My Italian Bulldozer

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Paul took a sip of his coffee.

  “I mustn’t disturb you,” said Onesto. “Not everybody comes in here to talk.”

  Paul assured him that he did not mind. “I enjoy conversation. It enables me to use my Italian—a language gets rusty, you know.” He paused. “I suppose everything we know goes that way.”

  Onesto nodded his agreement. “It certainly does. One of the subjects I teach is mathematics. The children go off on their school holidays—they’re on holiday now, of course—and they come back and they seem to have forgotten all I taught them.” He smiled. “My predecessor retired rather late. He went on and on, teaching several generations. Towards the end he found himself forgetting what he had taught the children the previous term, and they forgot it too—so nobody remembered anything.”

  Onesto picked up La Nazione. “The world,” he said, with a sigh, gesturing to a headline. “Politicians and their tricks. Wars. Floods. Bad accidents. That’s our world, isn’t it?”

  “It’s the world that people report.”

  Onesto shook his head. “They report it because that’s what people want to read. Nobody wants to read good news. Thousands of planes land safely is very dull news. Plane misses runway altogether is much better.”

  He opened a page. “You see here?” Onesto pointed to a news item at the top of the page. “This is a row about the disappearance of municipal funds in Florence. Where have the millions gone? they ask. I can tell you. Everybody can tell you. They’ve gone into the pockets of that scoundrel in the photograph. He’s the one who’s asking the question, but he’s the one who knows the answer best of all.” He made an explosive and dismissive sound. “Pah! Italy!”

  “It’s not just you,” said Paul; he was used to the self-deprecation of the Italians.

  “Perhaps not,” began Onesto. “Of course there are others…”

  Paul did not hear the rest. He had seen another headline. It was below the report on the Florentine funds, and set in smaller type. Occhidilupo Escapes.

  Onesto noticed his frown. “Something wrong?”

  Paul asked him for the newspaper. “Something there…” He took it from Onesto and began to read aloud.

  “Police authorities in Pisa revealed that Calogero Occhidilupo (38), currently under judicial investigation for multiple crimes, had escaped from his cell at Carabinieri Headquarters in the city. Occhidilupo overpowered his guard and fled through an unsecured window at the rear of the Carabinieri barracks. Extensive searches have been undertaken, including a raid on Occhidilupo’s last-known house in the Province of Siena, but these have so far proved fruitless.”

  Paul stopped reading, and looked at Onesto. “I met that man,” he said. “It’s a complicated story, but I was briefly detained—briefly and wrongfully—in Pisa after I arrived. I shared a cell with him—just for a few hours, but it was definitely him.”

  Onesto took the newspaper from him. Glancing at the photograph beneath the report, he let out a whistle. “Him!” he exclaimed.

  “He looks the part, doesn’t he?” said Paul.

  “Oh yes,” said Onesto. “He’s the real thing, all right. Every bit the traditional brigand.” He paused, and then tapped at the photograph. “He’ll be returning to his old haunts, I expect. He’s carried out every sort of crime you could name—and some you couldn’t.” He nodded in the direction of the road below. “Pisa was a bit off his usual beat, I think. They picked him up because there had been a spate of robberies over there.” He paused. “He has a woman down near San Antimo. That’s the place they’ll have searched.”

  Paul listened with growing fascination. How could they have allowed Occhidilupo to escape from the very heart of the Carabinieri barracks? And how could somebody as immediately recognisable as this bandit expect to avoid recapture in a society as watchful of others as rural Italy? “So where do you think he’ll be?”

  The teacher thought for a moment. “In the woods,” he said. “He’ll have found somewhere to hide. If wild boars can do it—and there are plenty of them—then a wily creature like Occhidilupo will have no trouble doing the same.”

  Onesto made a gesture towards the door—towards the piazza and beyond. It was a gesture that seemed to say Here we’re safe; out there, though…But then something seemed to occur to him. “They could get the dogs after him,” he mused. “Plenty of dogs round here.”

  Paul had seen dogs—small, pampered dogs of fussy breed—being walked in the street by their owners, but he could imagine Occhidilupo making short work of them.

  “I’ve seen them…”

  Onesto cut him short. “Oh, not those dogs,” he said dismissively. “Not them.” He went on to explain that people kept dogs—much larger dogs—to take part in boar hunts. Boars damaged the vineyards, he said, and every so often there would be an organised hunt, with scores of local men taking part.

  “It’s a very noisy occasion,” Onesto continued. “You hear the howling for miles around. The dogs love it, of course—it’s what they live for. Dogs are very easily caught up in human enthusiasms. And they’re so trusting—aren’t they? We can lead them astray very easily.”

  They both fell silent. Then Paul asked, “Will he…strike again?” He knew he sounded melodramatic, but the whole story of Occhidilupo had a surrealistic, unlikely tone to it. Did brigands still exist? It seemed that they did—at least in Italy. And every country had its outlaws: India had its dacoits, the Malacca Straits its pirates, and America its Mob. Occhidilupo, perhaps, was a universal human type.

  Onesto answered in a matter-of-fact way. “Yes, undoubtedly. Somebody will stumble across him and he’ll…” He made a throat-slitting gesture.

  Paul drew in his breath. “Really?”

  “But naturally.”

  The silence returned.

  Onesto folded his newspaper. “So be careful,” he said.

  —

  Paul returned to the hotel, unsettled by his conversation with Onesto. Of course he had enjoyed the opportunity to talk to a local—particularly to somebody who would be as well-informed as a schoolteacher—but the discussion of Occhidilupo had introduced an ominous note. And then there had been the mention of hunting dogs…Paul imagined what it was like to hear their braying as they led their owners through the woods; surely one of the most frightening sounds to the human ear, the sound of animals in pursuit of their prey—especially when the prey happened to be oneself.

  He had already arranged his day, conscious that this was not a holiday, but a working trip. He had assured Gloria that the manuscript would be ready for the copy-editor by the time he returned, and he intended to keep that promise. Three hours at his desk were to be followed by a visit to a vineyard. This had been set up through a telephone conversation the previous evening with a contact in the Consorzio, the body that ran the affairs of the wine producers and organised visits for any wine writers on a pilgrimage to the area. Paul had allocated twelve pages of the new book to the wines of the region and had already filled six with an account of the growth of their reputation in the last decades of the twentieth century. This was to precede a more personal section—an account of the experience of a typical wine producer of the region, Antonio Bartolo del Bosco. When the Consorzio official had suggested the estate, Paul had demurred. “I’m sure he runs a very good place,” he said as tactfully as he could, “but might it not be better to visit one of the better-known producers?” He was suddenly aware of his tactlessness. “No offence intended to Signor Barto…”

  “Bartolo del Bosco.”

  This was followed by a brief silence at the other end of the telephone, and by a revelation.

  “He’s my cousin.”

  “Of course, of course. Well, I very much look forward to meeting him. And…and I’m sure he’s very typical.”

  “Yes, he is.” The official continued: “You’ll like him, you know. Everybody does—and his wine’s much better than some…than some unkind people say.” There was a further pause. “He’s from a family
of great distinction and immense antiquity, you know. You’ll see.”

  The hours at the desk passed quickly. There was more work for him to do than he had imagined: reading through his manuscript in review, he realised that large sections of it had a heaviness about it, a dullness, that had not been present in his previous books. He suspected that this was probably a result of his state of mind at the time. The book had been started before Becky left, but he had not been far into it when the relationship began to unravel. If there was no sparkle in the manuscript, and that, the press had noted, was the hallmark of his books—a certain infectious delight in the discovery of new places and the food and wine that went with them—then that absence must be down to the absence of precisely that curiosity and engagement in his private life. But how did one add sparkle to a life from which that very quality had drained away? By coming here, he thought; by coming here to Montalcino and allowing the beauty of the Tuscan countryside to work its magic; by doing exactly what he was now doing.

  He turned his head slightly to look out of the window. He knew that windows could be the enemy of writers, being places out of which to gaze while you should instead be working. But not this window; this seemed to have the opposite effect, as the view it afforded of the hillside below, and beyond that of distant hills and sky, lifted his spirits, allowing him to approach his manuscript with renewed enthusiasm. He would somehow capture the feel of his surroundings—the quiet satisfaction of life on the land, the rhythms, the sense of history—of things having been for centuries the way they were now. All of that was tangible enough when you walked about the streets of Montalcino, and if he could somehow convey that when he wrote about Tuscan cuisine, then he would have achieved what he wanted. And he would do it.

  He looked at the page of typescript before him, and drew a line through it. Then, in the margin, he wrote: Start again, taking delight in the heroic firmness of the words. These were not the words of somebody who was procrastinating—they were the words of one who was going to finish what he had come to finish, and finish it well. With his laptop computer waiting obediently, he began to type: “The point about wild mushrooms is that they will grow where they want to grow, not where you want them to grow. In the woods that climb up the hill of a small Tuscan village, you may meet people over the weekend, sometimes whole families, foraging for the mushrooms they suspect are hiding under a covering of leaves, behind a slight ridge in the ground…” Yes! It was exactly the right beginning. He closed his eyes and for a moment imagined the Italian mushroom hunters combing the woods around Montalcino; he saw a man crouching over a find, the fungus in his hands, dusting at it with the small brush that comes at the end of an Italian mushroom-hunting penknife, before popping his trophy into a shoulder bag. This was the texture of the life that he would describe in Paul Stuart’s Tuscan Table—a life led in close proximity to the gifts of nature, to the produce that would end up on that very table. He wrote a note to himself: Mushroom, mushroom knife with brush…

  He worked for slightly longer than the three hours he had planned. When he heard the tolling of the bell from the church below, he was surprised by how quickly time had passed. Yet he had written more than he had hoped and rose from his desk with a sense of achievement. He had pinned a map of the surrounding area to the wall, and now he consulted this to find the precise location of the Castello Riccio estate. They had given him general instructions over the telephone as to how to find it; it was, they said, not far away at all, a short distance down the road to Sant’Angelo in Colle. Now, however, the map told a different story, and Paul realised that what he imagined would be a walk of half an hour or so, manageable even in the midday heat, was likely to take a good few hours on foot.

  He thought about the bulldozer. His earlier idea of using it as his main means of getting about had faded, and he had been wondering about taxis. There was a village taxi service—he had seen the car in question parked outside a vegetable shop—but if he resorted to that as a means of getting out to Castello Riccio, then he would either have to walk all the way back or, at the end of his visit, summon the taxi. The problem was that the taxi could turn out to be unreliable, or hard to contact, or disinclined to make the journey. Not all taxi drivers, Paul had discovered, actually wanted to take passengers to their destination; some of them, he felt, were in it for the arguments, or the opportunity to pontificate, or for the sheer pleasure of driving past those trying to summon them at the road edge.

  He made up his mind. What was the point of having a bulldozer if you were not going to make at least some use of it? He needed to get around in order to finish his book, and that meant he would have to use what transport he had; people could stare if they wished; he would use the bulldozer with conviction.

  He saw Ella on his way out.

  “So, you’re off on your researches?” she remarked.

  “Yes. Castello Riccio. A wine place. You know it?”

  His question was answered with a strange noise. It might have been speech—perhaps a rare word in the local dialect, an obscure shibboleth Paul would never know; or it could have been a simple clearing of the throat.

  He waited for something more to be said, but Ella remained silent.

  “Well,” said Paul at last, “that’s what I’m doing.”

  This prompted Ella to say something further. “Poor Tonio. So sad.”

  Paul raised an eyebrow. At least Tonio was less of a mouthful than Antonio Bartolo del Bosco.“Why? Why do you say ‘sad’?”

  She began to explain, but broke off, and finished with a shrug. “He tries,” she said.

  Paul waited for her to expand on this, but she looked at her watch, and smiled. “Books need to be written—and the hotel needs to be cleaned.” She paused. “Will we see you for dinner?”

  Paul nodded. “I hope so.”

  “Fagioli con salsiccia?” she asked.

  “Perfect,” said Paul. Beans with sausage would be just right at the end of a working day—and he would bring it into his chapter the following morning. “Cucina povera,” he would write. “The poor kitchen. At the heart of this Tuscan tradition of plain cooking lie beans in all their simplicity. And what better than a simple dish of beans and strong, home-cured sausage, washed down with a glass of Chianti while the sun sets on the distant hills and the last of the homing birds dart across the sky…”

  She thought of something. “If I give you something for Tonio—a cake, a simple castagnaccio—would you mind taking it to him? You’ll be driving there, I take it?”

  Paul hesitated. “Yes.” He did not need to explain. And it was true; he would be driving. “Yes, I’d be delighted.”

  “Poor man,” she muttered as she went off into the kitchen to collect the cake. “Tonio, I mean. Not you. Tonio. Poor man.”

  You Can Never Eat Enough Garlic

  He made his way to the car park. From the road circling the town walls he looked down on the neat line of parked cars; there at the end, in its specially created space, was the bulldozer. He paused and took in the sight, unable to stop himself grinning. Whatever disadvantages there were to driving around Italy on a bulldozer, there was the undoubted pleasure of having a story to tell in the future. You may not believe this, but I travelled around Tuscany on a bulldozer…People would be incredulous, but he would make sure he had a photograph to prove it. He would get somebody to take a picture of him at the controls, perhaps with the blade lowered, to show that he had actually used it for what it was intended. He might even use it in his book—the author in Tuscany, on his bulldozer…Author photographs were predictable, and often dull, showing the writer at his desk or, in the case of cookery books, at the chopping board; this would be refreshingly different.

  As he approached the entrance to the car park, he saw something that caused him concern. A uniformed attendant, a young woman sporting a white-topped cap at a jaunty angle, was walking along the lines of parked cars, peering at the tickets that the drivers had put out for display. She was paying special a
ttention to one car in particular, and now she extracted a pad from her bag and began to write. Paul hesitated. If he went in now, she would see him getting onto the bulldozer and might well question him about it. Perhaps she had already issued him with a ticket, or had even called the police to report the moving of the sign. He stood for some time in indecision, as he thought of another possibility. If he were to start the bulldozer within the next few minutes, the attendant would still be engaged in finding her victim and might not bother with him. He made up his mind and walked quickly and purposefully through the car park gate.

  He did not look at the attendant, but busied himself with climbing up into the bulldozer cabin and starting the engine. It fired immediately. Then he glanced over towards the attendant and saw she was looking in his direction. As their eyes met, she raised her hand in a cheerful wave. He waved back and engaged first gear.

  He had studied a map before leaving the hotel and had located Castello Riccio. The estate lay just off the road that followed the ridge of hills, dropping slightly as it neared Sant’Angelo in Colle. This small village, perched on its own hill, was at the south-west end of the Brunello zone of production, and was far quieter and less popular with visitors than Montalcino itself. Now, in the shimmering heat of the early afternoon, it was blue, as distant hills might appear in a watercolour. When it first came into view, Paul stopped for a while, steering the bulldozer to the verge of the road. Switching off the engine, he sat in the cab, enjoying the sights and sounds of the countryside. The vegetation at the roadside was scrub bush—wild brambles, small shrubs, and a sort of creeping vine with vivid heart-shaped leaves—but beyond that, only a few yards away, was an olive grove sloping down to a small farmhouse in the distance.

  The air was filled with the insistent protests of insects. This sound rose and fell in waves; at its highest point it was almost deafening, like a persistent and incorrigible natural tinnitus, but it would ebb into a background hum before rising once more in protest. A couple of cars passed, but otherwise Paul was on his own.