The only way one could see into this little room was through a heavily barred window; fortunately the wooden shutters were open.
It was a very small room, freshly whitewashed and lit by the same sort of oil lamps we had seen in the kitchen. The few bits of furniture, which almost completely filled it, consisted of a large, old single bed of polished wood with a high back inlaid with mother-of-pearl; made up with clean white linen sheets which were turned back, ready to receive whoever was going to sleep between them. Alongside the bed there was a little stool covered with a worn fragment of carpet, and on the wall next to the bed there was a crucifix and an oleograph of La Santissima Vergine del Rosario di Fontanellato, Wanda’s village near Parma, where I had been a prisoner-of-war in 1943, and below it there was a small, circular, marble-topped table, which it later transpired contained a vaso da notte, a chamber pot.
On the other side of the bed there was a very old wooden chest. Overhead the whitewashed ceiling looked decidedly wonky, with big patches of damp where the rain had penetrated; but in spite of this the room was a lap of luxury compared with the rest of the house, and the only part remotely ready for occupation.
‘And who sleeps in this room?’ Wanda asked superfluously. Like me she already knew the answer before Signora Angiolina confirmed that this was the bedchamber of Attilio. It was also unnecessary to ask who washed and ironed his sheets.‘Sta arrivando adesso, Attilio,’ she said. ‘He is coming now.’
Emerging from the deep shadow cast by the trees on the banks of the torrent we could see a small figure travelling towards us across the grass at a tremendous rate, rather like one of those gompa lamas who move across the Tibetan plateau at high speed, negotiating what would seem to be impossible obstacles on the way. A method of progression made possible only because they are in a trance state.
Soon we could see him clearly. A tiny, wizened man, bent by a lifetime of toil, toothless so that in profile his mouth looked like a new moon. He was old, how old it was impossible to say, anything between seventy and eighty, quite possibly even more.
As he drew near we could hear him talking to himself in an animated way, and occasionally laughing at some private joke. He was certainly nothing like a gompa lama, more like a benevolent gnome.
He was dressed in a pale-coloured jacket, baggy trousers, a white, open-necked shirt and on his head he wore a big, palecoloured cap that looked a bit like an unbaked sponge cake. Everything about him was very clean looking.
Now he was abreast of us and I prepared to welcome him, or for him to welcome Signora Angiolina, or welcome the three of us. But he did none of these things. Instead, he looked at us benevolently, cackled a bit while fishing a modest sized key from a pocket, said something that sounded like ‘Bisogna vedere un po’, the equivalent of ‘I’ll have to think this out a bit’, then opened the door to ‘Attilio’s Bedroom’, took the key out of the lock and went in and shut the door, still continuing to chuckle away on the other side of it.
I was completely bowled over by this encounter. I was sure I had met him before on two occasions in 1943, after the German occupation of Italy.
The man I remembered had looked more or less the same age and that was twenty-four years ago. Then I had thought of him as being very old, I suppose because anyone over the age of forty looks old when you yourself are twenty-four. And I remembered that he had already lost his teeth which had made him look older than perhaps he was.
The first time had been at the end of September when he had been the mysterious third man in the car decorated with a red cross in which an heroic Italian doctor had been driving me to the Apennines along the Via Emilia, what was then the main German line of communication with the battle front to the south. In Parma, which was stiff with Germans, the car, a Fiat propelled by gas, had broken down in Piazza Garibaldi, the main square of the city. There we had been surrounded by German Feldgendarmen armed with Schmeisser machine pistols telling us to hurry up with our repairs and be gone. While the doctor and I had been trying to get it going Attilio, if that was who he was, had sat in the back seat, dressed in a garment called a tabar, a voluminous cloak, cackling away at them completely unafraid.
The second meeting I had with this mystery man was later that winter when he literally saved my life after I had become hopelessly lost in a thick forest and got soaked to the skin in a river. He had put me up for the night in what must have been one of the loneliest houses in the Apennines. The front door of that house was almost exactly the same as the one here, at I Castagni. I wondered if it reminded him of it too.
It was Attilio (or was it?) who, later that same evening in the house in the mountains, told me the extraordinary story of what happened after Maestro Giovanni shot the Bird with the Golden Wings and gave it to the King; and it was he, the following morning, who put me on the right track back to the cave in which I had been living, and from which I had strayed like a lost sheep.
But it was impossible that he and Attilio could be the same man, if for no other reason than that of age. The man I had known in the autumn of 1943 must have been long since dead.
‘What we’ve got to do, before we buy the house, is to talk to him,’ Wanda said; but trying to interview Attilio proved to be like trying to interview a will o’ the wisp.
As we went up the hill with Signora Angiolina we had a last, fleeting glimpse of the little house through a break in the trees. Smoke was coming from the chimney which meant that Attilio had emerged from his place of refuge in the bedroom and was about to start preparing his evening meal. I wondered what it would be: perhaps some magic potion that would render him invisible.
A little later, sitting in Signora Angiolina’s cavern-like kitchen, eating cake and drinking the white wine made with long-ripened grapes, of a sort that was always produced for honoured guests, she told us what she knew about Attilio. We, ourselves, decided to say nothing.
‘Attilio is a very good little man, un ometto molto bravo,’ was how she described him for the second time that afternoon, as though we hadn’t taken it in. ‘He can do anything, repair anything, make anything. Some people think he is a bit strange, because he talks to himself more than he does to other people but he does this because he is really rather timido and some people make fun of him.
‘When he was young,’ she went on, ‘he learned the work of a blacksmith, and of a wheelwright. He can still work anything in iron or wood and he can make spades and hoes and the handles for scythes and for any other tools that are needed.
‘And he can make ladders, the triangular sort called tramalli, and he makes the oil lamps you saw in the kitchen.
‘Once he made a merry-go-round for the children hereabouts, and paid for a band to play while he made it turn.
‘He also made a cinema in which you looked through a sort of telescope – [what she probably meant was a magic lantern] – at coloured pictures, while a gramophone played music.
‘He even made an aeroplane and launched it with him inside it from a high place on the way to Fosdinovo, but the machine fell to the ground and he was injured. He doesn’t like to be reminded of this.
‘But his greatest skill, because he has such a good memory, is as what we call a narratore di fiabe, a teller of tales. Attilio inherited this skill from his father, who learned it from his father. There were also women who told stories, narratrice, they were called.
‘He knows many stories, Attilio – L’Uomo Verde d’Alghe [The Green Seaweed Man], L’Uomo che Usciva Solo di Notte [The Man who Only Went Out at Night], L’Oca con le Penne [The Goose with the Feathers], Il Drago e la Cavallina Bianca [The Dragon and the Little White Mare], and many, many more. Some are very old, from the time of the Saraceni.’
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