My First Seven Years (Plus a Few More)

CHAPTER 19. At Grandfather’s

At the age of fourteen, I was admitted to the Brera Academy after a very exacting selection process. Out of the one hundred and fifty applicants, only forty passed the examinations.

During the Easter holidays I went to stay with my grandparents in Lomellina. On arrival, I was astonished not to be met by the usual swarms of midges and mosquitoes. No wonder! It was only March and the onset of those hellish insects was still some time off. On the other hand, at nightfall, the croaking of the frogs rose up, only to end quite suddenly with a succession of splashes as they plunged into the canals and waterways. It was not for nothing that we were in Sartirana, a name which means ‘Leaping Frog’.

I could scarcely recognise my grandfather’s farmhouse when I got there. The climbing plants clinging to the columns of the arches under the quadrilateral portico were in bloom. There were dashes of colour on the walls of the stables and wood-store as well, and all that’s before we got to the orchard! As soon as I went with Granddad Bristìn on donkey back onto the bridge over the canal, the orchards appeared before us, laid out like an enormous chessboard of an infinite number of mosaic tesserae in an impossible perspective. The larger and smaller pawns were the fruit trees which had produced blossoms galore. My grandfather savoured my amazement in silence, then whispered to me: ‘Don’t just look with your eyes, look with your nose too.’

‘Look with my nose?’

‘Yes, smell, listen to the scents and perfumes.’

‘Ah yes, I hear them. They’re very good.’

‘Always be aware that you must know how to read smells and scents. For example, come over here, under this cherry tree. Sniff gently, breathing softly. Listen, it has an almost salty aftertaste … this one over here is also a cherry tree, but it has a sweeter scent, it’s almost rounded and is more intense than the other one. And do you know why? Because the first tree shed its blossoms too early, and so got a chill. The other wasn’t in such a hurry to bloom and so avoided the problem!’

‘And you can understand that from the scent?’

‘Certainly, and from the scent I already know what the fruit will be like: the one that the frost got to will have its fruit late and thin, but the second ones will be plump, full and beautifully scented. It’s the same with people. If a baby gets a serious illness, it needs time, care, food and warmth before it recovers, and you can tell from its smell when it’s not at its best.’

‘So why do doctors never smell you when they come to see you?’

‘Because they’ve forgotten ancient medicine. In the Salerno treatises that taught doctors how to go about examining a patient, it is written: “Feel the skin and muscles from head to toe, listen to how the blood is circulating, test the skin with the fingers to discover where it is sweet, damp or where it is dry and above all smell, guess the humour, the salted, the bitter, where it is pleasing and where it emanates odours … which is a way of saying where it stinks.”’

‘Really! How much you know, Granddad! Did you ever study medicine?’

‘No, but I’m a curious old soul that’s never easily satisfied with the notions books and academics try to palm you off with. Look, it doesn’t matter whether you are talking about trees, potatoes, flowers or tomatoes: if an apple is bitten by an insect or infected by a virus, it immediately reacts by changing smell, even before its appearance changes. It’s a sign it gives you gratis. It’s the same with a man or a woman. His or her pleasing smell doesn’t just inform you that they are in good health, it also tells you something about their mood. If they give off a whiff of perfume, it means they are experiencing some emotion, that perhaps they like you and you can be happy with that, and if then you feel a thrill or your heart starts beating faster, you can be sure that in the same way you’ll be sprinkling your own message of contented scents in the air!’

‘And everyone will be aware of it? All you have to do is sniff around?’

‘Unfortunately not. If a man falls in love and looks into his girlfriend’s eyes, he might notice that she’s pale or that she’s flushed, that her palms are damp with perspiration because of the emotion, but he won’t listen to her smell, he won’t hear it because we have lost the sense of smell. We have been castrated of this basic sense.’

I was astonished. ‘What a shame! And it’s too late to do anything about it?’

‘Well, you know … by practising with method and, above all, with constancy, maybe a remedy can be found.’

‘Sniffing exercises?’

‘Exactly. Training to use your nostrils on everything and every person, as the animals do. A dog that meets you sniffs at you. If he doesn’t like your smell, he goes off in disgust and you can count yourself lucky if he does not pee on you as well.’

‘Granddad, you’re making a fool of me! So you’re telling me that to get my sense of smell back, I’ve got to become a dog! I’ve got to go on all fours, sniff the legs and maybe even the backside of people I meet!’

Grandfather laughed heartily. ‘Congratulations! A great parry. In any case, I advise you to try it, without going over the top. You’ll acquire a splendid culture that way.’

‘A culture on stinks?’

‘Yes. Did you never wonder why women, and nowadays some men too, dose themselves more and more in perfume?’

‘To cover body odours and rancid sweat.’

‘Don’t exaggerate. It’s true that spraying yourself every so often with a delicate perfume can produce a pleasing effect: it is excess that does the harm. It’s a concealment born of distrust of the products of our own excellent glands. Professor Trangipane told me that as early as the eighteenth century, bewigged noblemen discovered they emitted odours according to their states of mind, and that these signals were clearly decipherable and legible by the nose. So, to prevent other people from using their smell to find out character, personality, emotions and hypocrisy, which has an especially stomach-churning smell, they preferred to cancel all smell with doses of perfume.’

‘Granddad, are you telling me that if I exercise properly … all I need is one good sniff, and no one will be able to put one over me?’

‘Absolutely right! Everything in nature has a language: people’s way of gesturing, gesticulating, their way of walking, of sitting down, of shaking hands … their way of using their voice and articulating words … everything is an encyclopedia of invaluable signs. It’s as though you were to pull people’s clothes off and see them naked, as they really are, with their buttocks and prattle exposed to the winds.’

At the end of this mad tirade from Grandfather, I wanted to clap wildly: ‘Where do you get these ideas from? And don’t tell me they come to you by chance, or that they’re just born all by themselves, like the radishes in the orchard.’

‘No, nothing comes from nothing, and it doesn’t matter whether you are talking about some idea spat out of a man’s brain or a fart shot out of a monkey’s arse. Not even a sneeze explodes on its own, by itself. Every intuition is always born by crossing different notions, often opposing ones, just as you do when you are grafting plants together.’

‘You started off talking about sniffing, now you’re on to grafts and farts, so where are you going to end up?’

‘At knowledge, at finding out about things, searching, checking. Never be content with facile rules, or with the lying books they give you to read at school.’

‘That’s enough, Granddad. You’re making my head spin with all these metaphors. All right, I’ll bear them in mind. But you were a peasant, so how did you manage to teach yourself so much … I mean, to graft together all these bits of knowledge?’

‘I’ll tell you: the ace in my pack was Don Gaetano. This holy man went straight to the seminary from Turin Polytechnic, where he was about to graduate. He was no run-of-the-mill spirit; he argued about everything, even about dogmas. A couple of centuries ago they would have burned him at the stake, at the very least. So as soon as he took his vows, they packed him off as a kind of punishment to a parish in the Monferrato countryside. I don’t know if it was out of a sense of vocation or out of a desire to overcome boredom, but Don Gaetano decided to open a school for the children of the district. He had a competition. I was seven, and I presented myself together with a dozen other hopefuls like me. That teacher was a real performer. He managed to make us passionate about any subject, he was able to transform everything into a laughter-filled game, or into stories more captivating than any fable. Just imagine, I was so taken by the desire to learn that I used to run away from the fields so as not to miss a single one of his lessons. Look, I am no Pico della Mirandola when it comes to memory, but if they tell me a story or if I read about a problem or a fact which catches my imagination, I can recount it to you a month later, without getting one word wrong!’

‘Don Gaetano’s ideas were slightly different from those of the bosses, that is from the landowners and mill-owners. He would often launch terrifying broadsides at them, even during his sermons, until one day someone laid a trap for him. He lived in a house attached to the church wall, so to get to the church all he had to do was climb a flight of stairs to the sacristy. One morning, he was coming down after mass but someone had had the bright idea of sawing off the first two steps. He fell down like a sack of potatoes. He broke his leg and femur, and was laid up in bed for I don’t know how long. Every day, as soon as I got home from the fields, I used to go and keep him company. As a way of thanking me, he used to read a couple of chapters to me, and when he got tired I read to him. I can’t tell you how much we read together: history, philosophy and even books of rational mechanics. And then novels, and we even read texts that were forbidden by the Vatican, for example, the edition of one of the gospels translated in the sixteenth century from the Greek to Mantuan dialect, and published secretly in Geneva. The translator was put on trial for heresy and burned alive.’

‘So explain this to me: why did you not become a priest yourself?’

‘Excuse me, did it never cross your mind that if your grandfather had become a priest, your mother would never have been born and you wouldn’t be here listening to me?’

‘Ah! It was all to make sure that I was born! Thank you very much. Anyway, Granddad, to listen to all your subversive speeches, nobody would ever know that you were educated by a parish priest!’

‘Never judge anyone by the clothes he wears, my boy! In any case, I do not owe the whole of my education to him. Do you remember Professor Trangipane, the one who used to teach in the Faculty of Agrarian Studies in the University of Alessandria, and who came here once with his students? He and his lads used to come and see me here before you were born. They would turn up, determined not to stand any nonsense, and fire loads of questions on Applied Agronomy at me. For the sake of my bella figura, I had to master theory: I got my head down over the texts the professor got for me, as though I were doing exams.’

‘It’s a pity you didn’t, Granddad. You would certainly have got a degree.’

‘Yes, that’s just what the professor said … but he always added that it would have been a crime. “Dear Bristìn, today you are a phenomenon. You are the only teaching peasant in the world. With a degree, you’d only be an ordinary professor!”’