Ricordi di famiglia
THE FABLE OF GAMEKEEPER BALDI
I remember "Baldi", my Grandfather's gamekeeper. A cottage, three little rooms above the cellar, with their narrow windows looking out onto both the big entrance and the inner courtyard.
And every single space along the windows and in the rooms full of small green wooden cages, all handmade, with birds inside them, green, blue, yellow, rainbow-colored, multicoloured, that sang and sang from the first light of day until late evening.
And him, this kind little fellow of few words, taking millet seeds to all the cages, who taught me - me, a boy just a few years old - what to do, how to give the birds water, how to move softly so as not to frighten them.
And next to Baldi I remember "Leone", the huge ferocious Maremman sheepdog that let us children do anything to him, just to lick our whole faces in one single slurp, but absolutely unapproachable by any other adult except Baldi himself, not even Grandfather.
Then Baldi died and shortly afterwards Leone, too. Other gamekeepers came, but the cages were soon emptied, the songs died out.
Grandfather died and everything stopped.
And then one morning my mother came up, almost beside herself: "I saw Baldi !! He said hello to me!! ". And so the women on the farm told her that yes, it was true, several people had met him in the woods, always kind, always wearing his gamekeeper's uniform, greeting them in few words, a sweet smile.
Years pass, generations pass. And a few months ago My Wife, with her solid positive American background, comes back to the farmhouse from the woods and tells me about a kind elderly man who was also looking for mushrooms, wearing a strange green suit, almost like a uniform, who had warned her not to venture into a certain spot in the woods because there was a viper's nest there and it could be dangerous, and had then disappeared again into the woods.
I asked around, thinking I might thank him, offer him a bottle of wine. But Baldi was always shy, and I'm convinced he still prefers it that way.
LA STANZA DELLA BOMBA
I have few memories of the war. I do remember being hungry. I recall being in a car, perhaps in the arms of a "nanny", stopping in the middle of the woods because they were shooting all around us.
I remember Grandfather lamenting the loss of the wrought iron fence at the entrance of the drive and worse for the 'vinsanto' barrels thrown into the ravine below the vineyards.
I clearly recall the huge hole in the wall of our children's room with half the wall missing and pieces of bricks, stones, broken tiles, dust and dirt covering our poor semi destroyed beds. A few years later the wall was rebuilt. However, the shell of a bomb that was fired at the retreating army by the advancing forces, which landed in our wall, thank goodness for Petroio, without exploding (it broke in half), was walled up in the facade were it had entered and is still clearly visible from the courtyard.
Then as years passed and generations moved through the villa our old children's room became a guest room. And every once in awhile, at dinner with guest, either My Wife or I tell the story of the miracle of the bomb which landed in the wall of the villa without exploding and which is still there, since no one has ventured to touch it, and given that it has never exploded and of course we hope that it will never do so...but perhaps if one of our guests might be snoring just a bit too loudly the vibrations just might reverberate in the wall and then, well, you just never know what might happen.
