by Angela Petch
It was easy to pour out his troubles to Giselda. He told her how unhappy he was at school, about the bullying and tormenting by his classmates. He told her he didn’t want to go to his school anymore and that if his parents made him he would run away again. They wanted him to be a famous tennis player but he hated all the training and he much preferred the idea of working with animals and becoming a vet when he was older. She listened without interrupting once, sitting still on her stone bench, hands clasped in her lap, her head inclined to one side like a little bird.
When he had finished and brushed away his tears with his sleeve, she stood up and together they tidied the remains of his breakfast into a basket.
‘Come and meet Pasquale,’ she said. ‘He’ll cheer you up, but he’ll probably tell you to fuck off.’
Davide grinned. He was absolutely forbidden to use that expression and had only heard Babbo say it once, when a man came down to the river to wash his hair with shampoo under the waterfall. He was very impressed that the old lady hadn’t even hesitated or apologised before saying it.
As they wandered over to her large house, she told him it would be best if they phoned his parents, for by now they would be frantic with worry. She turned to face him, tilting his face up, one hand under his chin.
‘Listen, dear child. Be proud of who you are,’ she said. ‘Be yourself. When I was a young lady – and I know you probably can’t imagine me young – I went against who I was and instead went along with what everybody else wanted me to be.’
Seeing his puzzlement, she explained. ‘I was in love with a young man from the village, you see. A special man. Strong and beautiful, inside and out. He adored animals and plants, like me, and used to wander about the countryside with his pockets full of chestnuts and walnuts to push into the ground wherever he thought there should be a tree growing.’
She pointed to the woods on the slopes above her house. ‘Next time you go for a walk up there, take a good look around you. Many of those trees were planted by him. My parents didn’t think he was good enough and forbade me to marry him. They wanted me to find somebody suitable and boring, like a doctor or a high flying civil servant and I was obedient to their wishes. Life was different in those days.’
She shook her head before continuing. ‘But look at me now, Davide. All alone, with no children to take all this on.’ She gestured to the land around them. ‘It’s just me and my cats and a blasphemous parrot. I’ve always been different but my beautiful young man understood me and accepted me for myself. We were kindred spirits and I should have followed my heart and married him.’
She sighed as they made their way into her house. ‘What I’m trying to tell you is, concentrate on being yourself and don’t worry what others think or say about you.’
She tugged on her stringy plaits. ‘Here’s another silly example. The hairdresser in Badia – lovely as she is – is always going on at me to cut these off and to dye my hair and have a nice perm.’ She laughed. ‘I think I continue to wear my plaits to prove a point. To say – this is me and take me as I am.’
He smiled at her and she continued, ‘You tell me your mother was brought up in England. Well, ask her about Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I studied that play at school, so she’s bound to have as well. Polonius tells us something you should take heed of.’
Giselda closed her eyes, clasped her hands together and recited in English: ‘ “This above all, to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
Now, isn’t that just so clever?’ she asked him, opening her eyes and peering at him.
Davide couldn’t quite understand all the words, which didn’t make much sense to him and the way she pronounced English in a funny way made it even harder. And he couldn’t imagine her without her plaits either.
Chapter 14
Inside Giselda’s house
‘Let’s go inside now and contact your parents. I don’t possess a mobile phone or computer. Just an old-fashioned telephone.’
Davide followed Giselda down a short path through beech woods to her large house. At one stage she bent to pick up a porcini mushroom, brushing aside the leaves around it and leaving a smaller one to grow.
‘This will do perfectly for my lunch,’ she said, ‘sliced up in an omelette. By the way, young man. Never put your gathered mushrooms into horrid plastic bags…’
‘Why not?’
‘You should always use a basket so the mushroom spores fall through the wicker and allow for more mushrooms to grow for another day.’
He resolved to tell this to Babbo. They usually took a plastic bag on their hunts but he didn’t want to admit that.
‘When we go inside, remind me to show you my special mushroom knife,’ she added. ‘It has a brush on one end to clean off soil and spores.’
They entered through a wooden door set into an arched stone framework with her surname,“Chiozzi”, chiseled between intricate patterns of cows and sheep.
‘That was done for me by a clever young man called Valentino. He used to be the chief stonemason for San Marino but he was rather too fond of red wine and he died young. Such a waste!’
He followed her up a stone spiral staircase, the first ten steps holding huge baskets filled with pine cones, interesting shaped stones and large seed heads. Half way up she paused at a long thin window. She was out of breath and he waited politely until she was able to speak.
‘I think my architect was very clever, don’t you?’ she said, pointing to the window. ‘Take a look and tell me it’s the ideal view to help you pause while you get your second wind…’
He stood on tip toe to look out. The panes were grubby and a cobweb hung across one corner like a tattered net curtain, blocking the view. He lifted his hand to brush it away.
‘Don’t!’ she shouted. ‘How would you like it if a great giant hand swooped away hours and hours of your work in one careless movement?’
‘But you asked me to look at the view and I can’t see a thing!’
‘Oh, never mind, you weren’t to know. But a cobweb is a thing of beauty to me. One of the joys in my life is to go for a walk after it’s rained and the sun comes out. Spiders’ webs are like diamond catchers – with raindrops glistening like tiny precious stones inside the most complex patterns. Spiders are so clever, don’t you agree?’
Davide hadn’t really thought about spiders being intelligent and he knew Mamma had a thing about cleaning webs away from the beams wherever she saw one. Giselda was quite different from anybody he’d ever met.
At the top of the stairs was another arched door. All round the handle and on the frame were scratch marks which she told him her cats had made. ‘They want to come in and be with me when I sit in here and I do let them sometimes but I have so many precious documents and there are so many cats and kittens. I have to say ‘no’ sometimes.
She opened the door to her study. There were books and papers everywhere. The shelves were spilling over with them and on one armchair books were piled so high on the seat, it was impossible to sit anywhere. A precarious pile of encyclopaedias propped up a chair with three legs and not a single surface of any piece of furniture was clutter-free.
A loud squawk made Davide jump and when this was followed by, ‘Good afternoon, what time of day do you call this, you wanker?’ he burst out laughing.
‘Be quiet, Pasquale. You’re only showing off because I have a visitor,’ Giselda wagged her fingers at a green and red parrot in a cage hanging by the window.
‘Willy, shit, fart, arse,’ answered Pasquale, much to Davide’s delight.
‘He’ll be quiet in a minute. I’ll just let him get it out of his system. Try to ignore him, please,’ Giselda said, turning her back on the bird.
‘Bossy old cow, shut the fuck up, shut up…’
Giselda put a finger to her mouth, warning Davide not to say anything. She pulled a stone from a shelf which held a variety of objects including a cracked coffee cup, the tail
of a squirrel and a piece of tree trunk shaped like a bent old woman.
‘I found this stone down by the river Marecchia. Just look at how marvellous nature is.’ She thrust it into his hands. ‘It’s a false fossil. You can see why. It looks like a pressed flower but those patterns have been created by water seeping into the rock.’
Another stone had outlines over its smooth surface resembling the outlines of an ancient city. The sort of background found on a Christmas card, Davide thought, depicting the houses in Bethlehem.
‘Wow, that’s really cool,’ he said, returning it carefully to the shelf.
One wall of the sitting room was completely covered with photographs.
‘Let me introduce you to my family,’ she said, her arms open as if to embrace the black-and-white framed figures. She pointed to one of the larger pictures. ‘This is my grandfather – Nonno Ubaldo. Isn’t he the most handsome man you’ve ever seen?’
She leaned towards a fuzzy, sepia photo of a middle-aged man sporting a battered felt hat and thick cords, a pointer curled at his feet. She blew the image a kiss.
‘He was famous for refusing to hunt because he loved animals, but he also knew everything there was to know about hunting in these parts. Just look at his wonderful moustache. Men don’t seem to like growing them like that anymore, do they?’
The moustache was very long and droopy, giving Ubaldo the look of a melancholy hound. Davide understood perfectly why this fashion was no longer popular. It would get in the way – dip into food, get caught in zips and all manner of things – but, once again, he didn’t have the heart to say this to Giselda. He guessed she was happier living with the ways of the past.
‘Wanker, wanker, silly old wanker,’ squawked Pasquale and Davide tried not to giggle.
Giselda threw a cloth over his cage. ‘It would take all day to tell you the names of my whole family,’ she said, moving as far away from Pasquale as possible, ‘so I’ll leave that to another time. First we have to find my telephone. It’s in this room somewhere. Let’s start our hunt now.’
Davide made for an occasional table at the side of the book-laden settee, moving aside a shoe box to see if the phone might be underneath.
‘Careful, do be careful…that box contains one of my most treasured possessions,’ Giselda said, taking the box from him. She held up a crude necklace threaded with lumpy brown beads. ‘Guess what this is.’
Davide had absolutely no idea but took a guess. ‘Something a child made for you?’
‘No, try again.’
‘Something made in Africa or India, given to you as a present from somebody who went there on holiday?’
She laughed. ‘No. I never get presents. I can see I shall have to enlighten you.’ She held the unusual piece of jewellery close to her heart while she told him it was a piece she had made herself as a young woman when she had had to go away to Florence for two years to work as a teacher.
‘I didn’t want to go one little bit. I’d qualified as a primary school teacher and hoped to find a job locally. But no such luck! I hate big cities. How can one begin to compare living in a polluted city to breathing this wonderful mountain air of ours?’
She sat down on a pile of books while she talked. ‘I made this to remind myself of home. In moments when I longed to be back here at Viamaggio, I would get out my necklace and hold on to it and then I could pretend I was back in my beloved home, surrounded by nature and far away from filthy cars and motor bikes - and filthy people.’ She paused. ‘I moulded the beads from rabbit droppings and soil, Davide, from my land.’
She laughed at his bemused expression. ‘In that way,’ she explained, ‘I had my very own unique talisman created from mountain earth, plants and animal.’
She returned her unusual jewellery to its shoe box and pushed it under the settee. ‘Even though I’m safe now back here, I keep it to remind me how lucky I am.’
Davide didn’t know what to say. He thought she was dotty but he liked her and he wasn’t frightened of her. ‘Where do you suggest I should look for the phone?’ he asked instead.
‘Well, that’s a very daft question. If I knew where to look, then we wouldn’t be searching, would we?’
They continued to move papers and books about. Davide lifted the lid from a tall basket and yelped when he saw its contents.
‘Ah, you’ve found Pinocchio the pine marten,’ Giselda said, lifting a stuffed animal into her arms. ‘He was such a good friend, God rest his little soul.’
Davide peered at the cat-like mammal, its glass eyes shining too brightly for a dead creature and put out his hand to touch it. A whiff of decomposition lingered in the room.
‘I stuffed him myself…I wouldn’t trust him to the taxidermist in Arezzo but it was rather more difficult that I imagined. Do you know, he used to play with my cats? He was very tame, you see. I found him when he was tiny; his mother had been killed by a wild boar and I fed him up with cat food and milk from a bottle and one of my cats eventually adopted him into her litter. You’ve never seen anything like it: a row of kittens and then, Pinocchio suckling in amongst them all. Of course I couldn’t let him go free again. He’d grown too used to human contact and wouldn’t have survived long on the mountain. A viper got him in the end. He was too nosy for his own good, really, and this viper had made a home in my log pile and I’m afraid he was bitten on the nose by her…’
She smiled and dropped a kiss on the stuffed animal’s head before replacing him in his basket.
They hunted some more for the telephone until Giselda, with a cry of “Eureka!” moved a pile of cushions and rugs from a corner and held up the missing object.
‘Phone your parents now and I’ll go and make another cup of chocolate for you and a coffee for me. Don’t know about you, but all this investigation has made me quite exhausted.’
In the car on the way back home, he found it hard to explain to his parents why he had run away and he yawned a couple of times from the back seat.
It was even harder to begin to describe eccentric Giselda and her house crammed with strange possessions. ‘I think she’s lonely,’ he said. ‘Can we invite her over one day and maybe adopt her as an extra Nonna?’
He didn’t want to talk about her too much as he felt his parents might not approve and possibly stop him from seeing her again. And he had a sense that too much discussion of her might somehow make some of her magic disappear.
So he closed his eyes and pretended to fall fast asleep on the fifteen minute journey home, trying not to chuckle as he remembered Pasquale’s “Willy, shit, fart, arse” outbursts and wondering if Mamma and Babbo would let him keep a parrot as a pet.
Chapter 15
Francesco and Davide
Davide was grounded for a week after running away but he didn’t mind. His parents had explained how worried they had been but after the initial telling-off, they sat down together and listened to his version of events. They agreed to adopting Giselda as a surrogate Nonna and invited her to Sunday lunch.
He found he enjoyed being at home during his curfew. Even the twins seemed less annoying since his adventure, volunteering to do his job of emptying the dishwasher for five days. Alba knocked on his bedroom door on his first evening back. She sat on his window seat and told him he must always feel free to talk to her if he ever had worries.
‘I’ve had a word with them about the tennis, Davi,’ she said. ‘It’s no big deal. You can stop whenever you want, you know. I sensed you weren’t enjoying it much.’
‘I don’t want to stop completely,’ he said. ‘It’s tournaments and regional stuff I don’t want to do anymore. It’s no fun.’
‘Fair enough. What about school? What’s happening there?’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘ It’ll be okay.’
She’d come over and hugged him. ‘You know I went through a bad time after my mum died. I didn’t have anyone I thought I could talk to, so I didn’t talk for six months. I know what it’s like, if you ever need to chat.�
�
Davide felt she was treating him as an equal and not an annoying little step-brother and he smiled his thanks. He and the twins knew about Alba’s real mother dying in a car crash before their father met their own mother, but she’d never opened up to him before about how she felt.
On the following Saturday when the curfew was over, his father took him out walking. It felt special to have Babbo to himself. Usually days out involved all six of them and taking ages getting organised. Somebody would forget something and they’d have to come back to fetch the bottle opener, a jacket, book or mobile phone.
‘Where are we going, Babbo?’ he asked as they prepared their picnic while the rest of the family was still asleep.’
He had been allowed to choose whatever he wanted to eat. Into his rucksack went white bread and salami, two packets of crisps, two chocolate bars and a can of Fanta orange juice. Francesco added cheese to his own bag, as well as water and a first aid kit.
‘It’s going to be a magical mystery walk,’ he replied, winking at his son.
They left the dented Fiat Panda (now only used for short excursions) outside the bar in Pratieghi. The isolated village was returning to normal after a few weeks of the mainly elderly population being swelled by other elderly guests holidaying in the little hotel. An old lady with large brown age spots on her face, like autumn russets, made a fuss of Francesco, kissing him on both cheeks and calling him her other son. Davide too was paid a lot of attention and given a handful of sweets from the jar on the bar.
‘Not too many, Aurelia,’ Babbo said, ‘or else he’ll be asking if he can borrow your false teeth.’
She cackled with laughter and told him off for being cheeky.
Following signs to the source of the river Marecchia, they passed by old stone houses on the edge of the village, their vegetable plots bright with ripening tomatoes, peppers and aubergines. Soon it would be time to harvest and either freeze or bottle the produce for winter. An old man wearing patched, faded blue overalls tied at the waist with a piece of twine handed them two fat ox-heart tomatoes.