My First Seven Years (Plus a Few More) Read Free

and, like the others, addressed no word of reproach to his son … but he did push him in front of him. Then, as I went down the twisty road leading to the station in my mother’s arms, I made out, at the point where the road doubles back on itself, the sergeant and his son, still one behind the other, with the father aiming kicks at the backside of his son, who was hopping about like a frisky goat.
    *   *   *
    After that adventure, Mamma was none too keen on my playing about in the hills with that gang of young hooligans, but it was not her way to straightforwardly forbid me anything, so, sharp-witted as ever, she came up with a fail-safe ruse of her own. When she figured that within a few hours the inevitable ‘call of the wild’ would make me restless, she would lay out on the table a bundle of sheets of paper, a selection of crayons and coloured pencils and invite me to indulge myself: ‘There you are, my little crackpot,’ she would say, ‘draw me a medley of pretty pictures.’
    And I was off scrawling colours on the white page, pursuing with curling lines images which gushed out one after the other as though they had been imprinted on my memory. The more I entered into the delights of making patterns and filling spaces with colours, the more I was overcome by the sheer enchantment of it all.
    It would invariably happen that after a bit my young hillside companions would turn up at the station porch and shout for me from under my window. ‘Dario,’ my mother would alert me, ‘these little beasts of friends of yours are here. Want to go with them?’
    She would need to repeat it over again. I was so absorbed in the paper before me that even the shrillest train whistle would pass me by.
    â€˜Sure you don’t want to go, my darling crackpot?’ she cheerfully repeated. ‘Do you want me to tell them that you’re not too well, or that you’ve got a bit of a temperature?’
    â€˜No, no,’ I replied instantly. ‘If you tell them I’m sick, they’ll make a fool of me for a week: “Ooooh, poor little diddums.” Could you not say they’ve taken me to Switzerland for cousin Tullia’s wedding?’
    â€˜Her wedding! What are you talking about? Tullia’s only twelve.’
    â€˜All right,’ I said, trying to make amends, ‘could the bride not be her sister Noemi … she’s grown up.’
    â€˜Yes, but she’s about to become a nun.’
    â€˜Well, then, say she’s given up the veil to marry a captain in the Swiss Guards.’
    â€˜The Pope’s Guards?’
    â€˜That’s right. A nun can’t just throw herself at the first man who comes along!’
    *   *   *
    Switzerland often cropped up in our conversation, in part because my father’s sister and her husband and daughters, Tullia and Noemi, lived on the far side of the lake, in the rich lands of the Canton of Ticino. There was another cousin as well, the older son, who represented all that I wanted to be when I grew up. Bruno was his name and he was a champion footballer, a goalkeeper with Lugano, organist in Lucerne Cathedral and had been recently selected as representative of the Helvetic Republic to the Italian Government in Rome. And if that was not enough, he was also engaged to a beautiful young woman whom he brought every now and again to visit us. Among all his uncles, Pa’ Fo was his favourite. They were more or less the same age. They spoke between themselves about politics, but they did so in a hushed voice: if they ever got so heated they could no longer keep their voices down, Mamma sent them outside. ‘Go for a walk along the lake because as they say in Sartirana (and here she would revert to her own dialect): Light talk glides soundlessly over the water, but heavy talk sinks.’
    As soon as Bruno and my father were off the scene, I would do all I could to