A Small Place in Italy by Eric Newby

Author:Eric Newby [Eric Newby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007508150
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 1994-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

‘Vorrei chiederle un piacere’ (‘I want to ask you a favour’) said a deep voice from behind me which I recognized immediately as being Tranquillo’s. I knew what was coming next: ‘un po’ di aiuto coi le bigonci’ (‘a bit of help with the bigonci’).

He was wearing the peaked cotton cap with the maker’s name on it with which the agents for the tractor had graciously presented him when he bought it. It was an early version of one of those long-peaked platypus caps that US presidents wear when trundling around golf courses in little electrically propelled carts instead of walking and then wonder why they have blood pressure problems.

I was trapped. I should have taken refuge in the lavatory, the one that at that time was in the open air, hidden, as ours was at I Castagni, in the midst of a plantation of canne, and only emerged when Tranquillo had found someone else to do the job. Perhaps I could even have offered to do the washing up – there were no washing-up machines, even ten years later – which would effectively have queered me with the whole Dadà clan. They would have thought I was the sort of Inglese who wears a ballet skirt in the privacy of his home. Men simply did not wash up in any part of Italy I had ever visited, and many of them still don’t, except in television commercials.

It was not that I objected to carrying heavy weights – anything in a rucksack or a pack or lashed to a pack frame was fine. What I didn’t like carrying were weights not really adapted to being carried, such as sacks filled to the brim with Australian grain, as I had had to when I was a sailor in 1939, or, what was worse, carrying a sack of rice across a ridge of the Apennines in the winter of 1943, which almost finished me off, or in 1941, helping to carry the corpse of an enormous member of the Indian civil service to a cemetery beside the Ganges when the temperature was up in the hundreds.

However, I could scarcely fail him, especially after eating such an enormous, delicious lunch.

‘Lei, soffre d’ernia?’ he asked. It seemed a bit late in the day for him to ask if I suffered from hernia.

‘Not up to now,’ I said.

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