My First Seven Years (Plus a Few More)

CHAPTER 1. The Discovery that God is also supreme head of the Italian State Railway

Everything depends on where you are born, a wise man once said. I have to say that in my case he got it absolutely right.

First of all, I have to say thank you to my mother, who chose to give birth to me in San Giano, on the shores of Lake Maggiore. Odd metamorphosis of a name: double-faced Janus, or Giano, one of the gods of ancient Rome, transformed into a completely invented Christian saint who was, into the bargain, the alleged protector of the fabulatores-comicos. To be truthful, the choice was made not by my mother but by the Italian State Railway, who decided to dispatch my father to perform his duties in that station. Yes, my father was station-master, even if he was not a native of the place. The San Giano stop was of such negligible importance that all too often engine drivers swept by without so much as noticing. One day a traveller, tired of having to get off at the next station, pulled the emergency cord. It took some time for the brakes to engage, and the train drew up right in the middle of a tunnel. A goods train coming behind ploughed into the back of the stationary train. Miraculously, there were no casualties, and only one serious injury — to the passenger who pulled the emergency cord. The wretched man had the misfortune to be severely beaten up by all the other occupants of the carriage, including a nun.

With the arrival of my father, everything at San Giano station changed utterly. Felice Fo was the sort of man who commanded respect and deference. When he took his stance on the railway line, erect and upright, red bonnet just above the eyeline, clutching the matching red flag, every single train, whether grand express train or local puffer, of which there were four a day, drew to halt.

I came into the world in that subsidiary stop four steps from the lake (Ante-lacus, in the words written on a Roman tablet), between a local train and a goods train. It was seven o’clock in the morning when I made up my mind to peep out from between my mother’s legs. The woman who acted as midwife hauled me out, held me up by the feet like a chicken, then, very swiftly, gave me a great slap on the buttocks … and I squealed like an alarm call. At that very moment, the six-thirty passed by … a couple of minutes late, obviously. My mother always swore that my first howl was far louder than the whistle of the locomotive.

So, I first saw the light at San Giano solely by decision of the Italian State Railway company, but that was my place of birth only in the eyes of the Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths.

In my own eyes, I came into the world and came to awareness some thirty or forty kilometres further north along the lake, at Pino Tronzano, and then some years later at Porto Valtravaglia, on the narrow strip of land flanking Lake Maggiore. Both of these were my ‘wonderlands’, the places which unleashed my wildest fantasies and determined every future choice I would make. The various moves were made courtesy of the executive of the Italian State Railway, Milan division.

Milan! I remember going there for the first time with my father. I was very young and he was there to take some exam or other in rail traffic control in the hope of being promoted to station-master, second class, category C. So why did he bring along a child of my age? I have always suspected that he took me with him as a magic charm. Everybody in the family was convinced that I brought boundless good luck. As it happens, I was born in a shirt, as the saying went, that is, I emerged wrapped up in my mother’s placenta, a harbinger of good fortune according to the age-old traditions of the lakelands.

When we got to Milan, shortly before entering the great hangar of the Stazione Centrale, the train slowed down to walking pace. Papà Felice — Pa’ Fo, as my mother called him — rolled down the window and made me lean head and shoulders out. ‘Look up there,’ he said, pointing to an overhead bridge on steel girders, under which all the trains had to pass. I saw a huge walkway crammed with lights trained in all directions, and a series of glass cabins lit up by bright, coloured lamps. The whole amazing structure was supported by giant pylons.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s the operational headquarters that controls the movement of all trains, as well as the points and the signals.’

At that moment, I was convinced: that glass cabin with its shining lights must be the abode of God and all the saints of station-masters. I had no doubt: our Heavenly Father was none other than the Director General of the Italian State Railway company. It was He who oversaw the placement of railway-men and the movement of trains, He who planned the engines and the birth of station-masters’ children!

But let us go back to the first move from San Giano to the station at Pino Tronzano, on the Swiss border. All the family furniture was loaded onto a goods wagon for a journey which was no more than an hour and a half. I was overwhelmed by the sight of the beds and cupboards being dismantled and, believing they were being broken apart, I burst into tears of despair. My father did all he could to reassure me: ‘As soon as we get there, we’ll put everything back together in no time, you’ll see.’

Alas, as our things were being loaded, the cast-iron stove tumbled off the carriage and smashed to pieces, causing my mother to let out a dreadful scream. I took her hand and to comfort her said: ‘Don’t worry, as soon as we get there, Papà will stick it back together.’ Ah, the good old trust in fathers!

The coach was attached to the train and we all clambered aboard. When we got to Pino Tronzano, our goods carriage was detached and, with the help of two porters, my father and mother started to unload the parts that had to be reassembled.

I was literally fascinated by that place: the station was bigger than the one where I had been born. We lived above the station, on the first floor, and the lake lay a hundred metres away, down a steep slope. Behind us, a rocky wall with a zigzagging road cut into the cliff and climbed up to a village of fifty or so houses piled one on top of the other, as in a Romanesque bas-relief. The village contained an ancient tower, a belfry standing over the church and a large palace which housed the town hall, the school and the medical centre.

My parents and the porters were still at work when the priest turned up to welcome us and bless each of the rooms and freshly plastered walls of the house. He came accompanied by an altar boy with hair as red as his soutane, and after the due benedictions, the altar boy led me off to an open space behind the station to inspect a big compound, in the middle of which stood a massive hen run, shaped like a pavilion and packed with cockerels and hens who greeted us with festive din. Behind the pavilion, there was a row of cages which seemed to be jumping with the endless scurrying of rabbits crammed into a kind of cloister.

My father had been called to take charge of the station in succession to an elderly colleague who had recently retired. ‘It’s all yours,’ said the altar boy addressing my mother, who came on the scene at that moment.

‘What do you mean?’

‘It is yours by law, the same as the points and the whistles.’

‘Listen here, ginger, you’re at it, aren’t you?’ At this point, the altar boy, never at a loss for words, was about to go into details about the origin of this unexpected inheritance, but the signalman arrived and took over from the lad. ‘The station-master who was here before you,’ he recounted, ‘was an absolute fanatic for animal breeding. He spent more time in the hen house than in the telegraph office. These creatures breed at an alarming rate, so when he was pensioned off and had to move out, he left all these creatures to the newcomers, that is to yourselves.’

‘Oh, thank you, a real godsend,’ my mother exclaimed.

‘Yes, sure is a fine gift, but I’ll be curious to see how you manage to deal with this lot,’ continued the signalman. ‘Apart from the fact that every day at least half a dozen of them will scarper, one or two are sure to end up on the line just when the trains are due.’

‘Well, I hope at least part of the carcass can still be salvaged,’ was my mother’s comment.

‘Your only problem,’ came back the guffawing reply, ‘is to make up your mind whether to serve rabbit stew or roast rabbit. That’s all there is to it.’

* * *

You will by now have guessed that our station was completely isolated. The only inhabitants were ourselves and the district signalman, who also looked after the points, and his wife. Down below, at the foot of the embankment, facing the cliff which rose from the depths of the lake, stood the police station with mooring for a motorboat and a little light-boat called Torpedine.

The silence at night-time was interrupted only by the steady beat-beat of the pump which drew water from the lake to fill the huge tank that supplied trains in transit to and from Switzerland. I was unduly fond of that humming sound: it seemed the very heart of the station, calm and reassuring.

Another pleasing sound was the screech which announced the arrival of a train. Sometimes the whistle of manoeuvring trains woke me up, but I had no problem in getting back to sleep, totally contented as I was. I can say that I grew up with the rattle of railway carriages and the creaking of brakes in my head, while my mind’s eye was filled with the flashes of light from the Torpedine sparkling on the water, on the sky and on the mountains before creeping in through the window shutters.

Since we were on the border, there was always a problem with smugglers or desperate people trying to cross secretly in the goods carriages. Every train waiting in the station had to be searched by police and customs, and my sleep was often disturbed by the signals conveyed by the whistles and flash lights of the detachment on duty. I couldn’t sleep through the banging on the sides of the carriages, the slamming of doors and the orders to check more thoroughly such-and-such a coach. Then the shouted signal: ‘All clear!’ I would be lying tensed up throughout the inspection, and only when I heard those words could I breathe freely. I always imagined some man or boy clinging onto the underside of a coach, finally able to get away to the other side. I fell asleep with a smile and a sigh of relief.

We are in 1930. The refugees in transit were usually persecuted anti-Fascists trying to reach Switzerland or France. I remember one particular night when I awoke with a start after hearing shouts, orders and a shot. I rushed to the window and peered out at what was going on below. They had seized a man fleeing the country and were dragging him off to the police station. The next day I saw them throwing him onto a truck bound for Luino, where the prison was. Later on, my father spoke to me about political fugitives, and although I did not understand much about it, that scene has remained indelibly imprinted on my memory, like a dark stain.

To meet boys of my own age to play with, I had to clamber up to the village. It was a sheer climb of at least three hundred metres, enough to leave anyone out of breath.

It was not hard to make friends with those children. They were huddled together in the piazza outside the church, and were more than a little curious to get to know a ‘foreigner’ like me. They all spoke a harsh, Swiss-style dialect, with ‘z’ in place of an ‘s’, but they did not drag out their vowels as did the people in the Canton of Ticino.

To try me out, they improvised a couple of rather heavy practical jokes: as I was doing a pee down the cliff side, they tossed a cloth soaked in burning naphtha over me. It was a miracle I got away without scorching my willy. For the second test, they stuffed an enraged lizard — a ghez in the local dialect — down my trousers. They laughed uproariously as I leapt and tossed about in a frenzy, before managing to do a cartwheel which fortunately was enough to send the creature scuttling off.

These scoundrels were nearly all the sons of smugglers with one almost surreal exception — the gang leader was son of the local police chief. There were also two girls in the village whose fathers were customs men, but their parents did not want to see them in our company. The ‘shoulder-boys’, the name given to the smugglers who carried baskets with merchandise across the border on their shoulders, had other professions apart from contraband. Almost all tended flocks of goats or sheep, were woodcutters or builders of the dry-stone dykes used to shore up the fields and woods which would otherwise have tumbled into the valley at every downpour. The customs officers were very tolerant: they were well aware that the labours of the shoulder-boys were scarcely likely to bring them wealth, but every so often they would receive orders to round up one or two of them to show that they were alert, on top of the job and deserved the miserable pay they received. So every now and then, a couple of smugglers would be marched off. To me it all seemed like a game. I watched the arrested shoulder-boys going down to the railway station: they had not even a chain on their wrists and chatted away to the customs officers or policemen as though they were off to have a drink together.

I loved wandering around the high crests, or climbing up the streams which had dug out deep gullies in the rocks, cutting into the mountainside and leaving scars of ugly, crooked furrows as they tumbled down into the valley. Certainly I never went on my own. I would claw my way up behind the Pino boys who were two or three years older than me. The policeman’s son was nine years old, and so had been elected leader and guide. To listen to him, you would think he knew every water channel and cave in that labyrinth … in fact he regularly got us lost!

Once, we were hauled out by a smuggler who heard our desperate yells. He appeared to us, in the cross light filtered through the dark overhang of the ditch, like the vision of a saint. He was the uncle of one of my friends, and by an incredible coincidence was called Salvatore (Saviour). I, as I have already said, was the smallest of the gang, and so he hoisted me onto his shoulders, and from that perch I looked down with a certain haughtiness at my companions. I believed I was the living reproduction of a fresco on the facade of the little church at Tronzano, where a giant saint carried the infant Jesus across a river. The baby Jesus is giving a blessing. Now that I had the chance, I too administered a swift blessing … giggling as I did so. Already a blasphemer at that age!

As we approached the village, night was falling. My worried mother had gone up to the piazza in Pino and there had met up with other mothers who were also waiting for their respective children, but none of them showed any signs of anxiety, quite the reverse, since they were accustomed to our late-coming. As we reached the piazza, they came over to their sons without a word. No comment, no reproaches. My mother lifted me down from Salvatore’s shoulders, gave me a hug and asked: ‘Were you afraid?’ Lying through my teeth, I answered, ‘No, Mamma, I had a great time.’ Hugging me ever more tightly, she said simply, ‘Oh, what a poor liar you are, my poor little crackpot.’ (‘Crackpot’ was the tender nickname by which my mother regularly addressed me.)

The police sergeant stood among the mothers 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.

‘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?’

‘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?’

‘Her wedding! What are you talking about? Tullia’s only twelve.’

‘All right,’ I said, trying to make amends, ‘could the bride not be her sister Noemi … she’s grown up.’

‘Yes, but she’s about to become a nun.’

‘Well, then, say she’s given up the veil to marry a captain in the Swiss Guards.’

‘The Pope’s Guards?’

‘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 attract the attention of Bedelià, Bruno’s fiancée. Her long neck, her soft hands, her Madonna-like fingers and above all her perfectly rounded breasts drove me crazy! When she lifted me onto her lap, I felt my cheeks flush and my whole being grow faint. Yes, I may as well admit it: ever since I came into this world, I have always liked women and they have always made my head spin. On those occasions when I have been with a radiant woman like Bedelià, with that scent of flowers and fruit emanating from her skin … Oh God, what raptures! In her arms, I gorged on her scents with the unrestrained greed of an addict.

My mother too was every bit as fresh and beautiful as Bedelià, and maybe even more so. After all, she was only nineteen when she had me, but a mother is beyond all comparison. My mother’s scents made me drool, brought on some desire to suck at her breast and a yearning to cling close against and inside every curve and crease of her body. In her arms there was neither wind nor heat. Her warmth melted every fear: I was indeed in the belly of the universe.

But to come back to Bedelià, every time that she and Bruno left, I was downcast and silent for a whole day. They set off by boat, and we would accompany them down to the pier. Their journey was short, only to the other side of the lake, where Brissago faced us. I would stand on the passageway leading to the mooring point, following the boat as it grew hazy, leaving behind a foamy wake which dispersed as the craft became smaller and sank into the distance. But it never disappeared. In fact I could see it moor on the far shore of the lake.

Once the police sergeant lent me his binoculars. When I put my eye to it, I saw the boat and the Swiss wharf come towards me. I got Bedelià too in my sights. Then I turned my eye to the roofs and houses. ‘Lucky things,’ I exclaimed, ‘they live in the midst of all that chocolate and marzipan.’ You see, ever since I had arrived in Pino Tronzano they had convinced me that over there, in Switzerland, everything was made of chocolate or almond paste and that even the roads were coated in nougat! The one who first fed me this lie was the telegrapher in the station, who offered me a square of chocolate with the words, ‘Life’s not fair! Here are we nibbling miserable, tiny squares of chocolate and there they are over there, bloody Swiss, with chocolate to throw away, even onto the roofs of their houses!’

‘Onto the roofs?’ I said.

‘That’s right. Can’t you see the dark red roofs they’ve got? That’s because the tiles are made with crushed chocolate.’

‘Chocolate tiles! Lucky things.’ And I swallowed enough saliva to flood my system.

That bastard of a louse of a telegrapher passed the word to the signalman, customs officers, the policemen … each and every one of them was in on the joke about a chocolate-coated Switzerland.

‘That’s why,’ those swine told me, ‘the other side is called the fat shore. If you’re good, I’m sure one day Pa’ Fo will take you there. Have you got your passport? You haven’t! Ah well then, you’ll not be going.’

Since I had fallen head-first for this tale about the land of milk and honey on the other side, even my mother, not wanting to disappoint me, joined in. ‘Bruno’s coming to see us next week, and he’s sure to bring you a lot of plain chocolate.’

My father had already got in touch with my cousin’s father, so when Bruno arrived in his usual boat, I was standing waiting for him on the pier, near to fainting. He and his girlfriend got off, carrying a large packet. At the customs booth, the officer made them open it. I was peering in from the gangway but I couldn’t see what was in the parcel. The customs officer, raising his voice, let them pass with the comment: ‘It isn’t really legal, but just this once we’ll turn a blind eye…’

The couple were finally on dry land. I was so excited and curious to find out what the parcel contained that I almost failed to greet the splendid Bedelià. In our house, up at the station, the surprise was revealed. When the paper and packing were removed, there appeared a large, slightly curved tile, entirely of chocolate!

‘I pulled it off my roof,’ said Bruno slyly, ‘and it’s for you, little crackpot. Don’t eat it all at once.’

I was so astonished that I could hardly breathe. ‘Can I give it a lick to taste it?’ I said uncertainly, and every last one of them chorused: ‘Of course. Lick away!’

‘God bless Switzerland,’ shouted Mamma.

* * *

A full year passed before I was able to cross the lake to Brissago. I was just five, and was as excited as a grasshopper in spring. When the parish priest in Pino spoke to us in religious education classes about Adam and Eve and the Earthly Paradise, my thoughts went to Switzerland, or more precisely to the Canton of Ticino: there in the Swiss Eden lay the abode of the elect, while our side was the home of the sinners, doomed to eternal punishment!

My mother was very cautious in feeding me information about our next journey to the Promised Land. ‘Maybe … in a few days…’ was as far as she would go, ‘if they manage to get the boat back in service, then we’ll take a trip to see uncle and aunt … perhaps.’

That night I dreamed they had once again suspended the ferry service: my father was standing on the gangway in a state of uncontrollable rage, as happened to him on his bad days. He pulled around him an embroidered blanket (the one from the big bed in our house), raised his arms to heaven as though he were Moses, and declaimed at the top of his voice: ‘Cursed lake, open up and let us pass, for the Promised Land awaits us.’

And wham! A high wind arose, the waters started to bubble as though in a great cauldron and … a miracle!.. sucked upwards by the wind, the water spiralled towards the heavens and divided in two, causing the Red Sea — sorry, Lake Maggiore — to open, whereupon the entire family, followed by the people of Pino Tronzano, Zenna and Maccagno, made their way across, chanting and singing, while the customs officers shouted after them despairingly: ‘Halt! Come back or we open fire! It is forbidden to cross without passport and visa.’ No one paid the slightest heed. Even the peasants and shepherds from the uplands with their cows, sheep and goats made their way across.

‘No, no goats! That’s not allowed,’ the police yelled.

The goats in reply fired off little pellets of shit as round as bronze billiard balls, and went on their way, wagging their tails behind them. What can I say? I was already dreaming in cinematic terms.

A cry of ‘Wake up, wake up!’ from my mother stopped me from completing that biblical dream. ‘We’re late, get up. The boat’s here in a quarter of an hour.’ I was in such a state that I put my trousers on back to front, put both socks on the one foot, spilled the coffee cup on top of the cat and even forgot to stick the paint brushes and paper into my bag. ‘Hurry up, hurry up.’

The siren from the boat tying up at the mooring was answered by the whistle of a train emerging from the tunnel. The station water-pump groaned. We were at the quay.

‘Careful on the gangway. You’re OK?’

‘All aboard.’

‘Cast off.’

I went to take my place at the prow. Mamma came up to me and whispered: ‘My little darling, I’ve got a bit of bad news for you.’

‘What sort of news?’ I asked, without taking my eyes off the Swiss coast as it rushed towards us.

‘The roofs in Brissago are not chocolate any more.’

‘Whaaaaat?’ I screamed in disbelief.

‘Yes, darling. The Swiss government made them change the whole lot. The order had to be carried out at once because all the children had been chewing the tiles so furiously that they were making the roofs leak … holes all over the place. So every time there was a downpour, the houses flooded and the inhabitants got colds or pneumonia, not to mention the fact that greedy children ended up in bed day after day with shooting pains in their stomachs.’

‘How could that be? Chocolate doesn’t give you a sore stomach.’

‘It all depends. If the tiles are old and as rotten as those ones…’

‘Rotten chocolate! But the tile that Bruno brought me wasn’t old.’

‘But that was from a new house.’

‘Oh well, then, at least his roof is safe.’

‘I’m afraid not. A couple of nights ago, some thieves stole the lot.’

I burst into tears of despair. ‘Damn them!’ I called down curses in silence. ‘God damn all thieves of fresh chocolate roofs and bring down on them a landslide of old cocoa, rotten marzipan and boiling vanilla!’

I could not be consoled.

* * *

At the quay in Brissago, Aunt Maria, whom I had never seen, Uncle Iginio Repetti and my two cousins were waiting for us. I was in such a state that I did not even deign to greet them with a glance, not even a cursory ciao. ‘What’s wrong with him?’ asked Aunt Maria, genuinely concerned. Mamma made her a sign to desist. ‘A tragedy. I’ll explain later,’ she whispered under her breath.

On the way to their house, we passed a cake shop whose windows were groaning with piles of chocolate bars. Noemi, the elder of the two cousins, had gone ahead and was coming out of the shop with an enormous lump of chocolate. When she offered me some, I accepted the offer but with a severe, disdainful look which said: ‘If you think for one moment that you can fob me off with a square of dry cocoa, you’ve got it wrong.’

My uncle and aunt’s house was on the lakeside. It even had a private harbour with a long, narrow boat, a yawl. Mamma and I were given a large room with a balcony. My God, what lodgings!

I immediately asked if it was possible to go out on the boat. In Pino I had been allowed every so often onto the customs men’s motor boat, but that yawl was of a different class. To say its balance was precarious is putting it mildly. You couldn’t move an inch in the boat without it immediately rocking about crazily.

They lowered me on board first: the two sisters jumped in right after me, the yawl overturned and all three of us ended up in the water. ‘Damn it all! I’m only five and I can’t even swim.’ To make matters worse, the yawl fell on top of me and I found myself trapped inside the hull, as though under a lid. I knocked, shouted, drank in gulps of water, and somehow, I’ll never know how, managed to grab hold of the bar of the seat. I heard Noemi screaming; ‘My God, the boy! Where has he ended up?’

Her sister replied: ‘He’s not in the water. I’ll bet he’s stuck under the boat, inside the hull.’

My uncle dived in. Together they managed to get the boat upright, and I came back to the surface, still clinging onto the crosspiece. I was spluttering like a flooded engine.

My God, life is hard in bloody Switzerland!

* * *

That night I had nightmares which made me toss and turn about in bed I don’t know how often. Just as well I was in the arms of my mother, who every time I moved gave me a kiss and dried the perspiration which had soaked me through and through. ‘All right, it’s nothing,’ she reassured me. ‘Never mind these bad dreams. You’re not in the water any more, little darling, there are no more lakes or boats. Go back to sleep.’

It didn’t work. As soon as I got back to sleep, water came at me from all sides. The rain was lashing down, the rivers were overflowing and bursting their banks, the water in the lake was high and rising until it seemed ready to flood onto the shoreline and submerge the station, dragging the trains beneath the waves. My mother was fleeing, holding me in her arms, climbing up the steep path which leads to Pino and on to Tronzano. Pa’ Fo was somewhere behind us, balancing on his head the huge copper tub we used as a bath … It might come in handy as a life boat. This recurring dream, or nightmare, was derived from an experience I had lived through the previous year, when a real cataclysm had made the water rise to the highest levels ever recorded. It seemed that the water, rising inexorably, was determined to swallow us all up.

When I awoke the following day in Switzerland, I was almost surprised to find that my bed was not floating on the waves. A bit dazed, I went down to the kitchen for a cup of coffee only to find on the table a huge paint box, a clutch of brushes and a sketch pad to paint on. They were not children’s toys but professional material, real painter’s equipment.

‘Are these for me?’ I asked hopefully.

‘Yes,’ replied my uncle, with a laugh.

I hardly recognised him. He was dressed as a soldier: green uniform with red edgings, boots and hat complete with visor. ‘Uncle, are you off to war?’

‘No, it’s my ordinary uniform. Didn’t you know? I am a sergeant in the town gendarmes.’

It was only then that I noticed the pistol in the holster of his belt. ‘Are those yours too?’ I asked, pointing to a trombone and a rifle with a bullet-holder displayed on the wall.

‘They are. I play in the police band, and this is my official rifle. Don’t ever touch it.’

He then picked up the paint box and emptied all the paint tubes onto the table. ‘See how lovely they are. They are from the Le Frank firm, a famous brand. When I was your age, I always dreamed of having paints like these. Did you know that I still paint sometimes? Have you every tried painting with colours and brushes like these?’

As he spoke, he squeezed tube after tube onto a big plate, showing me how to prepare a palette. He dipped his brush into the burnt sienna colour, handed it over to me, filled a cup of water and, setting it down on the table on a piece of cardboard, issued the peremptory order: ‘Right, then. Let me see if you really are the infant prodigy they say you are.’

It is easy to imagine the outcome. In my excitement I splashed paint left, right and centre. My idea was to depict the previous day’s incident with my cousins falling into the water, the boat capsizing and me ending up underneath, flailing about desperately. Instead, disaster upon disaster, nothing whatsoever of the story emerged from the hotchpotch on the page. A queue of onlookers formed, peeping over my shoulder. The whole family was there, including my mother and four gendarme colleagues of my uncle’s, all arrayed in uniform with their trumpets and trombones. They vied with one another in their enthusiastic comments on my artistic skill. ‘He’s a real artist! I’ve never seen a monster like that.’ ‘What is it, Noah’s Ark?’ ‘No, it’s the naval battle of the Malpaga family against the Borromeos.’

At the time I was sure they were churning out these flattering words only to please me, but a dozen years later, when I was already a student at the Brera Academy, I went back to visit Uncle Trombone (as everyone called him), and happened to see that painting hanging on a wall. They had even gone to the trouble of having it framed. I realised then that it was a fine piece of work. It looked like a Kandinsky! Who knows how I would have preened myself if I had been aware of that earlier but, both fortunately and unfortunately, candour and consciousness never take up residence in the same person at the same time.

* * *

In any case, that first week in Switzerland was unforgettable. I had the luck to be there during the festival of the Free Cantons. An assembly of people in period costume gathered in the piazza: first came those in gold and blue embroidered tunics playing the part of the tyrannical dukes, behind them in the procession the German soldiers, then the noble ladies and finally the patriotic rebels led by William Tell and his son. In the centre of the square, against a wall decorated with a bas-relief motif to signify a portal, stood a small boy with an apple on his head. William clutched a cross-bow, aimed it at the boy but a woman shouted: ‘No, my son, nooooo!’ It was the boy’s mother who obviously had little faith in the much-heralded accuracy of her husband. The point of that scream, I learned years later, was to distract the audience’s attention momentarily from the boy with the apple on his head. Taking advantage of that brief loss of concentration, the portal with the boy in front of it swung on its own axis. The real child disappeared, and a dummy of the same dimensions, same costume and face as the boy appeared in his place. Only the very smartest saw the trick, and at five years I was not even an apprentice smarty. In a flash, William Tell fired the arrow, piercing the apple, yells from an ecstatic public, end of show. ‘But what does it all mean?’ I asked my mother, who before the performance had tried to recount to me the sequence of historical facts. ‘It’s an absolute outrage,’ I exclaimed in indignation. ‘It’s always us children who end up in the middle of these things! The Baby Jesus is born in a stinking stable, with the roof falling in, no heating or stove, so he’s got to make do with the breath of an ox and ass. Herod, who knows why? wants him dead, and so goes off and slaughters all the children in the country as though they were goats. God Himself, just to teach poor Isaac a lesson, orders his father to chop off his head with an axe. Are we supposed to be impressed if He changes his mind and comes out with a “Stop right there! It was all a joke, a godly joke!” And to crown it all, this apple on the poor Swiss boy’s head, so that if Tell’s aim is out, his head is going to be split open. It’s him, the boy, who is the real hero but nobody even remembers what he’s called. The feast is in honour of his father, the idiot who put on the bet in the first place.’

To tell the truth, my indignation did not last long because at that moment the mounted gendarme band came on the scene. I let out a cry of amazement. My uncle, mounted on horseback like the others, was one of the musicians, and was blowing into his trombone with big oompas which resounded all over the square. I was puffed up with pride: in my eyes, the reputation of my gendarme uncle soared at the very least up to the stars!

* * *

The following day Mamma had to return to Luino, and to cheer me up Noemi took me with her to the kindergarten where she worked as nursery nurse. I found myself surrounded by a pack of children more or less my own age but who came mainly from the Cantons of the Léman, so they were Swiss-Germans, without a word of Italian. I attempted to communicate in the Lombard dialect, but they looked at me as though I were crazy.

After a while, we were all taken into a big room dominated by an organ. A large lady, who seemed to be made of butter and cream, was seated at the keyboard and began to play. Another woman, pedalling the bellows with all her might, was seated beside her. A sound worthy of a cathedral emerged from the pipes, and the children’s chorus gave voice to a magnificent hymn, the aria rising to a crescendo as it was repeated with only minuscule variations. Once I had got the hang of it, I joined in the chorus, at first quietly, then with full-throated gusto. I even imitated the words, pretending I had them at my fingertips: ‘Antzen ut Schivel mit nem lauben troi wirt…’ God knows what sort of fantastic tale I was recounting.

* * *

A few days later, Uncle Trombone presented himself on horseback in the open space in front of the house. Noemi heaved me up on the animal’s back or, more precisely, onto its neck. I was beside myself with joy. ‘Come on, let’s go and visit Bruno in Lugano. He’s expecting us.’ A hour’s journey on horseback with a gendarme uncle! A super-luxury marvel!

We did not go down the usual roads, but cut along the byways, beside the fields, through the woods. At one stage we were almost attacked by a swarm of bees. My uncle put his gendarme’s hat over my head and took off his jacket to cover my legs. ‘Put your hands in here too. Unfortunately, with your delicate skin, the bees will eat you alive,’ he said.

‘Who said Switzerland was an Earthly Paradise? It’s a terrifying place.’

To make matters worse, the horse was stung by those ravenous bees, got excited, neighed as though preparing for a lance-at-the-ready charge, pawed the ground twice and set off at full gallop! Uncle did his best to restrain him, but who could restrain the bees? They came after us as far as they could but after a time had to give up, allowing our champion to slow down, even if he still kept his neck arched and trotted like a great victor.

I would never have expected such warmth of greeting from my cousin who was standing waiting in the front of the church with some friends and … Bedelià and several other girls. Almost all splendid girls but — needless to say — none who could stand comparison with her!

‘Why are we going to church?’ I asked.

‘It is a very special church, where they give concerts, and there are some Italian musicians there. Come and I’ll introduce you. They are all exiles.’

‘Exiles. What does that mean?’

‘It means they all had to flee Italy to escape imprisonment.’

‘Ah, just like the men who hide in the carriages at Pino. Refugees, in other words.’

‘Exactly. The very same. These particular ones are all anarchists.’

Obviously I had no idea what ‘anarchist’ meant, and that was not the time to ask for explanations. We were late, and the concert was about to get underway. I took my seat in the best place in the world — Bedelià’s lap, where the chair back and headrest were her breasts!

The musicians were warming up, and Bruno was seated at the piano. There were guitars as big as a man (called double-basses), great twisted trumpets (the saxophones), drums with plates and metal tambourines (percussion), and then trumpets more or less identical to those in the gendarme band. The musicians also included two black men with a curious guitar and a woman with a violin. Bedelià explained to me that that the violin was called ‘hot’ and that the round guitar was a ukulele.

‘When are you coming back to see me on the other side of the lake?’ I asked her.

‘I’m afraid it’s going to be a bit difficult. The Fascist government has made our government withdraw Bruno from the embassy because of his somewhat subversive ideas.’

I was on the point of asking her what ‘subversive’ meant, but the concert was beginning, so silence and attention.

I had never heard music like that before. At first, it seemed to me like an off-key racket, or like the high-pitched trumpet sounds that clowns make, but then I found myself beating my hands to keep time. A ramshackle harmony was emerging from it all, and I was enjoying it.

‘What do you call this music?’ I asked Bedelià.

‘Jazz, and the one they’re starting is the blues. They’ll start singing in a minute.’

The two black men got to their feet and sang a few notes in a voice as powerful as a trumpet, then launched into a rhymed routine, waving their arms about and doing a few shuffling dance steps. The girl on the violin joined in the song, and Bruno, not to be outdone, produced from somewhere an incredibly guttural, mellow, black man’s voice.

In no time, everyone in the stalls was swept along by the singing. Gradually, even those highly reserved Swiss folk were raising their arms and swinging them about in imitation of the gospel singers in the transept: they were clapping their hands, stamping their feet and singing along to the various refrains. I certainly had no idea at the time, but I was present at one of the first jazz and blues events in Europe.

They say that as children our senses are as receptive as photographic plates: every colour, every tremor of emotion is imprinted with unbelievable depth and precision. That event must have affected my way of hearing music, leaving it inscribed not merely as a sequence of notes and rhythms but as a ritual gesture and collective action.

* * *

When, a week later, I returned to Pino, my mother asked me what had happened to me. I launched into an account of what I had seen — of my song in German, the horse enraged by the bees, and when I got to the jazz concert I tried to reproduce the sounds by shaking my arms and legs like a grasshopper.

‘My little darling,’ my mother said in genuine concern, ‘are you sure they didn’t drug you? Were you bitten by a tarantula or bewitched in some way? Calm down, take a deep breath and above all don’t tell a soul around here about the anarchist exiles who were playing and singing with the Negroes. It’s dangerous!’

* * *

It is 1932, I am six years old and have to go to school. My brother Fulvio was two years younger than me, but it was unanimously agreed that he gave proof of extraordinary intelligence. At four years, he could read and write like a child twice his age. In addition, he was liable to come out with witticisms and observations that left people gasping.

The primary school in Pino was nothing special: there were only three classes, and to carry on with their schooling, pupils had to go to Tronzano, some six hundred metres higher up. In Pino there was only one teacher in charge of ten boys and seven girls. Her name was Sister Maria, a nun in the order of Saint Vincent, and she wore a white headdress tied under her chin. For me, she was like the Great Earth Mother: generously built, majestic, gentle and filled with tenderness towards everyone. She never raised her voice nor her hand to any of us, not even when we fully merited a slap on the cheek or a kick on the backside. I was bewitched by Sister Maria, the more so since I was her favourite, even if she concealed it. Perhaps I behaved like a real teacher’s pet, always turning up with some flowers which I had picked on the hillside. Once I arrived with a little rabbit which I had dragged out of the compound, but on another occasion I went right over the score: I brought in an ugly, filthy stray dog.

On each occasion Sister Maria let out squeals of joy, and seemed as delighted as a little girl. And let us say nothing about her expressions of amazement when I showed her one of my paintings. She frequently encouraged me to draw or paint in class, and did her best to get all my classmates involved.

Our school was housed in the old, medieval town hall. Outside, in the corridors, they were freshening up the paint on the walls, and the painters had left tins of oil paint in a cupboard. One of the girls happened to bring a couple of brushes and one of these tins into the classroom and, while Sister Maria was briefly out, she started to do a painting on a wall. The rest of us were shocked. ‘Messing up the walls like that. You’re going to catch it when Sister Maria gets back!’

Sister came in just at that moment, took one look at all those smug faces and said: ‘Not a bad idea! Why don’t we paint the whole room?’ We looked at her dumbfounded. ‘Dear, dear, Sister Maria has gone off her head.’

The first girl, with a look of triumph, got on with splashing colour on the classroom wall. A moment later, each and every one of us, like crazed ants, attacked the walls, brandishing brushes dipped into the paint tins we had thieved.

* * *

That winter, it snowed more than usual, so to get to school we had to put on skis. My brother Fulvio and I had learned to use those contraptions fairly quickly, but these were not the kind of skis that people are familiar with nowadays. They were wooden boards, roughly cut and attached to the boots with belts and rudimentary fasteners. They were not intended for sporting purposes, but only to allow us to move about without sinking in the snow. The ski poles were staffs of ash with two little circles of wickerwork fixed onto the bottom.

It took real talent to move with skis like those, but all of us in the valley must have had an abundance of it, since we managed to hurtle down some of those breathtaking slopes without breaking our necks.

Towards February, when no one expected it, there was a tremendous snowstorm which left a covering of snow a metre deep. The lorries could no longer get through, and the railway, too, was blocked. There was a snowslide between the two Zenna tunnels and the snow made the road to Luino impassable. The only way to get about was by skis or sledge. As children, we had no idea what it meant to be completely cut off. It was not even possible to reach the Swiss side or the Luino shore from the lake. A north wind stirred up huge waves, causing the police motor boat to slip its moorings one night, crash into the cliff and sink.

For us the whole business was a godsend. The need to ski everywhere, the opportunity for endless snowball fights and the adventure of finding ourselves completely cut off made us feel as though we were marooned on a desert island. The people in the valley were not unduly worried, since the grocer had supplies enough for three or four days. The butcher had access to as many sheep and goats as he could wish, and the smugglers now had a free hand. The customs men on the border posts were not able to move with any agility on the snow-covered peaks, but the shoulder-boys with their home-made skis, even when they were weighed down with baskets packed with cigarettes and other contraband goods, could manage the circus turns needed to make it across the steep mountain slopes.

That very week the rumour began to circulate that the sergeant in charge of the carabinieri station had been relieved of his command and ordered to move to ‘another location’. Someone had snared him in the bird-trap, as the saying was, in other words, someone had written a letter to the head office in Luino accusing the poor officer of being in cahoots with the smugglers, and of turning a blind eye to the continual cross-border movement of subversives and common criminals wanted by the authorities.

A miserable stab in the back. Most people in the town were convinced that the whole squalid business had been orchestrated by the officer in the customs force, others that the report came from the vice station-master who came from Maccagno every day to relieve my father. ‘He’s a fanatical Fascist, that one,’ Pa’ Fo always maintained. ‘Yes, but he’d better look out,’ my father’s assistant would reply. ‘People are liable to slip under a train, especially with all this snow about!’

A few days later, the council workers managed to clear the tracks, and a tractor with a snow plough got through on the provincial road. We were once again free, the more’s the pity.

This meant that they could now arrange the removal of the carabiniere sergeant: the same story of dismantled furniture, the same stove slipping off and breaking apart. The officer’s wife was extremely sad: she embraced my mother and all the women in the town when they went down to say goodbye. Even Nanni, their son, the leader of our adventures and games on the hilltops, was upset and struggled to hold back his tears. I too felt a tightness in the pit of my stomach which almost bent me double.

But I knew that of all the family, the one I would miss most was Nanni’s little sister, Beatrice, who shared my bench at school … with those big black eyes of hers … the one who always stole my rubbers … who messed up my drawings … who put ink on my nose, but who held my hand on the way home to the station and who went happily sliding along beside me until we ended up rolling together on the grassy verge of the road, giving each other big hugs. Often as we rolled head over heels we would bump heavily into things but then would help each other back to our feet. I would put my arm round her waist, to help support her … and she would kiss me lightly.

It may be that we manufactured those accidents deliberately, or maybe they were completely fake! ‘But now that Beatrice is going away, who’s going to roll home with me through the fields?’