My First Seven Years (Plus a Few More)

CHAPTER 8. Foreigners and Strangers

It is a curious fact that even today, more than sixty years on, anyone leafing through the pages of the Valtravaglia telephone directory will come across an unusually high number of foreign surnames. Here are some chosen at random: Gutierrez, Vankaus, Schumacher, Batieux, Besinsky. These are the grandchildren of the master glass-blowers who, towards the end of the nineteenth century, arrived at the factories of Porto Valtravaglia from all over Europe, each with his own speciality in casting, moulding and glass-blowing.

These vetradór, to adopt the dialect term, turned up in family groups with clearly differentiated values, trades and skill levels.

Inside each ethnic group, people obviously expressed themselves in their language of origin, but at work, in the factory, in the bars and on the street, communication was not in Italian but in an eccentric Lombard dialect, a speech which, continually enriched by new lexical additions, was transformed into an idiom without equal anywhere in the world. The valley of the mezarat had quite suddenly become a fantastic crucible of the most diverse, outlandish and often irreconcilable cultures, traditions, prejudices and mentalities, and yet, however much it might strain belief, there was never any manifestation of racism among those people. Certainly they made fun of each other, were even bitingly sarcastic over their respective pronunciations, stock phrases, gestures or modulation of guttural or sharp sounds, but never aggressively or malevolently so. It was genuinely funny to hear Germans, Spaniards, French or Poles railing at each other in a dialect that was already more than sufficiently abstruse and contorted.

Porto Valtravaglia gave birth to an incredible new idiom: lizard became ritzòpora (from the Greek spoken in the Hellespont), shepherd became bergeròt, the German term tràmpen was used in the sense of clumsy, stappìch of cheat, sfulk of muddle, tacchinosa of street-walker, and so on.

Obviously, as a boy I was not fully aware that in absorbing that strange melange of languages and dialects I was attending a unique university of communication, an experience which would afford me an otherwise unknown freedom to create expressive modules ad infinitum.

* * *

But let’s get back to our fabulatori, the story-tellers of the Valtravaglia who with their language and tales made an indelible mark on my future choices and on my way of judging events and characters in both fantasy and reality.

The platforms where the performances unfolded, the idiosyncratic stages which varied with the trade of the individual fabulatore and the utility of the tale, were equally decisive.

The fishermen chose the porches near the harbour. We children were their most enthusiastic audience. Fidanza, the headman of a crew, would get his assistants to line us all up in a semicircle to hold and stretch out the nets which needed to be mended. Not that he forced us to do this, perish the thought! It was an invitation accepted with good grace, indeed with alacrity, and paid for by the tales they told. I was especially fascinated by the elements of paradox in those stories, and even more by the spicing of the language with bizarre terms which produced in my mind unfamiliar images which I then struggled to absorb into my vocabulary. Often I did not grasp exactly the sense of the word-play, and asked them to repeat it … so I ended up laughing out of turn, to the annoyance of my more attentive companions.

Beyond all doubt, my first teacher in the telling of tales was my grandfather Bristìn, but now I found myself attending a genuine masterclass for jesters, and I had the opportunity to study the most diverse techniques and forms of delivery.

At this school, I learned the structure of the original dialect, which is something different from merely speaking dialect: above all I acquired the structure of a primordial, integral language which grants you the total liberty, at any moment, to invent expressions.

The style of those fabulatori, story-tellers, was based on improvisation; as I have already mentioned, it was evident that their main concern was to adapt differing passages to a contingent reality. I had occasion to listen to the same story related in three or four different versions. The ability of the person recounting the story lay in his capacity to adapt it each time according to variations in events, including local incidents and laundry-room gossip. Every event, however unexpected, was immediately incorporated into the performance: an explosion caused by poachers, a shot from a hunter’s rifle, the ringing of church bells … everything was grist to their mills.

And most of all, the story-tellers never lost sight of the moods and emotions of their listeners. If there was someone who guffawed, who reacted uncomfortably to the irony or who took it all badly, he was sure to become the target of the whole routine. The same treatment was reserved for any spectator who seemed slow-witted or could not keep up with the comic action. Anything could be used to move things along, to bring them to life or to involve everyone in the narration. In brief, they managed to make the fantastic down-to-earth, and vice versa.

It is quite true that not all the story-tellers conceived narration as theatre, nor did I at that time link the two genres: in particular, I was not yet able to take in the vital difference between recounting and performing, and I was absolutely convinced that theatre-making had all to do with acting, the presence of several actors, scenery, sound and lighting effects … in short, with organised magic. Only much later, when I had already acquired considerable experience of the stage, did I realise that story-telling had been the mechanism which had encouraged me to express myself in epic-popular form. But this is a topic which merits a deeper, more detailed treatment which we will perhaps be able to dedicate to it elsewhere.

However, I was completely conscious that reality as seen by the story-tellers on the lake was reality seen through a distorting mirror, and that it was proposed by each of them using markedly differing narrative techniques and approaches.

For example, Galli — a poacher by profession — presented tragic tales with the nonchalant air of a man who analyses the details of a disaster without being fully aware that he is talking of the disaster itself. Then there was another who spoke quietly, almost flippantly, while he was fishing. His name was Dighelnò, a dialect name equivalent to ‘Don’t Tell Him’.

He settled down in his place at the harbour, set up his fishing rods while the children gathered round nagging him to tell us one of his absurd tales, but he remained where he was, not uttering a word, distractedly staring at the floats of his fishing lines as they bobbed up and down on the water. Then, under his breath, without warning, he would come out with three or four words which had no sense at all. ‘When the wind blows in winter, the minnows get an itch in their arse.’

We would stare at him in amazement and he, still looking out over the lake, would turn his rod in the direction of the island of the Malpagas and go on: ‘Look over there, you see that dark blue line in front of Cannero Castle? That’s a current strong enough to sweep away even the police motor boats.’

And this was his way of introducing, without preamble, the story of an extraordinary fishing expedition of which he was sole protagonist and witness. ‘Have you ever seen a line being pulled in with hundreds of bleak, chub and whitefish wriggling at the end of it?’

‘No, never,’ we chorused in reply.

‘Ah well, I’ve had the honour of witnessing this spectacle. It happened right here on the quayside, one day at dawn. I was on my own, with no one for company except my rods and lines. I had been slaving away all night, getting them into good order. I had ten or so rods, four or five of them more than seven feet in length. I lashed three of the biggest ones together, hoisted them up like a mast, stuck onto the top of this mast another two rods, then another two, and so on until I had one huge shaft at least thirty metres long. The problem then was how to cast the line with a rod that size! A line at least a couple of kilometres in length, with over two hundred hooks. So what was I to do with that line? I had an idea: I laid out the line of yarn all along the street which starts at the church and goes right down until it nearly plunges into the lake. I got my brother’s lorry and stuck the enormous rod right in the middle, with poles arranged around in a pyramid shape to hold it in place. As soon as I’d fixed up the equipment, I took the lorry up there to the top of the road which sweeps down … and away we go! full steam ahead towards the lakeside, dragging behind me the fishing line which is now soaring up into the sky like a kite. The lorry reaches the quay: screech of breaks, and VROOOOM, the huge mast cracks like a whip and hurls the line out towards the centre of the lake, distributing the baited hooks and the floats with great precision.

‘It was all just as I had expected. A wind got up from the land and pushed the bait and floats further out into the lake. The high waves made the water turn dark blue. “Here we go,” I shouted, “in no time whole shoals of them’ll be biting,” and in fact next thing the floats were going under like ducks after fish. This is the moment. I get onto the lorry and get ready to start pulling in the line. Right! Gently does it if we’re not to break the cord. I start off up the road, the pylon bends so far over that my heart skips a beat, but it holds. Pull, pull … fish, fish! Not a one! And yet I must have caught something! What could possibly be dragging with such force? Christ in heaven, I had caught the bells from the church tower in Cannero … on the other side of the lake!’

But the real master of the story-tellers was undoubtedly Ravanèl, who owed his nickname to the fact that he had a shock of bright red hair that made him resemble a ravanello, a radish. The stories he told were nearly all dramatisations of an event which had really occurred, perhaps even recently, and was thus still in everyone’s memory. He would start off, for instance, with the tale of someone who had gone mad. They had come to take him away in the morning, dragging him down from the bell-tower where he was roosted, pissing with considerable panache on the faithful below as they walked in procession on some saint’s day. They loaded him onto the specially padded van for the insane, the one which the council had made available for emergency transport to the mental asylum in Varese. The glass-blower’s trade, it has been established, is a cause of silicosis, which can lead to bouts of madness. It was for that reason that the Valtravaglia could boast the highest output of madmen on the entire lake.

On this subject, I remember the story of a man who got it into his head that he could fly. There was another one about a man who used to walk around in the nude with a suit painted onto his skin. Then there was the man who had jumped off a bridge or the one who had burned down his house after hanging all his hens.

Generally madness was a pretext to talk about the people who surrounded the madman: the priest who wanted to bless or exorcise him, the doctor who said it was all a matter of sexual depression, and so on … right up to the mayor, the wife, her lover, the police sergeant.

The figure of the other, of the unpredictable, of the illogical has always held a fascination for me, but what interested me most was achieving mastery of the techniques of story-telling itself.

Take, for instance, another narrator who was always playing billiards, a game he loved. He was known as ‘Braces’: he was tall and thin, and always wore two garish, red elastic straps to hold up his trousers. He was also called ‘Sorry Braces’ because before every game he would put on an overall so as not to wear out his trousers by rubbing them against the edge of the billiards table. As the game progressed, using as a pretext some phrase uttered by his opponent, he would stop the game for a moment to introduce some incident, some story. He would circle round the table, eyeing the balls and telling his story at the same time, carrying on with the performance as he prepared his shot. The game no longer existed: all that mattered was the tale. He played on heedlessly, scrutinising the green table and never putting down the cue which, as he went on narrating, became his sword, lance, staff or even woman or violin: it became everything.

When talking a while back about my grandfather Bristìn, I mentioned to you his technique of throwing his products into the air and transforming them into characters. A very similar device was employed by another story-teller, a travelling salesman from the Valtravaglia called Caldera-Magnan, a Romany name. It was no coincidence that he practised the classic gypsy trade of selling or mending pots and pans, and giving them a coating of zinc. He travelled in an enormous cart, with everything scattered about inside, from brushes to ammonia, washing powder, hundreds of cauldrons, casseroles, cooking pots and zinc and copper bowls.

When it arrived, it looked like a monument invented by Alberto Savinio … a gigantic, two-storey construction; the spoils from the rout of some medieval army. He took up his position on the top of it, and while he offered his wares, he engaged his customers in discussion, devised stories, proverbs or maxims and produced the most extraordinary anecdotes.

But he would never say ‘buy’. He never had a word to say on the issue of purchase: he displayed one pot, brought out another, drummed on them with his oaken fingers, creating a medley of sounds like a Japanese concert: ding, dong … bing, bong. He invented nonsense rhymes to that rhythm, going up and down the scales: ‘My good friend here has a curate’s arse … rub it up and it turns to gold.’

And as he drummed out his words, the character of the curate seemed to take shape almost as a real person: Ermanno by name, a young priest passionately in love with Fulvia, the tender-hearted mistress of the foundry owner. The poor booby had lost his head over her. He saw her go into church, slipped into the confessional in place of the parish priest and, in a situation straight out of classic farce, heard his beloved’s confession. Sobbing and sighing, Fulvia reveals her love for the young priest and he, overcome by the discovery, breaks down completely, bursts into tears and so the deception is uncovered. Fulvia gasps, raises the little curtain between them and literally throws herself into the priest’s arms. But it’s out of the question to make love in that big box, so, trembling with emotion, they climb to the top of the belfry. He removes his soutane, she her clothes.

At this point in the story, Caldera would lay down his pot-cum-drum, pick up the bellows, move the ‘heaving lung’ in and out to give the impression of the passionate panting of the two lovers entwined in an embrace. Almost without missing a beat, he would go back to his pots, switch tone and turn on any wretch who dared show a lack of confidence in his wares. ‘I told you, I told you you should have taken this pot: a pan I was giving away at half price … look at its lovely, shiny copper bottom, and there’s you, a right stuffed arse, you’ve snubbed it, you’ve turned your nose up at it, so now you’ve got it right up your buttocks! That’s what comes of scoffing. Remember what happened to those folk in Rocca di Caldé!’

At this point, he would introduce a kind of parable, naturally in dialect with a sprinkling of foreign words current in the Valtravaglia. ‘A gh’era un vegio mult tiempo passao chi-loga in lu Porto, ol me cuntava me’ per … l’es veretad, no’ sluz fabule sbergen…’

Halt! I see the readers’ eyes glazing over. So for pity’s sake, let us at once change register; and here follows the tale in a more simple, straightforward language. ‘A long time ago, an old man lived here in Porto … every word is true, I’m no charlatan with a baggage of yarns to spin. This old man had warned the inhabitants of Rocca di Caldé, which is just above the quarry at the port, that a crack had opened in the mountain and the village was sliding down towards the foot of the cliff. “Hey, watch out,” they shouted to the peasants and fishermen who lived lower down, “it’s caving in … get out of there!”

‘“Come on! Who says? Take it easy! The ground’s not moving.” And the people in Rocca laughed the whole thing off, made a joke of it: “Smart lot, them, eh? They want us out of here so they can get their hands on our lands and houses.”

‘And so they went on pruning the vines, sowing the fields, getting married, happily making love. They could feel the rock moving under the foundations of the houses … but they were not unduly concerned. “Normal process of settlement,” they reassured each other. A great section of rock broke off and crashed into the lake. “Look out, you’ve got your feet in the water!” they yelled from along the coast. “What are you talking about? It’s only overflow water from the fountains.” And so, bit by bit, inexorably the whole town slid down until it tumbled into the lake.

‘Splash, splash, plop, plop … houses, men, women, two horses, three donkeys … Unperturbed, the priest continued hearing a nun’s confession … “ego te absolvo … animus … sancti” … plooooop … Amen … Splaaaash! The tower went under, the belfry with the church bells disappeared … ding, dang, dong … plop! Even today,’ continued Caldera, ‘if you peep over the tip of the rock which still sticks out above the surface of the lake, and if at that precise moment there is a thunder and lightning storm and the flashes light up the bed of the lake … incredible!.. underneath you can just make out the sunken town with its houses and streets still intact and you’ll see them, the inhabitants of old Caldé, still moving about as if it were a live crib … and they’re still repeating, quite unperturbed: “Nothing’s happened.” The fish swim in front of their eyes and even get into their ears, but there they are still: “Nothing to be afraid of … it’s only a new kind of fish that has learned to fly. Certainly, it’s a bit more damp nowadays than it used to be,” they comment, and apart from that they go on with their daily lives without a shadow of concern about the disaster that has occurred.’

When I am on stage, I gladly and readily make use of this approach and technique for developing a story, not with the same themes but with similar situations and above all with a similar atmosphere: for instance, in the fabliau inspired by the texts of The Butterfly Mouse rediscovered by Rossana Brusegan, or in the apologue that I based on Lucius and the Ass by Lucian of Samosata, the adventure of the poet who goes in search of the impossible and arrives at a town in Thessalia inhabited by magicians and wizards. Each time I recount this metaphysical, hyperclassical fable, what is the image I seek to project? I am certainly not attempting to imagine to myself, or to make people imagine, the Hellespont, Samos or Thessalia. I am firmly rooted in my native place, in its streets, alongside Lombard rivers, among the woods which are familiar to me: the mountains, skies, waters are always those of the place where I listened to my first stories. It may be that it does not all come out clearly enough, but my universe of images is there. Similarly, when I talk of the Provencal mountains in Obscene Fables, of Javan Petro, of Icarus insulting his father Dedalus, even when I bring on stage the Chinese tiger and Tibet with its rivers and its vast caverns, or even in the despairing outburst of Medea or in the flight on the magic chariot, I never move far from the lake, the valleys and the rivers where I was born.

But I often tear myself away from the memory of these ‘tales’ to plunge into the texts of medieval codices and poets, a testimony of our more ancient roots, and each time I discover, not without some smug satisfaction, that there, in those writings, lie the roots of every fable I ever learned from my storytellers. Fables which are never pedantically reproduced but conveyed for our times with the ironic rhythms of a modernity which is, to put it mildly, astounding. Let one example suffice. It is the tale of a great hunting expedition, a wild, mythical hunt which took place year after year in the same valley. The hero of this great epic was presented from the outset astride his motor-bicycle, kitted out like a medieval knight. The hunter greets his friends and announces that this will be the final combat. One of the two must succumb that day: him or his prey. But who is this awesome prey? A snail!

But pause a moment. We are not talking about some run-of-the-mill, slithery mollusc. No, we are dealing with an epic, gigantic slug of the dimensions of a hippopotamus, a horrendous beast, a leftover from the Mesozoic age, which goes charging fiercely about in the three valleys between the slopes of Muceno and the forests of Musadino. The hunt was scheduled for the days when the chestnut trees were in bloom; scents to raise the spirits of any hunter and give him heart for the fight wafted abroad the length and breadth of the valley. So, off our hero set on his motorbike, rifle and spear at the ready, intent on seizing this snail which had escaped him for years both because of its extraordinary speed of movement and zigzagging abilities, and because of the slimy sludge the animal left in its wake as it fled. ‘There it is! Damnation! You’re dribbling your filthy mess right on the curve!’ The warrior brakes, wobbles, slides and rolls, but this time he manages to induce the snail to speed up beyond its abilities, so that it takes a tumble and rolls into a ditch. It’s done for. The hunter descends into the trench, sliding on his buttocks down the slope … he slays the still-breathing beast, chops it to pieces, loads his catch onto the motorbike, which groans under the weight of snail-flesh, and returns home. The whole town has good eating, or more precisely good gorging, for a whole week: enough portions of snail to make you sick!

Today I realise that this could have been a tale from Rabelais.