Portrait of a Family with a Fat Daughter E-Book

Margherita Giacobino

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

'It has been a long while in Italian fiction since such an authentic and engaging voice has appeared.' Bruno Quaranta in La Stampa. Portrait of a Family with a Fat Daughter tells the story of four generations of a peasant family living outside Turin between the late nineteenth century and the boom years of the 1950s, as they clamber out of grinding rural poverty into the sixties world of frozen fish and fridges. The author's grandmother emigrates to California and returns to Italy semi-paralysed after a mishap as she is giving birth. When her father dies the author's eight-year-old mother returns to Italy, to be brought up by a family she does not know, to become Italian again and ultimately to marry a captivating 'man-boy' whose fecklessness is grippingly described, as is his time in a German prison camp in World War 11. She runs a small shop which gradually expands, lifting the family out of the working class; her daughter, Margherita, always a conscientious student, reared by this extended matriarchal family, becomes the writer of this book. 'An epic novel, which is the story of an Italy which no longer exists, becomes the portrait of a family. It is a novel which touches the heart.' Valeria Parrella in Grazie.

Leseprobe

The Author

Margherita Giacobino was born in 1952 and lives in Turin. She is a writer, journalist and translator from English and French. Her first novel Un’Americana a Parigi was published in 1993 and was written under the pseudonym of Elinor Rigby.

Portrait of a Family with a Fat Daughter, published in Italy in 2015, has already been translated into French and German. It is the first novel by Margherita Giacobino to be translated into English.

The Translator

Judith Landry was educated at Somerville College, Oxford where she obtained a first class honours degree in French and Italian.

Her translations for Dedalus are: The House by the Medlar Tree by Giovanni Verga, New Finnish Grammar, God’s Dog, The Last of the Vostyachs and The Interpreter by Diego Marani, The Mussolini Canal by Antonio Pennacchi, The Devil in Love by Jacques Cazotte, Prague Noir: The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague by Sylvie Germain and Smarra & Trilby by Charles Nodier.

Her translation of New Finnish Grammar was awarded the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize in 2012.

Dedication

For Maria, my mother, for all my family, and for Claudia

Contents

Title

The Author

The Translator

Dedication

The Fresh Air from the Door

The Little Girl from America

Soon it will Snow

Grey Skies

My Childhood’s East and West

Treasure Hunt

Author’s Note

Copyright

The Fresh Air from the Door

She was sixty-one when I was born, and throughout my childhood, despite my mother’s urgings (‘You must call her aunt Ninin!’), she was always and only Ninin, a diminutive which served as a foothold for my small impertinent feet in my efforts to subvert an authority to which in fact she never laid any claim.

In the parish register she was ‘Caterina’, like her grandmother – her father’s mother – but pronounced ‘Catlina’, with that particular throaty ‘n’ found, in Italy, only around our way. That she had been given this name was only to be expected: if the first-born girls of the sons of the old Catlina had not been christened Catlina the granda would have been offended, and the guilty parties would have been the first to know it. With rules like this, a family was bound to include several people with the same name, and endless diminutives were resorted to so as to avoid the ensuing confusion: Catlinin, Catlinota, Catlinetta. She herself was known as Ninin, from Catlinin, but in our dialect ninin also means a babe in swaddling clothes, something small and new which may or may not stay the course, a scrap of a life stirring within a worm-eaten cradle between a woollen blanket and a pallet made from maize, and you don’t give it a real name until it has learned to crawl. And Ninin she remained, even when a whole string of brothers and sisters began to follow after, including my grandmother.

She was the daughter of a Domenica and a Giuseppe, and her nursemaid was a cow. The story goes that they put her under this cow when her mother’s milk dried up before the newborn baby was old enough to eat polenta, and the other sister-in-law couldn’t feed her because she already had a strapping great lad who was drinking her dry. So they took Ninin into the stable and attached her to the long pink protrusion beneath the cow, and on hearing her famished shrieks, that kindly creature, it was said, just stood there quietly as though at milking time, with bovine patience, while Ninin sucked with all the force of her infant gums. She came to no harm at all. In those days people rubbed along with germs better than they do now; and any way children were often born in stables, which were the only warm places during winter, and they came into immediate contact with straw, and animals’ warm breath. They either grew up strong or they didn’t grow up at all. Ninin survived both the lack of mother’s milk and the remedy for it. The only damage she suffered, according to family legend, was a slight deformation of the mouth, due to having sucked for months on a cow’s big teat; her teeth, when they came through, stuck out, and remained that way until a set of false ones came to improve the picture.

We’re in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Throughout the year, women wore a coarse, scratchy undergarment known as the camisa, which you stuffed into your drawers, when you wore any, which was hardly ever. On top of it, any number of cumbersome skirts and bodices concealed the all too frequent pregnancies. Men too wore a version of the camisa, with detachable collars and cuffs for washing purposes; on high days and holidays they put on dark woollen suits, always three piece: trousers, jacket and waistcoat. In those days hemp was still used, cool yet heavy, unsuited to winter wear. All adult males sported a moustache, and wore hats; all women, from earliest childhood to old age, forced their hair into plaits or buns.

A photograph, in those days, was a rare and momentous event, you had to sit still for quite some time, looking as solemn as though you were posing for your own funeral portrait, and indeed some whiff of funeral parlour finality can still be sensed in the magical ritual conducted by the photographer when he hides his head behind the piece of black cloth. No one is smiling, that levity so apparent in our digital clicks is still in the distant future. In those family photographs that you find stowed away in the bottom of chests-of-drawers, no one is the least concerned with looking happy, and certainly not radiant. Indeed, everyone looks peevish, gloomy, if not actually ferocious; guarded, crotchety.

I have no photographs of Ninin as a baby or young girl, or of her family, in the years around the turn of the century. Perhaps they have been lost, or perhaps spending money on a photographer struck people as a scandalous luxury. So I have been obliged to invent one.

It can only be a group portrait, with the old people seated in the middle, stiff and impassive, as though dried out by age, no hint of benevolence softening the hardness of their lips and looks; behind them and around them are their sons and daughters-in-law, some fully grown, indeed prematurely aging, some still almost children. The men stare fiercely at the lens as soldiers might stare at enemy cannon; the women, doomed yet expressionless, like so many Iphigenias ready for sacrifice, proffer white bundles balanced on their outstretched arms, with children of various ages clustered at their feet, staring out in surprise, their eyes like so many black buttons in astonished faces. At one of the edges of the family portrait, a woman in miniature, dressed like her mother, and like her determined to act and to resist: Ninin.

I see this image as though through running water, which is gradually eroding features already flattened by their pose and the direct light. Who, really, were these men and women? Were they as gruff and stern as they appear? Did they love each other, or merely put up with each other? What would they have to say to me, if they could surface from that water which is carrying them off a bit further day by day, above all if they were in the habit of talking about themselves, as they almost certainly were not? Have they anything in common with me, with the world as it seems to me today? The only one I can see clearly, the only one I can still just touch, dipping my hand into the flow of that past, all relatively recent though it is – little more than a century old – is the child Ninin; through her, the images of her brothers and sisters also take on life.

For me, Ninin is the fons et origo. Ninin the indefatigable, Mulier Fabricans. My Lucy, the first human form emerging from the slime.

Unmistakable, unique, my DNA, as deep in me as the marrow of my bones, her thoughts the substratum of my own. And, at the same time, wider, a super-personal being, a spirit permeating the very idea of what it is to be human.

Young or old, she’s always my Ninin. As when I called to her when I was a child, with the imperious possessiveness of a lover. Passion is not a prerogative of youth and it has little in common with sexual desire, with which it is often confused; sometimes, intense and total passions are experienced during the least sexual parts of life, in infancy and old age. I can only define as passion the feeling that bound me to my mother and the old people of my early childhood, among whom Ninin was the most reassuring yet most inaccessible, the most loved and necessary.

If I had to describe what, over the years, became my personal cosmogony, Ninin would be at its core: the small, clear-cut keystone of my universe, a symbol of the most absolute, unvarnished and pragmatic woman’s love.

The firstborn daughter of Giuseppe and his wife Domenica is destined to survive many another trial after the cow’s teat, including typhus, two world wars, breast cancer and a starveling’s pension after fifty years of working in a factory. She will bring up three generations: her own brothers and sisters (before she herself dies, she lays flowers on all their graves), her niece Maria, my mother, and me, her great-niece. She sees the history of almost a century unfold before her, with its events and portents: electric light, ships full of emigrants, cars, cinema, Mussolini, liberation and the republic, the Madonna Pellegrina, Kennedy, Pope John, the popular variety programme Canzonissima, the first man on the moon, the miniskirt. Always in danger of being crushed by history, she stands resolutely aside from it, absorbed in weaving a story of her own, and of her folks, small-scale, persistent, ever to be cobbled together anew and then shored up, an everyday adventure which keeps her holding her breath. However monotonous her deeds and days, Ninin is never bored. Throughout her eighty-five years on this earth, she works tirelessly (except during her last year, spent in bed complaining of her aches and pains and inability to carry on working) without putting aside anything for herself, or asking for any respite; quickened, to the very last, by a desire – all the stronger for being purely instinctive, indeed almost unconscious – to care for those who have been put into her care. To help them to negotiate today with honour and dignity, and to lead them to safety tomorrow; beginning afresh each day.

Work is to be her sacrament, and duty her religion – duty, a mysterious word whose very utterance tears at her lips like a sharp blade. Duty is a cruel god who demands that you rise early and go to bed late, that you give your bones no rest and your eyes no peace, that you curry-comb your very soul. Duty consumes its worshippers like an undying flame; you can sometimes glimpse it in her eyes, that little flame, storm-tossed but never quite put out. Ninin’s sense of duty has nothing to do with the law of the land, and on occasions may be at odds with it; her very personal theology is spliced with curious and contradictory dogmas, but its beating heart knows no words, it is inarticulate, pure élan vital. As prosaic and down-to-earth as the heart which pumps blood into the veins. While there is life, come what may, Ninin will push on.

She was born at the beginning of March, when it was still winter, in the stable among the cows and donkeys like Jesus Christ, as everyone was born around her way in those days; there was certainly an ox, and probably a little donkey, but no angels, and instead of the Three Kings there was grandfather Bartolomeo, with a yellow moustache which reached almost to his ears, and his teeth even more yellow than his moustache, his son barba Giacu, stinking of wine, and the primordial Catlina, the mare granda, the grandmother, with her little black eyes, dressed in seven layers of skirts and bodices, with deep pockets between one layer and another, and knotted bundles containing handkerchiefs and snuff, and cheese rind – and the countless fine blades of her own viciousness. The gift Bartolomeo brought to the birth was the willow rod he was always quick to send whistling around his grandchildren’s grubby legs; Catlina’s gift was the bitter taste of countless injustices to come. Barba Giacu brought nothing; it was he himself who was brought back from the wine shop.

After her came a Maria who was to be my grandmother, and then a Domenica known as Michin; a Bartolomeo known as Mecio; a Margherita who died at the age of three, drowned in a nearby stream where they did the washing; then a Giuseppe known as Noto (from Pinot, which was the usual shortening of Giuseppe), then another Margherita to replace the first. By the age of four Ninin, the oldest, was already busy rocking cradles, changing nappies, peeling small potatoes for which grown-ups’ hands were too big. Her mother Domenica – once she’d finished milking cows and goats, cutting grass, carrying logs and making cheese – would sit down at the loom, which stood in a corner of the big kitchen, in a niche in the ground, where she would settle with a rustle of petticoats, her feet flying over the pedals while her arms would lower and raise the bar. It was hard work. What she spun was coarse hempen cloth, for sheets and shirts, off-white in colour like cream when it’s time to take it off the milk to make it into butter.

Twice a year they would go to the market at Chivasso to buy hemp yarn and sell their cloth. It was neither Domenica nor the other current daughter-in-law who struck the bargains with the dealers, but la granda: ‘You two don’t even know what the weather’s like outside, they’d eat you for breakfast,’ Catlina would say to the daughters-in-law. And off she’d go, her donkey laden with bundles, together with a young son or a grandson who was no longer wet behind the ears.

It was Catlina who was in charge of all the women’s money, and her pockets gave out a faint clinking sound. It was always she who went to the local market of a Saturday, to buy flour, cooking pots, salted anchovies and clogs. The daughters-in-law stayed at home, looking after the animals and the kitchen garden.

The hierarchy which reigned in the house of my ancestors was a tribal affair, with hints of matriarchy. When, as an arts student in the Seventies, despite the professors’ objections, I insisted on doing a thesis on witches (a subject which was becoming popular among feminists at the time, which was why I, eager for revelations about myself and life in general, was so keen to engage with it, and also why my teachers were so against it, one of them expressing the view that witches were a phenomenon of no importance, or, to use the terminology of the time, ‘a boil on the arsehole of history’) what I discovered as I painfully transcribed late medieval Latin court proceedings written in a bastard Gothic script, was a stretch of the past whose smoke-filled gloom put me in mind of nothing so strongly as my own house, before my birth. At the end of the nineteenth century as in the fifteenth, families were large, and the women were under the thumb of the oldest among them. As in a harem, perhaps, or a Chinese house where many wives live together, with the first one having the whip-hand, in the stone houses of the villages in the foothills of the Alps la granda lorded it over the daughters-in-law and, if she was firm and had them in her grip, the young men would serve as her armed right hand. She was a royal madam, a regent who had to watch out both for women’s plots and for vendettas fuelled by male pride. It was a world untroubled by finicky matters of democracy, nothing but power and submission, and it was no coincidence that the daughters-in-law referred to their mother-in-law deferentially as madona, which comes from mea domina, my lady, even if they didn’t know it.

What I was reading then, at the age of twenty, in those courtroom proceedings, spoke to me of the fragility of women’s power, enclosed and contained as it was within those walls of stone, within those caves of beaten earth, amidst domestic objects transformed by a collective nightmare into instruments of witchcraft. Whether kindly or ill-disposed, the witches of bygone days – peasants, mothers, midwives, herbalists, witch-women or quite simply women – lived their lives exposed to a wind of pure barbarism, that same wind which was still worming its way into the house where Domenica gave birth to her first-born.

The other daughter-in-law of the family was called Rita; a woman of few words, she kept her eyes lowered and would nod her head without ever moving her pale lips. She was a see-through woman, the colour of the cold morning air; Domenica had tried to befriend her, to have someone young to talk to, but Rita was too timid, she didn’t know what friendship was, she’d grown up under the protective wing of a fat and jealous aunt and then fallen straight under la granda’s iron rod, without even a whiff of freedom in between.

Domenica had something invisch, something vibrant about her, which Catlina didn’t like. Furthermore, Domenica’s oldest children were all girls, while Rita had given birth to two boys, and it was this too – apart from her docile nature – which caused her mother-in-law to view her in so favourable a light.

Right from her poverty-stricken, hard-working youth, Ninin realised that she belonged to a persecuted tribe. Magna Rita’s sons received larger portions of polenta, and if there was any full-cream milk it went straight to them. Domenica’s daughters looked on, and knew better than to complain. ‘Men eat more,’ their grandmother had decreed, and this was true for all males, even as children (though in the future Domenica’s male children would eat less than Rita’s). In that cavernous kitchen, beneath the long beam, the men would be seated at the massive table, blackened by the smoke of many meals, while the women crouched by the stone hearth, feeding their babies, or managed to gulp down the odd mouthful while they served the men, and the girl children would perch on stools with a plate balanced on their knee. Only Catlina would be seated at table, among the men, dividing out the portions on the chopping board and keeping an eye out to see that no one sopped up too much of the anchovy oil along with their slice of polenta, or helped themselves to both cheese and milk.

‘Cheese is made from milk’ – her voice would fall like an axe on greedy, guilty hands – ‘so if you drink milk you won’t be eating cheese, and if you eat cheese you won’t be drinking milk.’

Ninin never shook off this culture of dearth. Born into poverty, she never adjusted to the idea of being comfortably off, regarding it as some new-fangled fad, even when in the Sixties our house, like so many others throughout Italy, suddenly filled up with objects and foodstuffs which had not previously existed and which soon seemed indispensable. When, within the space of a couple of years, any number of tinned or frozen foods became available, along with household appliances and plastic buckets and televisions and man-made materials – things which in the immediate postwar years had come in parcels from America but which you could now buy here as well – she remained faithful to her cotton overalls and evening cup of milky coffee. She watched television, but only after supper, when she had done the washing up and all the other household chores. Her great friend was the washing machine, which she treated with the respect due to a hard-working individual which plays its part in the household economy.

Food, for Ninin, always retained the aura of the truly precious, worth more than gold, because you can’t eat gold. The fruit of hard work, food had to be made by your own hand; food made by others, don’t even mention by a machine, was suspect. Particularly precious were the slightly burnt meatballs so gloriously combining all the remains from the previous day, the leftover pasta (always overcooked) reheated, the panada, dry bread cooked in broth, over-ripe fruit with the bad bits cut out, then cooked with a bit of sugar and lemon rind, and fresh cheeses made at home in hollow moulds, soft white blocks which you mashed up with your fork and ate with a ripe tomato and a bit of salt. In private, like someone practising a secret and barely tolerated religion, Ninin would eat up any leftovers which were beginning to go off, because food is like people, you have to show it respect even in its old age and decline.

For her – as I imagine for a Bangladeshi widow with a gaggle of children to look after – wastage was sacrilege. She would never have accepted today’s unisex, one-size-fits-all label of consumer: my great-aunt’s sole aim was to avoid consumption. For her, it was as though you had to creep up to things on tiptoe, leaving no sign of your approach, and, above all, never let the source run dry. She was an ardent ecologist avant la lettre, not for political reasons, but genetic ones: what shall we do tomorrow if there’s no more light, water, wood, bread, sun? ‘Turn the tap off. Turn the light out. What are you doing, still reading at this time of night? What a waste!’

She spoke these words in a harsh and somehow ancient voice: a voice calling me back to a world of poverty which is no more. Poverty may still linger on in many parts of the world, perhaps even more desperate and primitive than that which was felt around Catlina’s stone hearth. But nowadays poverty is always and everywhere reflected back to us through our complex, anguished wealth. For Ninin, on the other hand, when she was little, poverty was the whole story, all 360 degrees of it. Affluence was so far off that she couldn’t have glimpsed it even through binoculars, had she had any.

What she did have, right to hand, was that continual pain in the stomach which is known as hunger.

Not that her family were the poorest of the poor. They had some land, even if it didn’t yield much, scattered bits of field and woodland up in the mountains, which could only be reached by clambering up hill and down dale for hours on end, possibly with a load of hay or firewood on your back, or a sack of chestnuts over your shoulder. And there were animals in the stables, which gave milk to make cheese that you could sell. But people who lived in the mountains did not have an easy time of it, even if they did have the odd cow and a bit of workable land. My family numbered up to eighteen at times, what with the two grand, and their children and grandchildren; there was food to eat, but you rarely ate your fill, and what there was, was divided up not in an equitable fashion, but according to power and privilege. The bread was never white, but d’melia, made of maize mixed with wheat or rye and bran, and it came in hard, solid cob loaves. It was good, though, for children it took the place of sweets, which they never ate except perhaps at Easter, when they might have a little sugar egg, or at Carnival a bugia fried in bacon fat. It wasn’t every day that you ate a piece of bread, and it was quite a treat. Once when Ninin has crept into the cellar lured by the smell of fresh bread and cut herself a slice, footsteps behind her cause her to freeze in the damp darkness which smells of stone and mould. Two hands clamp down on her shoulders in a vice-like grip, followed by Catlina’s voice: ‘What are you doing here? Thief!’

Scarcely has she bitten into the slice of bread than it is snatched out of her hands to end up among the folds of her grandmother’s petticoats. Ninin’s saliva turns to acid in her mouth.

That evenig, polenta and nothing else.

‘Why aren’t you giving any milk to the cita?’ Domenica objects.

‘Because she’s a thief.’

‘But she’s a little girl, that’s no way to carry on!’ protests Domenica, bravely raising her voice.

‘That bread didn’t belong to her! And pipe down you, let’s have a bit of respect round here!’

Catlina in a rage is like a snake, swaying and spitting – this is one of Ninin’s earliest memories, a true revelation of things to come, and it will remain with her for ever.

Domenica is about to strike back, but her husband Giuseppe bangs his fist down on the table to silence her. She swallows her words and bites her lip. Bartolomeo, the pare grand, looks at her and tugs at his moustaches, first one side then the other. His eyes darken, then brighten, and for an instant a Saturday night smirk enlivens his set patriarch’s mask.

‘She can season the polenta with a bit of aria d’l’uss,’ says Catlina with a disdainful gesture which sets her seven petticoats aflutter.

Ninin is all too familiar with the aria d’l’uss, the fresh air from the door; it’s a common expression in everyday parlance. It refers to the lightness of what is absent, as opposed to the solidity of what is present; food seasoned with the fresh air from the door is flavourlless and dull, only extreme hunger can spice it up; but faced with such unsustaining fare, the unsatisfied stomach constructs dream banquets. Child that she is – that is, still in thrall to the splendidly literal nature of the metaphor – Ninin moves towards the door with her slice of cold, hard polenta, hoping that it will change taste as she approaches; and, be it the power of the imagination or hunger, pure and simple, if you concentrate, it does indeed seem that, in the space between inside and out, that piece of polenta suddenly begins to taste of the cheese and butter it so sadly lacks.

They are called Davito Gara, and the village where they live is called Ca’ d’Gara, the Gara houses. So they are the Davito of Gara, they’ve left their mark on that terrain and have been marked by it in their turn.

It’s a little cluster of houses huddled above the village of Rocca Canavese, six or seven hundred metres above sea level, on an Alpine foothill covered in chestnuts, ilexes and birches. We are some thirty kilometres from Turin, but in another world. The Canavese is a region of Piedmont with shifting borders, not quite sure where it belongs. Its history goes back to the old Celtic peoples defeated by the Romans, and it knew the usual sequence of war, occupation and repression, including by the Lombards, king Arduin of Ivrea, small local feudal lords, the Savoy and Napoleon’s conquering armies. But for my family, rough and ignorant as they were, history consisted of nothing more than births, deaths and seasons, harvesting chestnuts and potatoes, and – since we were too numerous and too poor all to survive on a single patch of not very productive land – of the gradual appearance of small factories, particularly those making textiles, which grew in size and offered more and more work, especially to women, who cost less, so gradually replacing weaving at home. There were already foundries and metalworks down in the cities and towns, at Castellamonte they made ceramics, stoves and pots, and there were mines in the Val Chiusella. Migration was the great event: people migrated a few kilometres down to the plain, or to another world across the ocean, just for one season or for good. Either way, it meant a change.

From Rocca, a village in the Malone valley with nothing to boast about except a frescoed medieval chapel – the castle, or Rocca from which it takes its name having been reduced to a ruin centuries ago – a road, or rather a wide path, leads to the chapel of Our Lady of the Snows, perched on top of a steep hill, the goal of summer processions. It is by no means the only Our Lady of the Snows, around these parts they’re two a penny, built on their lofty pinnacles with the idea that Our Lady must have been particularly attracted by the chill and solitude of such places. And, as it climbs, this path branches out into many smaller ones which end up in dozens of little hamlets.

Ours, Ca’ d’Gara, stands right by the main road, enclasped in one of its loops; two rows of houses to either side of a road of stones and beaten earth with a stone fountain in the middle. Any passer-by can drink the water – cool in summer and icy cold in winter – from a copper-plated ladle hanging from a chain. Ca’ d’Gara has eighty, perhaps a hundred inhabitants. Dogs, goats and the odd donkey mingle with the humans, all of them bound by chain or habits; only the hens wander about more or less at will, with their idiotic air. Cats lead a dog’s life up here, obliged as they are to keep an eye out for birds and mice if they don’t want to become vegetarians and make do with the watery remains of polenta which the women leave out for them. And they’ve learned not to be too trustful of humans, who tend to associate them with witches, and hound them accordingly. At night, stone martens stalk the hen-runs, tethered dogs bark, angry and powerless. Night here is the land of shadows, there are no lights apart from the moon. You grope your way to bed, hands and feet made expert by previous experience. Beds rustle, since mattresses are stuffed with maize leaves, home to tribes of ravenous fleas. Parents and children sleep in the same room; alarming sounds may alert children to the unplumbed mysteries of married couples’ nights, but childhood sleep is merciful, it lays you out within minutes, before mother and father have even come to bed.

The rhythms of life vary according to the seasons. In summer you get up before dawn, go out into the fields, stay up in the hills until late at night threshing such little wheat or rye as succeeds in growing there, and stripping the maize. In winter you have supper early, then go into the cattle-heated stable and stay there, saying the rosary and telling stories. You give yourself only as much light as you need to work, to card wool, to string beans, to cut wood; when you’ve run through your ration of oil, you sit there in the dark. The stories are always the same, they’re about witches who turn into animals, nanny-goats or tom-cats; their identity is revealed when the cat is injured or the goat becomes crippled, and the next day it is the witch who comes on to the scene, bedraggled or limping. These stories tell of strange and horrid deaths, of ghastly miracles, of talking animals and human stupidity.

Ninin’s favourite is the story about the wolf and the fox, the mangy, famished denizens of a world no less penurious than her own, and thus worthy of a certain fellow-feeling, rogues though they be. One fine day this pair, driven by hunger and their natural tendency towards thievery, decide to go and eat up the quaia, the curds belonging to a certain Pinin, who lives not far away, behind some crag or other. Scrawny as they are, they have no trouble getting into the crotin, the little dry-stone shed half built into the hillside where the milk and cheeses are kept, they slip in easily through an air vent and instantly start lapping up the curds. But the fox, who is a sly one, occasionally goes back to the air vent to see if he can still fit through it, whereas the wolf gobbles away without a care in the world. So when Pinin, hearing the kerfuffle, arrives on the scene with a big stick, the fox manages to slip away in time, while the wolf, with his bloated stomach, gets stuck in the air vent and receives a healthy thrashing. And the fox is not just cunning, he is also spiteful: while his unfortunate partner in crime is howling under the blows, the fox espies a cornaj, a cornelian cherry tree, and rolls around in the ripe fruit that has fallen to the ground. And when the wolf at last manages to escape Pinin’s wrath and extract himself, who does he see but the fox, all stained in red, and groaning wretchedly: Oh brother wolf, what a state I’m in! I can hardly walk for the beating I’ve taken! And the wolf – a duffer, but a kindly one – takes the fox on his back, while the fox sings: Now we tramp down the marshy track, one bag of bones with another on its back, now we tramp through the narrow vale, the sick one carrying the hale!

This story has several morals: stealing is wrong, but hunger may drive you to it; in this world, it pays to think ahead; never trust anyone; and, last but not least, a good joke is worth more than pity. How they would laugh, Ninin and her sisters and little cousins, at the expense of the poor thwacked and bloodied wolf, so irredeemably stupid. There is something bracing about this story with its artless cruelty, you find yourself laughing, but reluctantly, you feel yourself both the giver and the receiver of blows, at once robbed and robber, but luckily you also feel yourself a bit of a fox, as well.

Hearing these stories sixty years on, I find them at once stale and primitive, like the air in an attic, a cave of dust and cobwebs, but also a realm high among the rooftops, strewn with the gnawed bones and blackened tatters of the past, the launching-pad from which the childish imagination will take flight towards a future that is still in part a dream. Those colours, those smells, neither seen nor smelt, but simply imagined in words only half known: are they not in fact the most vivid?

Then there were the French stories about Gribouille, who burned down his house to sell the ashes and cut off his nose to spite his face, stories which left us children open-mouthed, wondering whether you could indeed sell ashes (might they be worth more than the house itself? Who would buy them? What was this topsy-turvy world where Gribouille lived?) Children would listen to these tales in silence: the fact that they were so often repeated made them as familiar as landscapes, places you go through time after time, yet without ever forgetting their potential to take you by surprise, feeling out the terrain under your feet for pitfalls, sensing the shadow cast by the hill at sundown, questioning the messages carried on the wind. With the passing of time, that distant figure of Gribouille ceased to be bizarre and unfathomable and became the yardstick for gauging human stupidity; you might stumble upon him anywhere. I like to think that our Italian Gribuia was not just the echo of the French Gribouille, but that he added a particularly Italian flavour to the popular legend which inspired George Sand and Mme de Segur. That business of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face is the first piece of home-grown nonsense I remember: little blazes of meaning which shatter the fabric of everyday speech, laughter staking its claim, declaring its presence. Why deny oneself this necessary luxury, particularly since it’s free?

In other contexts, within the family the word is a pathway as narrow and stony as that leading to the Virgin of the Snows, it serves to transmit unvarnished orders: get up, be quiet, get to work! All emotions – fear, wonder, pain, joy – have to find expression in set phrases. The idea that siblings, or parents and children, might talk to each other, confide in each other, is unheard of. Individualism is heartily discouraged, to the point that it is, indeed, unthinkable. Everyone who comes into this world has a model right there before their eyes, fathers for sons, mothers for daughters, and no arguing about the unspoken rules which govern life here below: respect for authority, devotion to the land; prudence, sobriety and modesty for women, a covert cockiness for men, deference towards the powerful and acceptance of one’s lot for all. Old stories too could serve as models, but also – in their own mysterious way, in their apparent ambiguity – as possible ways out.

The school is down in the village, one big room crammed with some sixty children, heated by a stove to which each pupil contributes fuel, arriving with a piece of wood under his or her arm. The teacher, who is remarkably energetic and determined, teaches three classes at once, grouping the smallest children at the front and the oldest at the back. While those in front are chanting a, o, u together and the second class are saying their times tables, those at the back are roving over Italy with its rivers and seas and hills. The noise level is barely tolerable, voices interweave and jar, but our teacher conducts that jangling concert like a true maestro, skillfully deploying her long baton so that it reaches into the furthest row and falls pitilessly on the ears of the mischief-makers who, in cases of particularly serious misdeeds, are summoned to the blackboard to have it fall on their bunched fingers, tac, a sharp rap which hurts most in winter when it lands on chilblains and scravasse, bloody patches in chapped skin made stiff by cold.

Because she sees her mission as dinning education into heads as hard as the stone which bred them, and since their attendance is far from regular – in winter children almost always come to school, even through deep snow, but with the arrival of spring the older ones are sent to work in the pastures and the fields – she has patented her own personal educational system which consists of multiplying each class by itself: you’re in the first class for one year, in the second for two and the third for three. Like that, one way or another, something will get into those shaved and lice-infested heads; it’s better to spend the winter on benches rather than in the stable, at least they’re obliged to wash their hands and faces and learn to count and utter a few words of Italian, which no one speaks at home, and when they go down into the valleys everyone laughs at them and cheats them.

Ninin likes the teacher. For all its severity, in comparison with that of la granda her regime is like a breath of fresh air. At school Ninin encounters the hitherto unknown concept of fairness, by which she is much taken. One day the teacher brings a sack of chestnuts into class and roasts them on the stove; each child is given the same number. Everyone gobbles them up at high speed, burning their tongues because the chestnuts are still hot, before someone else can come and filch them, although in their heart of hearts they know this will not happen, not here. The teacher distributes raps and praise impartially, according to the principle of what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, which will become one of the linchpins of her pupil’s credo.

Knowing herself to be a citizen of the world, feeling that she has a certain dignity, young though she is, being able to do her duty with her head held high rather than humbly and shamefully with eyes cast down: Ninin likes school. She attends as often as she can, it doesn’t matter to her if her feet in their clogs are sopping wet and her damp dress steams as she sits next to the stove. The teacher has faith in her – perhaps those young eyes already show the first glints of that steely tendency to take care of her neighbour which was to reach such a pitch over the course of her lifetime – and makes her her assistant. Ninin busies herself in helping with the little ones, just as she does at home.

One winter night she is awoken by the voice of her mother, down below. She is not shouting, she is not even talking particularly loudly, but Ninin, heart beating loudly, immediately sits up, so that the mattress starts to creak. She throws off her little sister Maria who is sleeping on top of her, jumps down from the bed, doesn’t put on her clogs so as not to make a noise; runs barefoot on to the wooden landing, goes down the stairs leading to the courtyard and peeks through the gap beneath the shutters, which is just at her own level.

In the kitchen Domenica and old Bartolomeo, one to each side of the table, are glaring at one another; red in the face, she’s breathing heavily, the palms of her hands resting on the wood. Still wearing his cloak, he is one dark and threatening mass. It’s Saturday night, he’s just come back from the wine shop, before his sons.

‘I married one, not two,’ says Domenica choking back the tears; steeling herself by pressing a hand on the dishevelled knot in her handkerchief.

Then she turns round and moves away. He takes a step towards her, sways, holds out a heavy arm. The door swings open, Ninin flattens herself against the wall, between the window and the bench. Domenica flies up the stairs without even making them creak, in the kitchen the pare grand is blaspheming and spitting on the ground.

Ninin follows her mother into the bedroom. Domenica gives her daughter a look which alarms her, as though asking for help. But then she takes her in her arms and they sleep together in the grown-ups’ bed until morning, when Giuseppe wakes them up by crashing down on to the mattress like a dead weight.

From then on the old man is ever more alarming, an irate, inscrutable god who casts a cold shadow on the beaten earth that is the floor. Ninin shrinks at the very sight of him.

That phrase ‘I married one, not two’, buzzes around in her head, it sounds sinful and threatening. Her mother seems to be being driven towards some strange abyss, from which she can rescue herself only by some dizzying acrobatic feat.

‘Marriage is the union of man and woman for the founding of a family,’ says the teacher. ‘Honour your father and mother,’ say the commandments. ‘A bit of respect, if you don’t mind,’ thunders la granda if anyone dares step out of line.

The idea that unfairness and evil could work themselves into the very roots of power fills her with pained astonishment. Yet that is how it is, she’s always known it, and now she senses it in her mother’s timid gestures, in her downcast eyes, in the thumping of her heart, so loud it seems to find a echo within her own ribs.

La granda, all-seeing as always, now takes an even greater dislike to her young daughter-in-law, becomes even more brusque and demanding. One day – it is some holiday or other – while they are turning the cheeses in the crotin, Domenica tackles her mother-in-law head on with the words: ‘I can hold my head high, I’ve never brought dishonour on my husband’s house – your son’s, that is.’

Her eyes bright with malice and loathing, the old woman proceeds to pour a bucket of milk over Domenica’s feet.

‘Look what you’ve done,’ she says to her, ‘that means that tonight you and your daughters will go to bed without any supper.’

Domenica sees that she has said the wrong thing, it is not reassurance that the old woman is seeking. She should have held her tongue. Perhaps she should even… but she dare not think along those lines. If la granda has not previously been her friend, she is now her enemy. Domenica becomes increasingly nervous, clutches Michin, her youngest, to her, holds her in her arms as though the presence of a child were enough to keep her out of danger, while it has been clearly proved that, that is not the case, because there are always plenty of children around, in those cramped spaces, and things happen anyway.

One day, at milking-time, when Ninin is in the stable peeling chestnuts almost in the dark – her fingers are so expert they don’t need light – il grand comes in and shuts the door behind him. He walks forward, slightly bent, his black jacket turning twilight into night. Seated under the brown cow, magna Rita trembles as he approaches. There’s a brief rasping sound, is it a stifled cry or just the three-legged stool knocked over by a clumsy gesture of the woman doing the milking?

Ninin is seized with a sudden sense of danger and also a strange fascination, as though one of those devilish portents described in winter evening gatherings were taking place before her very eyes. She’d like to run away, to disappear, but she daren’t take a step, she’s afraid she’ll be seen and meet the same fate as the woman, who’s been set upon by the man, and shaken, and repeatedly knocked against the wall. She doesn’t seem to be putting up any resistance, her body is acting as a shock absorber for il grand’s gasping frenzy, or has he actually killed her?

Ninin is probably crying, or more likely whimpering like a dog. She certainly wets herself from fear, as she can tell afterwards from the state of her dress and drawers.

Suddenly il grand turns round, scans the shadows, catches sight of her. His blazing eyes are those of a beast-god ready for a good meal. His hands are fumbling through the woman’s dishevelled garments, she’s slumped against him, he’s pushing her away. The child forces herself into action and runs out of the room, followed by the crack of the willow cane, taking with her for ever the memory of the half-dead woman, magna Rita, floppy as a rag doll.

Ninin runs up the road to the shrine of Our Lady of the Snows, pauses for breath, mumbles a hasty Ave Maria and checks that no one is running after her. It’s pitch dark by the time she gets home and they are already out looking for her, her grandmother is not going to forgive her but she couldn’t care less about missing supper this evening, all she cares about is snuggling up close to her mother and fervently thanking Our Lady that it wasn’t she who had been in the stable, that it hadn’t been Domenica’s turn to milk that evening and die that strange death.

In fact Rita is still alive but she’s not in good shape. Every day Ninin checks to see whether she’s ill, if she’s bleeding, dying. Women bleed, they often have strange illnesses, sometimes the washing in the stream is all red and there are bloody sheets each time they buy a baby at the market. But Rita survives, she’s just paler and quieter than usual, that’s all.

‘She’s sensitive, she’s missing her man,’ says la granda.

Her husband, barba Nando, went off at the end of autumn and no one knows when he’ll be back.

‘Isn’t she the lucky one?’ comments Domenica quietly; she has not forgotten her sister-in-law’s rejection of her attempts at friendship. ‘Sensitive, is she? I haven’t got the time.’

Spring arrives and Giuseppe says that he’s off too. Every family has men who go off, and sometimes even a woman; they go to France to work. Domenica looks up and seems to want to say something but then doesn’t.

Ninin hears her parents talking in the stable, in the kitchen garden, keeping their voices down so that the old folk can’t hear them, Domenica runs after him, tugs at his sleeve. He says: ‘No, not you! You’re staying here.’