Narrow, perhaps two hundred metres long, and straight as straight, Via Colombare achieves an exquisite confusion of invading suburbia and peasant tradition. It is where furgoncino and Mercedes both come home to lunch. Closely packed along either side, the houses are all different: two, three or four storeys, one facing this way, one that, some centuries old, handsome or poverty-stricken, others new, crude or lavish; one pink-stuccoed, one blue, one green, many with just bare, pitted cement the same grim colour as today’s unpromising sky. There may be a new Alfa 75 drawn up outside one door, and a decrepit straw-hatted grandfather on rickety chair parked outside the next. To add to the sense of emblematic collision, from the far end of the street a painted Madonna gazes from her shrine in the wall of a cherry orchard, right along the flat ribbon of patchy tarmac to where a derelict bottling factory is due for redevelopment opposite.
There is no pavement in Via Colombare. The front doors of most of the older, poorer houses thus open directly on to the hot asphalt. Their owners have to remember to keep their window shutters tied back in case a truck (presumably lost) should carry them away (one day it was an old stone balcony that went). And where the newer houses of urban arrivals or peasant farmers made good are set back from the road, or perhaps there is a garden, the welcome breathing space that might result is lost because of the obsession with tall and elaborate iron railings as an indicator of wealth. Likewise, gates must be tall and iron and complicated and, where possible, rendered all the more impressive by the addition of little brick and stucco shelters with terracotta-tile roofs.
It was by these gates, as we parked the car, and by the humbler doorways with their fly curtains, as we climbed out, that the street’s inhabitants had begun, if not quite to gather, then at least to appear: a heavy woman with the alibi of a broom, a man not quite intent on forcing his dog into the boot of his car, others with no more excuse than the walls or railings they were leaning on. And it was impossible not to get the feeling that they were there to watch us. Not in any way suspiciously, nor with hostility. But with curiosity, yes. With definite and considerable interest.
Well, we felt uncomfortable enough with the heat, the humidity. It was possible we looked out of sorts. And, of course, we were aware by now that Italians don’t drive bright orange cars (or bright yellow or green cars for that matter) and that the owners of such cars are looked upon with a certain amount of condescension and immediately understood to be Germans, an epithet more or less synonymous with bad taste. Then despite our new Verona plates we still had that old GB sticker on the back, and so could be, what, from Gibilterra it has often been suggested. Yes, we were used to all this; in a mild, light-hearted kind of way perhaps we even cultivated it, for it is fun to be foreign, at least for a year or two. But however far out in the country we were, an orange car and an air of disorientation and discomfort were not usually enough to get ten or fifteen people hanging around their doors in the glaring heat to watch us. And so soon after lunch, too. Did they know something we didn’t? Were they expecting a show?
Our future padrona was nervous, clumsily pushing the wrong key into the gate of what was certainly the most modern building on the street: newish lime-green stucco with a rough, graffiato finish, huge, broad, quite superfluous Californian eaves, double-glazed glass front door, large terrace balconies to each of the four flats. She made no comment on the watching faces around us; they did not surprise her. Was it safe to assume that what they knew, she knew too? And why had she insisted, so uncharacteristically for an Italian, on arranging our meeting at a time when most people were resting, shutters half drawn, dazed by the combination of heavy lunch and humid heat?
Quite unprompted now, and in a nervous attempt to be offhand, this dry, thin-faced, intelligent woman with her small bright brown eyes was telling us about some gynaecological problem she had. She’d been to the clinic again this morning. All the tests doctors made one do nowadays. The time, the expense. Especially when one more or less had to go privately if one was to get any decent service. But who could afford to risk the unnameable diseases? You know how it is? Her hand was shaking. She was having terrible trouble with her bunch of keys, forcing quite improbable versions into the lock on the gate.
My wife and I exchanged glances, looked about us. The sun did not so much lie along the street like a white-hot poker, as it would do later in August and September; it was more that the whole scene, the scarred asphalt, the flaking stone or cement of the walls, the gardens, the vines, the dusty ivies, were fizzing with light. Everything glared.
‘Eccoci!’ the gate snapped open. And at that precise moment Lucilla appeared on a balcony above us and began to shout, or rather to yell, to shriek, to scream.
Lucilla was, is, a short, squat woman, big-breasted, fat, more than round-faced, tinted hair thinning almost to baldness, teeth with the quality of bones, set apart from each other and slightly protruding. Certainly the general impression she gave us that first day in Montecchio was not improved by the fact that every feature was contorted with rage.
This, then, was what the inhabitants of Via Colombare had been waiting for. The tubby woman danced and screamed on her balcony. Her voice filled the air in the narrow street. She pointed down at us, waving her arm as if to hurl anathema and excommunication.
I had been in Italy just over a year at the time. I lay no claims to being a linguist, but I think I had reached the point where I understood perhaps 80 per cent of what was spoken directly to me, and say 50 per cent (far more than enough) of what was merely said in my presence. But that afternoon I could identify not one syllable of what Signora Lucilla was so urgently bawling.
I turned to Rita for help. She understood very little more than me. This was not apparently the local dialect. Which was reassuring. On the balcony above us the little woman continued to be galvanised by rage. A quite extraordinary energy. As if determined to spit out her teeth at us by dint of shrieking.
‘Pazza’, Signora Marta said firmly. ‘Crazy.’ She was refusing to look up and acknowledge the tirade. ‘Completamente pazza. It’s the afa.’ By great good luck she got the key to the glass front door first time and we were inside; there were creamy marble stairs, a feeling akin to coolness, tropical plants, a reduction in the noise level, but absolutely no time to lose. Up we panted past the two ground-floor flats on the first landing with their funereal, polished-wood doors and round, brass knobs; on we rushed to the second landing where an identical pair of doors again faced each other like diametrically opposed choices in some masonic trial. Our padrona knew to go left. Out came the keys again amidst growing nervousness. Ah, finalmente! But no, there was still the security lock. And Lucilla simply exploded from the door opposite.
Later I came to think of Lucilla’s story as something that in England would be exclusively the stuff of nineteenth-century novels — child labour and deprivation, uncertain inheritance, deathbed fawning, wills burnt or buried and others with forged signatures or clauses added under duress with the complicity of generously bribed physicians — a world where money was not sensibly regulated by the likes of pension funds and insurance policies. I remember planning a novel around Lucilla, but then thought nobody would believe it, they’d think I’d been reading too much Dickens, was stealing passages from Middlemarch. Hence, in describing now the scene that followed, it seems natural to use expressions like, ‘her bosom heaved’, for heave it did, and greatly; or, ‘eyes and cheeks were blown out with apoplexy’, for blown out they most certainly were. Smaller even than I had imagined, and bigger breasted, Lucilla stamped a high-heeled foot as if to strike sparks from the marble. Her heavy jowls quivered. The blue print dress stretched and strained about her. Tears of rage rolled down her cheeks. And now we began to understand something. Her shouting had resolved itself into a simple chant of, ‘è mio, è mio, l’appartamento è mio! The flat is mine! Mine, mine, mine!’ She grabbed the other woman and shook her. She spat. As for ourselves, it was as if we hadn’t existed. Which was just as well …