Under the portico, the king and his concubine rolled about in a strange mime which looked more like a Graeco-Roman wrestling contest than any loving embrace. Preceded by a roll of drums, Saint John made his entrance, accusing forefinger pointed at the fornicators, to bawl out his anathema: ‘Shame on your carnal lusts! Damned be the harlot!’
At this point, the guards intervened to seize hold of the recalcitrant saint and bind him to a pillar. Herodias, overcome by a hysterical crisis, smashed the plates and crystal vases (obviously all rejects from the prize-winning glassworks) noisily to the ground. Coup de scène. Appearance of Salomè, the dancer-daughter. The mother bursts into tears, and implores Herod: ‘I beg you, cut off the head of that bastard, Saint John. He has insulted me!’
‘Not on your life!’ replies Herod. ‘Next thing, Jesus will come along and lay on me a curse which will bugger me for all eternity.’ He stops a moment, peers at the lovely Salomè and promises: ‘Yeah, I will remove his head if your daughter will do a dance for me.’
Salomè is ready and willing: ‘All right, I’ll go along with you, but first of all, you take an oath by the Lord that as soon as the dance is over you will give the order for the saint’s head to be chopped off.’
‘Yes, I swear, but in return you’ll have to take off all seven veils.’
‘Let’s make it five.’
‘No, all or nothing.’
‘All,’ shout the guests at Herod’s table, clapping their hands as they cry out.
Cue the orchestra: two accordions, one saxophone, two trumpets and the double-bass. A quiet number for starters. They strike up a languid tango. The lovely Salomè (now substituted by a girl with a stupendous body) begins her dance, all rhythmically writhing thighs and buttocks. She bends so far back that her falling hair almost scrapes along the floor. At intervals, she pulls off a veil which she tosses in the face of Saint John, who is still there, bound hand and foot.
At the third veil, Herod rises to his feet, goes over to the girl and, like an overexcited lecher, seizes hold of Salomè and hoists her onto his back. Herodias, the infuriated mother, rushes over brandishing an enormous fish by the tail. All the faithful had by now grasped the allegory and were guffawing wildly. Some scattered applause was heard, and many people turned towards the Mangelli palace to see the reaction of the lady of the house.
A few days later, Signora Sveva packed her bags and left town in a car loaded with an improbable quantity of suitcases, followed by an articulated lorry piled high with objects.
The Sunday after the great escape, the parishioners filled their church for mass as usual. We choirboys processed down the apse in our white embroidered lace surplices and red soutanes. From the foot of the nave, the Engineer made his way forward. He was dressed in jacket, neatly ironed trousers, white shirt and the usual cravat round his neck. As he passed by, one or two worshippers sniffed at him: not the remotest trace of the sewage stench. He took his seat in the family pew, smiled at the priest who returned the greeting and made a sign to us in the choir to start up with the Te Deum Laudamus. We began our chant, loudly: a solemn tone, which managed also to be somewhat lively, almost festive. Most of the congregation joined in what became a jubilant piece fit for any grand finale.
CHAPTER 15. Spawning Time
At the beginning of spring, the boys and girls along the lakeside were in a state of ferment. The risciada, that is, the mythical leaping of the fish from the water for their spawning festivities, was about to explode on us. For anyone unfamiliar with the reproductive conduct of ichthyological fauna, let me explain that ‘spawning’ indicates the moment when fish get horny. To lay their eggs, the female fish allow themselves to be carried by the waves close to the shore at the point where the waters lap the risciada, the rocky coast. Shortly afterwards, the male fish, after a ritual which sees them shoot out of the water and perform an infinite variety of pirouettes and dives, arrive to fertilise the eggs.
All of us children used to gather together on the quayside and there we would decide which groups to divide into and where to go. Some would choose to go northwards along the coast, and others to go down towards Laveno. Everybody brought along one or two buckets, and the more organised among us would even have fish nets or proper fishing tackle. Those in my group had chosen the beach near Luino. We agreed to meet up at dawn: it was important to be on the spot where the spawning took place before the sun rose over the mountains. We were all excited, especially the girls. As well as buckets, we brought with us long poles to chase away the snakes which would quite definitely be there, like us, on the shoreline.
The old story-tellers recounted that going along to see the fish leaping was an ancient rite dating back to the first matriarchal communities in the Verbano. Professor Civolla, acknowledged as the most prestigious historian of local traditions, insisted that as recently as one hundred years before, only girls past the age of puberty were allowed to take part in the great spawning event.
I was not even ten years old, and it was the first time I had had the chance to attend this extraordinary phenomenon. Perhaps, apart from two female classmates, I was the youngest in the gang. When we got to the shore, we started leaping about on the small gravel stones. ‘Watch out! There’s a grass snake!’ At that, all of us turned on the poor reptile, who took to his heels, so to speak. ‘There’s another one … quick, get it!’
‘But what are all these snakes after?’ I asked. ‘You never usually see them.’
‘They’re here for the same reason as us, to grab a couple of fish as soon as the spawning begins,’ was the reply.
‘But when does it start?’
‘Hold on a minute and you’ll see.’
In fact scarcely a minute later we see a ray of light fan out over the coastline under the Verzoni mountain range. The sun rises and peeps out over the highest mountain in the range, covering the whole shoreline in a golden sheen. ‘Look, the bleaks are first.’
We see two or three tiny fish jump up in the air, out of water scarcely ruffled by a breath of wind, then further out, in a flash, hundreds all at once. Up, up, then splash!.. they fall back into the water. These are males and females that spring up lightly touching each other, aquatic acrobats that lovingly brush one against the other as they somersault.
‘Look, we’re nearly at the mass spawn!’
The low sun, its rays piercing the air, adds glitter to the sparkle of bright scales from the thousands of excited fish. Bleaks and gudgeons by the handful begin falling on the gravel. We, jumping barefoot on the pebbles which hurt our feet, race over to the fish as they writhe about on the gravelly beach. We gather bucketfuls!
A little later, one of the older boys removed his jumper and trousers and went with his net into the water, where he was literally assaulted by acrobatic fish which flew at him and leapt into his net of their own accord. ‘Quick, pass me the bucket!’ Baldy, a smaller boy with a shaven head, took off all his clothes and dived into the lake in the nude, to the scandalised screams of the girls present. Soon afterwards, all the others followed his lead, wading into the middle of the foaming spray of fish now rising improbably high in the air. Then the climax: a girl stripped down to her knickers, holding her arms over her little breasts, and jumped in with the others.
‘Chubs!’ screamed one of her friends, as she too plunged in half-naked. ‘The chubs and the whitefish are jumping as well!’ And it was true: now the bigger fish were darting about, leaping in the air, twisting and turning with the agility of dolphins. The girls were now all in the water, and I too went in. I held on to my underpants to cover my embarrassment because, as I was taking them off, I had burst the elastic. In the event, no one paid any heed.