The Road to San Giovanni

  (That life is partly waste was something my mother would not accept: I mean that it is partly passion. Hence she never left the garden where every plant was labelled, the house swathed in bougainvillea, the study with its herbariums and the microscope undere the glass dome. Always sure of herself, methodical, she transformed passions into duties and lived on those. But what pushed my father up the road to San Giovanni every morning – and me downwards along my own road – was not so much the duty of the hardworking landowner, the altruism of the agricultural innovator – and in my case not so much those definitions of duty that I would gradually impose on myself – but passion, fierce passion, pain of existence – what else could have forced him to scramble up through woods and wilderness and me to plunge into a labyrinth of walls and printed paper? – desperate confrontation with that which lies outside of ourselves, waste of self set against the waste of the world in general.)

  My father never attempted to save energy, only time: he wouldn’t shirk the steeper slope if it was the shorter. Depending on what stretches of mule track you chose, what shortcuts and bridges, there were all kinds of ways of getting from our house to San Giovanni: the route my father took was doubtless the result of long experience and numerous improvements and second thoughts; but by now it had become like the stairs at home, a series of steps you could climb with your eyes closed, taking up barely an instant of mental space, as if impatience had abolished both distance and effort. He only had to think: “Now I’ll go to San Giovanni” (he’d suddenly remembered that a strip of Jerusalem artichokes hadn’t been watered, that some aubergine seeds should be sprouting their first leaves) and it was as if he’d already been transported there, already he was seething inside with the scolding he was planning to give his workers or day labourers and the words would be bursting from his breast in an avalanche of insults for men and women alike, insults whose obscenity had lost all the warmth of complicity to become as austere and compact as a stone wall. This impatience, this intolerance at finding himself anywhere but on his own land, would sometimes seize him halfway through the day, when he’d already got back from his regular morning inspection at San Giovanni and changed into his town clothes, his starched collar, the waistcoat with the silver chain, a red fez he had bought in Tripolitania and wore in the house and the office to cover his bald head, and all of a sudden, in the middle of doing something else, he would think – because it was the estate that was always on his mind – of some job that hadn’t been finished up at San Giovanni or that hadn’t been done properly or of some worker who for lack of instructions might be standing idle, and immediately we would see him get up from his desk, go upstairs to his room, come down all togged up from hunting hat to leggins, untie the dog and go out by the door to the beudo, even in the hottest moments of a summer afternoon, staring straight ahead of him, the sun beating down.

  From the beudo you went out onto the brick and cobbled steps of Salita San Pietro. Here you would meet old folks from the Giovanni Marsaglia Home in their grey caps with red initials (including, as everybody knew, Russian princes fallen upon hard times, lords who had gambled away fortunes on the Riviera) and nuns leading lines of little girls from the holiday camps for the Milanese and people climbing up to visit sick relatives in the New Hospital. The housing in this area – there was a stretch of paved road now – was the result of various stages of sedimentation: like everywhere else the place had once been a stretch of fields watched over by farmhouses; then at the turn of the century a few expensive villas had sprung up, their gardens waving with palms, like the house we lived in (my parents’ first purchase on their return from America) and another a little further up the hill, built Indian style, all spindly steeples and domes, called “Palais d’Agra” (a name I always found mysterious until I read Kipling’s Kim), and yet another converted into a municipal quarantine station, its shutters always closed; later on, the wealthy residential districts of the town moved elsewhere and the area was taken over by more modest little houses, homely cottages wth small pieces of land used for seedbeds and sheds for chickens or rabbits. So that as far as the Baragallo bridge you were walking through a district that was half rural but already under fierce attack from the town, the remains of the traditional agricultural life (an old olive mill where water and moss roared on rusted wheels; a winery, stained purple, with vats and presses) rubbing shoulders with garages, flower wholesalers, sawmills, brick storage yards, an electric-power plant full of windows that loomed bright empty and humming in the mornings before dawn, and beyond all these the huge rectangle of the housing project, first and only completed lot of a planned village, an “achievement of the Regime” begun with enthusiasm and left without sequel, but sufficing to remind you that this was already the Europe of the masses.

  At the Baragallo bridge we would leave the road, which went on towards Madonna della Costa (we only walked that way when we went to see Uncle Quirino, nicknamed Titin, in the Calvinos’ eighteenth-century house, its old pink stucco rising from a grey cloud of olive trees on top of the hill where my great-grandparents had once had their brick kilns), and follow the river. Immediately something changed, and the first sign of it was this: that as far as Baragallo, people, like people on suburban streets anywhere, didn’t so much as look at one another, whereas after Baragallo everybody greeted everybody else as they passed by, even people they didn’t know, with a loud “Mornin,” or some other generic expression indicating recognition of the existence of their fellow man, like: “Keep it up, keep it up,” or “Aren’t we carrying a lot today,” or a comment on the weather, “Looks like rain to me,” messages of consideration and friendship full of discretion, spoken as they went along, without stopping, almost to themselves, barely raising their eyes. My father too would change after Baragallo; that nervous impatience that had marked his step so far would disappear, likewise his irritation when he shouted at the dog or tugged on the leash; now he would look around more calmly, the dog would usually be let loose and the shouts and whistles and fingersnapping directed its way were more good-natured, even affectionate. This feeling of being back in more isolated, familiar places had its effect on me too, but at the same time I would also feel uneasy at no longer being able to think of myself as the anonymous passerby of the street; from now on I was “one of the professor’s boys,” subjected to the scrutiny of every eye.

  On the other side of a wooden fence pigs shrieked and fought with each other (an unusual sight in our part of the world), bred by a Piedmontese family who had set up the kind of dairy farm typical of their home country. (On the way up we would already have passed by old Spirito driving his cart loaded with milk churns for his customers.) Opposite the pig farm the road gave onto a rocky stream, and there would be a row of women leaning over a sort of long raised trough washing clothes. Further on you could choose between two different paths, depending on whether or not you went back across the river over an ancient humpbacked bridge. If you didn’t go over the bridge you followed some ditches and shortcuts running beside strips of farmland until you reached the San Giovanni mule track via a flight of recently built (or restored) steps which climbed so sharp and steep in bright sunlight it took your breath away. (After the last war, someone wrote an obscenity in huge tarred letters on a wall at the top of the steps, in mockery of those climbing up carrying things, perhaps to reawaken an instinct of rebellion, or just seeking confirmation of his own hopelessness.) Then the mule track pushed on toward San Giovanni on the flat for a good while; the sea was behind us; on the other side of the river, the Tasciaire bank was slashed by a huge long gorge, testimony to an old landslide, a splash of blue in the splintered, earth-coloured stone. After rounding one particular bend you’d be able to see the little valley of San Giovanni opening up obliquely from the end of the main valley and so sharply lit that you could make out each separate strip of land and –where the olives didn’t cloud your view – who was working there, and the smoke from the red roofs of the barns.

  We liked to use this rou
te going down; climbing up we found the other more attractive: having crossed the bridge, you climbed the hill along the Tasciaire mule track, likewise steep and exposed to the sun, but twisting and varied and paved with old, crooked, worn-out stones, so that it seemed painless and homely by comparison. Then you left the track to follow a long beudo which ran across the side of the valley halfway up, just below that huge gorge you could see from the other side. The beudo was raised over the farmed strips and you had to watch your step so as not to slip and sometimes you had to hang on to the crooked, bulging wall beside. The dog usually found that the safest way to go was in the ditch, padding along in the water. Here and there fig trees rose from the strips on either side and a green shadow shaded the beudo; some farmhouses had been built right up against it and walking along you could almost be inside them, mixed up in the lives of those families, all out at work since dawn, women and men and children digging the earth of their strip with dull blows from their magaiu (a three-pronged fork), or, using their magaiu again to “turn in the water”, which meant knocking down the earth bank of the ditch and building other banks to lead the water twisting and turning through the seedbeds.

  Further on, the beudo disappeared into a dense thicket of rustling reeds, and we had reached the river. This had to be forded with a zigzag of jumps across white stepping-stones following a pattern we knew by heart but which could always change when rainy days swelled the river and carried off one of the stones. Climbing up away from the river you cut across between the strips along private paths till you reached a shortcut that was itself half a stream, and as with the other path you now joined the San Giovanni mule track, but at a point much further on.

  The nearer we got to San Giovanni, the more my father would be overcome by a new tension, which wasn’t just a last burst of impatience to arrive at the only place he felt was his own, but also a sort of remorse at having been away for so long, his conviction that something must have been lost or have gone wrong during his absence, his urgency to cancel out everything in his life that was not San Giovanni, and at the same time a feeling that since San Giovanni was not the whole world but merely a corner of the world besieged by the rest, it would always spell despair for him.

  But all it took was for someone at the top of a strip, pruning or spreading sulphate on the vines, to call down, “Professore, if you please, could I ask you a question?” and go on to ask advice about mixtures of fertilizers, the best time to make graftings, or about insecticides or the new seeds the Farming Consortium had in, and my father would stop and, cheering up, relaxing, exclamatory, a bit long-winded, explain the whys and wherefores. In short, all he wanted was a sign that civil cohabitation was possible in this world of his, a cohabitation prompted by a passion for improvement and informed by natural reason; but then he would immediately be oppressed again by reminders that all was precarious and beset by danger and once more the fury was upon him. And one of these reminders was myself, the fact that I belonged to that other, metropolitan and hostile part of the world, the painful awareness that he couldn’t count on his children to consolidate this ideal San Giovanni civilization of his, which thus had no future. So that the last stretch of the path was covered in an unwarranted hurry, as though it were the edge of a blanket he could use to tuck himself away inside San Giovanni; and hurrying along like this we went by a decrepit olive mill inhabited by two even more decrepit old women, over the concrete bridge that went back across the river (the track began to climb a little again here), past Regin’s house – he was a relative of ours and a customs officer whose dog would resume an interminable quarrel with our own, barking and leaping up (the track became steep here) – through the field of another relative, Bartumelìn, who had spent his youth in Peru (his wife, who we saw rinsing clothes in the washing trough, was a Peruvian Indian, a fat woman exactly like our own local women both in features and speech), (and here we began the last part of the climb, the steepest), past the field of two lanky muleteers who at some point replaced their mule with a stocky draught ox … My father’s breast heaved not with tiredness but with insults and scoldings: we had arrived at San Giovanni, now we were on home ground.

  What I ought to do now is recount every step and every gesture and every change of mood there on our land, except that everything loses its precision in my memory at this point, as if having reached the end of our climb with its rosary of images I would become wrapt in a kind of bewildered limbo, which lasted until it was time to pick up the baskets and set off down the path back home. I’ve already said that our daily duty consisted above all in helping father to bring back the baskets. Or rather, we were supposed to help him with everything, so as to learn how to run an estate, so as to be like him, as sons ought to be like their fathers, but soon both he and we understood that we weren’t going to learn anything, and the idea of training us for the farm was tacitly dropped, or put off until we were older and wiser, as if we had been granted an extension to our childhood. Hence carrying the baskets was the only thing that was certain, the only duty accepted as undeniably necessary. The job wasn’t, I should say, without its pleasure: having carefully balanced up my load, a wicker pannier on my back, a basket under one arm – with luck the other arm would be free, so the weight could be swapped about – I would set off head down, with a kind of fury, a bit like my father; and as I walked, relieved of any duty to pay attention to the world around me or to decide what to do, all my energy being employed in the effort of getting my load home and planting my feet along a path unchanging as a train track, my mind was at once protected and free to wander where it would. We plunged ourselves into this “humper’s” task with exaggerated effort, myself, my brother, and my father too; since for him as for us it seemed it was no longer the creativity of growing things, the experimentation and the risk that drew him to San Giovanni, so much as the transportation and accumulation of things, this antlike toiling, a question of life or death (and in fact it almost was that now: the interminable years of the war had begun; amid the general penury, our family had, thanks to the land in San Giovanni, entered a phase of agricultural self-sufficiency, or “autarky”, as they used to say then), and if we weren’t there to help him Father would come down overloaded – “like a mule” was the traditional image – flaunting his burden, perhaps partly so as to have our desertion weigh on us; but even if one or both of his sons went with him, we would all come down equally heavy laden, bow-legged, mute, gazing at the ground, each absorbed in his own thoughts, inscrutable.

  Our gloom was at odds with the generous contents of our baskets. These were concealed (with that typical peasant diffidence towards prying eyes) under a layer of broad vine or fig leaves, yet with our swaying steps the loose covering would get lost along the way and the green trunks of zucchini would emerge, the “nun’s-thigh” pears and the bunches of Saint Jeannet grapes, the first figs, the tough down of the chayote, the purple-green spines of the artichokes, the cobs of sweet corn to boil and munch on, the potatoes, the tomatoes, the big bottles of milk and wine, and sometimes a spindly rabbit, already skinned, with everything being carefully arranged so that the hard things wouldn’t bruise the soft and there was still enough space left for a bunch of oregano, or sweet marjoram or basil. (To my distracted eyes those baskets seemed insignificant then, as the basic materials of life always seem banal to the young, yet now that I have but a smooth sheet of white paper in their place, I struggle to fill them with name upon name, to cram them with words, and in remembering and arranging these names I spend more time than I spent gathering and arranging the things themselves, more passion … – no, not true: I imagined as I set out to describe the baskets that I would reach the crowning moment of my regret, and instead nothing, what came out was a cold, predictable list: and it’s pointless my trying to kindle a halo of feeling behind it with these words of commentary: all remains as it was then, those baskets were already dead then and I knew it, ghosts of a concreteness that had already disappeared, and I was already what I am, a citizen
of cities and of history – still without either city or history and suffering for it – a consumer – and victim – of industrial products – a candidate for consumerism, a freshly designated victim – and already the lots were cast, all the lots, our own and everybody else’s, yet what was this morning fury of my childhood, the fury that still persists in these not entirely sincere pages? Could everything perhaps have been different – not very different but just enough to make the difference – if those baskets hadn’t even then been so alien to me, if the rift between myself and my father hadn’t been so deep? Might everything that is happening now perhaps have taken a different slant, in the world, in the history of civilization – the losses not have been so absolute, the gains so uncertain?)