CHAPTER 25. Revisiting Grandfather Bristin
Now that the war was over, Porto Valtravaglia went through a period of wild euphoria. Professor Civolla kept repeating: ‘What we finally have before us is an enormous blank page on which to write new ideas and new dreams!’ I started travelling with Bianca and Fulvio back and forth to Milan, but I spent more and more time in the city near Largo La Foppa, where my mother had rented a little villa, the property of the railway company.
One Saturday in May, I went to visit my grandfather, whom I had not seen for almost a year. Nino, one of my uncles, offered to take me in his car, known as the ‘hotchpotch’, so called because it had been put together with bits and pieces from various cars and from scrap recovered from the foundry. ‘Thank you, I’ll be glad to come along … and let’s hope that we make it as far as Sartirana!’ The journey was a bit of an adventure. We had to get a horse to pull the car across the Po. When we got near Grandfather’s farm, my uncle parked his jalopy in a neighbour’s stable, begging him not to breathe a word to his father about that collection of scrap metaclass="underline" Bristìn would have skinned him alive with his mockery.
We found Granddad in the middle of his farmyard, putting the final touches to a ‘conservatory’. It had an enormous conical-shaped cupola of a roof, at least ten metres high, whose base rested directly on the ground. The cone covered a large well, at least ten metres in diameter and the same in depth. The conical cupola was made of interwoven wood and reeds, so that it looked like a big, upturned basket. Entry to the well was via a spiral staircase dug into the ground and reinforced with planks and boards of alder wood, and at the bottom there was a press of snow and ice from the winter cold. The plan was to preserve dairy produce, meat, vegetables and even fish on that deep frozen base. In short, it was the kind of refrigerator in use among the Romans: a ‘conservatory’, in other words. Grandfather’s eyesight had deteriorated considerably in recent times, and to oversee that kind of temple, he needed the help of the eldest of his sons, Aronne. I was deeply moved as I embraced him, and as he gave me a kiss I felt his cheeks were damp.
The following day was a Sunday, when no work is done in the fields, so I convinced him to pose for me for a portrait. He had on a velvet jacket and a newly ironed shirt, and sat bolt upright as though he were on horseback. I needed him to relax and not to appear to be encased in plaster, so to put him at ease I threw at him a load of questions on problems which I knew were close to his heart.
‘Excuse me, Granddad, but what’s happening now to your orchards, trees and greenhouses? Who’s left to help you?’
‘No one. Who do you think is interested in this work? I’ve got five sons and three daughters, and I was the first, even if involuntarily, to do everything to make sure they had other interests. I got them passionately interested in mechanics by dragging every kind of machine, even an electric-powered pump, into the house! I taught them how to dismantle and reassemble engines, driving them crazy by making them do it over and over again. A peasant cannot only know about sowing and harvesting, spreading shit … I beg your pardon, manure and verdigris on the vines. If he limits himself to that, he will never be anything more than a country bumpkin, with all the vision of a blinkered horse. Be curious, throw open all the windows of your brain! And they have thrown them open. Beniamino has become a test pilot with Macchi in Varese, Giosuè is an insurance agent, Mattia is a gold engraver in Valence, and Nino, as you know, is also mad about engines. He has taken a diploma in mechanical engineering and now he’s enrolled for an evening course at the politecnico in Milan. Aronne, the only one who gave me a hand with the farm work, has gone and decided to set up a garage. I have chased my sons off the land! But don’t worry, I have no intention of letting my barns go to wrack and ruin. I’m putting together a cooperative of young people just back from the war. I’m very gradually getting them broken in. It was them you saw yesterday, putting up the cupola-conservatory. They’re coming along nicely. I make them pay a little rent, and if it all works out, I’ll hand the lot over to them.’
Grandfather was beginning to relax. He was throwing his arms about and gesticulating, and at one point even got to his feet.
‘Hey, Granddad, where are you going? I’m doing your portrait.’
‘Ah, yes, sorry.’ He came round behind me to get a better look at the painting. ‘Goodness! Wait till I change glasses. Well done, that’s me exactly!’ He gave me a slap on the back and went back to his seat. Now he was silent, following his own thoughts, then, as though talking to himself, he came out with: ‘And to think that I was born a perdapé.’
‘Perdapé? What does that mean, Granddad?’
‘It’s the bottom level, the lowest rank among peasants. They are the tenant farmers who have the right to take what remains of the crops only after the landlord has taken his fixed share. And if the harvest goes badly that year, they die. The perdapé contract is called the angheria, in other words the ‘vexation’. Does that term not say something to you? Look at it, I was born to perdere i piedi, to lose my feet, destined to wear out my feet by having them sunk in the earth from dawn to dusk.’
* * *
When winter was over, I went back to visit my grandfather. I met him coming towards me as I came out of the station, using his stick to pick his way among the trunks of the lime trees on either side of him in the avenue. The people he met called out to him, said hello, stopped to chat and tried to needle Bristìn into coming out with one of his witty, trenchant remarks. He was by now almost completely blind, but he put up with this situation with an impressive degree of self-irony. Occasionally he would walk backwards: ‘In this way,’ he explained to those who questioned him about this odd habit, ‘I manage to get the sun on my face, and that gives me great pleasure. And anyway, what’s the point of walking forwards? I can’t see a thing!’
When he was at home, he was never on his own. Peasants came to ask his advice about planting such-and-such citrus fruits or cereals, to check whether the moon was right, or if the seeds they had bought at the cooperative were any good. It was true that he could not see but, as he had taught me as a boy, touch and smell were infallible tools of judgement. He would plunge his hand into the sack of grain or rice, let the seeds run through his fingers as though they were rosary beads, then he would sniff at them, put them in his mouth and chew them. At the end he gave his verdict. Bristìn was the terror of seed merchants.
Many times he insulted his peasant friends who came along to show him the anti-cryptogamic concoctions the consortium had advised them to use to get rid of moths, mole crickets and other scourges of the fields: ‘It’s quite true, bonehead, that with these pesticides you can wipe out at least ten bastard variations of seed-devourer, but have you ever thought of how many other grubs of good insects you would slaughter? No, you didn’t, did you? Take DDT, for instance, look at the damned disaster that brought … last year, you remember, they flew over the fields with an aeroplane spraying out this poisonous sludge as though it were holy water at Corpus Christi. “It is a panacea, a marvel,” intoned the agronomists … the bastards, as ignorant as pigshit they were. Oh yes, it’s true, they did away with the bugs in the maize, the weeds in the rice-fields … there were savings on rice-weeders, red mushrooms and phylloxera. But at the same time, they killed nesting birds, fireflies, bees, dragonflies, frogs, carps by the ton, and even flocks of swallows. What a bunch of swine! You eliminate the birds, sparrows and starlings, you kill off the blackbirds … and then you’re surprised that processionary caterpillars grow tenfold and strip bare whole woods of poplars, tearing them apart. But who was it — you tell me, hare-brain — who was it who in years past used to gobble all those thousand-footed, slimey grubs when they dangled from branches, hanging from their own slobber like so many miniature Tarzans? The swallows, sparrows, starlings and so on! And it was the same with the frogs: it was they that swallowed the larvae of the mosquitoes and horseflies as they floated on the waterways. It was the dragonflies who got rid of the vermin which devour the rye and the tender potato flower. Now it will take years before that astonishing equilibrium can be re-established!’