How i lost the war, p.10
How I Lost the War, page 10
This was the text of the municipal ordinance fixed with scotch tape to the counter in the bar. I read it and reread it with growing apprehension. So what I had heard about the renting of the waters and the exceptional measures put in place to control and ration them was true.
Gattai had not wasted his time. After the presentation in the theatre of his lavish project to revive the baths, he had signed an outrageous contract with the municipality, which granted him the use, abuse, exploitation and usufruct of all the thermal waters present in the territory of the municipality for a period of thirty-five years. By blackmailing the unions and parties with the promise of hundreds of jobs, flattering the ambitions of local politicians and civil servants frustrated by years of systematic failures, pandering to the dreams of financial gain entertained by local merchants who saw the spa as the goose that laid the golden egg, Gattai had immediately gained the upper hand. And for a ridiculous price, he had won the whole kitty, like a casino croupier who, after an unlucky round of betting, rakes in the chips while the players look on, powerless to do anything. Apart from the baths, Gattai had also secured for himself the commercial exploitation of all the thermal waters present in the territory. Except that in that clause of the contract, the word ‘thermal’ had been deliberately omitted. What was mentioned was water in general. So that theoretically, and very soon practically, he had become the owner of the waters. All of them. He would have been able to present himself at your house in his bathrobe, with his shampoo in his hand, and demand to take a shower in your bathroom, or to requisition your cisterns in the name of the law. One year, during the harvest, a man named Arrigo had told me about a breakdown in the water pipes in a village close to mine. The village had been divided into two sections, one with water and the other without. The days passed and the breakdown had still not been repaired. The citizens protested to the Mayor, who, as the experienced politician that he was, countered the criticisms with formulas such as ‘as soon as possible’, ‘temporary inconvenience’, ‘we’re doing our best’, and other phrases of that kind which mean that nobody is doing anything. I think they were taking their time because the Mayor’s house was in the part of the village that had water. One day, a cousin of Arrigo’s who wasn’t as patient as he was turned up in dressing gown and slippers at the Mayor’s door, with his comb and shampoo.
“Yes?”
“Signora, is your husband at home?”
“Who wants him?”
“Pierino from Casamatta.”
“One moment.”
“Mayor?”
“What is it?”
“Do you have water here?”
“Yes, why?”
“Open the door then, I’ve come to take a shower … ”
I don’t know how, but in drawing up the contract, Ottone Gattai had managed to have included within the grounds of the spa the Chiesina, a small, bare parish church, early Christian in origin, with, at the back, a fig tree that produced very sweet, fleshy black figs at the end of September, and, at the front, an arcaded loggia where as children we parked our bicycles or took shelter and waited for the rain to stop when we were caught in a storm on a lazy summer afternoon. Now the little church is used as a weapons store for the armed men commanded by Gattai’s right-hand man, that damned Kraut Unterwasser. Polizei, privat polizei. As soon as he opened the spa, Gattai had immediately realised that in order to control the territory and defend the resort, he needed a specially selected and very loyal private police force. While the establishment was still being run in, Gattai offered packages and complete treatments to a restricted circle of powerful people—politicians, generals, television presenters, businessmen—which made for a lot of free publicity that would keep the powerful thermal machine boiling. He must have thought it was a good thing to ingratiate himself, because you never know how it might help in future. One of the people he invited was a rich German industrialist from the Ruhr, who brought with him a friend, a man named Unterwasser who claimed to have been the personal secretary to the Elector of Saxony. I don’t know if he really had been the secretary to the Elector of Saxony, what is certain is that Unterwasser was a former SS officer, supreme commander of the canine unit of the Third Reich, who had somehow evaded Nuremburg and half the world’s intelligence services. Bald, one eye a pale grey almost devoid of pigmentation, the other of glass—lost in battle according to him, a badly treated stye according to information in my possession. Unterwassser is a bony old man, thin and angular, almost as if his body were the psychosomatic result of an evil temperament slowly eroding a physique too thin to offer any resistance. It was he who was given the task of forming a vigilante force entrusted with the security of the entire resort complex. Under cover of putting together an innocent team of nightwatchmen, Unterwasser recruited dozens of retired Swiss Guards, pool attendants from Baden Baden, sons of Nazis, and cut-throats and mercenaries with years of experience in Rhodesia, the Congo, Liberia and other hotspots. The rumours that had been circulating for a while concerning Gattai’s legendary despotism and Mussolinian methods were taking a sinister form.
The confiscation of the Barbetti Martorellis’ estate was a fact, a worrying fact. But how could it have been allowed? I wanted to submit the question to a lawyer friend of mine, who had given me an appointment, but unfortunately, as I was heading towards the square, I was stopped in front of the church steps by none other than Count Barbetti Martorelli himself. Our house, a Renaissance building communicating with the castle, had two large matching doors which look out onto the church square. This central location meant that it was impossible to escape without running into someone you would have preferred not to run into. The most difficult time was the end of Mass. You had to be very careful not to leave home at exactly the same time as the stream of worshippers, or else you were screwed. Vague relatives, pensioners in sad grey overcoats, provincial petits bourgeois in mothballs, spiteful bigots, lubricious Christian Democrats, virtuous citizens, devout Communists, deaf old people. A camphor embrace, a touch of mangy fur, an overly vigorous handshake, an unsolicited maxim, an inappropriate quip, a slobbering kiss with a smudge of lipstick, a whiff of stale perfume—everyone had something to give you on their way out of Mass. But to get back to old Count Barbetti Martorelli, he caught me at a delicate point of tangency between my late awakening and his precocious exit from the Mass. He took me by the arm, which was an awful habit of his, and, nodding towards an attractive working-class girl descending the church steps with a nice pair of tits jiggling up and down under her sober black dress, said, “Young man, you’re still young, don’t do what I did. I wasted so many opportunities because of stupid class prejudices … ”
The count didn’t have time to say anything more because his wife came out of the church at that moment and took him in hand. I gave up the idea of asking him for further details about the confiscation of his estate. “I’ll be sure to, count,” I said, loosening myself from his hateful grip, and returned home.
To avoid more encounters of this kind, I decided it would be simpler to phone my friend the lawyer. So I called him and told him what was happening, and asked him how it was possible that all that could happen within the law. I wanted to know if the fears I was harbouring for my family were in any way founded. We, too, had our piece of land in the sun, with farmhouses, three of them miraculously served by hot water which—like a gift from God, my grandmother would say—gushed copiously on our estate. Water which for thousands of years had served the tomatoes or the animals, natural pools that gushed amid old, abandoned Fiat 500s turned into hen houses, piles of logs, cellophane dust sheets, plastic buckets and rusty tools. The peasants had never thought of using the water for hedonistic purposes, which was why, at best, the springs had been intubated and blocked with a siphon or a tap, but more often than not had just been left in the open, as God—or someone on his behalf—had created them.
Only my grandfather Vanni, the son of the man who whipped the peasants, a lean, handsome, elegant man with melancholy green eyes who, because of the fact that his dead twin’s destiny had been contracted out to him, had found himself with the mind of an engineer trapped in the profession of an agronomist, had had the idea of channelling into a pool all that water which every day for thousands of years had lost its way amid grassy ditches and the croaking of frogs. And so, following his own particular conception of spartan, rational architecture, Grandfather Vanni had built two communicating, reinforced-concrete basins, prettifying them a little by placing stones found in the fields and old sun-yellowed terracotta bricks round the edges. Then the floodgates had been opened and the water, channelled through a large underground plastic pipe, had started docilely to fill the basins.
“Good, good,” I remember my grandfather saying, watching that little cascade slowly fill the pool like a child watching rapt as the water level rises in a bathtub. That basin—which had come out very well, at least according to my uncle who immediately undressed to give it a try, even though it wasn’t yet full—had been followed by two others, the design of which had gradually become less spartan.
“Yes, yes,” my grandfather said one evening, as I was sitting on his knees in the garden under the branches of the cedar.
“Yes what, Grandpa?” I asked distractedly.
“I’ve just thought how I’m going to do the second swimming pool.”
“Ah,” I said, the way adults did, even though I didn’t understand. My grandfather went up to his study to get a pen and paper and came back under the shade of the old cedar, whose long branches stretched towards the sun like arms held out to a man who has fallen into the sea. Vanni sat down at the corner of the stone table and after about ten minutes came up with a design for the basin—a perfect rectangle with two half moons at the ends. And in fact that is exactly how the great swimming pool was built, adjacent to, but more beautiful and deeper than, the first one.
“Yes, it’s beautiful but … how to put this, less cosy, less intimate,” commented my uncle, who had got a taste for it and refused to come out of the water—for some time now, he had been in the habit of having the newspaper brought to him at the edge of the basin and of being served meals in the little forty-degree pool, emerging only from time to time to light a cigarette when there was no one in the vicinity who could pass it to him already lit. “This is the life!” my uncle would say, inhaling voluptuous mouthfuls of smoke and stretching his neck out of the water like a little tortoise trying to reach a lettuce leaf. The second basin had been followed by a third, a larger, circular one, in the last of the holdings blessed by hot water. And so my grandfather, whom my grandmother idolised, had left us three wonderful swimming pools as an inheritance.
My friend the lawyer phoned me back a few days later. He had studied the situation carefully, examining all the clauses of the contract Gattai had drawn up when he rented the baths. It was a Machiavellian masterstroke—the company had been set up as a profit-sharing partnership, initially fifty-one per cent to Gattai and forty-nine to be shared between the municipality and the province, but a well-camouflaged clause anticipated that the municipality would gradually reduce its quota until it disappeared almost completely and they were left with a negligible one per cent. The laws which governed the exploitation of thermal waters were the same as those that regulated mining concessions. The contract provided for an exclusive concession—Ottone Gattai was the one true, indisputable owner of the waters. There wasn’t much we could do, Gattai was on the side of the law, or rather, the law was on the side of Gattai. In the light of that, the confiscation of the Barbetti Martorellis’ water became a truly worrying precedent. Something like that could easily happen to us, too, at any moment.
For Epiphany, we would play Monopoly
FOR EPIPHANY, we would play Monopoly. At the Cremona house, we gathered together all our closest relatives and assembled in one of the many rooms built by grandfather Terenzio, the one who whipped the peasants. A room which was closed almost the whole year except for Epiphany and visits by acquaintances of my grandparents’, the Gherardis, reason enough to call this room ‘the Gherardi Room’. The Gherardi Room was one of the few rooms in the castle that had no frescoes. It had high ceilings, plain white walls and a floor of baked herringbone clay which, after decades of wax polishing, was now a dark red, almost amber colour. There was also a comfortable refectory table with a dozen penitential chairs and a loggia that housed a library which could be reached by a narrow wooden staircase. There was nothing special about the room. The only thing I had really liked about it ever since I was little was an authentic Garibaldian musket transformed into a night lamp, with the lampshade mounted on the bayonet and the switch where the trigger had been.
It was in this room that we played Monopoly. But not the classic Monopoly that all families play. No, our Monopoly was a special one. The names of the houses and buildings had been replaced with the names of properties belonging to the Cremona family, which had been meticulously written out by my grandmother and stuck one by one on the folding board, in accordance with their colour, value, and the original location. ‘Park of Victory’ became ‘Villa Alibrandi’. ‘Narrow Lane’ was transformed into ‘La Paiccia Farm’, ‘Water Company’ was changed into ‘Combine Harvester Warehouse’. And the things that could happen during the game had also been modified with an enviably childlike imagination. Go to jail and miss a turn became The workers ask for a wage rise. Go back two squares became The European Union suspend grants for organic farming …
As my grandmother, with maniacal patience, updated the Monopoly board every year to take account of any new disposal or acquisition of property, it ended up being the one reliable record of the state of the Cremona family’s assets. During one of these games of Monopoly, as the dice were rolling on the table, I decided to broach the subject.
“Did you hear about the Barbetti Martorellis?” I asked.
“Your turn,” my grandmother said, handing me the dice.
I took it and squeezed it in the palm of my hand. “Did you hear how they confiscated one of his holdings because of the water?”
My grandmother looked up from the collection of chips and stopped counting. “The Barbetti Martorellis deserved it.”
“What did they do to deserve it?”
“They know what they did,” she replied, with an ambiguous smile on her face.
I felt the eyes of the whole family on me. “You seem almost happy, all of you … ”
“What do you mean, happy?” my grandmother said. “You know, those who do evil have evil done to them in return … ”
Over the years my grandmother had developed this subtle, radical version of Christian philosophy. She maintained that it is in evil that we see people’s true characters, and that a knowledge of evil is necessary for our neighbour to finally resolve to do good. It all seemed a bit convoluted to me.
“What evil have the Barbetti Martorellis ever done? But the point is, aren’t you afraid that what happened to them could happen to us? We also have farms with hot water. What if one morning the carabinieri turn up with a plumber and close the taps and sequestrate everything? What do we do then?”
“Oh, no, that mustn’t happen,” said my uncle, who had been silent until then.
“It won’t happen,” my grandmother said.
“How can you be so sure?” I insisted.
“We’ve had guarantees from Signor Gattai,” my grandmother replied, as if she were replying for everyone.
“You’re holding up the game,” my cousin said in an irritable tone that still annoys me when I think about it.
I threw the dice.
One-two-three-four and five. The caterpillar tractor’s cardan joint is broken. Miss a turn for maintenance.
Peasants were worse than their masters
SEPTEMBER ARRIVED, the days grew shorter, the air turned transparent, and the light over the woods and the bare ridges was radiant. This was the moment Gattai choose for his fateful announcement. More than three months in advance he decided to show his hand and fix the date for the inauguration of the spa—the thirty-first of December. The invitations were sent out, written in beautiful swirling writing on headed stationery which had been printed a good three months earlier. And as usual, those who had been invited missed no opportunity to tell those who hadn’t been invited. The disagreements and gossip triggered by the imminent ‘exclusive’ party being thrown by Ottone Gattai got the whole village worked up. I remember that I was at the barber’s, and Abele, a villager who had his hair cut every two weeks, commented on the ‘selective’ invitations.
“I hear they invited you,” he said, referring to my family, “which means the Ricciardis and the Guidis will definitely be there … ”
I closed my eyes while the barber brushed my face, and shrugged as if to say that I really didn’t give a damn.
“I also heard,” Abele continued, “that they invited my cousin, Capoduro’s daughter, who somehow managed to graduate in the end, God knows how, but everybody knows she’s having an affair with the deputy mayor, and now that she’s having an affair with the deputy mayor, it just so happens they’ve hired her for the spa … ”
Then he paused for a moment, his protruding ears glowing in the mirror.
“Now that she’s graduated and can say two or three words of English, she thinks she’s God knows who. I heard she insisted that I shouldn’t be invited. I heard that now she feels she’s somebody, she’s ashamed of the time when she was nobody. I was always told that when they got power, peasants were worse than their masters, but I never wanted to believe it. For God’s sake, she can graduate, she can learn English, she can have an affair with the deputy mayor, and she can even get herself invited to Gattai’s party, but to me she’ll always be Capoduro’s daughter.”
