3. Vipers and Pears

Today, Zio Antonio and I are going pear picking to Fallarino.

He lives across the hallway in mother’s apartment building, an imposing five-residence, two-story unit.  It was built in the middle of the nineteen eighties on the farmland, L’Orto, where I used to play as a child. The pigsty, the khaki tree, the grape vines, and the strawberry patches are all gone now; replaced by a driveway and a small decorative garden. Thanks to Zio Antonio’s influence, the ancient pear-tree and the walnut-tree were spared from the excavators’ steel jaws and they remain as the sentinels, the reminders of the changes that have occurred to the land. This dream house was built mostly at the urging of my mother, and thanks to uncle Lando’s most cruel, but effective, sink-or-swim manner of involving other family members in the financing of the project.  After we left for the new world, mother worked as a tailor for the Holy Cross hospital, and with everyone’s help bought two houses, not thinking that the house in Antrodoco would ever happen.  The dream endured through Calgary’s skyrocketing real estate, inflation, and her son leaving for McGill in Montreal. Occurring very closely together, these were signs that mother’s age-old-dream had  dawned into reality.  The planets, the moon, and the stars all lined up properly for her.  She welcomed her Age of Aquarius.

I get dressed quickly and go knock on his door. It is barely light out; a gentle rap with the knuckles should be enough to wake him without disturbing my aunt Iside. They have been married for almost fifty years and she sleeps longer because of her heart-condition. He answers immediately and lets me in. He is already dressed.

—Lo vuoi il caffè?— he says in raucous tones like those of the asthmatic rooster, which he never hears. Zia is still asleep so talking loud is forbidden. Conversation with uncle is normally difficult because he is very hard of hearing, and though he wears a hearing aid, most of the time he does not understand what I am saying. His redeeming quality that compensates for his lack of hearing, is that he loves to talk.  I love to hear his soothing voice speaking Antrodocano with the nasal intonations of Ternano, the dialect which he learned after living in Terni for many years. Like hearing a melody for trombone and fugle horn.

A familiar sense of unrest begins to return. I fidget and ask myself what I am doing driving up the hills of Antrodoco so early in the morning with a relative who only has one-way conversations with me. Damnation, I feel like the most unaccomplished man in the whole world. Panic grips my throat. I could be re-reading I Promessi Sposi, fun but hard work, or maybe planning to ascend the mountain Giano that has been staring me in the face and teasing me ever since I was a child: “Giovanniiiinooo. . . vieni. . . vieni, sali su. . .” Or, I could be thinking about what to say at the memorial, -- they will want me to say something for sure --  since I have come from so far. Damned circumstance, che rotta! Why me?

I take a deep breath and try to relax. I am another city-slicker impatient with the ways of Italian villages. I should focus on the good Zio Antonio and my cousins whom I love dearly. The thought mellows me. He is the kindest of men, and he has known me since I was born. His son and my sister were born on the same day, only a few hours apart. He is fun to be with. Very patient. I recognize that this trip is a moment to cherish, and a privilege. I am reliving with him a food gathering experience of other years. 

He knows a lot about current farming of the hills. He lets me drive his royal-blue Fiat 126. I have to duck because my head always hits the rooftop. The inside is meant for shorter people and my head remains scrunched against the hard top. I am so well wedged in, that I do not need a seat belt. Zio jokes about what a large car I would need to accommodate my six-foot frame and 250-pound bulk. He says that I am so lucky that I live in Canada where cars are so much bigger. I agree with him, but my laughter hides my self-loathing and my wish to be smaller and skinnier. 

We drive up the road to La Rocca, past a switchback just to the right of the sign that says San Terenziano, which everyone knows in the vernacular as Santu Lonzanu. On the right, an outdoor fountain with a rectangular wash-basin as big as two pool tables overlooks the creek below.  Concrete washboards all around it, it was built many years earlier solely for washing clothes by hand, From here both the creek and the river are distant. A water tap drips continuously and the basin and is rarely used now, having been replaced by the Italian washing machine, ever present in bathrooms, and requiring no separate hot water tap. An energy efficient appliance for certain, but it is as slow to finish a small load as it is efficient.

—Gira qua Giovà—he says. He points to a sign that indicates we will be going the wrong way on a narrow and very steep road up the East face of bushy Marmorale. It is a one-way road in the opposite direction of our climb and so narrow that it can barely accomodate our Fiat.  It is the shortest way to get to the top of Marmorale and around to Fallarino, no doubt about that. I venture on cautiously.

Suddenly I see a car rushing at me at 120 km/hour, horn blaring.  I hear more traffic behind it.  I grip the wheel tightly, ready for impact. Blood leaves my clenched fingers and rushes to my face.

Shaking my head, I deny my eyes and shuddering to break the spell of the hallucination  I whisper sanity mantras to myself:

—No way! We are not in Toronto!

—This is not Highway 401!

In first gear, even with both of us aboard, the Fiat is amazingly able to manage the steep hill. I have seen it do it fully loaded: four people on board, and trunk filled with a harvest of fruit. The motor whirs and its valves go clickety-click like an old Singer sewing-machine. The gears whine like a bee, but the car climbs like a mule.

Parking is not a problem because some enterprising soul with some heavy earth-moving equipment has taken a chunk out of the mountainside and left a square-sided hole, as if he had helped himself to a large serving of Black Forest cake. The hole is made to measure: large enough for just uncle’s car and with room only to get out from one side. He opens the passenger door and walks around to guide me as I attempt my parallel park manoeuvre.  I do it the first time, after whirring the clickety-clicking engine and plunking the gear shift lever just the right amounts. Parking completed, I turn off the motor. It is very quiet here now, we are alone. At last I can speak loudly so he can hear me. I ask:

—E il padrone?— I realize that this is someone else’s parking spot, because it is right in front of a new mountain-chalet built with stones.  I do not recognize it.  It is not the property of uncle’s family. Uncle accepts his transgression in a very natural, matter-of-fact way, without bothering to answer me in detail.  He hints that we were here first and that the others, owners or otherwise, would have to wait until we came back to move the car.

The family hillside land is situated below the road we just drove on and it is rented out as pasture for sheep. At cherry and pear-picking time uncle retains the right to reap a too-often-small harvest from fruit trees that have grown large with wild, unkempt branches. We walk down the hill to where the old pear tree will certainly reward our early-morning climb with ripened fruit. I carry, in one hand, a wicker basket, and in the other, a long handled sickle. I will use it like a hook to bend distant branches and bring them within arm’s reach. 

I have borrowed the tool from my father’s garage, removing it from his orderly, well-stocked shop, without asking. I am suddenly aware of a longstanding supposition of implicit permission from father to son, most certainly arrogant for my current Canadian values and circumstances. Father has often thanked me for helping him make the decision to return to Antrodoco to live in the new house for his retirement. He bought me a pair of Scarpa, rugged mountain shoes, as a present to mark the occasion. I am proud of having deserved his gratitude.

The path to the pear tree is grown over with grass but in some parts it has been widened by machine. The top soil has been scraped off showing the bare white rocks and yellow clay underneath.  All of the bare ground is peppered with sheep droppings, round and about the size of an olive. It is hardly recognisable as the tight, well-groomed trail that I walked on as an eight-year-old. As my feet make clumping noises on the grass, I retrace my footsteps of an earlier time and I hear the echoes of voices long faded.

—Ma, ho visto ‘na serpe!—squeaks Adele, my little sister running back down the hill, to my mothers arms.

—Ma va!—mother always seems to doubt the things her children say to her. Intrepid Antonina, mother’s younger sister, goes up the path to investigate the spot at which Adele had pointed.

—Ma è vero! Gesú è una vipera! Corri.

Uncle Antonio jars me out of my reverie with uncanny perspicacity. Up to now, he has been walking quietly, eyes to the ground slightly ahead of me. He starts talking as if picking up from a previously held conversation, in tune with my thoughts:

—Le vipere, diciamo, non ti fanno niente, ma vedi, le vipere sono maledette. Perché le altre serpi ti lasciano . . .  ma la vipera se ti vede passà, la vipera ti mozzica, la vipera!

For a moment, I pause on the fact that it is true that there are vipers everywhere (so the papers say) because of an ecological imbalance where rodents are plentiful and hawks scarce. I clip the pushy thought in the bud, before it overwhelms me, that just when I felt safest, humans surprised me with a sneaky, conniving attack, and then, victorious, ran away to multiply their kind. Like these vipers, they had no predator to keep them in check.

I ask uncle:

—Ma l’hai mai vista, una?

—Sì, e come. 

—Ma che ha fatto?

            —È scappata, che ha fatto? Ma guarda che sono bestie feroci le vipere!

Earlier in the week my friend, Luigi, and I took the traditional easy route up to the top of Monte Giano—not the more difficult, still unconquered route that keeps beckoning me straight up to the Cerdolimoli peak on the North East side.

“Viper fear” almost caused us to cancel the hike. I did not want to bother buying a viper venom antidote and syringe kit to take with us: it was expensive and the last time I bought one, I gave it away to my aunt Tonina, unused. She never found occasion to use it either. Also, talking to my cousin Rolando, who is always knowledgeable in everything, he insisted that the unlikely bite from a viper would, normally, not be more harmful than a large bee-sting. He knew of no one in the area who had ever died of a Mediterranean viper’s bite. He added that vipers were viviparous, so they hatched their young inside the mother, and at birth were the deaf, harmless aspu surdu. Showing off his knowledge of the species and the Latin names with masterly eloquence, he clarified that the species of deadly asp that killed Cleopatra’s with its bite, did not live in the area.

As an incentive, I promised that I would give Luigi one hundred thousand lire, about 80 Canadian dollars, if we spotted a viper. I did not lose any money. Three tiny lizards was the total number of reptiles that we encountered in the full-day trip.

Uncle Antonio and I walk through a patch of tall grass. I hear more echoes from the past.. . .