A Small Place in Italy Read Free Page B

Guareschi’s Piccolo Mondo di Don Camillo .) But in spite of it now being closed, probably for ever, we always called it ‘The Cell’ because it sounded more exciting than a branch.
    ‘Then, after the eighteenth bend, you will see, a hundred metres or so up the hill, a tall solitary cypress, from which a rough track leads off to the left.
    ‘This track,’ he wrote, ‘leads down to a small house. In it lives a widow, a Signora Angiolina. She has the keys of the property and she is expecting you at three o’clock.’
    All the years we subsequently lived here we had trouble with what Signor Vescovo described as the eighteenth bend from Caniparola. Wanda made it the twenty-second, I made it the twenty-first and none of the friends who came to stay with us was able to agree how many there were either. It was a waste of time appealing to the local inhabitants, they had never even attempted to count them.
    Signora Angiolina was hovering in her vegetable patch outside her house, awaiting our arrival. As she told us, she had just finished feeding her rabbits which lived in a large wooden hutch at the back of the house.
    The house looked bigger than it really was as she had rented a large room on the ground floor to a communist social club which was, at the moment, like the cell at the seventeenth bend, more or less moribund, but not completely so, and subsequently it started up with evenings of very un-communist pop which would have made Lenin turn in his grave.
    Signora Angiolina’s husband had died a couple of years previously and because of this she was in deep mourning, which meant that she was dressed in black from head to foot: black headscarf, black cardigan, black skirt, reaching below the knee, black woollen stockings – normally she wouldn’t have worn any at all before the cold weather set in – and black felt slippers.
    The only item that wasn’t black was her apron which was dark navy with small white spots on it, which helped to cheer her outfit up a bit.
    Later she told Wanda that she was fed up with being in mourning – the navy apron was probably a first sign of rebellionagainst it – and she was looking forward to leaving it off and quite soon she did so, which raised her spirits no end.
    Signora Angiolina was in her sixties when we first met her, and was very slim. She had nice, bright-blue eyes and she cried easily. She had greyish-brown hair drawn back tightly from her forehead in a bun, now hidden by her headscarf. And she had a really lovely smile.
    It was a tragic face but a beautiful one, a beauty, one felt, that would endure and in fact it did, until the day she died. Even seeing her briefly for the first time it was obvious that at some time in her life something awful had befallen her but we had to wait until we were on more intimate terms with her in order to discover what it was.
    Like most contadini she was wary of people such as ourselves who came from cities and were foreigners but, in spite of this, she did bestow on us this lovely smile.
    However, when Wanda asked her if she would take us to see the house and unlock the doors for us so that we could see the inside, which was the purpose of our visit, she suddenly looked serious, shrugged her shoulders in a way that was almost imperceptible, and said, ‘ Ma!’
    This seemed like bad news. In my experience almost all the Italian contadini I had ever met who used this expression had done so in a negative sense, one that usually boded ill.
    When, for instance, while on the run in Italy during the war, I had asked the contadini for whom I was working in exchange for food and a roof over my head, if I had any chance of remaining free when the snow fell in the Apennines, something I had been thinking about for some time, there was no doubt as to what they meant when they said, ‘Ma!’ They meant ‘No!’ And they were right. But Signora Angiolina’s ‘Ma!’ was of a different sort. One she used in the sense of ‘Chissa?’ (‘Who