by Ben Aitken
There’s nothing for it. I go out for a sleepwalk. I go out the back of the hotel then follow a winding road up the hillside for a mile or so, to the village of Griante, where there’s a trattoria, a town hall, and, up on a shelf of rock, a small church. The latter’s bells toll as I approach, signalling the start of something, or the end of something else. I sit on a bench in front of the church and watch the youngest villagers – more forgetful than their elders – emerge from their houses and climb the hill in a hurry. I can see olive trees, and the lake, and the hills and mountains wearing wood coats and snow peaks. Closer, above the olive trees, dark green shutters rest against yellow and orange walls, and a tennis court is calm and still, uncalled for this Sunday.
I stand at the back of the church and listen to the shared prayer and song. Two of the Irish women from breakfast are here. The atmosphere is heavy and light at once. I don’t feel moved as such, but nicely content and beside myself somehow. I catch or half catch the odd word: confesso, spirito, pesto. The last time I was in a church, I read a poem about slowing down. God knows there’s no chance of me speeding up right now.
I enter the trattoria, the one just down from the church. I don’t want to be presumptuous, but I’d say the few people in here aren’t on the Shearings holiday. They look as local and established as the church up the road. I’m reminded instantly of an Ernest Hemingway story – any of them, all of them. His main man is on the run – that’s me – and stops in here for some rabbit stew and risotto alla Milanese and a mug of grappa, before continuing to the frontline to blow up a bridge or catch a fish. I drink an Americano at a heavy wooden table, watching the men stirring sugar into their coffee. There’s a copy of La Provincia on the table. A politician is up to his neck in something, and I don’t think it’s acclaim.
I meet Vinny in reception. He’s got his room and he’s happy with it – lake view, balcony, Bob’s your uncle. I tell him where I’ve been – up to the village, to the church, to the pub – and he knows where I’m on about. He’s been here a few times, you see, and some were better than others. A few years ago, he had a bit of a heart attack upstairs in his room, and Rita, his wife, had to rush up to the village to fetch a doctor. ‘And what happened?’ I say. ‘She said it was a lovely walk,’ he says.
Vinny asks if I’ve plans for the evening. I tell him I saw a place that’s showing the football later. He says he’d tag along if he was allowed, but he’s not. Vinny doesn’t mind a bit of football. He used to captain Rochdale when they were in the second division, played against Bobby Moore, even left a mark on him. Vinny asks if I play, or if I used to. I tell him that I had no composure on the ball, that I preferred to panic instead and then accidentally kick someone in the shin. I give a demonstration of what I mean. I don’t try to make it funny, but it makes Vinny laugh. He tells me he’s now got short-term memory loss on account of heading the ball so many times. ‘It was like heading a cannonball. And if you weren’t seen to be doing it twenty times a match and with a smile on your face, you were hauled off for being a wuss.’ He’s on these pills now, to help with the memory loss, but he says quite seriously and not as a joke that he can never remember to take the bloody things. He has to rely on his wife Rita, who thankfully never headed a ball in her life. And here’s Rita now. Vinny tells her to tell me how heavy the football was back then, but instead of doing that, Rita asks Vinny how he expects her to know. I ask about the book Rita’s holding. ‘It’s about a woman who loses her husband on purpose and then hooks up with her ex in Paris,’ she says. ‘See what I have to put up with?’ says Vinny. ‘And she says watching Match of the Day gives me ideas.’
18.00. After sleeping for a few hours, I go down for dinner. There’s no set seating plan, so I join Jill and a bloke called Graham from Sheffield. It’s a buffet-style affair, so I help myself to pasta and salad and then pistachio ice cream. Graham says the fella he was sat next to on the coach is stopping at another hotel and won’t be doing any of the excursions. Jill asks why and Graham explains that the fella came on the same holiday with his wife a few years back, but she died recently so he’s doing it again as a sort of pilgrimage, though he reckons he can only cope with the nostalgia up to a point. ‘There’s a million ways to grieve,’ says Jill. ‘One’s enough for me,’ says Graham.
The conversation gets to Jill’s work at the job centre in Telford. It gets there via Graham talking about Sheffield, then The Full Monty, then the demise of the steel industry and then unemployment. Jill says that when she started working at the job centre, they told her to look out for people with paint on their clothes, which was considered a sign that they were decorating on the side. Then Jill mentions someone who slashed their wrists in front of Jill’s colleague when her money was stopped. Graham says that although there are plenty who will happily have their cake and eat it, there are plenty more who could do with a bit of support but won’t go near a job centre because they think admitting you need help is admitting you’ve failed or something. ‘I think I might get some more ice cream,’ says Jill. ‘My husband liked ice cream.’
After dinner we move downstairs, where there is a bar and a man playing the keyboard and singing. Graham and I find a table, while Jill goes up to the bar to get some drinks – gin for them, coffee for me. When she gets back with the drinks, she says the Italian barman spoke English ‘like a posh Welsh schoolboy’. As I’m trying to hear in my mind’s ear what Jill’s going on about, Graham remembers an Italian boy he met on holiday in Naples some time ago who had the most horrible Lancastrian accent he’d ever heard. Turns out the Italian boy had never been to Lancashire, but his mother – also Italian – had learnt English in Blackburn and he’d got it off her. When Graham gives us an approximation of the boy’s accent, Jill says it sounds neither Italian nor Lancastrian. Graham says alright then, give us your posh Welsh schoolboy. She does so and Graham has to admit that it’s not bad. Then Graham says that I don’t sound like I’m from Portsmouth, and he knows what he’s talking about because his daughter lived there until she died at the age of 53 from smoking too much. Then he mentions that he’s got a 60-year-old son and for some reason I find the idea funny.
‘What is it?’ says Graham.
‘Nothing, nothing.’
‘Come on, spit it out.’
‘Ah, just the idea of … no it’s nothing.’
‘Come on lad!’
‘It’s just. The idea of a 60-year-old son, that’s all.’
‘Well he didn’t come out that way.’
‘I know, I know.’
‘The man’s had a life. He’s all grown up. I don’t tell him to brush his teeth.’
‘You’re right. I’m sorry.’
‘In fact he tells me to brush mine.’
Graham points to my soft drink and says that an all-inclusive holiday is a funny spot for a detox. And now that Graham thinks about it, nor was being a publican for 30 years much good for detoxing. ‘People used to say, “Give me a pint of bitter Graham and one for yourself ”, and I never learnt the knack of saying no. We say it were the good old days but it weren’t really that good. It was so smoky in my pub you couldn’t see the person next to yer. My wife didn’t smoke but she worked in the pub with me, so she might as well have done. She got lung cancer and died at 53, same age as my daughter.’
Jill shifts the subject from smoking and lung cancer to the paintings on the wall – and one in particular, a reproduction of a Picasso. Graham doesn’t think much of Picasso. He’s got nothing against him, but just doesn’t fancy his pictures. Graham prefers Lowry because he had a look at ordinary people and did ’em in a way that appealed to them same people. I tell them that my girlfriend’s a painter and Jill says, ‘Is she? Go on then, give us a look.’ I get up a painting on Jill’s phone. It’s called Love Storm and shows two young lovers embracing in a kitchen after an argument – quite a big one by the look of it. Graham has a look and says, ‘Is my nose really that big?’
19
Now there’s no whis
tling because he never comes home
I sleep like a log. An actual log. Not the type of log Jill sleeps like. Then I go down to the dining room, where I start with a bowl of prunes, a decision which causes a man wearing socks with sandals and a white vest under a leather jacket to observe, ‘They’ll teach you what your arsehole’s for.’ Of all the possible sentences to get my day up and running.
It’s hard to be sure from twenty metres, but it looks like the man’s eating prunes as well. He looks a bit like Silvio Berlusconi, the former Italian Prime Minister. His hair’s slicked back and he’s wearing a sizable gold necklace. That’ll teach me what my arsehole’s for … Tch. I’ll teach you what my – no, no I won’t. I think I’ll leave it there. I think I’ll fetch the honey.
I’m prevented from fetching the honey by Richie, a waiter, who insists on doing it for me and getting me a coffee while he’s at it. I ask Richie in my best Italian what he thinks of the area. He says in English that his parents were killed and his brothers groomed and that he lived in a war zone until being granted refuge in Italy, with the result that he’s got no complaints for the moment. Milk? Latte?
Today’s excursion is a lap of the lake. We start by heading north, towards its apex. Doing so, Danny brings us up to speed regarding the region of Lombardy. He says there were Celts here before the Romans scared them away to Wales and Cornwall and Ireland; that polenta and rice are more popular than pasta and pizza; and that Mussolini was shot just over there – in a village called Dongo.33
Benito Mussolini rose to power after the First World War. He was assisted in doing so by an army of fascist enforcers known as Blackshirts, who, it’s fair to say, weren’t known for their discretion. Mussolini’s message was a simple one – let’s make Italy great again. It was also an effective one: it carried him to the highest reaches of the State, where he consolidated his supremacy by dismantling the mechanisms that could be used to oust or undermine him. At the start of the Second World War, Italy remained neutral, but when the tide turned against the Allies, Mussolini rowed in behind Hitler. It would prove to be the last thing he rowed in behind. When Italy was taken by the Allies, Benny donned a pair of comfortable loafers and went on the run. He made it as far as Dongo, where he stopped for one coffee too many.
Because you can’t photograph such things, such stories, such events, we take pictures of the lake instead, and each other, and the jetty, and the small pleasure boats. I take a picture of a lady from Eccles (at her behest), and then ask about the cake named after her hometown, which gets us on to baking and then cooking generally. She says her husband won’t let her in the kitchen since he retired. She says he didn’t even know the house had a kitchen until a few years ago. She says his chilli con carne is terrible. She says he does the rice in the kettle. She says she doesn’t want to be emancipated if it tastes like that. But of course she’s allowed into the kitchen when there’s washing up to be done. She says it’s a murder scene after every meal – even breakfast, when they only have fruit and cereal and perhaps a yoghurt. If she’s frank, she preferred having him at work. At least he came home whistling every day. Now there’s no whistling because he never comes home – how can he when he’s always in the bleeding kitchen? I suggest he might be struggling with having less to do these days, less purpose. She says she knows he’s got nothing to do, but she just wishes he’d do it somewhere else.
Back on the coach, and back on the move, I ask Jill if she was up late last night.
‘Who told you?’ she says.
‘No one. But I take that as a yes.’
‘I was in bed by one and up by seven.’
‘And is your room alright?’
‘Oh yes. Very nice. Very operatic.’
‘And did you sleep okay?’
‘I didn’t actually.’
‘Perhaps you should keep wearing your travel pillow.’
‘I would, but it’s got a puncture.’
‘How did it get that?’
‘I’m not sure, but I think it might have been your beard.’
‘Really?’
‘I reckon you might have been getting too close.’
You know how when you stare at a word for ages and it starts to lose its meaning and sense and seem absurd and wrong? Well that’s happening now, regarding the natural environment. Everything around me has started to blur and unfold. I’m staring at this mountain and that lake and I’m thinking: what the hell even is a mountain? What the hell even is a lake? Before I’ve chance to start answering my own questions – a mountain is what happens when bits of the earth’s crust run into each other and something has to give; a lake is a big puddle – Jill is saying, ‘It’s a buzzard! It’s a buzzard!’ and the moment of quiet contemplation is lost. I ask Jill what a buzzard is exactly. She says they’re brownish and love catching voles. When I ask what a vole is exactly, Jill says, ‘Are you taking the piss?’
We round the lake’s topmost hairpin and head south to the village of Dervio, where we stop to have a look at an old church and the ruined castle beside it, whose surviving walls look brittle enough to be snapped off like bits of cracker. Danny directs us to a belvedere (nice view in Italian), where everyone starts clambering on the medieval walls and pulling themselves up by the railings, like children on a climbing frame, the better to see the view. And they’re right to, for the view’s a belter. The water is a royal blue, and the vibrant green of the hills is only darkened here and there by the shadow of clouds, while the long, surrounding summit wears a thin kerchief of snow, which might be gone within days. Someone says, ‘There’s nowt like it near Wigan.’
We stop in Lecco for a bit of lunch. The town’s at the bottom of the lake’s right leg, if it is understood as an upturned Y. There’s another upturned Y in front of me now: a young woman is straddling a young man who is sat on a lakeside bench. Her meaning in doing so – one assumes – is to let the young man know how delightful he is. They need a room this pair, two even. I reason that this must be their fourth or fifth date. Any fewer and they wouldn’t have the temerity to take such liberties, any more and they wouldn’t want to. You don’t see elder couples behaving like this. Not least because their joints couldn’t cope with some of the trigonometry.
I find Lecco’s main street and then take a side one, hoping for somewhere small and quiet and in the sun. I find the place I’m looking for. I sit at one of its three outside tables and order sparkling water and the menu del giorno, which is salami and bread, then penne puttanesca, and then ossobuco, which is a piece of veal in potato sauce. The pasta is three types of salty – it’s coming from the capers, the olives and the Parmesan, and in the final analysis, is coming too much. The best part of the meal is the bread and olive oil, and watching the locals come and go on their lunch breaks.
Ciao, Marty!
Ciao, Beppi!
Ciao, ciao!
Come sta il cane?
Perfetto, perfetto.
Come sta il donna?
Bella, bella.
Okay allora.
Allora.
Ciao, Marty!
Ciao, Beppi!
You might not get the tongue, but you get the picture. Italian small talk, street talk. At the table next to mine, the talk is less small, however: two ladies speak in whispers to protect me from their scandal. They don’t want their sins – or the sins of whoever they’re discussing – on my conscience. Paying the bill – la quenta – I see that if you fell from another planet you could land on worse spots than Lecco – among the balconies, the old stone streets and buildings, the lake, of course, and the menu del giorno and the bread and oil especially.34
Walking back to the coach, I spot an intergenerational encounter outside a café on Via Roma. Two people are sitting at a table, facing off. I see them in profile briefly, and then obliquely as I continue down the street towards the lake. I won’t assume that one is grandmother and the other granddaughter, but I will assume that one is over 60 and one is under five. The point is: they are leaning in
to one another, almost touching noses, both grinning equally – at the occasion, at their good luck, at the prospect of what’s to come. I can’t be sure they’re on good terms, but they’re definitely making it look that way. It’s enough to make you want grandchildren, or grandparents, or more grandparents, or grandparents again, and whatever that pastry is they’re sharing.
On our way back to the hotel, we stop outside George Clooney’s house. Jill is visibly and audibly excited – she even has a puff of her inhaler. And she’s not alone in her excitement. The sight of Clooney’s house has the entire coach spellbound, even the blokes. They’re using their cameras to zoom in. Someone thinks the kitchen window’s open. Someone can see a massive pepper grinder. Someone thinks they saw him through frosted glass – which means he was probably getting out of the shower. The very thought does something to Jill. I watch her inch closer to George’s perimeter. I watch her look over her shoulder to make sure a few people are looking. And then I watch her remove her bra from under her blouse and fling it over the wall into George’s garden. I ask her what she did that for. She shrugs her shoulders and says, ‘Well, I’ve plenty of others.’