t have been a saint. My convent education had taught me that much.

  “Japanese couples come to get married here on San Valentino’s day, February 14th, every year,” she went on. It must come as quite a shock when they actually turn up, I thought. I couldn’t think of a less romantic place to get married.

  Cesare opened the door while Mirella was still looking for the key in her bag. He was an enormous man with a small goatee beard and a smile that started in the crinkles around his eyes and worked its way down his huge face. Cesare was the leader of the local boy scouts group. He indicated a chair for me at the dinner table. Unlike some people, he said pointedly, he had a conscience, and he would take it upon himself to make sure that no one would cheat the signorina inglese.

  “I am a scout, and just like your Baden Powell, I am a man of honour,” said Cesare, pronouncing his hero’s first name like the German spa town. Seated at the head of the dinner table, he opened a bottle of wine, sniffing the cork appreciatively. Cesare was flanked on one side by his wife who nodded, ready to translate if I should need it, and on another by a couple who were introduced as their very good friends. They also had a small house in San Massano where they often spent weekends.

  “She’s one of your lot,” said the husband in rapid, though far from perfect English, with a strange twang of Liverpuddlian that became especially strong when he swore, which seemed to be quite often. This was Ercolino, whose name, he quickly told me, meant Little Hercules, though he had a problem deciding where to put his aitches, so he pronounced it Ercules. The name suited him rather well. He was a small man in his fifties with twinkling eyes and a cigarette in one hand, which he waved around constantly as he became more animated. He pointed to his wife, a red-haired woman a few years younger, who had been speaking Italian at high speed to Mirella.

  “She’s English you know, but she’s not so English any more. She’s been away too long,” he said, laughing loudly, jabbing his cigarette in the direction of his spouse.

  Angela, his wife, had indeed been away a long time. As more dishes appeared on the table, and Cesare poured the wine, the couple told how they had met and run off to get married nearly twenty years earlier. They interrupted each other as they remembered the details.

  “Cesare and Ercolino went to school together as boys,” said Angela, lighting a cigarette of her own. “It wasn’t long after the war, in Terni.”

  “The war left such poverty, and it was all the fault of you bloody English,” interjected Ercolino. “Your airplanes flattened Terni to wipe out the steelworks here which was making weapons for Mussolini. And the bloody Americans helped with the bombing.”

  Puzzled, I asked how the war had played a role in his meeting Angela all those years later.

  “Pazienza. I’ll get to that bit in a minute,” he said.

  The experience of being brought up in those harsh times left Ercolino with two convictions, he recalled. He paused to stretch out his plate for another helping of Mirella’s home-made tortellini. The first was that he would never again eat courgettes, one of the few things his parents could grow in their tiny allotment to feed their family of eight children. The second was that he would always have nice shoes. For much of his childhood, Ercolino and his brothers and sisters had had to make do with strips of old tyres cut into the shape of soles by his mother and tied to the children’s feet with lengths of twine from old hay bales.

  “You can’t believe how hard it was to run with those things on your feet,” he said. He downed another glass of red wine and shook his head at the memory.

  Ercolino had left Italy for England almost as soon as he left school, drawn by the idea of working in a country where he had heard that people had money and knew how to enjoy themselves. It was the early Sixties and the young Italian soon found work as a waiter after landing in Liverpool.

  “There was music in the air,” he said, switching constantly between broken English to Italian. “That’s where I met Angela. It’s funny that we fell for each other really. We were so different – like cheese and chalk.”

  Angela had come over to stay for the weekend from her home across the water in the Isle of Man, she explained, taking up the story again. She was the daughter of wealthy Jewish parents and her future had already been decided, including her marriage to the son of a respectable family who attended the same synagogue.

  “He was a nice Jewish boy, but it would never have worked, though I would probably have been a lot richer,” said Angela. Ercolino’s parents were Catholics, but had very little money. His father stoked the fires in the steelworks and his mother stayed at home to look after a small vegetable plot and a few chickens in the backyard. Both were members of the Italian Communist Party.

  In Liverpool, Angela was initially attracted by the young Italian waiter’s winklepickers, which were made out of soft black leather and were unmistakably stylis
h.

  “I fell for his shoes,” she said. She laughed at the memory, running her fingers through her hair.

  He was captivated by her rich auburn curls and the way she looked at him when she said his name. The pair realised that there was no future for them together in either of their home countries, so six weeks after their first meeting they slipped off and caught a boat to Sweden where they got married in a registry office.

  “And that was bloody that,” said Ercolino. He blew his wife a kiss.

  A loud crash came from next door.

  “Santo cielo.” Mirella stood up and rushed out of the room and her voice could be heard remonstrating with her two children.

  “Basta Danni! Stop it Roberto!”

  I had met them on my way in, two boys who looked to be about six and eight years old, both with tightly cropped hair. Their mother had indulgently rubbed their heads as they took a break from a game that appeared to consist of jumping off the kitchen table and climbing back on to do it again.

  “Bambini eh!” said Cesare, with a look of resignation. “Here, try some of this. It’s traditional at this time of year.” He pushed over a ceramic dish containing something which looked like a misshapen pig’s trotter. That was precisely what it was, I discovered, though thankfully it had been hollowed out and stuffed with a mixture of sautéed pieces of salame, meat and herbs. Around the side were rich dark-coloured lentils. “Have some. They are lucky for bringing money,” said Cesare. “You’ll need some of that, though don’t worry, I’ll make sure it’s not too much.”

  *

  Cesare kept his word and in the weeks that followed my return to England, he sent me regular updates on my house, “il castello di Clare”, “Clare’s castle”, as he called it. Each letter was typed on a single sheet of paper, with a list of the purchases made so far and an explanation of the work carried out. I would often find myself gazing at the latest missive at my desk in the newsroom, my notes from the magistrates’ court hearing that I had attended earlier that morning carelessly pushed to one side.