My First Seven Years (Plus a Few More)

CHAPTER 12. The Overhead Cable

Like all children in this world who live in the country, we in Porto went on fruit-pilfering expeditions in orchards and farms. The point of stealing fruit was not to satisfy hunger but to test our courage in the face of the danger of having a potshot aimed at our backsides, as they do with toads. The local peasants were pitiless: if they caught you making off with their fruit, they fired at you with rifles loaded with salt … and it was painful!

My brother Fulvio and I were part of a gang where an obligatory rite of passage was risking your neck, whether by diving head-first into the lake from the rock face in the Caldé quarry, or by taking suicide runs on the trolleys which sped along the railway lines down to the loading point for the abandoned furnaces …

The craziest thing we got up to was undoubtedly speeding along the overhead cable constructed for moving bundles of wood down from the uplands: an iron or copper cable was put up by the wood-cutters to run from the Corveggio Alps, at a height of eight hundred metres, down to the ramps in Tramezzo. The tree trunks and bundles of timber were attached to rollers which rattled down the cable and crashed into enormous buffers at the foot … the impact was to say the least violent!

The first one to suspend himself from the rollers was Manàch, the son of a wood-cutter. With one hand he grabbed hold of a steel hook and with the other he gripped one of the runners and off he went as though it were the easiest thing in the world.

All the rest of us were down in the valley looking up, holding our breath, in suspended animation, our eyes clouding over. He came down at top speed. When he got close to the buffers at the bottom, he tried to slow down … Good Lord, he’s going to crash into the wooden planks, he’s going to be jelly! But Manàch knew what he was doing and tightened his grip on the steel hook to make it act as a brake … now he’s hanging on to that alone. The friction on the wire is giving off as many sparks as a soldering iron. Bloody hell! He’s not slowing down enough. He’ll be pulped!

No, look, he’s braking. He’s still at speed when he gets to the buffers but there is no crash. Our whizzing hero throws his legs in the air to soften the blow while, as pale as shadows, we all let out a yell. I fall full length to the ground. ‘Now it’s the turn of you lot,’ sneers Manàch.

We do our calculations. First off should be Bigulòt, son of a fisherman. He chooses a less steep and risky descent. He makes it! He wobbles a bit … shaves the top of a few chestnuts trees, takes a couple of whiplash blows in the face but holds on … the final bang is not too bad.

The boy ahead of me starts off well but halfway down scrapes along the top of a gigantic, very high elm tree. He did not have the strength to raise his legs and body, so gets into a tangle with the foliage but holds on and comes through, but when he gets to the destination, he is covered in cuts and scratches: face, arms and legs all bleeding. A dip in the stream, and he’s as right as rain.

Now it’s my turn and I am just a little anxious. In comparison with those fearless spirits, I feel like a wet sponge but, goaded by pride, I work up my courage. I had heard Manàch and Bigulòt making sniggering remarks about my more or less non-existent chances of coming out in one piece. I had the one advantage, only one, of having been able to observe with great care all the other descents. I had noted that each one had almost instinctively used his feet, or rather his boots, to drag along the cable and reduce speed. Having mastered that detail, I tie two hooks, one for each foot, with pieces of string to the soles of my boots.

My companions observe me with a kind of cruel irony. I take hold of one of the hooks which hangs from a runner, then of another … I let my body go limp … but at once begin to sway as though I were on a trapeze until I manage to attach the hooks sticking out of my boots to the wire of the cable. My invention works marvellously. I manage to control the speed with some ease. When I want to accelerate, all I have to do is release my foot-hold: to brake, I clutch more tightly. The boys following my progress from down below give up making a fool of me.

‘Oh, shitty-pants has got away with it. Good old tight-arse, you’re an eagle!’ they shout at me.

When I climbed down from the overhead cable, I was so excited and euphoric that I did not even notice that smoke was coming from my feet: the friction had caused the hooks to overheat and they were literally burning the soles of my boots.

When I got back home, I had a problem in explaining to Mamma how that disaster had come about: the two soles seemed to have been sawn in half.