A Small Place in Italy. Eric Newby

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СКАЧАТЬ if not ancient, dark, cavernous, rambling were just some of the epithets that could be applied to it without being offensive. In fact it was lovely. Its rooms were full of good rustic furniture of the mid-nineteenth century and of later date, of a sort that we would have been only too happy to acquire for I Castagni: presses and chests-of-drawers in mahogany and chestnut which could swallow up heaps of clothes; cylindrical marble-topped bedside tables of the sort that Attilio possessed which also secreted within them massive vasi da notte with floral embellishments, receptacles of which, judging by the sanitary arrangements obtaining at I Castagni, we were going to stand in constant need.

      But most desirable of all were the beautiful bedsteads, of all shapes and sizes, built of wood or wrought iron with tin-plate panels painted with flowers and arcadian landscapes, or decorated with mother-of-pearl, or very simple ones constructed entirely of wrought iron with no embellishment at all.

      The hotel was owned by a local butcher who had a shop a few yards up the road, inside what had been one of the gates of the town. He also made excellent salami. He was a good butcher, but he always gave the impression of being on the point of falling asleep, like the Dormouse in Alice in Wonderland. Even shaking hands with him was an enervating experience.

      His wife was of an entirely different disposition: large but not fat, black-haired, full of energy, what the Italians call slancio, and with a voice that made the rafters ring, and she was as adept at cutting meat or boning hams as her husband.

      She was also extremely generous. The morning of Easter Saturday when we left the hotel to go down to I Castagni and paid our bill she gave us an entire salame as if it were an arrival present, and whenever thereafter we bought anything in the shop and she was there she always gave us something extra, which meant that we couldn’t use it as much as we might otherwise have done.

      There were two daughters of marriageable age, both of whom had fiancés. They were personable girls and were a good catch for any young men, with an hotel, a ristorante, a caffè/bar and butcher’s shop as visible future assets. Meanwhile they acted as waitresses and chambermaids and ran the bar, all of which was enough to be getting on with, while the Signora’s elderly mother did the cooking for the ristorante with some outside help in the season, which had not yet begun. Both subsequently married.

      After we had signed in and had been consigned to one of the cavernous bedrooms which by now, with the awful weather prevailing outside, was almost totally dark, the two girls invited us to take part in the Processione del Venerdì Santo.

      This procession, which had to end in the afternoon, at the hour of Christ’s death, was due to start in a couple of minutes from the Oratorio dei Bianchi, an old church in the middle of the town. In the course of this procession the participants would make an almost complete tour of it. They themselves were going to take part. Would we like to go with them? We said yes.

      Swathed in the warmest clothes we had at our disposal, but still inadequately clad – the wind was coming straight off the Apuan Alps, which were newly snow-covered – we set off with the girls for the piazza in which the Oratorio was situated and in which the procession would be assembling.

      The piazza was about the size of a squash court and one side of it was entirely taken up by one façade of the Oratorio, an austere and beautiful construction of what appeared to be almost translucent marble. It had been built in 1600 by Pasquale Malaspina and a great marble escutcheon over the entrance displayed the coat of arms of the Malaspina, a flowering hawthorn. Below it there was an Annunciation carved in the same material. Inside the building, hidden behind the high altar, was a wooden statue of the Madonna, carved in 1300 and lodged here when the church was built, after the original one was destroyed by fire.

      Normally the doors of the Oratorio were kept closed but this afternoon they were wide open to allow an effigy of the Crucified Christ to be taken out from it into the piazza on a wooden float carried by a band of porters, who supported the weight on their shoulders. Two other men also emerged from it bearing a funereal-looking black and silver banner which was now giving trouble in the wind that was swirling around the piazza.

      At the head of the procession was the rather elderly priest of Fosdinovo and Caniparola, dressed in black vestments. He was accompanied by a couple of acolytes, who were without their censers, because they were not used in such processions, and a good thing too, in the wind that was blowing, they might easily have set themselves on fire, or some other participant.

      They were followed by the main body of the faithful, among whom we found ourselves. Altogether there were not many more than fifty people and most of them were women. There were also a few children; but it was not surprising that there was a poor turn-out. It was terrible weather for a procession. Already at around two in the afternoon it was growing dark.

      Conspicuous among the few men present in the piazza, apart from those who would be carrying the images, looking benevolently at all and sundry, was Attilio who, we later learned, was not only molto religioso but also a grande appassionato of religious feasts and processions. He had walked up from I Castagni in the appalling weather in order to attend this one and, in spite of the buffeting he must have received on the way, was very smart in a long, dark navy-blue, fur-collared overcoat of antique cut which almost reached to his ankles, and an article of clothing without which neither of us saw him, except when, later on, he had to go to hospital, his cap.

      As soon as he saw us he came shooting across the piazza as if it was ice – in fact it was wet marble and equally slippery. Then, after paying his respects to the girls in a formal manner, he took our hands in his, first Wanda’s, then mine, and pumped them up and down as if he expected water to come gushing out of our mouths, at the same time saying, so far as either of us could understand, how happy he was to see us.

      But what was more extraordinary, so far as I was concerned, was that, when he began the pumping treatment he said, perfectly audibly, after having more or less cut me dead up to now, ‘Adesso ricordo!’ (‘Now I remember!’)

      What he said was mysterious, if not ambiguous. Unless I knew, which I now did without a shadow of doubt, that he, Attilio, and the old man in the mountains of twenty-odd years ago were not one and the same, I would have thought that when he said, ‘Adesso ricordo!’ he was remembering that time, whereas what he was presumably referring to was our brief encounter five months ago. I gave up. Two storytellers, both of whom could make things, both of whom were religioso, one of whom, possibly both of whom prayed by their bedsides, although there must be, I realized, whole hordes of little old men in Italy who do just that, were more than I could cope with. Eventually the whole thing was resolved when I asked Signora Angiolina if Attilio had ever gone away from home during the war. She said categorically no, he hadn’t. I was sorry I asked. Perhaps it would have been better if it had remained a mystery but short of having a sphinx on the premises at I Castagni I could hardly complain.

      Anyway I didn’t care. What he had just said to me gave me the same feelings of pleasure that I would experience in the future when Signora Angiolina said to me ‘Hai fatto bene!’ To be remembered by Attilio was different from being remembered by any Tom, Dick or Harry, or even General de Gaulle. He never enlarged on what he meant again. Now, however, to show where his sympathies lay, he attached himself, as it were, to our suite and prepared to walk with us in the procession.

      It was at this moment that the priest gave some kind of inconspicuous signal, but one that was sufficient to set the whole thing in motion, and we all began to move uphill with the priest in the van, flanked by the acolytes, followed by Christ nailed to the Cross and the two men carrying the black and silver banner flapping madly in the wind, and behind them the main body of whom I was certainly the only Protestant present, snuffling and sneezing, for a number of them had already contracted nasty colds, sometimes chanting, СКАЧАТЬ