Chickens Eat Pasta Page 4

  “What a bloody pain in the harse you’ve been.” He reached into the tiny leather handbag that he wore on one shoulder and pulled out a paper handkerchief. “You know something? I’m glad you’re leaving. You drive me up the bend.”

  “And what’s this? What’s a malaprop… you bloody English.”

  ***

  Angela had told me the story of how she and Ercolino had come to live in Italy after eloping to Sweden, where they had spent several years. Angela’s father had never forgiven her for marrying the son of a poor Catholic family and had cut her out of his life, and though Ercolino’s family had proved more understanding, they had very little to offer. Then Ercolino’s father had died, and the pair had decided that they should come back to look after Ercolino’s mother. They had moved into the cramped council house where Ercolino had lived as a boy. There were two small bedrooms, a kitchen and a living room to share between Angela, Ercolino and Mamma. Angela gave English lessons at home and spent the rest of the time looking after her mother-in-law, giving her a head-to-toe wash once a week, perched on a plastic stool under the shower in the tiny bathroom.

  “It’s not exactly what I was used to, but it’s not that bad, and she’s a great character,” said Angela as she showed me around.

  “The thing I long for more than anything is to have a bath. We’ve only got this small shower.”

  That reminded me, and I opened my bag to find the jar of picallili I had brought for Angela. For Ercolino, there was a book. He only read books in English, he had told me, and had a weakness for novels, the fatter the better, set in faraway places such as India. His favourites were ones that revolved around long dynasties, with tales of family quarrels. There was nowhere you could find anything like that in Terni.

  Lunch was a big plate of pasta with clams cooked by Angela and eaten in their kitchen with Mamma at the head of the table, knocking back two tumblers of red wine in quick succession. She had no teeth, which made it difficult to understand much of what she said, but she smiled most of the time and would occasionally pat Angela’s hand and mutter something that sounded like “brava!”

  *

  As lunch progressed, with Mamma doing full justice to a large dish of ham and melon, Angela and Ercolino filled me in on some of the news from the village. I still hadn’t met most of the people they talked about, but by the end of the meal, it felt as if I had known them for years.

  Settima had been seen down on the main road between Terni and Spoleto, selling bundles of wild asparagus, most of which had been picked from Generosa’s land when she wasn’t looking. Dario and Valentina had set the date for their wedding.

  “Valentina is Benedetto and Caterina’s daughter, and Dario works in a car body repair workshop,” explained Angela. “He seems a very nice boy and they’ll be getting married in the village.”

  “Well they don’t have much choice do they?” quipped her husband. “Seeing that she’s already got a cake in the oven.”

  The old man who lived in a wing of the house that I had bought had died. Cesare’s builders had found him one morning when they arrived to do the rewiring. It had taken some time to contact his sons, who lived down in Terni and who hardly ever came to see him. There had been a small funeral attended by most of the villagers. Angela and Ercolino had gone too, walking behind the hearse to the cemetery, which was set in a shaded vale down a gravel path flanked by cypress trees. The other main news was that Fabrizio, an 18-year-old boy from the village, was waiting to see if he would be called up for his military service. And local elections were planned the following week.

  “That should be a bloody fiasco,” muttered Ercolino acidly.

  San Massano was one of the few strongholds in Umbria to remain under the control of the right-of-centre Christian Democrat party that was strongly supported by the Catholic Church. As a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, taken by his father to sign up as soon as he was eligible, the affront was too much for Ercolino.

  “Oh yes, and Primo wants to tarmac the part of the driveway that your houses both share,” said Angela.

  “I told him it would cost a fortune and he said it wouldn’t be a problem as you must have lots of money. Everyone thinks you must be rich if you’re foreign. Anyway, he’s coming over to see you once you’re up there, so you haven’t got much time to think of an excuse. You’ll meet his sweet wife Nadia too.”

  My heart sank as the implications of Primo’s plan began to register. The rent from my house in Brighton would cover the mortgage there, and I had a few contacts to launch what I hoped would be a new career writing for newspapers from Italy. But I had no salary at all for the time being. The situation had not been helped by the news from Cesare shortly before I left that he had managed to get the local council to lift the ban on my building work through the good offices of a friend who sat on the planning committee. That was a huge relief, but the change of heart had come with a price tag of several hundred thousand lire. The balance in my current account was worryingly low. In any case, the idea of covering the drive with tarmac horrified me. I liked the uneven surface and the colour of the stones, which exactly matched the warm yellow and pink shade of the stonework on the house.

  After coffee, with Ercolino’s cup laced with a generous shot of grappa, he took me outside to show me what he said was a surprise. During one of our frequent telephone calls conducted from the newsroom whenever Caroline wasn’t looking, I had asked him to keep his eye out for a car that I could use while I was here. San Massano was far too remote to be served by public transport. There, parked outside the back of Ercolino’s house was a pale yellow Fiat 500, a Cinquecento, almost identical to his red one, if not quite so shiny. It even had a small sunroof and would be perfect for driving around these narrow country lanes.

  “Watch where you put your bloody feet,” he said as I climbed into the spotless car that he had spent all morning cleaning. “You’d better like the house too,” he said. “It’s time we went to see it.”

  *

  Cesare and his building team had done an extraordinary job, transforming the old ruin into a building that looked as if it really could become a home one day. But there was still a daunting amount of work to be done, perhaps rather more than I had remembered. The walls were much as when I had last seen them, pale blue in most of the rooms, the plaster bulging in what looked like giant blisters. In several places, whole chunks had fallen away. The holes in the roof were gone, and so too were the gaping chasms in the floors of the sitting room and the main bedroom. But there were no floor tiles to cover the grey concrete put down by the builders. The bath I had heard so much about was now installed. Best of all, there was hot running water, powered by an electric boiler. I pressed a switch on the wall. The light came on.

  “You see what bloody luxury you’ve got?” said Ercolino.

  Our gaze fell simultaneously on a strange sight out in the garden. It was an old metal and plastic chair with a hole made through the seat. Silver paper had been wrapped around what was left, and a loo roll was propped on a stick lashed to the backrest.

  “Space Bog!” I muttered, recognising it instantly. “My brother came out here a few weeks ago when there was still no bathroom.”

  “Oh yes, I met him all right,” said Ercolino. “He’s completely up the bend, just like you. It must run in the family.”

  *

  The next morning I was wakened early by a loud knocking on the door. It had taken me some time to get to sleep, partly because my mind was still whirring from the excitement of spending the night in my house for the first time, and partly because of the discomfort. Although it was spring, it was still cold at night up in the hills and the thick stone walls would take a very long time to warm up again after all these years of neglect. And to think I had always thought of Italy as a hot country. There was no heating, apart from the massive fireplace in the sitting room, which had a large hook fixed on an old chain to support a cauldron for cooking soup and pasta. I looked at my watch. It was
still six o’clock. Who could be calling on me so early? The hammering became more insistent, and pulling on a jumper and a pair of jeans, I stumbled sleepily to the door.

  “Who is it?” I shouted, before drawing the ancient brass bolt that closed it from within. The faint sound of singing appeared to be coming from the other side. As I listened, it grew louder. It was a man’s voice, and though it was hard to make out the words, they seemed to be in rhyme. I opened the door slowly and saw a face I recognised from the village. His hands clutched a basket containing about a dozen eggs and his eyes were half-closed as if in a trance. He was crooning a song in a strong dialect.

  This was Pompeo, the gentle village troubadour or cantastoria. Aside from making up songs to tell the story of the people he knew, he spent most of his time having arguments with his wife Settima and seeking solace in the wine he produced from the strip of vines he kept on a small plot near his house. I strained to make out the words he was singing. The song seemed to be about a young woman from far away, who left her home to live with strangers. It wasn’t easy to understand, not least because, as I now saw, Pompeo had tears slowly coursing down his cheeks. There was a faint reek of wine on his breath.

  “I brought you a small gift, and I hoped you would do me the favour of taking me down to Montebello,” he said. He wiped his face with the back of his sleeve. “I have to run a few errands, and there are so few people here who have a car.”

  I had only had my Cinquecento since the previous afternoon. News clearly got around fast in these parts. Pompeo’s features dissolved into more tears, and I guessed that there must have been another altercation with Settima. She was far from beautiful, with thin wiry hair that had been inexpertly dyed at home, and several teeth missing. But rumour had it that she was a woman of easy virtue, popular with some of the older men in the nearby villages and that she accepted presents in return for her favours. Since the family home lacked most things, she encouraged her admirers to give her practical gifts.

  The previous evening, Pompeo had come home from the fields to find Settima cooking dinner with a brand new set of gleaming pots and pans. It didn’t take him long to work out where they had come from, and the villagers sitting around in the piazza had suddenly witnessed a volley of frying pans and saucepans come shooting from Settima’s kitchen window, amid much shouting from within. The offending cooking utensils had subsequently disappeared from where they had fallen. No one could say exactly what had happened to them, but Generosa, a buxom woman in her sixties with a reputation as one of the sharpest characters in the village, had been seen carrying a large bundle as she slipped into her front door shortly before midnight.

  This morning, Pompeo was adamant that he needed to go to Montebello and, now that I was up, I saw no reason not to take him. I hadn’t had a chance to get in any supplies, so it would be a good opportunity to pick up some bread, cheese and wine. For the time being, I had no way of making anything warm, unless I made up the fire in the sitting room to cook on. Pompeo asked to be dropped off at the carabinieri, the local police station for the surrounding area.

  I arranged to meet him an hour later after I had been to the small grocery store just around the corner. The sign outside claimed it was a supermercato, but aside from the usual salames, cheeses and sides of prosciutto displayed behind a glass counter, the only products it seemed to sell were flowered overalls for women to put over their dresses as they went about their household chores and hobnail boots for both men and women to wear as they worked in the fields.

  *

  Pompeo was quiet on the way home, though he muttered something I didn’t catch as he climbed into the front seat. I was keen to get back to see Benedetto, the villager recommended by Cesare. There was still so much to be done inside the house that it was difficult to know where to begin. The walls needed stripping of the old paint and plaster before being given a fresh coat of whitewash. For some unfathomable reason, the wooden beams that crisscrossed each ceiling had been covered with layers of the ubiquitous pale blue paint at some stage, so they would also need to be stripped and restained. I had no fridge, no cupboards and almost no furniture, aside from a rusty old bed that had been left in the cellar. There was also a formica covered table in the kitchen, complete with a drawer filled with tin knives and forks. The outside area was a seething mass of brambles which were gradually strangling the olive trees that dotted the terraced slopes.

  Pompeo said he would send Benedetto down. He climbed out of the car and thanked me again for the lift, his mood definitely more upbeat now. Back inside my house, I reached into the drawer of the kitchen table to retrieve a menacing looking knife that I had spotted earlier. This was just what I needed to hack a piece of bread from the loaf I had just bought. Although the bread was freshly made that morning, it was no easy task cutting off a slice. The crust was thick and hard and the inside was firm and strangely tasteless. As I had already discovered, the local bread was one of the more unappetising features of Umbrian cuisine, though it did make delicious bruschetta, once grilled over the fire and topped with garlic, olive oil and a sprinkle of salt. Salt was the missing ingredient. The bread around here was made without it, a hangover from the Salt Wars some four centuries earlier between the city states allied to Perugia and Spoleto, and the others who sided with the Vatican. I had read all about the conflict in a book that Mirella had given me as a present when I decided to buy the house.

  “In many ways, not much has changed,” she had said as I unwrapped the book. Mercifully, she had given up trying to speak in English. “Most of the small fortress hill towns have a long and bloody history of fighting amongst each other. They all still hate each other’s guts, and San Massano is no exception.”

  *

  There was no point in putting it off any longer. There was work to be done. I still hadn’t unpacked as there was nowhere to put anything, so reaching for one of my bags, I pulled out a pair of shorts and one of my brother’s old rugby shirts. There were some rubber gloves to protect my hands and a ski hat and goggles to keep the worst of the old paint out of my eyes and hair. Just as well there no mirrors yet, I thought. I dragged the kitchen table into what I had decided would be my bedroom, and climbed up to see if I could reach the ceiling from there. Not quite. A chair like the one that had been dismembered to make Space Bog should do the trick, though it was pretty precarious. Armed with a scraper and a steel brush I had bought down in Montebello, I began to hack away at the layers of old blue paint. It came away quite easily, and I soon worked out the best way of using first the scraper then the brush to reveal the wood of the beams. But it was painfully slow. And it was very uncomfortable working at that angle. Now I knew how Michelangelo felt when he painted the Sistine Chapel.

  *

  The put-put sound of an engine interrupted my musings, and I looked out of the window to see an Ape – a Bee — chugging up the drive. That was the name aptly given to the noisy but zippy contraptions that seemed to serve as transport for many of the villagers in this part of Umbria. Just the thing really, for these narrow roads. Mirella had told me there had been no road at all to San Massano until twenty five years ago. The only thing that connected the village to the outside world has been a dirt track which most people had travelled by mule. Progress had brought with it a wider path, which was actually paved in some parts, but it was still not suited to cars of any great size.

  The Ape drew to a halt, and a short swarthy man climbed out from a bench seat, turning off the engine beneath what looked like the handlebars of a motor scooter. Hanging from the leather belt pulled tight beneath a large stomach was a chilling assortment of cutting tools, among them a knife, a scythe and what appeared to be a small saw. From the other side, a woman with greying hair and pebble glasses stepped out and stood beside him, coughing every now and then. She was wearing one of the pinafores and a pair of the boots I had seen in the shop that morning.

  The couple needed little introduction, and I knew from their appearance that this must be
Benedetto and his wife Caterina. Angela had told me over lunch the previous day that the couple had been married for twelve years and had twin boys of about the same age. But Caterina had six other older children, all of them by different fathers.

  “Everyone thinks of Italians as being very religious and obeying the Church,” Angela had said. “Of course it’s all nonsense. They’re a licentious bunch, especially up here. I suppose it’s because there’s not much else to do. They’re always either at it, or talking about it, as far as I can see.”

  Benedetto, Caterina and I went through the ritual of formally introducing ourselves and shaking hands, and I noticed that Benedetto was missing the ends of a couple of fingers. I started to explain what kind of work I needed doing, and he interrupted me, saying something that I struggled to understand. His wife uttered a few words of explanation, though it was impossible to grasp much of what she was saying either. Benedetto now started to speak even faster, in an animated way, smiling broadly, his eyes shining meaningfully. Caterina broke into a laugh and they both looked at me expectantly. It appeared that Benedetto had just made a joke, but I hadn’t a clue what it was. It wasn’t just the accent that threw me, or the machine gun speed of the delivery of their speech. The dialect these people used was quite another language, with completely different words. Benedetto was especially hard to understand, though he clearly found the whole thing highly amusing. So much for my university degree. I could read Petrarch’s poetry and discuss the allegory in Dante’s Inferno, but I couldn’t hold a sensible conversation with the people who were now my neighbours.

  We moved inside so that I could show Benedetto around and we could discuss where shelves would go once the walls had been scraped and repainted. We entered the kitchen and Caterina smiled wistfully.

  “This was where I went to school. My desk was just here and the teacher used to stand over there by the blackboard,” she said, helping me to understand with plenty of gestures, and pointing to what was now the sink. I remembered what Mirella had told me that first time I saw it, that the house had once served as the village school, all the classes mixed in together in the one room. Nowadays, the children went down in a rickety old school bus to Montebello, driven at breakneck speed by Ettore, who lived with his old mother.