For Gloria everything was easy.
For Pietro nothing was.
If something like this had happened to Gloria, she would have gone to her mother and her mother would have given her a cuddle and taken her shopping in Orbano to console her.
His mother wouldn’t do anything of the sort. She would burst into tears and keep asking him why.
Why did you do it? Why are you always getting into trouble?
And she wouldn’t listen to his answers. She wouldn’t be interested in whether or not it was Pietro’s fault. The only thing she would be worried about would be the fact that she had to go and talk to the teachers (it’s too much, you know I’m not well, you can’t ask that of me, Pietro) and that her son was suspended and everything else. The actual reasons would go in one ear and out the other. She wouldn’t take them in.
And finally she would whimper, ‘You know your father’s the one you must talk to about this sort of thing. There’s nothing I can do about it.’
* * *
His father’s tractor was outside the farmers’ club.
Pietro dismounted from his bike, took a deep breath and went in.
There was hardly anyone there.
Good.
Only Gabriele, the barman, who with screwdriver and hammer in hand was taking the coffee machine apart.
His father was sitting at a table reading the paper. His black hair gleamed under the neon light. The brilliantine. Spectacles on the tip of his nose. A scowl on his face, he was following the lines of newsprint with his forefinger and muttering to himself. The news always got him riled.
He approached him in silence and when he was a metre away called out. ‘Papa …’
Mr Moroni turned. He saw him. He smiled. ‘Pietro! What are you doing here?’
‘I came …’
‘Sit down.’
Pietro obeyed.
‘Do you want an ice cream?’
‘No thanks.’
‘Crisps? What would you like?’
‘I won’t have anything, thanks.’
‘I’ve nearly finished. We’ll go home in a minute.’ He went on reading the paper.
He was in a good mood. That was promising.
Maybe …
‘Papa, I’ve got something to tell you …’ He opened his backpack, took out a letter and handed it to him.
Mr Moroni read it. ‘What is it?’ His voice had dropped an octave.
‘I’ve been suspended … You’ve got to go and speak to the deputy head.’
‘What have you been up to?’
‘Nothing much. There was a bit of trouble last night …’ And in thirty seconds he told him the story. He was fairly truthful. He omitted the part about the graffiti, but told him about the TV and the video recorder and how the other three had forced him to go in.
When he had finished, he looked at his father.
He gave no sign of anger, but continued to stare at the letter as if it were an Egyptian hieroglyphic.
Pietro said nothing and nervously clasped his hands as he waited for an answer.
Then at last his father spoke. ‘And what do you want from me?’
‘You have to go to the school. It’s important. The deputy headmistress wants you to …’ Pietro tried to say this as if it were a formality, a matter that could be settled in a minute.
‘And what does she want from me?’
‘Nothing really … She’ll have to tell you … I don’t know. That what I did was wrong. That I did something I mustn’t do. Things like that.’
‘What’s that got to do with me?’
What do you mean, what’s it got to do with you? ‘Well … you are my father.’
‘Yes, but it wasn’t me who broke into the school. It wasn’t me who let a bunch of idiots push me around. What I did last night was do my work and go to bed.’ He went on reading.
The subject was closed.
Pietro tried again. ‘So you won’t go?’
Mr Moroni looked up from his paper. ‘No. I certainly will not. I’m not going to apologise for the stupid things you do. Sort it out for yourself. You’re old enough. You do stupid things and then you expect me to solve all your problems?’
‘But Papa, it’s not me who wants you to go and talk to her. It’s the deputy headmistress who wants to talk to you. If you don’t go, she’ll think …’
‘What will she think?’ snapped Mr Moroni.
The apparent calm was beginning to crumble.
That I’ve got a father who doesn’t care a shit about me, that’s what she’ll think. That he’s crazy, someone who has problems with the law, a drunk. (That’s what that bitch Gianna Loria had said to him once, when they had quarrelled over a seat on the bus. Your father’s a stupid crazy drunk.) That I’m not a normal child like all the others who have parents who go and speak to the teachers.
‘I don’t know. But if you don’t go they’ll fail me. When you’re suspended your parents have to go to the school. It’s compulsory. That’s the way it works. You’ve got to go and tell them …’ That I’m a good boy.
‘I haven’t got to go anywhere. If they fail you, it’ll be no more than you deserve. You’ll repeat the year. Like that idiot brother of yours. And then we’ll have no more of this talk about studying and wanting to go to high school. Now be quiet. I’m tired of talking. Go away. I want to read the paper.’
‘You won’t go?’ Pietro asked again.
‘No.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Leave me alone.’
Mr Moroni’s Catapult
But why did all the villagers say Mario Moroni was crazy, and what were these problems he’d had with the law?
It should be explained that when Mr Moroni was not working in the fields or going to the farmers’ club in Serra to rot his liver with Fernet Branca, he had a hobby.
Woodwork.
Usually he made cupboards, picture frames, little bookcases. Once he had built a small trailer incorporating the wheels of a Vespa, to hook onto the back of Mimmo’s motorbike. They used it for carrying hay to the sheep. In the storeroom he had a little workshop complete with circular saw, plane, chisels and all the other tools of the trade.
One evening Mr Moroni had seen a film about the ancient Romans on television. There was a big scene with thousands of extras. The legions were besieging a fortress with war machines. Rams, testudos and catapults with which they hurled boulders and fireballs at the enemy ramparts.
This had made a deep impression on Mario Moroni.
Next day he had gone to the public library in Ischiano and, with the librarian’s help, found some pictures of catapults in the illustrated encyclopaedia Knowledge. He had had some photocopies made and taken them home. He had studied them carefully. Then he had called his sons and told them he intended to build a catapult.
Neither of them dared to ask why. Such questions were better not asked of Mr Moroni. You just did what he said and never mind the reasons.
A sound principle of the Moroni household.
Pietro had taken to the idea at once. Nobody he knew had a catapult in their garden. They would be able to throw rocks, knock down a wall or two. Mimmo, however, was strongly opposed to the plan. It would mean them spending the next few Sundays slogging their guts out to build something that was no use to man or beast.
The following Sunday work had begun.
And after a few hours they had all begun to enjoy it. There was something grand and new about this labour to build a completely useless contraption. Although you worked and sweated just as hard, it was nothing like as much effort as building that new fence for the sheep.
Four of them worked on it.
Mr Moroni, Pietro, Mimmo and Poppi.
Augusto, nicknamed Poppi, was an old donkey with a coat that was patchy and white with age, who had laboured hard for many years until Mr Moroni had bought the tractor. Now he was in retirement, spending the twilight of his life browsing in the meadow behind the house. He was very bad-tempered and
would let no one touch him except Mr Moroni. Other people he bit. And when a donkey bites it really hurts, so the rest of the family kept well away from him.
The first thing they did was to chop down a tall pine tree which grew at the edge of the woods. With Poppi’s help they dragged it home and there, with chainsaw, hatchets and planes, they made it into a long pole.
Around this pole, over the next few weekends, they built the catapult. Sometimes Mr Moroni would get furious with his sons because they botched their work or were clumsy and then he would kick them in the backside. At other times, when he saw that they had done things properly, he would say, ‘Well done, good work.’ And a fleeting smile, as rare as a sunny day in February, would appear on his lips.
Then Mrs Moroni would arrive bringing ham and caciotta rolls and they would eat their lunch sitting beside the catapult discussing the next stage of the work.
Mimmo and Pietro were happy. Their father’s good humour was infectious.
A couple of months later the completed catapult towered behind Fig-Tree Cottage. It was a strange machine, and rather ungainly to look at. It bore some resemblance to the Roman catapults but not a very close one. Essentially it was a huge lever. The fulcrum was fixed, with the help of a steel hinge (specially made by the blacksmith), to two upside-down Vs nailed to a four-wheeled trolley. Attached to the short end of the arm was a sort of basket full of sandbags (weighing six hundred kilos!). The long end terminated in a kind of spoon in which you put the rock you wanted to throw.
When it was wound up, the sandbag-filled basket rose and the spoon came down and was tied to the ground by a thick rope. To achieve this, Mr Moroni had designed a system of pulleys and ropes which were pulled round a winch which in turn was pulled round by poor old Poppi. Whenever the donkey stopped short and started braying, Mr Moroni would go over, stroke him and whisper in his ear and he would start turning again.
For the inauguration of the catapult there was a party. The only party ever held at Fig-Tree Cottage.
Mrs Biglia cooked three immense trayfulls of lasagne. Pietro put on his smart jacket. Mimmo invited Patti. And Mr Moroni shaved.
Uncle Giovanni arrived with his pregnant wife and his children. Some friends from the farmers’ club came, a fire was lit and some sausages and steaks barbecued. When everyone had had their fill of food and wine, it was launch time. Uncle Giovanni smashed a bottle of wine against one of the catapult’s wheels and Mr Moroni, who was rolling drunk, drove up on his tractor whistling a military march and towing a trailer loaded with some more or less spherical rocks he had found along the road to Gazzina. It took four people to lift one and place it on the ready-primed catapult.
Pietro was really excited and even Mimmo, though he tried not to show it, was following proceedings closely.
Everyone stood back and with a clean blow of his hatchet Mr Moroni cut the rope. There was a loud crack, the drum full of sand dropped and the rock shot up, curved through the air and landed two hundred metres away in the woods. There was a sound of snapping branches and flocks of birds flew up from the treetops.
The audience clapped and cheered.
Mr Moroni was delighted. He went over to Mimmo and put his arm round his neck. ‘Did you hear the noise it made? That’s the sound I wanted to hear. Great work, Mimmo.’ Then he picked up Pietro in his arms and kissed him. ‘Run along now, go and see where it’s landed.’
Pietro and his cousins dashed into the woods. They found the rock embedded in the earth beside a great oak. And some broken branches.
Then, at last, came Poppi’s moment. They had decked him out in a new harness and coloured ribbons. He looked like a Sicilian ceremonial ass. With great effort the donkey started walking round the winch. Everyone laughed and said it would be the death of the poor beast.
But Mr Moroni didn’t care about those sceptics, he knew Poppi could do it. He was as stubborn and unyielding as the finest of his species. When he was younger, Mr Moroni had loaded on that back the bricks and bags of cement he needed to build the upper floor of the house.
And now he was winding the catapult up, never stopping, never digging his heels in, never braying as he usually did. He knows this is his moment, Mr Moroni said to himself, deeply moved.
He was so proud of his animal.
When Poppi had finished, Mr Moroni started clapping and everyone else followed suit.
A second boulder was thrown and there was more applause, though more muted this time. Then everyone descended on the pastries.
It’s understandable. Watching a catapult throw rocks into the woods isn’t exactly the most enthralling pastime in the world.
It was Mr Moroni who found him.
The murderer had shot him in the head.
Poppi had dropped dead on the ground.
He lay there, stiff-legged, stiff-eared and stiff-tailed, by the fence that marked off Contarello’s land.
‘Contarello, you son of a bitch, I’m going to kill you, this time I’m really going to kill you,’ gurgled Mr Moroni, kneeling by Poppi’s corpse.
If his tear ducts hadn’t been drier than the Kalahari desert, Mr Moroni would have wept.
The war with Contarello had been going on since time immemorial. It was a private feud, incomprehensible to the rest of the world, which had begun over a few square metres of pastureland which each of them considered his own. And it had been waged through insults, death threats, provocations and acts of spite.
It had never occurred to either man to check the documents in the land registry.
Mr Moroni kicked the mud, punched the trees.
‘Contarello, you shouldn’t have done this … You shouldn’t.’ Then he gave a wild roar at the sky. He grabbed Poppi’s legs and with a strength born of fury hoisted the carcass onto his back. Poor Poppi weighed nearly a hundred and fifty kilos, but that little man who weighed sixty and drank like a fish walked forward across the grass, legs apart, swaying from side to side. His face, with the effort, was a mass of humps and furrows. ‘Contarello, now you’ll see,’ he said, grinding his teeth.
He staggered as far as the farmhouse and threw Poppi on the ground. Then he tied a rope to the tractor and wound up the catapult.
He knew the exact position of Contarello’s house.
Village legend has it that Contarello and family were in the sitting room watching Carramba, What a Surprise! when it arrived.
Raffaella Carrà had succeeded in reuniting two twins from Macerata who had been separated at birth and the two of them were hugging each other and crying and the Contarellos were sniffling, deeply touched. It was a tear-jerking scene.
But suddenly everything seemed to explode over their heads. Something had fallen on the house and shaken it to its foundations.
The television went off, so did all the lights.
‘Good grief, what’s happened?’ screamed grandmother Ottavia, clutching her daughter.
‘A meteorite!’ shouted Contarello. ‘We’ve been hit by a fucking meteorite. There was a report about them on Quark Science. It happens sometimes.’
The lights came back on. They peered around in terror, then looked upwards. One beam of the ceiling had split and some pieces of plaster had fallen down.
The family climbed the stairs, full of trepidation.
Everything seemed normal up there.
Contarello opened the bedroom door and fell on his knees. Hands over his mouth.
The roof had gone.
The walls were red. The floor was red. The eiderdown that grandmother Ottavia had made with her own hands was red. The windowpanes were red. Everything was red.
Bits of Poppi (guts and bones and shit and hairs) were scattered all over the room together with debris and roof tiles.
* * *
Nobody was around when Mr Moroni catapulted the corpse, but if anyone had been, they would have seen a donkey shoot up into the air, describe a perfect parabola, sail over the cork woods, the stream and the vineyard, and land like a Scud missile on the Contarellos’ r
oof.
That little prank cost Mr Moroni dear.
He was reported to the police, charged and condemned to pay damages, and it was only because he had no previous convictions that he wasn’t jailed for attempted murder. He now had a criminal record.
Oh, and he was ordered to dismantle the catapult.
69
Not thinking about anything is very difficult.
And it’s the first thing you have to learn to do when you start yoga.
You try, you concentrate like mad and start thinking that you mustn’t think about anything and you’ve already blown it because that’s a thought.
No, it’s not easy.
But to Graziano Biglia it came naturally.
He had assumed the lotus position in the middle of his room and kept his mind blank for half an hour. Then he’d taken a nice hot bath, got dressed and rung Roscio to tell him the Saturnia trip was still on but that he wouldn’t be able to join them for dinner. He would go straight to the baths and meet them there at about half past ten or eleven.
All in all, his first day as a single hadn’t gone too badly. He had spent the whole day indoors. He’d watched tennis on TV and had his lunch in bed. Depression had buzzed around him like a horsefly, ready to plunge its sting into his heart, but Graziano had organised things well, he had slept, eaten and watched sport in a kind of bovine apathy that was proof against the emotions.
Now he was ready for the schoolmistress.
He took one last look at himself in the mirror. He had decided to drop the country gentleman look. It didn’t suit him, and anyway his shirt and jacket were spattered with vomit. He had opted for a blend of the casual with the elegant. Early Spandau Ballet, if you get the picture.
Black satin shirt with pointed collar. Red waistcoat. Black cord jacket with three buttons. Jeans. Python boots. Yellow ochre scarf. Black headband.
Oh yes, and under his jeans, a pair of purple Speedo bathing trunks.
He was putting on his overcoat when his mother emerged from the kitchen, mumbling. Without even trying to understand what she wanted, he replied: ‘No, Mama, I won’t be home for dinner. I’ll be back late.’
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