My Italian Bulldozer

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Now the blade was only a few inches off the ground. Paul lifted his hand from the lever altogether and put the bulldozer into gear. Moving with the blade lowered gave a slightly different sensation to the driver, making him feel as if the bulldozer was leaning forward; but it was responsive enough and was easily manoeuvred into position immediately in front of the concrete block and its sign.

  Paul took a deep breath. What he was about to do was illegal, and he could not recall ever deliberately breaking the law before, or at least breaking it in this calculated way. And breaking one’s own laws was one thing; breaking the laws of a foreign country was quite another. He wondered what offence he was committing. He was aware of Italy’s Criminal Code—he knew about it from his days in Florence; he had shared a room with a law student who always seemed to have his nose buried in the Codice Penale. What did the code say about unlawfully moving concrete blocks that were the property of the Comune di Montalcino—and doing so with the intention of avoiding a legitimate charge?

  He knew from reading the newspapers that those who disappeared into the maw of the Italian criminal justice system could be trapped there for years, even when their offence was a petty one. There were endless procedural complications, often of Byzantine complexity, and understood only by lawyers—and not by all lawyers at that. There were appeals that dragged on and on, working their way up through layer after layer of courts—and frequently lasting for decades. And at the end of the day, unless you were a politician and for this reason exempt from punishment, there were Italian jails where you would be surrounded by people like Occhidilupo, who would be related by an elaborate system of cousinage to everybody else in the prison, but not to you. Of course very few people were actually incarcerated: the Italian justice system allowed sentences to be served at home, and if home were a villa on the Amalfi coast, or a bucolic farmhouse in an olive grove, then that would have to do, and for many it did.

  And then there was the moral question. Was it right to move a public sign, even a very short distance? Parking regulations might seem petty, but they were part of the system of rules that made human society possible—a clause in the social contract without which, as Hobbes had warned, life would be nasty, brutish, and short. Paul thought of Hobbes, and imagined him watching him reproachfully, ready to witness yet another infringement. He sighed. He had not asked for this bulldozer—he had taken it solely to avoid giving offence to the Professor and Claudio, both of whom were patently decent people only trying to help. So if one were to weigh his actions in some notional scales of justice, surely a minor twisting—or, in this case perhaps, pushing—of a rule would be offset by the greater good of not hurting the feelings of others.

  And then the solution occurred to him. The answer, when it presented itself, struck him as morally unassailable: he would not try to evade payment of the parking charge—rather he would calculate what it would cost each day were he to pay it at the ticket machine. Then, having worked that out, he would multiply that figure by the appropriate number of days (allowing for Sundays, during which parking was free) and give that exact sum of money to the Comune, leaving it in an envelope under their door before he left. In that way he would not be depriving the town of its due.

  He smiled to himself. That was it: nobody, not even Thomas Hobbes, could fault him; nobody could accuse him of anything criminal. The moving of the sign would be no more than a temporary expedient that would, in the result, lead to the civic authorities collecting more money than they otherwise would. This was because if he did not move the sign and went off to park his bulldozer beyond the town boundaries, that income would be lost to the public purse. So doing what he was proposing to do was not only convenient to him, but an act of generosity to the town itself. There was a useful word for that—one that he remembered from his schooldays, when he would sometimes page through the dictionary to find words to display in essays, like trophies: it would be a supererogatory act. He had loved that word, and now he could use it again after those long-ago sixteen-year-old ramblings. Supererogatory: more than was required by duty…it was a perfect fit.

  His conscience now clear, Paul inched the bulldozer forward. There was a slight jolt as the blade encountered the concrete, but then slowly, and with an odd rasping sound, the block began to move. The pole swayed a bit, and Paul was momentarily concerned that it might fall over, but it soon steadied itself. Then he stopped. He had shifted the notice about three yards and this created just enough room for him to reverse the bulldozer into the space opened up. It was the perfect place—shaded by a tree and in no way impeding the entry of other cars into the parking lot.

  He raised the blade before switching off the engine. Once again there was a satisfying whirring sound from the hydraulic system as the blade lifted. Everything worked, and Paul felt a sudden affection for this curious vehicle that had brought him to his destination. He decided there was a lot to be said for bulldozers. They were honest vehicles—honest in the sense that they did not purport to be anything other than what they were. They were not about luxury or speed; they did what they were meant to do and no more. They made no statement; they said nothing about the people who drove them. They earned their living and made no demands.

  The car park was still deserted as Paul followed the path to the town above. He was travelling fairly light even if he was planning to spend some weeks away from home, and had fitted all his clothes and personal effects into one soft-sided suitcase and all the papers and files for his book into another. Now, balanced with a suitcase in each hand, he began to make his way up to the road circling the town walls and that led to his hotel. He paused halfway, putting the suitcases down for a few minutes while he recovered his breath and looked down the hillside. He saw olive trees. He saw more hills, blue and distant, and a line of cypresses on the horizon. He looked up at the sky, empty and filled with a lambent blue. He wanted to break into song, but did not, of course, although nobody minds—or is surprised—if you break into song in Italy; and so he continued his short journey, ten minutes later finding himself standing at the door of the Fiore. Somewhere inside, in the cool darkness of the hotel, a woman was singing. He listened: her voice had the purity that comes with being an amateur who has had a smattering of training; he did not want her to stop.

  There was a sign that read Reception, and beneath it a desk. He put down his suitcases and looked about him. On the wall behind the desk was a framed picture, brightly coloured, of the Montalcino coat of arms. It was an indication of the civic pride that sustains every small Italian town—except those few that have given up because everyone has gone away. Campanilismo—the devotion to the local, often exaggerated, was the patriotism that counted in Italy, outdoing the claims of any wider national feeling. My campanile, my bell tower, is bigger and more glorious than yours…

  “Buon giorno…”

  A woman had appeared almost unnoticed, and was greeting him with a smile. The singing had stopped.

  “I was enjoying your song,” he said. “Maremma amara?”

  She clapped her hands in delight. “You knew it! And you speak Italian!”

  “Poorly.”

  “Nonsense. You could be taken for one of us.”

  He made a gesture of acceptance. “You’re very kind. But it’s a rather sad song, that one, isn’t it?”

  “I wasn’t feeling sad, I was just remembering how we learned it at school. Everybody does—at least around here. And Maremma is no longer the hard place it used to be—so that makes it a little less sad.”

  They moved on to his reservation. “You’re going to be with us for a good long time,” she said, looking at the register. “When they made the booking for you, I wondered why you would want to spend so long here.”

  It was a polite way of enquiring, and he told her. “I’m working on something.” He made a scribbling movement. “Writing.”

  She nodded. “We often have writers here. I think they enjoy the peacefulness.”

  “Yes, of course.”
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br />   “And our wine…”

  He laughed. “Perhaps the two go together.”

  She filled in a form and handed it to him. “We’ve put you in the best room. It’s one that looks down over the valley.”

  “You’re very kind,” he said.

  She showed him to his room. As they climbed the stairs, she asked him whether he had a car. “Since you’re staying for so long, we might be able to arrange somewhere for you to park.”

  “I have something,” he said. “But I’ve found somewhere for it.” It was too complicated to explain; he could hardly say, “I have a bulldozer.”

  They entered the room. The window was open, the air clean and cool, freshened by the several hundred metres that lay between the town and the floor of the valley below.

  “We have given you a table,” she said, pointing to a simple desk that had been placed against a wall. “As the woman who made the reservation asked.” She hesitated. “Your wife, perhaps?”

  Paul shook his head. “My editor.”

  “Your wife has stayed in Scotland? She doesn’t like Italy?”

  “No wife,” said Paul. “I’m single.”

  She looked apologetic.

  “Sort of,” Paul continued. “I was with somebody, but then…”

  She touched his arm lightly. “I’m sure there’ll be someone else. All in good time.”

  He thanked her for providing the table. “This will be a wonderful place to work,” he said. “This view…I’ll have to be careful that I don’t sit here all day and look out over the valley.” He paused. “You didn’t give me your name.”

  “I’m Elena Sabatino,” she said. “Everybody calls me Ella, which was the name of my grandmother too. My daughter’s also called Ella. The women in our family have been Ella all the way back. Right back to the time when the Florentines…”

  At the mention of the Florentines, he lowered his eyes. “A terrible time,” he said.

  She gave him a searching glance. “So you understand?”

  He nodded. “I’ve read the history books.” He had, but was a bit hazy on the details—and the dates. The Florentines had laid siege to Montalcino in…when was it? The sixteenth century? Yesterday, in Italian terms.

  She shook her head. “It was a long time ago, and people should forget. But they don’t, you know.”

  “So much has happened in history.”

  It was an anodyne remark, but it served its purpose, and the Florentines were temporarily forgotten. Ella moved on to a discussion of the times when meals would be served and the arrangements for the opening of the front door should he come in late at night.

  “I doubt if I’ll be in late,” he said.

  She shrugged. “You never know. This is a place where the unexpected happens.”

  “Of course.”

  She continued, “Which is what makes life interesting, would you not say, dottore?”

  “Please, not dottore, Paul. Or, if you wish, Paolo.” He understood Italian formality, but he found the constant use of dottore tiresome. It was a title given to any graduate, or to anybody whom people suspected might be a graduate. In fact, as a friend had explained to him when he first went to live in Florence, dottore sometimes seemed to be a courtesy title for anybody who wore glasses…“And it’s better to err on the side of caution,” the same friend had said. “Always address a tenente as Capitano; always address a conte as Principe. If demotion always hurts, promotion invariably pleases.”

  She handed him the key. “You’ll be very happy here, Paolo. People usually are.”

  A Simple Dish of Beans and Strong, Home-Cured Sausage

  He awoke the next day to the tolling of a bell. The sound came in waves, growing slightly louder and then receding, as if the person puling at the bell rope was tiring, summoning up energy, and then returning to the task with renewed vigour. Paul unlatched the wooden shutters and let the daylight flood into his room. Opening the window itself, he filled his lungs with air that bore the scents of the morning, of trees and vines, of the stone of the houses warmed by the sun, of wood smoke from a fire somewhere. It was the scent of place, the subtle signature of an entire landscape. It was the smell of Tuscany.

  The bell made its final announcement—a last, half-hearted strike that was followed by silence. This was broken by a sudden burst of song from a bird concealed in the foliage below the window. He looked down: directly beneath him, two floors lower, was the hotel garden. This was an irregularly shaped piece of land that dropped sharply down to the next building, of which only the red-tiled roof was visible. Thereafter the village continued its descent of the hill until it reached the strip of olive trees marking the start of the vineyards.

  He saw the church off to the side, its bell tower projecting above a cluster of rooftops. He remembered being told on his last visit that it was disused, and had been acquired by one of the town’s quarters as a venue for communal dinners and meetings. That was not an undignified fate for a church, he thought, and the bell, at least, had survived—a reminder of a time when the divisions of the day were marked by peals. And to such a sound he had now awoken—it was infinitely better, he felt, than the electronic buzz of an alarm clock.

  Ella had told him that breakfast would be served in the small dining room at the foot of the stairs, but that if he preferred to go elsewhere, the café in the main piazza would have fresh pastries from the town bakery. He had decided on that, and after a quick shower in the tiny bathroom attached to his room, he made his way out into the street. On a corner directly opposite the hotel a statue of the Madonna, set back into a wall, looked down on passers-by with that other-worldly, slightly dreamy gaze that Marian figures affect so effortlessly. At the foot of this figure, just low enough for somebody to reach on tiptoes, was a small shelf for offerings of flowers. A tiny wilted posy, the sort of thing a child might pick, lay on this shelf along with a square of delicate printed tissue paper in which amarettini are wrapped: an offering, too, perhaps, that the Madonna had discreetly consumed overnight.

  He remembered the Caffé Fiaschetteria Italiana from his last visit. The Art Deco ornamentation of the café, with its red velvet benches and ornate mirrors, was not what one expected in a Tuscan hilltop town, but had made it the pride of Montalcino’s citizens; Florence, Venice might have their treasures, but so do we, and as long as you have one fine place to sit and review the world, then that will suffice. You cannot be in more than one place at a time, can you?

  He found a table indoors, as those directly outside the café were occupied by early arrivals. Two groups of visitors, German and Swedish, were already ensconced under the umbrellas, and were watching the public strolling with which Italy begins the day, the precursor of the evening ritual of the passeggiata. Those inside seemed more local: a couple of men who had interrupted their work in the vineyards to come into town for equipment and a chance to speak to friends; a woman in business dress, a briefcase of papers by her side; a late-teenage boy and his girlfriend engaged in urgent, whispered conversation. Paul looked at the teenagers; the boy looked worried, as the girl’s gestures made clear her displeasure. He wondered about the boy’s offence: insensitivity, perhaps; looking at other girls; not returning a phone call. There were so many ways a relationship could go wrong, and the young man was probably only now discovering them.

  He ordered a cup of milky coffee and an almond croissant. The pleasure he had felt on waking up that morning—the sheer delight of being in a place like this, free of the restraints of home—had not faded. If anything, it was stronger. The day stretched ahead of him—a day in which he could please himself as to what he did. He knew that he had to work—he had told himself that he must put in at least three hours a day at his desk—but for the rest he was at liberty to walk, to read, or simply to sit in a café if he so wished. Italy was full of people who simply sat in cafés, he reminded himself, and few of them seemed to be unhappy or anxious—apart from young men, perhaps, whose girlfriends were now shaking a finger in admoniti
on.

  His coffee and croissant arrived, and at the same time a man came in and sat down at the table next to his. Paul glanced at him and nodded a greeting. The Fiaschetteria Italiana might have sophisticated ambitions, but this was still a small town, and people greeted one another in the way of small towns everywhere.

  His neighbour was a man in his late forties, dressed smartly but not in a way that suggested he was bound for work. He had a copy of the newspaper La Nazione, which he laid down on the table with a sigh.

  “A fine day,” said the man. He spoke cautiously, articulating the words with care.

  Paul looked out through the doorway. “Not a cloud,” he said.

  The response caused relief. “You speak Italian…But may I ask where are you from?”

  Paul told him.

  “I shall never get to Scotland,” said the man, rather wistfully. “I am a great devotee of Lucia di Lammermoor, but I shall never get to Scotland.”

  Paul smiled. “You never know.”

  This brought a shaking of the head. “No, I can’t get away from Italy—from here. I have aged relatives, you see—they live here in Montalcino, in Siena itself, down in Grosseto—all over the place, in fact. I am the one they telephone every day, never my brother.” He paused. “I should introduce myself. I am Fellini—Onesto Fellini. That is my burden, I’m afraid.”

  Paul was tactful. “I see nothing…”

  “Oh no, I’m afraid it is not the easiest of names. Onesto is usually a surname in Italy, but these things migrate. And Fellini is common enough, but I still think of Federico Fellini and his films. If some famous person has your name, you’re always in his shadow. Always.”

  Paul shrugged. “I didn’t think of him when you gave me your name.”

  “The difficulty,” continued Onesto, “is that I’m the local schoolteacher—or one of them. I’m the principal of the school, you see, and children find a name like Onesto very amusing.”