The Mussolini Canal E-Book

Antonio Pennacchi

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

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

100 years of italian history seen through the lives of the Peruzzi family

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Leseprobe

To my brother Gianni, and all our dead.

The Author

Antonio Pennacchi still lives in Latina outside Rome, where he was born in 1950. For most of his life he worked on the nightshift of a local factory before his success as a writer allowed him to leave.

His first novel Il Fasciocommunista (2003) won the Premio Napoli and was turned into a major feature film. His second novel The Mussolini Canal (2010) won The Strega Prize and has been one of the most successful literary novels published in Italy in recent years.

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, The Last of the Vostyachs and God’s Dog 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 2012.

For what it’s worth, this is the book I came into the world to write. Stories are not invented by authors, they float around in the air waiting for someone to pluck them out of it. From childhood onwards, I have always known that this was the story I had to lay my hands on, before it vanished. This story and no other. This story, this book; no other.

Each book that I’ve written – for what it’s worth – has seemed to me a prelude to this present one. My other books came into being with this one in mind; and it was for this that I began to look into the more freakish aspects of this world, from Neanderthal man to Fascist architecture and land reclamation. So, here and there, the reader may expect to come upon things he has also read about in those earlier works. This book does not copy from them. Rather, it is they which were written for this one.

Naturally enough, there was no real Peruzzi family in the Pontine Marshes to whom all these things happened. Although this book contains references to historical figures, both the Peruzzi family and the series of events in which they were caught up are pure invention. But there was no family of settlers in the Pontine Marshes – whether from the Veneto, Friuli or around Ferrara – this too is a fact – who did not experience at least some of the events in which the Peruzzi were caught up.

In this sense, and in this alone, all the events recounted in this book are to be regarded as true.

A.P.

Contents

Title

Dedication

The Author

The Translator

Quote

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Copyright

I

Hunger. That’s what drove us south. Why else would we have left? Except for hunger, we’d have stayed put. We belonged up there. Why would we want to come down here? That was where we’d always been, that was where all our relations were. We knew every nook and cranny of that place, we knew every thought that went through our neighbours’ heads. We knew every tree. Every canal. Why would we want to come down here?

They kicked us out, that’s why. Kicked us right where it hurts. Count Zorzi Vila. Stripped us bare. Robbed us blind. Of our livestock. Our calves. Our cows, with their udders bursting. You can’t imagine how much milk they produced. One squirt, and you’d have a bucketful. You’d sit down on the stool, you’d hardly touched a tit, you’d barely tickled an udder than a jet of milk streamed out, filling the pail, and you had to grip that pail firmly between your legs so it didn’t fall over.

Why are you laughing? Don’t you believe me? I just wish you’d been there to see it all.

And the oxen – our pairs of oxen could pull a plough faster than any caterpillar.

Now what are you laughing at?

Those oxen cut through that earth like butter. You just have no idea. I swear, up there we would plough a holding in one day, with just a couple of our oxen. Then, out of the blue, count Zorzi Vila stole them from us. Took over our livestock at the drop of a hat. Left us with nothing. And it was then – when they’d evicted us, then robbed us of our livestock – that Uncle Adelchi ran back into the house, and up into the loft, to take Uncle Pericles’ pistol out from its hiding-place under the beam, behind the loose tile. Then he came roaring down again to the threshing-floor, shrieking and shooting. And the factor scarpered; everyone scarpered. The factor went off hopping and skipping along with the rest, and trying to hide – because it was him that Uncle Adelchi was after. ‘I’ll get you,’ he shouted at the factor; ‘I’ll get you, wherever you are!’ And my grandmother – the only one who wasn’t scarpering, apart from the animals of course, they were standing quietly in the courtyard, all lined up to go, they didn’t know what was going on, poor things, and they were just chewing the cud – my grandmother went up to her son who was shooting and said: ‘Delchi – Delchi boy, Delchin.’

And Uncle Adelchi stopped shooting and stood there with the pistol in his hand and stared at it, as though wondering what he was doing. And my grandmother was saying: ‘Delchin, Delchin,’ and both of them were kneeling on the threshing-floor, wailing, with the others all gathered round them.

The factor came back, though, and Count Zorzi Vila gestured to him to keep clear. Then the carabinieri arrived. And that’s how they found the pair of them, kneeling in the middle of the threshing-floor, with my uncle weeping. They put him in chains and were starting to drag him off when Count Zorzi Vila began bawling at his steward in his usual high and mighty way: ‘Get a move on! What are we waiting for?’ and went back to tugging on the animals’ chains and off they all went, Uncle Adelchi with the carabinieri and our livestock with Count Zorzi Vila and his lot.

What did you say? That you can’t see Uncle Adelchi in a towering rage, firing like a madman and then starting to weep in his mother’s arms? That you remember him as tall and upstanding, commanding universal respect in his policeman’s uniform?

But this happened much, much later, and anyway such rage runs in the family. You don’t amble round all day saying to people: ‘Look, I’m in a towering rage.’ You keep it to yourself, hidden, coiled up, and it might never come out at all. Then, when you’re least expecting it, they get you smack on the spot where it’s all coiled up, and the rage comes out and gets the upper hand, and afterwards you say: ‘What was that all about? I didn’t mean it. Let’s turn the clock back, please, let’s go back to where we were a minute ago.’ But nothing will ever be the same again, and please God your mother would be there for you that day, so you could weep there in her arms.

Anyway, Uncle Adelchi wasn’t the saint that you remember, the man everyone turned to when a quarrel needed patching up. He was no peacemaker – he meant war, at least in his own house, which was also our own. And it was because of him, rather than the livestock, when all’s said and done, that we ended up coming down here.

There was nothing we could do about the livestock. Before the business with the count and the factor, my Uncle Pericles had already gone to make inquiries at the Fascist Headquarters and the union, first at Rovigo and then at Ferrara, because the Rovigo lot hadn’t got a lot of clout. It was Ferrara that mattered, and if at Ferrara they said to you: ‘Look, Peruzzi, there’s nothing to be done, this is how things are, it’s all to do with that new 90 lira rate, the only person who can help you is Rossoni,’ then you saw that was that, because the Ferrara lot were Balbo’s men, they were on the side of the landowners, and if they said to you ‘Go and see Rossoni’ – they’d always hated him – it was to put the blame on him: ‘You see? He couldn’t do anything for you either.’ Anyway, Rossoni was in Rome, which might as well have been Babylon. Was my Uncle Pericles going to go all the way down to Rome?

In fact, though, when he saw his younger brother being dragged away in chains by the carabinieri – Uncle Adelchi was twenty-five or twenty-six, whereas Uncle Pericles, who was born in ’99, was thirty-two and already had a couple of kids to think about – and not only his younger brother, but the livestock with him, and my grandmother turning trustingly towards him, as though he, Pericles, were her one hope of salvation, and shouting ‘Pericles, Pericles!’ he might well have felt like saying: ‘Well, what am I supposed to do about it?’ because he would never have expected Adelchi to crack up like that. Yes, he’d seen him rushing into the house, but he hadn’t taken much notice, because he didn’t really set much store by that brother – always conveniently somewhere else, never around when you needed him – and he would have liked to give him a good thrashing whenever he heard him screeching and shrieking at his sisters. But when he saw him reappearing from the door which led on to the staircase and not even closing the mosquito net, and shrieking and shooting, and stumbling slightly as he came down the outside stairs, and shooting like a madman, and the factor making himself scarce and Adelchi shouting ‘I’ll get you,’ and shooting some more – well, put like that it all seems to take an age, but actually it happened in a flash – seeing his brother at that moment, Uncle Pericles actually burst out laughing: ‘Just look at Adelchi.’ And suddenly he felt love for him.

So when his mother turned to him with that ‘Pericles, Pericles,’ he would have liked to come back with ‘What am I supposed to do about it?’ but then she immediately added: ‘Go to Rome, Periclin,’ and she’d never used that diminutive before, even when he was a child. And then he said: ‘All right then, tomorrow we’ll be going to Rome’ – and it was a matter-of-fact sort of statement, not a suggestion, directed at Uncle Themistocles, his older brother; you won’t remember him, you can’t have known him because his sons took him back to Northern Italy in the Sixties, to Turin. They worked at the Fiat factory, but he was too old for that.

What did you say? How many of us were there? Quite a crowd. My grandfather had produced seventeen children, eight girls and nine boys, and his brother had produced another seventeen, also eight girls and nine boys. At first we were rock-solid, just one big family, but with time the cracks began to show. They stayed up north, they didn’t come down to the Pontine Marshes. But that wasn’t why we split: they didn’t come south because we were split already, and we never made it up. It was to do with politics. Anyway, there were seventeen of us children, and it was different in those days, children weren’t a financial burden. In those days children meant prosperity, because they were tantamount to so many hands to work the land. What did you say? They were also so many mouths to feed? Of course they were, but that wasn’t a problem, you just gave them whatever was around. And if a child was strong, it more or less brought itself up. If a child got ill, you didn’t go off to some special doctor and buy some special medicine. My grandmother would light a candle and set herself to pray; and the child would get better, grow up and be put to work. And if it didn’t get better, it would die. You’d cry, pray, bury it and have another. That’s what everyone did, not just us. To work the land, what you needed was a pair of hands, there was no other way. Tractors and all those modern contraptions came later, they weren’t around in those days, and if you’d been there, you would have done as we did. That was how it had been done for centuries, saeculorum amen. There was no welfare then, just hunger.

What did you say? That large families made things worse, they just meant more people sharing the same hunger? For us, each one was a pair of hands, what more can I say? We were hungry and we needed hands to produce food, which was our wealth. But even now, you say, it isn’t just the rich who don’t have so many children? Well, we don’t in Italy, but in Africa – where they’re still poor, and get themselves drowned trying to get to Lampedusa – they carry on having children like nobody’s business. Just try telling them not to. You think they don’t know that a child is all too likely to die of hunger, or of AIDS? That’s why they have so many: ‘Sooner or later one of them is bound to pull through.’ You have children because they’re useful to you, and the poorer you are, the more useful they are; it’s when you’re rich that you can get by with just a few.

Uncle Iseo wanted to go to Rome as well. He was the third of the male children, just two years younger than Uncle Pericles, and they’d always been thick as thieves, both in the fields and in the wine-shop. Uncle Pericles himself would have preferred Iseo to go, because you didn’t flit down to Rome on some idle whim and come back the next day, there weren’t any of those fast trains you have nowadays. You never knew when you’d make it back, or indeed whether you’d make it back at all, though actually at that point the Fascist regime had already brought in some degree of order, but a few years earlier, when Italy was still divided, or barely united – apart from the fact that you’d never take it into your head to go as far as Rome at all – those few people who did go there, on some pilgrimage or for Holy Year, would make their will before they left, because you never knew what kind of pickle you might be getting into, brigands on the roads, or in the woods, or illness – and the journey would be a long one. Anyway, it was better to embark on such an undertaking with someone you could really trust – who, if it came to a fight to the death, would be sure to look out for you as well as for himself. It’s true that Themistocles could be counted on for this, and Uncle Pericles had always got on with him and been close to him. Uncle Themistocles had also fought in the war, he’d been involved in hand-to-hand fighting, and he knew what it meant to cut a man’s throat to stop him cutting yours. He’d been in that situation more than once in the war.

But Pericles was closer to Uncle Iseo. Indeed, at a later stage – when they had set up on their own and things weren’t going too well and first the Mussolini Canal broke its banks and then there was the hail – they’d both been tempted by the pay and enrolled as volunteers in the last World War, and had been sent to East Africa to defend it against the English who’d gone in from Kenya, and who had Land Rovers and armoured cars, the lot, whereas we’d got nothing, just carbines and hand grenades, our kind that is, the Balilla SRCM, which were made of tin, and all they produced was little slivers of wire, not like the English Pineapples, which were real hand grenades made with real iron. And while my uncles were attacking, amidst all those explosions and all that smoke, and people falling down and shrieking and the lieutenant shouting ‘Forward march!’, at some point Uncle Iseo found himself on his knees and then flat on the ground, unable to breathe. ‘What’s going on here?’ he wondered, and then he put a hand to his side and there wasn’t anything there, and his hand was all red, and he looked at it and tried again, but he felt the pain even though he couldn’t find his side, and then he shrieked: ‘Pericles, Pericles – Periclin.’

And Uncle Pericles was right by him on the ground: ‘Just keep calm,’ he urged him.

‘They got me, good and proper,’ Uncle Iseo was saying, and then: ‘I’ve had it, it’s you who’ll have to take care of the kids.’ And Uncle Pericles dragged him out of harm’s way, behind an upturned truck, and plugged his wound while everything else carried on as before, explosions and smoke and shrieking, and Uncle Iseo said: ‘Stay here, don’t leave me alone.’

But everyone else carried on shooting, and Uncle Pericles left him where he was: ‘Just keep calm, you’re all right here, I’ll be back soon, just wait for me here.’

‘I’ll wait for you all right; if I don’t die, I’ll wait,’ said Uncle Iseo.

But that time they went to Rome, it had to be the eldest, they couldn’t all go, and so it was my Uncle Themistocles who went. The women put the water on to boil and then filled the wash-tub in the threshing-area, and Uncle Pericles and Uncle Themistocles took a bath, one after another in the same water, because that’s how we did things back then, there wasn’t anything like a shower in those days. They had supper and then they went to bed, where each of them probably had a go at his wife. And the next morning, off they went. Actually, Uncle Pericles probably had more than one go, because he was known to be hot-blooded and had probably wanted to stock up, as you might put it, since a bit of enforced abstinence was in the offing. Come to that, she was hot-blooded too. My cousins – who sometimes got to hear how things were going, through the wall – said that she would snarl encouragement at her husband, and he would tell her to stop scratching him, in no uncertain terms. Anyway, early the next morning they set off for Rome, on their bicycles, well before dawn.

What did you say? Why didn’t they take the train? Well, if we’d had the money to buy the tickets, we’d have had the money to pay the boss; it was all down to that new 90 lire rate, as I told you, and there wasn’t a lira to be had anywhere, for love or money. We had sacks full of grain, but we didn’t have a single spare lira, because grain wasn’t worth anything either, by now. The Duce had killed Italian agriculture stone dead – industry was all right, but agriculture had had it.

Anyway, off they went, and after a lot of legwork they arrived in Rome. They took five days, or was it six, I can’t remember. They must have done about a hundred kilometres a day, it wasn’t the Giro d’Italia, where they do two hundred and fifty or even three hundred kilometres a day, averaging sixty an hour with erythropoietin. Bicycles were heavy in those days, and the tyres were worn. Every now and again you’d get a puncture, and have to stop to repair the inner tube with rubber solution. They’d taken some spare ones, but those were old too, and had already been repaired on several occasions. They’d also taken a load of bread, and some clothes. The roads themselves weren’t too bad, because the Fascists had already set up Anas to take care of them, and the road from Ferrara to Rome – first the Via Emilia and then the Flaminia – was asphalted. They slept wherever they happened to stop, in cowsheds or haylofts, and sometimes there were pilgrims’ hostels. Anyway, up hill and down dale, and after lot of legwork, they arrived in Rome. There they stayed at the Casa del Viaggiatore, a place for travellers near the station, and the next morning they washed, put on the militiaman’s black shirt and uniform they’d taken with them – rolled up in a package tied behind the saddle, and which they’d had ironed for them the night before – and presented themselves at Palazzo Venezia: ‘Knock knock, we want a word with Rossoni.’

‘What’s he to you then, your bosom chum?’ came the reply. ‘How dare you! His Excellency Rossoni, to you! And just who are you, anyway? Do you think you can just roll up here, at Palazzo Venezia, and say you want a word with whoever you choose? With the Duce himself, why not? Troublemakers, that’s what you are.’

Uncle Pericles didn’t fly off the handle immediately, though. While they were walking up from Via Nazionale, and his brother asked him: ‘What d’you think, are you sure they’ll see us? Aren’t they more likely to send us packing?’ he had immediately reassured him: ‘Are you joking? Send us packing? What price the revolution, in that case? Don’t you worry.’ But, in his heart of hearts, he wasn’t quite so sure. Throughout the journey, up and down the Apennines – even during the steepest climbs, at the Furlo and all through Umbria, when they had to dismount and carry on on foot, pushing their bicycles – he hadn’t known a moment’s hesitation: ‘Just wait till I’m in Rome, I’ll have the whole thing sorted in less than no time.’ But after Terni, when it was clear that they would be in Rome by nightfall, other thoughts began running through his head: ‘Perhaps I won’t be able to sort anything out at all – perhaps they won’t even let me see Rossoni.’

So Uncle Pericles didn’t fly off the handle immediately. He was resigned; it was almost as though he was expecting it. But when he saw Themistocles’ crestfallen look, the one he’d so often seen on his face as a child, as though he were saying: ‘Here we go again, it’s hopeless, just one more wasted journey, we’ve been had, as always,’ then Pericles really took offence, really flew off the handle. He put his hand to the knife he wore on his belt, pulled it out and began to yell, and was just about to use his other hand to swivel over the bench and come face to face with the usher on the other side. But in the meantime – hardly had he put his hand to his knife – the two brothers were set upon by four men from the secret police or some such outfit, and tied up like so much salami, and Uncle Pericles just had time to finish shouting at the usher, ‘Tell Rossoni that Peruzzi from Codigoro was asking for him, you oaf!’ and they bundled them straight into a cell that just happened to be there to hand. And, while they were bundling them into it, they gave them a thorough going over, kicking and punching to their hearts’ content. Then they plonked them down on to the plank-bed, with Uncle Pericles still shrieking ‘Peruzzi from Codigoro,’ until the last the policemen said: ‘Shut up now – we’ve got the message.’

But – just to be on the safe side – before calling the police station to have them taken away, the officer of the guard sent someone to the floor above – ‘Have you ever seen the likes?’ – who spoke to the usher there, who spoke to a secretary, who spoke to a clerk who, picking up a few things that needed to be signed, knocked on Rossoni’s door and went in: ‘Excuse me your Excellency, there are two madmen downstairs who say they’re called Peruzzi. From Codigoro, I believe. I had them put inside, you can’t be too careful nowadays.’

Well, you won’t believe this, but Rossoni leapt up from his desk like a jack-in-the-box, rushed down the stairs, had the cell door opened, saw who was in it and held out his arms: ‘Peruzzi!’

My uncles leapt up from the plank-bed where they were sitting, jumped to attention, gave the Roman salute and uttered the one word ‘Excellency,’ in tones of reverence.

‘Excellency nothing, you sons of bitches! Come over here,’ and he threw his arms around them, saying to his secretary: ‘This here is Pericles Peruzzi, watch out for him, he’s a right scoundrel, I’ve known him since he was a boy,’ and took them straight back upstairs with him, one on each arm.

None of this stopped Uncle Pericles from shouting out: ‘You oaf!’ at the usher as they passed his lodge for the second time.

At that time – as any history book will tell you – Rossoni was Number Two in the pecking order. Straight after the Duce; before Balbo and all the others who were ministers by name, but he was the one who did the real ministering, because he was Under-Secretary to the Prime Minister, equivalent to the American Secretary of State in relation to the US President, no less. He was the Duce’s eyes and ears, his right-hand man, and he knew absolutely everything that was going on. Number Two, as I’ve already said. Of course, that wasn’t the case throughout the whole twenty years. With the Duce, you never quite knew where you stood. Today you’d be his blue-eyed boy, tomorrow you would find yourself on the scrapheap. Look what he did to Balbo. And Ciano. Ciano was his son-in-law – married to his daughter – and he had him shot. What hope was there for a lesser mortal? So Rossoni too found himself in the doghouse, shortly after the Charter of Labour, when the Duce had him sacked from his position as President of the Fascist Unions – there was even a rumour that he had escaped to Switzerland with their funds, the ‘treasure’, so the rumour went; but he always denied this utterly, even though those who succeeded him found the cupboard completely bare, not a lira to be seen, nothing but debts – but in 1932 it was carrot time again, rather than stick time, and it was Rossoni who was calling the tune. Of course the Duce was always breathing down his neck – just one office away – but you couldn’t see the Duce without seeing Rossoni first. And as soon as he saw Uncle Pericles he threw his arms around him and almost lifted him off his feet.

What – you don’t believe me? You think it sounds like the stuff of fiction, that it’s impossible that someone like Rossoni should have put himself out for the likes of them, that they should have got through the doors of Palazzo Venezia – even if it was only to talk to the usher – without anyone stopping them, as though it was any old block of flats on Via Vincenzo Monti? Indeed, that two bumpkins like them couldn’t even have got themselves inside a block of flats on Via Vincenzo Monti?

Well, obviously, I’ve given you a shortened version – I couldn’t spell it all out for you blow by blow. Naturally, on their first lap, when they left home in the early morning, they went first to Ferrara. And they weren’t fools – they wouldn’t have set out on such a venture without thinking about the paperwork. In those days you didn’t just wander all over the place just as the fancy took you: ‘I’ve had enough of it around these parts, I think I’ll give it a try somewhere else.’ You needed permits. There was a Commissariat for Internal Migration, and they checked on all your comings and goings. For instance, you weren’t allowed to leave the countryside and go to live in town, saying that you were looking for work – they wouldn’t put you on the employment register, or give you a residency permit, they’d just send you off with the inevitable piece of paper like they do with illegal immigrants today. All right, we were peasants, we didn’t really know the ropes, but anyway, before they set off for Rome my uncles had gone to the provincial Fascist Headquarters in Ferrara and got themselves a letter that read: ‘Comrades Tom and Dick are coming to Rome for such and such a purpose, please help them in any way you can, Fascist greetings and thanks.’ Was there any way the provincial party secretary would not have written that letter for my Uncle Pericles? You do understand who we’re talking about? So, when they got to Piazza Venezia, even before they were anywhere near the Palazzo, they immediately showed that piece of paper to a policeman, and then to another couple of plain-clothes men, there in the square, and then again on several other occasions, until they got to the main door, with the sentry stationed alongside the Duce’s special guard, all puffed up in his sentry box, and he let them in – the sentry, that is – and took them to the usher. And the usher didn’t even bother to look at their piece of paper – he must have seen quite enough pieces of paper in his time, he’d got out of bed the wrong side that day, and when he saw those two little peasant nobodies, self-important though they were – ‘We want a word with Rossoni’ – goodness knows what he must have thought, and he said: ‘I’ll show these two country bumpkins how I snap to attention, I’ll soon have them grovelling.’ And it wasn’t long before he learned that rage was a besetting sin in our family. You and I, though, can’t go on like this. We’ll have to come to some agreement. I don’t know why you should want one, but if indeed you do want a blow by blow account I can give you one – I have nothing to hide now that so many years have gone by – and everything I’m telling you is the pure unvarnished truth. But at this rate we’ll never get anywhere. If you want to be around to hear the end of the story, I’ll have to skimp on surplus details. If I tell you that they did such and such a thing, then that’s what they did, you’ll just have to believe me, otherwise we’ll just have to let the whole thing drop. I’m not inventing anything; at most my memory may be faulty.

Anyway, just to backtrack a bit, my grandfather had been in prison with Rossoni at the time when they were still reds and Socialists, at Copparo, in 1904, the year Uncle Adelchi was born – he was the only one to have been born in his father’s absence. Although, in fact, my grandfather hadn’t exactly been there when the others were born either. On mornings when my grandmother would say: ‘I’m not going into the fields today,’ and begin to put great pans of water on to the fire and pull out pillowcases and sheets and clean linen, he didn’t even wait for her to send off the smaller children in the charge of the bigger ones, but would just say: ‘What would you say if I were to go off and had a little game of cards?’

‘Be off with you,’ she’d say.

And off he’d go to the wine shop – and he’d sit inside, not out, he didn’t want to be within earshot of any telltale noises – and play briscola and drink wine, until, in the early afternoon, or towards evening, some child would roll up and say to him: ‘It’s been born.’

‘Boy or girl?’ he’d ask. And, on hearing the reply, he’d go off to see for himself.

All my grandmother’s children were born by day, not even one by night, because the wine-shop was shut then. And all at home, with my grandfather safely out of the way. All except Uncle Themistocles, who was the oldest, who was born before my grandfather understood the system and so could recognize the signs, she always had them in the fields, when they were getting up the sugar beet. Her waters broke while she was using a hook to grapple with a particularly large one, just when it was poised half in and half out, like the baby itself, and she said: ‘What’s all this then?’ and left the beet where it was, with the hook attached, ‘Excuse me a moment,’ she said, and walked across the field to the drainage canal, sat down in the shade of a tree and produced my Uncle Themistocles. Once they’d realized what was up – the news had spread fast – the other women all went to gather round her, and she said: ‘Next time I’ll stay at home,’ and got up and wanted to go back to finish off her work with the large beet. It was only with the excuse of wanting to wash the baby that they managed to get her back home.

Anyway, at that time we were still in Codigoro. I don’t know how many years we stayed there, but not many. My people tended to be on the move. Hither and thither we went, wherever we could get contracts as sharecroppers. Where exactly my grandfather was from, I really couldn’t tell you – but certainly somewhere on the Po, well before it starts to branch out, and the delta begins. Indeed, perhaps from around Modena, or Reggio Emilia. His family seems to have had a bit of money at some stage – that’s what the old people said – and they were millers, so they were quite well off. Some grandfather or great-grandfather – I don’t know on which side of the family – had apparently been in Russia with Napoleon, and on his return he’d built himself one of those water mills, you know, the ones you used to see on floating barges on the Po, with the river water turning the paddles. People would bring him their grain and his people would keep their share, that’s how they made their money. Then it ran out. Because they had bought land; and ultimately they lost that as well. I don’t know whether it was through mismanagement, or some wastrel son, or perhaps a disastrous flood which washed away the lot, mills and money both, leaving my grandfather and his brother – and their parents, too – with nothing but the clothes they stood up in, and not a penny to their names. They lived in huts made out of branches, and started to work as carters, going from village to village. And that was how my grandfather met my grandmother, going up and down the roads of what was known as the Greater Ferrarese drainage area, which, despite being called ‘Ferrarese’, actually also extended beyond the Po, along the delta, into the Polesine, which was in the Province of Rovigo. I’ve never understood why it should have been called that: perhaps the funds – the capital, and the firms involved – came from Ferrara, or else when work began the whole area to be drained was in the Province of Ferrara. At all events, in their comings and goings around Formignana, where there was a tiny hamlet called Tresigallo – not a real town, like it is now, but just three houses and a little church – my grandfather and his brother would pass an isolated dwelling, and here they would often glimpse a particularly lovely girl. I don’t know if you remember any photographs of her – she was as tall and sturdy as a carabiniere even as an old woman – and goodness knows what she must have looked like when she was young, all dark-skinned as she was. Anyway, on those frequent sightings, my grandfather would pay her his respects. At first, she would just blush, but as time went by she started to give as good as she got – she was never one to be lost for words. And my grandfather too cut quite a dash from up there on his cart: fair-haired, a fine moustache, smoking his ever-present cigar. But my grandmother’s brothers were not so keen: ‘A nobody, that’s what he is,’ they’d tell her. And then: ‘A carter?’ For them, a carter was a nobody.

They were peasants – they worked the land. They owned the odd field, and held some land as sharecroppers, and had some livestock of their own. But it was those four square metres of land they owned that made them feel like gentlemen, as good as any landowner. Nobility, almost, in comparison to my grandfather. And they weren’t going to allow themselves to be besmirched. Their sister, on the other hand, had taken it into her head to fall for that ‘shirker’, as they called him, and there was nothing to be done, eventually she got her man, and the brothers put a brave face on it and set themselves to making a good peasant of him too. They even taught him to read and write.

He took some persuading – he liked his cart, his horses, and going around the roads and stopping off at the odd wine-shop. But he also liked that woman, even if he must soon have realized that she would be the one who would wear the trousers when it came to money matters. She in her turn both respected and adored him, and even as an old woman she would blush and laugh whenever he looked her in the eye in a certain way, chuckling mischievously. But when there was a decision to be made, she would listen to no one but her brothers – particularly the eldest, the one who never married – and then decide everything for herself.

My grandfather was easy-going, thoroughly sweet-natured and always laughing. He’d take his children in his arms – and, later, his grandchildren and great-grandchildren – and laugh and joke with them, whether she liked it or not. She’d tell him to get out the whip, but as often as not it was us children who had the whip hand. We never saw him angry, he never told us off; he would just give us a look – and a gentle one at that. He would do anything she asked of him with great good humour, and if anyone asked his opinion on some matter, even when we were already down in the Pontine Marshes, he would throw up his hands and say: ‘She’s the one to ask.’

She on the other hand made all the decisions without even asking his opinion, and then she would tell him what she had decided, and if one of my uncles felt bold enough to express a doubt – ‘What about pa? Are you sure that’ll be all right with him?’ – she’d just say: ‘I know him.’

But I wouldn’t want you to misunderstand me, I may have given the wrong impression: my grandfather was no pushover, no doormat. It was just that that was the way they liked it. Indeed, at the very end – in 1952 – one morning when my grandmother got up as usual and saw that he wasn’t making a move, just lying there in bed, she shot him a dark look, as though to say: ‘What are you waiting for?’

He said: ‘I’m not feeling all that good. I’m staying put.’ And he did, and one evening, three weeks later, she sat down beside him on the bed and he said to her, weakly: ‘What a beauty you are.’

‘No, love,’ she answered. ‘It’s you who’s the beauty,’ and shortly afterwards he died.

During those three whole weeks she was up and down those stairs, caring for him like a child, and after he died she insisted on washing and dressing him herself and the day after, at the funeral, she held herself stiff as a ramrod throughout and didn’t shed a tear. In the evening, though, once they’d all gone home, she took to her bed and stayed there, and three weeks later she too was dead.

Anyway, once he was married, my grandfather stopped being a full-time carter and started being a peasant. He must have been about twenty-three. At first they lived with his wife’s brothers – partly to get his hand in, as you might say, although getting your hand in as a peasant isn’t as easy as it sounds, you need to have been born on the land, and if you weren’t you’ll always be at a bit of a loss, you’ll never know the right moment to plant or harvest things, you’ll have to watch what everyone else is doing, and even your movements will always be a bit stilted; and perhaps that’s why he always put his trust in her. After two or three years they decided to set up on their own. She always listened to her brothers, but now she was married she wanted a separate life for herself and her family. In a word, they rented some fields at Codigoro and had a cow or two, given them by her brothers, and they also worked elsewhere, as day-labourers and, if the occasion arose, my grandfather would enjoy a bit of independence working as a carter, because when it came to the land it was my grandmother who ruled the roost.

Anyway, that famous time – in 1904 – on one of these trips, my grandfather happened to pass through Copparo. He was transporting a load of small casks of wine, tied one above the other. At a certain point he came upon a workers’ demonstration – labourers working on the Ferrarese drainage system, navvies, men with wheelbarrows. And, standing on a box, yelling and gesticulating, was Edmondo Rossoni.

‘Let’s hear what he has to say,’ said my grandfather to himself, because he’d already met him years before: tall and wiry, a beanpole of a lad, there on the square in Copparo Rossoni cut the figure of a madman. He was from Formignana, or Tresigallo to be more precise, those three houses and a little church where my grandfather’s brothers-in-law also lived. Rossoni’s father was one of those navvies who dug out canals by hand and built up their banks. His mother was from Comacchio, and worked as a day labourer, weeding the rice-fields and cornfields. My grandfather was eight or nine years his senior, and had known him as a little boy. Now Rossoni must have been about twenty, and my grandfather almost thirty, because he’d been born in 1875, and already had a swarm of children to his name: Themistocles, who was born in 1897, then a girl, in 1898, then Pericles, in 1899, no one in 1900, Iseo in 1901, another girl in 1902, yet another in 1903 and, in 1904, as I’ve already said, Uncle Adelchi.

Anyway, my grandfather saw Rossoni, all kitted out in a student’s jacket, shirt and bow tie, and he stood behind the workers and listened to him speak. It seemed that a few days earlier – in a place called Buggerru, in Sardinia – soldiers had fired on some striking miners, killing three of them. At least, according to Rossoni. But, as though that weren’t enough, a few days before that, in Castelluzzo, in Sicily, the carabinieri had fired on another group of peasants, killing two and wounding ten. ‘Whoa there,’ my grandfather agreed: ‘That’s beyond the pale. Do you mean I don’t even have the right to protest?’ And no, in fact, you didn’t. Now let’s make one thing clear – my grandfather wasn’t born yesterday. He knew how the world worked. He was a carter and didn’t really have any political ideas as such, he knew that the rich and the poor had always been with us and that there was nothing to be done about it, there was no point in getting any fancy ideas, you were better off just grinning and bearing it. But when you’re on your beam ends and can’t feed your family, and you ask someone who’s rolling in it to give you work or pay you an extra lira, that someone can’t have you fired on by the carabinieri, or the soldiers. That’s beyond the pale, was what my grandfather told himself.

But at that very moment the soldiers arrived on the scene. Right there in the square. In Copparo. Together with the Royal Guards and the local policemen. While Rossoni was talking. But they had no intention of letting him talk. ‘This is an unauthorized demonstration, you’re under arrest, now break it up.’ Then they began to lash out, and all hell broke loose. My grandfather stayed where he was, at the edge of the square – open-mouthed with astonishment – looking down on things from his vantage point on his cart. Behind the workers.

It was utter pandemonium. A thick cloud of dust – there was no asphalt in those days – and shouts and shrieks and gunfire and people running all over the place, and just when my grandfather was raising his whip to let his horse know that it was time to make themselves scarce, who should loom up, like Moses, out of that cloud of dust, but with a swarm of guards bustling and flustering behind him, and land on his cart with a sudden thud, but Rossoni, shrieking: ‘Help me, Peruzzi, get me out of here.’

What could my grandfather do? He’d known Rossoni since he was a little boy. He couldn’t just leave him there, now could he? My grandfather didn’t even stop to ask himself the question, he reacted automatically. He raised his whip and told his horse to giddy-up. But not soon enough: the guards were already on the attack, some trying to stop the horse, seizing it by the bit, and others attacking the cart and the horse – and Rossoni – with the flat of their sabres.

I don’t know who got the worst of it, Rossoni or the horse. Anyway, my grandfather flew into a right royal rage, and began lashing out left, right and centre with his long whip: at policemen, bystanders, every nearby Tom, Dick and Harry. ‘Sons of bitches,’ he was shrieking, beside himself.

The horse had never seen him in such a state – as I’ve said, he was a quiet man, mild as milk, almost ridiculously obedient; but something had really got into him that day, or rather had got out of him, and anyway the horse had never seen him like that and it took fright. Not at the policemen and the whacks it was receiving on the rump, but at its owner, and it suddenly started shying and bucking like a colt, like at a rodeo, and rearing up between the shafts, with the cart in hot pursuit, with my grandfather and Rossoni clinging to the sides and my grandfather still shouting ‘Sons of bitches’ and the ropes snapping and all the casks of wine falling down on to the road and the wine spilling out, and my grandfather thinking: ‘What am I going to say to her?’ meaning his wife, because they’d have to pay for all the wine and for the casks.

To put it briefly, they all landed up on the road, and the cart broke, too, and then the horse stopped short and the policemen grabbed them and threw them into prison, not without roughing them up first, particularly my grandfather, perhaps because he was wearing peasant gear, whereas Rossoni – for all he was a subversive and a revolutionary – was all got up as a thoroughly decent citizen, right down to his bow tie. But it might also have been as a result of those lashes – because, truth to tell, Rossoni had only been on the receiving end, whereas my grandfather had also been handing them out. Anyway, the guards too gave as good as they’d got – including a few to Rossoni – and clapped them into gaol. Then came a trial and a month inside.

I don’t know whether they did their time at Copparo or in Ferrara, but I know they shared a cell – a big one, too, from what they said – and the same disgusting prison rations, and bucket, an earthenware pot in a corner of the room, where you did your business. So, they shared their bread and, as it were, their business, and my grandfather, who had never had a political idea in his head in his life – all right, he hadn’t much time for priests, but he regarded politics as something for his betters – well, during that month, by dint of listening to Rossoni from dawn to dusk, he too had turned into something of a Karl Marx, even if every so often, particularly when he was curled up in his corner trying to get a bit of sleep, he would shout out from under his blanket: ‘Help me, Peruzzi, get me out of here!’ and everyone would start to laugh, Rossoni included. Then, after the last laughter had died down at the far end of the cell, my grandfather would add, in tones of desperation: ‘Now what will I tell the wife?’ Then the others would start to laugh again, but that was all he could think about and, as the days passed, and the time of his release drew ever closer, he began to dread it more and more: ‘Thirty days? Thirty years, that’s what they should have given me.’

But thirty days it was, and out they went. After saying goodbye to Rossoni at the turn-off for Tresigallo, my grandfather carried on on foot for Codigoro – about fifteen kilometres away – still hoping that he’d never make it, or perhaps indeed with thoughts of turning back. Mild as milk though he was, he wasn’t a man to try and avoid his fate; what was done was done, and so he left the main road and took the farm-track towards home. She saw him from a distance – it was late afternoon – appearing and disappearing among the leaves and bursts of sunlight, because by now he was walking along between the rows of elms. And she was coming towards him to meet him.

He guessed that it was her – he could only see her outline, not her features, because the sun was behind her – and he quickened his step: ‘Now I’m for it.’ But when she was some twenty metres from him, and he saw her face – it bore no trace of anger, so there would be no trouble about the wine, or the cart, it was just happy, and her eyes were smiling even more than her lips – then my grandfather ran forwards to take her in his arms. But as soon as he touched her – just with his outstretched arms, even before he took her into them – my grandfather began to cry, and she had never seen him cry, nor indeed, as far as he could remember, had he ever done so before in his whole life. And my grandmother said to him, over and over: ‘We’ll pay up, Peruzzi, don’t you worry,’ so as to comfort him, because she thought that he was weeping with worry, about the debts and the damage. But he was weeping from sheer happiness: ‘What a beauty you are,’ he said to her, ‘what a beauty.’ My grandfather was crying because his wife was beautiful. No more no less. Well, of course he also felt a certain sense of relief, because some of his anxieties had been laid to rest; but basically he was crying because she was so beautiful, and not only was she so beautiful, but she also loved him. Well, don’t such things make you cry?

It was only afterwards – that evening, in bed, when the matter of enforced abstinence had become a thing of the past – that she felt the need for further explanation. First she’d put her children to bed, keeping Adelchi, the youngest, in a cradle beside them. She’d washed herself with the scented soap she kept in the chest-of-drawers, and thrust some milk impatiently into Adelchi – ‘Come on, son, drink up’ – until it was streaming down his chin, and he fell fast asleep there at her breast. ‘Now he’ll sleep through the night,’ she said, and laid him in his cradle, and then my grandfather took over at the breast, until they were both exhausted, after all that time apart, and it was only then that she asked him, chuckling, almost teasingly: ‘But what got into you, Peruzzi – what got into you?’ And then she burst out laughing, and had to turn over because she was heaving so much, they had been lying side by side, and she turned towards him, propping herself up on her elbow, and, again, asked him what had got into him, still laughing, because she had scarcely been able to believe her ears when people had come to tell her about how he’d shouted ‘Son of bitches’ from up there on his cart, and lashed out at the guards. And now there she was, propped up on the pillow, trying to imagine the scene: ‘What got into you?’ while he was staring through the candlelight at a damp patch on the ceiling, with his hands clasped behind his head, absorbed and serious, asking himself the self-same question.

‘I don’t know, either,’ he had admitted to her earlier. But now he thought about it again – while she was still laughing and already beginning to coax him back into life with her other hand – and he turned over too, and started kissing her, and said: ‘It was my horse, woman. No one touches my horse!’ And my grandmother sensed something hard and threatening in his voice, which, together with his kisses, sent a shiver down her spine.

After that, Rossoni disappeared. First he went to the Workers’ Association in Piacenza and then to Milan, or vice versa, and now his name was known throughout Northern Italy, he wrote articles in the papers, and often there would be mention of him in Avanti!: ‘Comrade Rossoni spoke at such and such a meeting and met with a rapturous reception, only to have the police inform on him.’ When he was young, he thought nothing of addressing three separate meetings in three different places in one single day, and then it wasn’t at all like it is nowadays. Nowadays no one would even think of mingling with the crowd while they were addressing a meeting. In those days you’d be out there on the square, and people would butt in and harangue and heckle you. And you had to know how to hold your ground and give as good as you got, right there on the spot. Whereas now you go on television and a nice girl smothers you with make-up, and the questions are easy, you know them in advance. And in those days there weren’t any cars, either, or trains. Or rather, there were cars, but there weren’t any roads. There was no direct road from Codigoro to Ferrara until 1927, and it was Rossoni himself who had it built. Before that, it took four hours by stagecoach, along the banks of the Po di Volano. Anyway, Rossoni could manage three meetings in three different squares in one single day, ranting and railing against the rich and the bosses and, above all, the priests – he’d done his schooling with the Salesian Brothers; his father had forced him to go to a seminary, in Turin, hoping to make a priest of him, but he’d been expelled. So each time he’d have to get back into his gig, hoarse from all his yelling, and hurtle down a few more kilometres of dusty road to go and get hoarse somewhere else. And that takes stamina. Goodness knows what those Salesians must have done to him in that boarding-school of theirs.

Anyway, whenever he happened to see Avanti! in the wine-shop, my grandfather would comment aloud on what a fine career Rossoni was forging for himself, but what he was hinting at was that it had all been his doing, ‘I gave him the first step up the ladder.’ In fact, at this point my grandfather didn’t understand much more about politics than he ever had. He’d joined the Farmworkers’ Union, of course, and would attend sessions at the Workers’ Association. But that was it. As I’ve said, he’d always steered clear of priests, but he didn’t make a thing of it – ‘You go your way and I’ll go mine,’ end of story – not like Rossoni, who was vehemently anticlerical: ‘They’re the devil incarnate. They keep the poor in ignorance, in fear of hellfire, so they won’t rise up against their lords and masters.’ My grandfather was different: he simply left priests out of the picture, partly because my grandmother continued to have a certain respect for them. She wasn’t particularly devout, but she did go to mass on high days and holidays – Christmas, Easter and Whitsun – she paid her tithe to the parish when the priest called round after the harvest, and she would always pray when one of her children fell ill. By now, though, everyone regarded my grandfather as a Socialist, a subversive, who’d gone to prison with Rossoni for his ideas. How could he not be a Socialist after all that had happened? Well, he was, and he was all for the revolution; but only from the safely of the wine-shop, while he was playing briscola with his mates.

Rossoni put in an appearance again in 1908, at the beginning of June. He was just passing through, he’d been holding a meeting at the Farmworkers’ Union, and he came round to our house for supper. He was with another man, an elementary teacher from somewhere near Forli – a much shorter man, in comparison with him, that is – and he’d brought him along to meet us. His father was a blacksmith, Rossoni told my grandfather.

‘Well, ask him whether he can mend my harrow while I’m making his supper,’ my grandmother said to no one in particular on hearing this information.

The short man caught what she said, and started laughing. Put on his mettle, he took off his jacket, loosened his bow tie and rolled up his sleeves. Since she said nothing – indeed, she carried on looking at him with a slight smile, hands on hips, as though challenging him to show his worth – he picked up the hammer, stirred up the embers, blew air into the forge and mended the harrow, straightening out all the spikes into the bargain. And, while he was hammering here, there and everywhere, she was putting the supper on the table – that long table which could already accommodate all six or seven children; home-made pasta and beans, with a side dish of polenta.

This fellow – who was called Mussolini – clearly had brains as well as charm. He was only a year older than Rossoni – he had been born in ’83, and Rossoni in ’84 – but Rossoni seemed to hold him in great regard, drawing his attention to this or that, and at one point both of them were looking at Uncle Pericles, who was already as nimble as a hare.

Uncle Themistocles, the eldest, was rather unsociable and withdrawn; he wouldn’t open his mouth unless you asked him a direct question. Uncle Pericles, on the other hand, never stopped talking; about anything and everything. Now, to grab their attention, what he came up with was: ‘What we need around here is a revolution; we’ve got to force them to give us the land, and give them a sound thrashing,’ and Rossoni and his friend laughed, but at the same time they were also watching how he moved, the speed with which he carried out his tasks in the cowshed and the firm tone he used with the animals. He was only nine, but his hands were as work-worn as those of many an older man, and he could read and write and add up, and do all kinds of work around the farm, driving the oxen and handling the bulls. Mussolini carried on glancing in his direction every now and again, even when he was talking with my grandfather and Rossoni.

There was no doubt that Mussolini had great charm, as I’ve already said, and my grandfather was enraptured by his conversation, because he talked even better than Rossoni: his language was crisp and clear-cut, and you immediately saw what he was driving at. With him everything seemed simple, he didn’t come out with that gobbledegook you’d need a lawyer to explain to you. So, my grandfather liked him, or rather, he liked his politics. What he didn’t like was the way he was looking at my grandmother, but he went on nodding and smiling a false smile as the two men carried on talking.