by Dario Fo
The pathways to the different nurseries were lined with myriads of plants and flowers. High jets of violet irises or blue gladioli appeared at intervals along the way, while a luxuriant bower of roses held pride of place at the crossroads in the centre of the farm. In the background, in the distance, lay the railway track: ‘Thanks, Granddad, for that railway line,’ I said. ‘You did it to make me feel at home, didn’t you?’
‘Good lad,’ he exclaimed. ‘Very witty. You’re a Bristìn as well.’
The following day, I discovered that Granddad Bristìn was a greengrocer as well. In addition to growing vegetables and fruit, he went to sell them in the town and in all the farms and farmsteads in the district. He came to wake me up that morning when it was still dark, and took me down to the kitchen, a big room with a fireplace as grand and deep as a closet in a sacristy. Five or six young men sat around the table in the centre of the room, taking their breakfast. Each of them greeted me noisily and wanted to pick me up and throw me in the air like a puppet. These were my uncles and they all had ferocious strength. Grandmother was worried and stopped them: ‘Enough of that. You’ll hurt him.’
Grandmother’s name was Maria but they all called her la bella Maria. She was fifty-five and even though she had had nine children and had worked hard all her life in the fields and spinning mills, she was still worthy of the name they had given her. She was gentle and kindly, and moved with unimaginable grace.
Grandfather Bristìn was in the farmyard, harnessing the horse to the vegetable cart with the help of Aronne, his eldest son. All of them, uncles and farmhands, went over to the wagon to help load the last baskets of fruit and newly picked bunches of flowers. Granddad picked me up and placed me astride the horse’s back, then handed me the reins: ‘You drive,’ he ordered.
‘But I don’t know how to, Granddad. I’ve never done it.’
‘Nothing to it. When you want the horse to turn right, pull this rein. When you want it to go left, pull the other one. To make it stop, tug both of them together.’
‘And to get it going again?’
‘Let the reins go slack and bring them down on his back. Give him one or two digs with your heels and above all, you have to shout – Go! Giddy-up!’
‘I’ll have a go, but where are you going to sit?’
‘On the cart. I’ll have a little snooze.’
I was terrified. ‘But at least tell me the way.’
My uncle, trying to be helpful, said: ‘So that you won’t get lost, here’s the map with the way marked in red. You follow this route and stop the horse where you see these yellow signs. You can’t go wrong.’
They were all mad in that house. For God’s sake, I wasn’t even seven, and they were packing me off down roads I had never seen before, with a horse and cart I had never ridden, and at the same time my grandfather was planning to snooze in the back. And now I had to read a map!
‘Excuse me, Uncle Aronne, but what does this sign mean?’
‘It’s a bridge, a big bridge over the river Po.’
I was near to tears, but all together the whole family began chanting:
Il fantolino è un gran fantino,
E’ un carrettiere che non può sbagliare.
Il nonno dorme come un ghiro
e lui, tranquillo, lo porta in giro.
What a horseman is this young boy,
He’ll drive the wagon like a toy.
His granddad’s sleeping like a dormouse
As they trot from house to house.
A slap on its hindquarters and off goes the horse, slowly but surely, its hooves clinking against the hard cobbles. First right … straight on, over the bridge … down to the first farmstead. Unbelievable! I’ve made it! The collection of houses was as big as a small town: an open space in the centre and on all four sides an enormous porticoed structure housing ten or more families. Women and children emerge from every corner and come charging over to Bristìn’s cart as though they had been waiting for him. He greets them all by name and, in a tone of good-humoured ribaldry, has a complimentary or ironic joke for each one. He teases each in turn about their husbands or lovers, devises clownish bits of nonsense on their relationships, all the while throwing vegetables up in the air and catching them as they fall, like a real juggler. At the time, I did not grasp the storm of sexual, often downright obscene, allusions which my grandfather was firing off as he fiddled about with courgettes, enormous carrots and cucumbers festooned with odd bumps. His comic routine produced shrieks of high-pitched laughter, not to say hysterics in some quarters.
‘Oh stop it, Bristìn, that’s enough,’ begged a large lady, holding her tummy. ‘I’m going to wet myself.’ And with those words, she hoisted up her skirt, swept it back and revealed a long stream of pee on the cobbles.
The women chose the merchandise, nearly all pre-season fruit which Grandfather obtained by cultivating them in his greenhouse. He weighed all the fruit and vegetables on his scales, always adding something extra – a few carrots, a sprig of rosemary, a big marrow or some flowers, accompanied usually by jaunty declarations of love delivered in mock poetic tones. It was clear that all those customers flocked in such numbers to his cart more than anything else to savour the show given by that merry chatterbox. I have often wondered if they ended up buying things they did not need simply to repay the enjoyment Bristìn offered them.
The ritual of sales and farce was repeated for the whole of the merchandising round. Every so often, Grandfather would make me get down from the horse’s back and lift me up onto the cart, on top of the baskets of melons and watermelons. When the women asked who the child was, he would go into a rigmarole of being astounded at seeing me there for the first time. ‘I have no idea who this little ruffian is, or where he came from,’ he said. ‘A while back, a girl handed him over to me, telling me he was my own flesh and blood. The father is supposed to be one of my five sons, but the girl couldn’t remember which one. “What do you mean? How did it happen? When did all this take place?” I asked her. And the girl replied: “In the woods near the Po … I was walking along the banks of the river, picking mushrooms, long thin ones and little stubby ones. All of a sudden, what a bit of luck! I saw an erect one, as firm as a rod, protruding from the ground. A big juicy porcino! I love that kind and couldn’t wait to grab hold of it, but I banged my head on the branch of a poplar tree so hard that my knees buckled and I sank to the ground. As I did so, I got skewered by this hard rod of a mushroom. A warm flame shot through my whole body from feet to brain. Ye gods, what a feeling! I stayed where I was, stunned. Then I heard a loud groan, and before my very eyes, in the thick grass, I saw emerge first a face, then shoulders and the rest of a body. Behind my bottom, I espied two thighs and two legs: ‘Holy God,’ I think to myself, ‘a mushroom born of a man!’ The youth with the mushroom, or the skewer-woman equipment, sighed and groaned: ‘Thank you, pretty maiden!’ And I said to him: ‘What are you doing here buried in the shrubbery?’ ‘I was splashing about naked in the water, and had covered myself with leaves to get dry … I fell fast asleep, and when you suddenly plopped yourself down on my pecker, I thought I was going to die.’ ‘And what if you’ve made me pregnant?’ ‘We could always call him Mushroom!’” The girl said she’d had a hard time getting away from that scoundrel. “I pulled my sickle from my bag and shouted to him: ‘All right. I’ll give you a son, but in return I want the mushroom,’ and with one chop, off it came.” And here it is,’ yelled Bristìn. ‘Now then ladies, this is your chance!’ and so saying he held up a firm, erect, ruby-red mushroom. ‘This is a satisfaction-guaranteed mushroom, but don’t expect me to sell it. However, I will agree to hire it out a week at a time. Plant it in your woods and fall on top of it whenever your fancy takes you.’
I need hardly say the women laughed long and hard. They joined in the fun, and went off with the mushroom, pretending to fight over it.
Lucian of Samosata said: ‘Everything depends on the masters you have had. But watch out. Often you do not
choose your masters, they choose you.’ My grandfather Bristìn had chosen me as his pupil in clowning when he put me on the back of that gigantic nag as though I were one of the seven dwarves.
* * *
But Bristìn was no mere buffoon. One day I discovered that his orchard was an academy of agrarian science. In addition to the transplants, he had accomplished incredible marriages between different species of tomato, peperone and cucumber.
‘You see,’ he explained to me, while taking a sharp knife to those vegetables as though they were the bodies of animals he wanted to cut open to show me their structure, ‘we’ve got male and female here, too, not to mention various hybrids. All of them, fruit and vegetable alike, are creatures like us. They are sensitive to fear and perhaps even pain, they feel attraction and repulsion among themselves just as men and women do. There are fruits which fall in love normally, and others which lose their head for creatures of another species. Even though I’ve tried my level best, I’ve never managed to get a persimmon and a papaya to join together in loving union!’
Professor Trangipane, who taught in the Faculty of Agrarian Science at Alessandria, was a frequent visitor, always accompanied by students who were spellbound by the practical lessons, spiced with comic turns, my grandfather imparted to them.
One day, while he was giving a lecture in the greenhouse, the sky all of a sudden turned black. Bristìn put two fingers in the corners of his mouth and let out a shrill whistle. His sons, fully aware of what was required of them, came running out of the carriage sheds. They stretched a covering, a gigantic fine-meshed net, out in a circle. Bristìn made sure everyone was involved in the operation, students and farm workers alike. Guy-ropes with pegs at the end hung down from high poles surrounding the greenhouse, and the net was laid along that line of poles. Following my grandfather’s orders, the men started to tug at the guy-ropes in twos or threes. The net was swiftly hauled up and pulled out like a circus big-top to cover the glass of the greenhouse and give it full protection. Bristìn and his sons hammered in the stakes at top speed and secured the bottom end of the cover to the ground. The whole set-up was hardly in place when a terrible wind, whistling through the mesh of the net, got up, followed by thunder and lightning and a hail storm which sent chunks of ice as big as eggs bouncing off the net as though they were tennis balls. Everyone else rushed for shelter under the portico, but Bristìn took me by the hand and dragged me inside the greenhouse: ‘Come and I’ll show you a sight you won’t forget even if you live to be a hundred.’
Under the glass, it seemed as though the world were coming to an end. As they struck against the net and bounced off it, the hailstones generated indescribable sounds, while the vibrating panes of glass produced howls which were in turns terrifying and entrancing. The flashes of lightning, reflected on the greenhouse glass, had their brightness multiplied as in a distorting mirror at a fairground.
When later at school I encountered for the first time the adventure of Dante’s Ulysses, strapped to the mast of his ship, awestruck and bewitched by the special effects of sound and light organised by the Sirens, I could not help connecting that magical situation with the spectacle I had witnessed as a boy inside that crystal nursery, where the storm performed for us a concert that presaged the end of the world.
‘You’re a madman, fit to be tied,’ screamed my grandmother with that thin voice of hers. ‘Don’t you realise what would have happened to you and that poor boy if the wind had blown the net away? The whole glass structure would have shattered to pieces and fallen on top of you.’
Bristìn, normally so strong and sure of himself, bowed his head before that fragile, delicate little woman. ‘Yes, you’re right, Maria. I was a bit thoughtless … in fact completely thoughtless. But to experience certain moments, you’ve got to take risks.’
CHAPTER 6
Back in Oleggio
After several months, Uncle Beniamino, the youngest of my mother’s brothers, was given the job of taking me home. As I was leaving, Granddad lifted me onto the back of that great horse, Gargantua’s stallion. ‘We’ll let him take you to the station!’
I took hold of the reins, but made no effort to manoeuvre with them. I had long since discovered that there was no point in pulling the reins up and down since the horse made up its own mind about where it was supposed to turn. For years, it had been padding at least three times a week along the same roads that led to the farms and villages where my granddad dispensed his chatter and wares. They had put one over me, but I refused to give them the satisfaction of knowing that I knew, and so I carried on unperturbed, mimicking the various actions of driving the cart.
Moreover, the horse responded to variations in routine only when its master gave orders with a shout or a jerk of the bridle. That was why on this occasion Granddad got up on the horse’s back beside me: our destination was the station, which was not part of the horse’s usual round.
Kisses, hugs, a lump in the throat and a few tears … shaking hands … the train moving off. I remained glued to the window the whole time we travelled through Lomellina, and I thought back to the day of my arrival in Sartirana, to the aversion I had felt towards that countryside infested by mosquitoes and midges, lined with rows of poplar trees marking the boundaries of rice fields and cut into an infinity of labyrinthine patterns by the vertical and horizontal spider’s web of canals and waterways. Now those complex geometries had entered my brain like expressions of some surreal, metaphysical calm.
The guard on the train was surprised to see me riding alone in the carriage: it was not normal, especially in those days, for a child to travel on his own without a guardian, but I was used to it. Trains, railway tracks, stations were all as natural to me as breathing, drinking and going to the toilet.
On my arrival in Oleggio, all I had to do was look around and there, near the engine, red hat pulled down over his head, was my father. He came towards me, picked me up with one arm, gave me a hug, held me close to his face, whistled to the engine driver to give him the sign to move off and then announced with a big smile: ‘There’s a big surprise waiting for you at home! You’ve got a little sister … Bianca! You’ll not believe how pretty she is, like a porcelain doll!’
She was indeed just like a porcelain doll, my little sister … so delicate in her features, with those big, shining eyes. They let me hold her in my arms for a little, but I had to give up almost immediately because she wriggled like a baby goat and burst into a terrible wail. Everybody gathered round her: relatives, friends, as well as the three schoolteacher sisters who lived on the landing. No one paid any heed to me or to my brother Fulvio. They seemed to be aware of our presence only when they tripped over us, so we decided to keep ourselves to ourselves. We played in the courtyard and in the wasteland among the trees in the park on the other side of the road. There they were putting up a circus tent. Incapable of minding our own business, we set out to get on good terms with the workers erecting large poles and stretching out the ropes which would support the Big Top. They soon found work for us: we were dispatched with the owner’s son to stick up posters on the walls and lampposts all along the main streets.
In this way we won the right to get in free for the evening performances. We did ask our mother for permission but she was so busy with the new baby that she scarcely put up any resistance. We were first in the queue outside the Big Top, two hours before the opening. The attendant in charge of the wild animals took us over to see the cages. A good ten metres away from the animal compound, we were overcome by an odour that nearly made us throw up – the stench of the lions.
What a disappointment! An animal of such majesty, the symbol of might and courage giving off such a rancid stink. How can an emperor raise as his standard the image of that foul shitter?
‘To be consistent, it really should bring its smell along with it everywhere it goes…’ I said to the attendant. ‘This is what happens to them when they are locked up … animals in captivity, forced to live in a cage, that’s wha
t makes them smell like that. Normally, freedom has no stench. When they are at liberty in the forests, they certainly do not pong that way. They smell the way they should, just enough to let themselves be recognised by their own kind and feared by their prey.’
That first encounter with the circus was overwhelming for both of us: lions prancing about and roaring so loudly that they made your insides churn up, elephants on parade, sometimes with movements of such lightness that they seemed filled with warm air, like giant balloons.
But the act which left us breathless every time was undoubtedly the acrobats’ turn. Two girls starting off from their position up there on the trapeze, swinging backwards and forwards, leaving traces of evanescent light as they go. My God, what was that? A somersault … a girl upside down, with no grip, hands waving in the void … she’s going to fall … no … a miracle! I have no idea how, but she remains hanging by her feet from the bar of the trapeze. Now, she swings across the whole arch of the Big Top, swallowed up by the spotlights’ back-lighting, and then comes back into view, slender and sinuous. From nowhere, another girl appears walking on a tightrope which crosses the dome. She dances in mid-air, pirouetting and twirling.
Beneath, in the centre of the arena, a clown lets out shrill screams of fear at each turn, but now he is enchanted by the grace of the girl on the tightrope and wants to join her up there. He produces a long ladder and, without supporting it on the wire, climbs swiftly up. The rungs come away one after the other, but the clown continues relentlessly, clinging on by the sheer strength of his arms. There he is. He has reached the tightrope: with one leap he is there, on his feet, keeping his balance as he strolls along with his hands in his pockets. The girl tells him off and orders him to go away, and all of a sudden the clown realises he is suspended in mid-air and is overcome by panic. He wobbles, topples over … tumbles … grabs a hold of the girl’s feet … an incredible sway to one side and there he is, upright once again, tenderly embracing his beautiful tightrope walker. He kisses her. Rapturous applause.