These story-tellers were the pride and glory of this new home of mine. You came across them in bars, in the piazzas, on the church steps, on the benches down at the harbour. Often they spoke of events which had occurred centuries and centuries previously … but it was pure chicanery, that is, they borrowed mythical stories to deal with day-to-day life and with events reported in recent newspapers, adding a touch of satire and of the grotesque.
CHAPTER 8. Foreigners and Strangers
It is a curious fact that even today, more than sixty years on, anyone leafing through the pages of the Valtravaglia telephone directory will come across an unusually high number of foreign surnames. Here are some chosen at random: Gutierrez, Vankaus, Schumacher, Batieux, Besinsky. These are the grandchildren of the master glass-blowers who, towards the end of the nineteenth century, arrived at the factories of Porto Valtravaglia from all over Europe, each with his own speciality in casting, moulding and glass-blowing.
These vetradór, to adopt the dialect term, turned up in family groups with clearly differentiated values, trades and skill levels.
Inside each ethnic group, people obviously expressed themselves in their language of origin, but at work, in the factory, in the bars and on the street, communication was not in Italian but in an eccentric Lombard dialect, a speech which, continually enriched by new lexical additions, was transformed into an idiom without equal anywhere in the world. The valley of the mezarat had quite suddenly become a fantastic crucible of the most diverse, outlandish and often irreconcilable cultures, traditions, prejudices and mentalities, and yet, however much it might strain belief, there was never any manifestation of racism among those people. Certainly they made fun of each other, were even bitingly sarcastic over their respective pronunciations, stock phrases, gestures or modulation of guttural or sharp sounds, but never aggressively or malevolently so. It was genuinely funny to hear Germans, Spaniards, French or Poles railing at each other in a dialect that was already more than sufficiently abstruse and contorted.
Porto Valtravaglia gave birth to an incredible new idiom: lizard became ritzòpora (from the Greek spoken in the Hellespont), shepherd became bergeròt, the German term tràmpen was used in the sense of clumsy, stappìch of cheat, sfulk of muddle, tacchinosa of street-walker, and so on.
Obviously, as a boy I was not fully aware that in absorbing that strange melange of languages and dialects I was attending a unique university of communication, an experience which would afford me an otherwise unknown freedom to create expressive modules ad infinitum.
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But let’s get back to our fabulatori, the story-tellers of the Valtravaglia who with their language and tales made an indelible mark on my future choices and on my way of judging events and characters in both fantasy and reality.
The platforms where the performances unfolded, the idiosyncratic stages which varied with the trade of the individual fabulatore and the utility of the tale, were equally decisive.
The fishermen chose the porches near the harbour. We children were their most enthusiastic audience. Fidanza, the headman of a crew, would get his assistants to line us all up in a semicircle to hold and stretch out the nets which needed to be mended. Not that he forced us to do this, perish the thought! It was an invitation accepted with good grace, indeed with alacrity, and paid for by the tales they told. I was especially fascinated by the elements of paradox in those stories, and even more by the spicing of the language with bizarre terms which produced in my mind unfamiliar images which I then struggled to absorb into my vocabulary. Often I did not grasp exactly the sense of the word-play, and asked them to repeat it … so I ended up laughing out of turn, to the annoyance of my more attentive companions.
Beyond all doubt, my first teacher in the telling of tales was my grandfather Bristìn, but now I found myself attending a genuine masterclass for jesters, and I had the opportunity to study the most diverse techniques and forms of delivery.
At this school, I learned the structure of the original dialect, which is something different from merely speaking dialect: above all I acquired the structure of a primordial, integral language which grants you the total liberty, at any moment, to invent expressions.
The style of those fabulatori, story-tellers, was based on improvisation; as I have already mentioned, it was evident that their main concern was to adapt differing passages to a contingent reality. I had occasion to listen to the same story related in three or four different versions. The ability of the person recounting the story lay in his capacity to adapt it each time according to variations in events, including local incidents and laundry-room gossip. Every event, however unexpected, was immediately incorporated into the performance: an explosion caused by poachers, a shot from a hunter’s rifle, the ringing of church bells … everything was grist to their mills.
And most of all, the story-tellers never lost sight of the moods and emotions of their listeners. If there was someone who guffawed, who reacted uncomfortably to the irony or who took it all badly, he was sure to become the target of the whole routine. The same treatment was reserved for any spectator who seemed slow-witted or could not keep up with the comic action. Anything could be used to move things along, to bring them to life or to involve everyone in the narration. In brief, they managed to make the fantastic down-to-earth, and vice versa.
It is quite true that not all the story-tellers conceived narration as theatre, nor did I at that time link the two genres: in particular, I was not yet able to take in the vital difference between recounting and performing, and I was absolutely convinced that theatre-making had all to do with acting, the presence of several actors, scenery, sound and lighting effects … in short, with organised magic. Only much later, when I had already acquired considerable experience of the stage, did I realise that story-telling had been the mechanism which had encouraged me to express myself in epic-popular form. But this is a topic which merits a deeper, more detailed treatment which we will perhaps be able to dedicate to it elsewhere.
However, I was completely conscious that reality as seen by the story-tellers on the lake was reality seen through a distorting mirror, and that it was proposed by each of them using markedly differing narrative techniques and approaches.
For example, Galli — a poacher by profession — presented tragic tales with the nonchalant air of a man who analyses the details of a disaster without being fully aware that he is talking of the disaster itself. Then there was another who spoke quietly, almost flippantly, while he was fishing. His name was Dighelnò, a dialect name equivalent to ‘Don’t Tell Him’.
He settled down in his place at the harbour, set up his fishing rods while the children gathered round nagging him to tell us one of his absurd tales, but he remained where he was, not uttering a word, distractedly staring at the floats of his fishing lines as they bobbed up and down on the water. Then, under his breath, without warning, he would come out with three or four words which had no sense at all. ‘When the wind blows in winter, the minnows get an itch in their arse.’
We would stare at him in amazement and he, still looking out over the lake, would turn his rod in the direction of the island of the Malpagas and go on: ‘Look over there, you see that dark blue line in front of Cannero Castle? That’s a current strong enough to sweep away even the police motor boats.’