Now and Then in Tuscany: Italian journeys

by Angela Petch

  After just over one hour of brisk walking, and with light fading fast, I turned the corner into the square adjoining our house. Nobody answered when I knocked on our door, so I popped over to Maria Rosa’s house, where a candle glimmered at the kitchen window. Peeping through the panes I saw my son and his young cousins playing by the fire and I tapped on the glass.

  ‘Marisa? Is that you?’ my sister asked as she pulled open the door, baby Flavia on her hip. When she saw me she gasped and covered her mouth with her hand. She pulled me into the kitchen, embracing me as she whispered, ‘I didn’t want to worry young Dario but something’s wrong.’

  She glanced over to my son who hadn’t yet seen me, engrossed in a card game on the floor. ‘Marisa went off to look for a Christmas log on the ridge two hours ago but she’s not back. I’m sorry, Beppe, I couldn’t leave the children alone to go and search for her. Thank God you’re here.’

  It took me less than five minutes to fetch a paraffin lamp and length of rope from the house. At the last minute I grabbed a bottle of grappa from the corner cupboard in the kitchen. The sun would soon be gone behind the peak of Montebotolino and I had to hurry. Even though a full moon was due, conditions and visibility would be far from ideal for a night search. I had a good idea where she might have gone and as I started up the steep path, a shape bounded towards me out of the gloom. Instinctively fearing it was a wolf I drew out my knife but urgent barking made me drop to my knees. ‘Chicco! Good boy! Good boy! Where is she?’ I patted his head and he scampered away up the slope.

  If it had not been for the dog, I wouldn’t have found her that night. She was wedged behind a rock about ten metres off the path and when I got to her, her eyes were closed. I thought for a moment she was dead and knelt on the forest floor, taking her frozen hands in mine.

  ‘Beppe, is it really you…? Or am I dead and gone to Heaven?’ she murmured, opening her eyes to peer up at me.

  I was to repeat her phrase many times in the future when telling people the story of how Chicco and I rescued my plucky wife. She would slap me in embarrassment, blaming her confusion on her pain and fear. But all the same everybody teased her each time the tale was told.

  ‘You were the last person I expected to see in the middle of the woods on Christmas Eve,’ she would say in her defence, ‘you can’t blame me if I was delirious…’

  The children of the village knew our story off by heart. It was retold countless times at the fireside.

  Later on at home, sitting by the hearth with the fire blazing and a blanket tucked round her knees, she sat and watched me as I moved about the kitchen. I tapped old tobacco from my pipe, packed fresh leaves into the bowl with my thumb and asked her if she was feeling any better.

  ‘A little,’ she said. ‘But this bruise is painful. It’s not helping my sciatica either. If you boil up a handful of rosemary leaves for ten minutes for me, Beppe, and then rub the liquid on my hip morning and night, that will help.’

  I fetched sprigs of the herb from the patch outside the back door. Marisa said shyly when I returned, ‘You know the best medicine is to have you home with us.’

  It was unusual for her to talk this way and I smiled at her sentimentality. While the leaves boiled in a little pan, the fire beneath it crackling and snapping, we sipped the remainder of the grappa I’d taken up the mountain. Dario was already tucked up warm in his bed. We decided to miss Midnight Mass as I’d promised to take him with me early next morning to fetch down the log that Marisa had taken so much trouble to find. In view of her accident we’d agreed it didn’t matter if traditions were altered this year. We’d burn the ceppo on Christmas night instead of tonight.

  ‘I like the smell of your pipe,’ she said. ‘I miss it when you’re away. Did you know Rossella had started to smoke one? She looks so funny puffing away. She coughs and splutters all the time.’

  I told her more about Paolo’s death. She was very upset although we both knew his health was poor and talked about inviting his family to eat Christmas lunch with us the next day.

  ‘I think we should leave them to grieve a while,’ Marisa said in her typical wise way. ‘But we’ll keep an eye on her. Poor Rossella!’

  She stared into the fire, her fingers working at a tuft of wool sticking up from the blanket. And then she laughed aloud. ‘How many strange beliefs we have,’ she said. ‘Christmas Eve is when I’m supposed to receive special graces to strengthen my powers as a healer. Just look at the state of me! I can’t even heal myself.’

  ‘There must be some truth if the belief’s been handed down over all these years. And it does no harm to anybody.’

  I’d seen enough of these old superstitions over the past ten years of travelling with the shepherds to see the merit of practices that dated hundreds of years. If they worked it seemed foolish to discard them.

  The rosemary infusion was ready and she pulled up her skirt to reveal a livid bruise. As carefully as I could, I dipped a cloth in the liquid to make a poultice. She winced as I put it into position, telling me not to take any notice of her whingeing, and then rearranged her clothes and settled down again on the bench.

  It was very warm by the fire. Outside the wind had picked up, whistling at the cracks in the door.

  ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if we have snow soon,’ Marisa said. ‘But the weather has been strange. Do you remember how my father always used to say that snow in December meant a fruitful year? Dicembre nevoso, anno fruttuoso.’

  ‘And mine used to say we were more likely to have bread on the table if there was snow; that rain brought hunger. Sotto la neve pane, sotto l’acqua fame.’

  ‘They did know what they were talking about, our old folk. But I hope snow doesn’t fall quite yet, Beppe,’ she added shyly. ‘We’re so enjoying having you home unexpectedly.’

  I smiled.

  After a while I asked her how Dario had been while I was away. ‘I tried talking about school when I put him to bed, but I couldn’t get much from him. All he wanted to know were details about the Appennino train – how big the engine was, how much coal it burned. I kept reminding him the fare was too expensive for the likes of us and how I’d had to hitch rides on carts to get home. But he kept firing train questions at me.’

  ‘He’s not enjoying school. Did you know he now has to attend the youth movement on Saturdays? They all do. He’s in the Balila brigade and they have to wear black shirts and caps.

  ‘They’re stuffing their little heads with propaganda,’ I said, ‘I don’t like it.’

  ‘He hates the military exercises. They have to march about with wooden guns and he said as there were only six in his group, when they make mistakes the professore sees straightaway and he’s always shouting! Horrible little gnome of a man.’

  ‘ He’s always been a bully.’

  ‘Dario was in trouble last week for not learning his homework by heart.’

  ‘A poem, was it? I could help him.’

  ‘No, not a poem. If only it had been.’ She sat forward in her chair, wincing with pain. ‘I can quote his homework word for word because I tried to help him memorise it: “I believe in Rome…”’ Marisa enunciated sarcastically, ‘ “…the Eternal, the mother of my country…I believe in the genius of Mussolini…and the resurrection of the Empire…”.’ She broke off, shaking her head and grimacing.

  ‘Brainwashing! Like catching sardines in a net,’ I said. ‘And what he learned is not too different from our prayers, if you think about it. Very similar to the Credo. Just replace “Rome” with “God the Father”.’ I pushed a log further into the centre of the hearth with my boot and replenished my glass.

  ‘I’m not happy about it either. But what can we do, Beppe? If we want him to attend school, then this is now a part of it. And we would be punished if we stopped sending him. I heard that Pierluigi kicked up a fuss in the osteria the other week about his boy having to attend military exercises on Saturday. He wanted him to stay at home to help. Somebody must have reported him because a group of
older boys in the Avanguardista turned up the following night and he’s disappeared. They say he’s probably been sent down to Rome to work on the Pontine Marshes. It’s supposed to be worse down there than the Maremma for malaria. And all simply for wanting his son to help on the farm.’

  ‘Porca Madonna,’ I swore. ‘Mussolini promised us so much. It looks like we’ll have to suffer before Italy will be strong again in the future.’

  ‘Yes, but for how long do we go on suffering, Beppe? They talk about children begging in the streets in big cities…that’s surely not right…what sort of progress is that?’

  This was the old Marisa from the days I remembered when we were young and used to sit for hours discussing how to change the world. Her cheeks burned pink and her eyes flashed with anger as she spoke

  ‘Best to keep this kind of talk within these four walls, from what you say.’ I warned.

  ‘And not in front of Dario either,’ she added. ‘If he mentioned at school that we disapprove, there’d be trouble for all of us.’ She leant forward again, whispering, ‘Do you know what he actually quoted to me the other day, Beppe? “War is to the male what childbearing is to the female.” And then he asked me why I hadn’t done more childbearing… I nearly choked on my food.’

  ‘So much propaganda,’ I replied. ‘Get them while they’re young and then you have them for life - just like in the seminary.’

  ‘It’s hard to know what to do for the best. Over my dead body will he become a little warrior for our nation. Maybe he will have to become a train driver, after all.’ She stared into the fire.

  ‘And what’s so wrong with that?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s too bright. I want more for him. Perhaps we could send him away to your seminary?’

  ‘There is no way my son is attending that place.’ I left the fireside to reach again for the grappa bottle but it was empty.

  ‘There’s a bottle of wine in the larder,’ Marisa said. ‘But I was saving it for Christmas lunch.’ She looked at me before continuing, ‘You promised me you would cut down on your drinking.’

  ‘Then I’ll go to the osteria and drink with the men. They won’t nag me,’ I wanted to bite back the words as soon as they left my mouth.

  ‘Please, Beppe,’ she said softly, patting the space next to her on the bench. ‘It’s Christmas Eve. Don’t spoil it.’

  I stood for a while staring down at her. Firelight danced off her curls; her face, so deathly pale when I found her lying in the forest, was now flushed from the warmth of the fire. She was a pretty woman and I felt ashamed of the way I was with her. My respect for her had grown and grown since the time she’d taken on Dario with never a complaint.

  I sat down again. It was stifling in the little room and I was more used to sleeping in a hut or on the ground with a dozen men. I pulled off my thick jumper and rolled up the sleeves of my vest.

  ‘It’s boiling in here,’ I said.

  ‘If you want fresh water to quench you, I fetched it from the spring yesterday. Get a bottle from the larder – that’ll cool you down. I’ll have some too.’

  As I handed her a tumbler of water, she held on to my hand. ‘What did happen to you at your seminary, Beppe?’

  I pulled my hand away and sat down next to her.

  ‘You’ve never talked about it, have you?’ she persisted. ‘But I know something went horribly wrong. Otherwise why are you so dead set against Dario having the education you wanted.’

  I shook my head and remained silent.

  ‘Well then,’ she said, ‘we shall drink something stronger than spring water. I made walnut liqueur and Christmas day can begin early. It’s on the top shelf.’ She pointed to the corner cupboard.

  It was fiery, brewed the usual way from pure alcohol, watered down to half its strength. She told me she’d added sugar and soaked a hundred shelled walnuts in it for the whole of November. It was good and strong and helped loosen my tongue.

  I knocked back several glasses and began to tell her what had happened all those years ago, sparing no detail of the abuse. I spoke softly in case anybody should be listening, even though I knew there was only Dario upstairs and he was fast asleep. When I told her how I’d always felt it was my fault, she put her arms around me.

  ‘How could you ever think you encouraged him?’ she whispered. ‘He was a wicked, vile man and you were too innocent to know about the evil he was intent on.’

  ‘Exactly, Marisa! That is why I’ve no wish for our son to go through the same torture as I did. How can we protect him if he’s so far away from us?’

  She turned my face to hers and kissed me on the lips, long and slow. Our kiss grew more passionate and my tongue played with hers. She tasted of walnuts and honey and as I cupped her face in my hands, she moved deeper into my hold.

  ‘I’ll bring the bedcover from downstairs,’ I whispered.

  Over and over I asked if I was hurting her, if her hip was too sore and I made love to her as gently as possible.

  It might have been the walnut liqueur; it might have been because I knew I had come close to losing her to the mountains, I don’t know. But for the first time in our marriage, Marisa relaxed as she lay with me. The fire crackled and spat in the hearth and our lovemaking made shadows on the walls of the kitchen. When she came, I covered her mouth to still her whimpers in case Dario awakened and came down the ladder from his room.

  Afterwards she cried soundlessly in my arms. Tears streamed down her face and I pulled her closer, wiping them with my thumbs, worried I’d yet again done something wrong.

  ‘Did I hurt you?’ I asked. ‘Was I too rough? It’s been too long…’

  She shook her head. ‘No, you didn’t hurt me, Beppe. I’m just happy.’

  It worried me that when I went to drink at our osteria on Christmas day, one or two of the men gave me the fascist salute instead of shaking my hand as we’d always done. I laughed at first, thinking they were joking, but they scowled at me. I wondered what would become of us all. On the wall behind the counter hung a poster of Benito Mussolini, il Duce, in his battle helmet. The Great War had taken lives but it had happened at a distance from most of us. But now, twenty years later, our nation seemed to be preparing for another war. Our children were being groomed to be part of a nation of warriors. Dario had proudly shown me his colourful exercise books. One of them displayed a picture of a young boy in uniform, with the caption: “Book and rifle make the perfect fascist.” Mussolino was bent on recreating the glory of the old Roman Empire which seemed to lurk as the background to our children’s lessons. My son had shown me his uniform hanging on the back of his bedroom door and stood to attention. ‘I’m a legionary’, he’d said, clicking his little heels together. And my heart sank to my boots.

  On the feast of Saint Stephen, I left once more for the coast. Storm clouds threatened in a sky pregnant with snow. If I stayed, it might be months before I could return to my work.

  Before leaving, Marisa and I talked and talked about Dario’s future. We agreed not to send him to any seminary but to let him continue with his schooling in Badia. She persuaded me to make this my last journey down to the Maremma and urged me to bring Nonno’s forge in Montebotolino back to life. There was still blacksmithing work to be picked up from a few small farmers and shepherds who had decided to overwinter their stock in barns up in our mountains. We would manage, she told me.

  ‘Our little Dario will fall right,’ she persuaded me, ‘with the two of us to guide him. As long as we are careful, we can instil in him the values we believe in.’

  Marisa and Dario clung to me at the door. My wife begged me to come back soon, telling me she couldn’t wait to be together with me again. For the first time in all these years I left for the Maremma with a lighter heart and hope for the future.

  Chapter 29

  A trip to the Tuscan Coast

  September 2010

  At five o’clock on a Sunday morning, Francesco, Anna, the twins and Davide boarded a coach bound for Alberese, down
on the Maremma coast.

  Most of the passengers were pensioners and they greeted the youngsters with smiles of delight. Francesco explained they were coming along because of Davide’s school project and Anna chipped in, telling them she was coming along out of interest in the transumanza.

  ‘But we’re only coming because we have to, uffa!’ piped up Emilia.

  Rosanna dug her in the ribs, ‘Shut up! Babbo promised us big ice creams if we behaved, remember?’

  ‘If you want to know about the transumanza, come and talk to us,’ said a slight, elderly man with a beard. ‘My father and his father before him went down to that godforsaken malaria infested swamp each year. Bless their souls!’

  There were murmurs from several of the older passengers, which set off an exchange of information and reminiscences all round the coach.

  Stars were still shining overhead as the coach set off down the bends towards Sansepolcro. Anna couldn’t help eavesdropping on the elderly couple sitting in front of her. Their silver heads inclined towards each other as they chatted, most sentences were prefaced with, ‘I remember… ’as they shared stories from their youth. The passengers all knew each other and seemed a happy band of old friends. She listened to their chatter as they exchanged news of who had been in hospital, whose grandson had just graduated and who was the latest of their pals to be afflicted with dementia and, once again, marvelled at the sociable nature of Italians.

  They passed by the rambling house of the Chiozzi family on the way to the Viamaggio Pass where Giselda now lived with her cats and where, once upon a time, shepherds and flocks joined the caravan as it straggled along from villages and hamlets tucked into folds of the Apennines. Near the house and clustered beneath a huge oak stood a group of fallow deer, one huge stag with impressive horns standing guard. They scattered as the headlights of the coach picked them out.