My First Seven Years (Plus a Few More) by Dario Fo

Author:Dario Fo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2016-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

The Portrait of Nofret

I had just turned thirteen. One evening as darkness was falling, we went with our gang to pinch fruit from the garden of the Polish woman whose villa was perched a hundred metres above the point where the Grifone, a cobalt-blue lake more than three hundred metres deep, widened out. We learned from Vescica, the oldest in the gang, that in those days the estate was uninhabited. I had already been to the villa at the invitation of the Polish woman’s youngest son. Everything in the suite of public rooms, starting from the enormous mirrors which covered the walls and gave the impression of a fairground gallery, had seemed to me overelaborate and overdecorated.

We clambered over the precinct wall and scrambled down the creepers. The targets of the raid were the bunches of grapes hanging from the pergola which ran round almost the whole villa. There were four of us: our guide was Bigulòt, who had slipped down the wisteria onto the pergola and who was crawling along the trellises towards the most plump, juicy bunches. We followed his lead, taking care not to tumble off. I was the last in the line, with Germàn, son of a German glass-blower, crawling along ahead of me.

We were very close to the glass shutters which looked onto the Grifone when all of a sudden the central section was flung open. As one, we all crouched down among the leaves of the vine. Some people appeared at the grand windows, a man and a woman. Fortunately the darkness gave us complete cover, and from up there they could not see us. I raised my face slightly to have a look and I recognised the girl. She was called Elise and she was the woman of one of the most wealthy crooks on the entire coast – Brizzi, also known as Scorridór, a thug who was boss of the criminal underworld.

‘Look at the shining ripples of the moon on the waters … but in this pitch black it’s quite scary!’ said Elise in a whisper to the man who had his arm round her waist.

The man with Elise had nothing to do with the gangsters. He was much younger. He embraced her and they kissed. Now they were talking quietly, whispering from mouth to mouth. We held our breath. I kept my face buried in the foliage and it was all I could do not to sneeze, but luckily they moved away from the window and went back inside. We heard them groaning and panting. Our fear did not permit us to take any pleasure from our peeping-tom situation. I have no idea how long their idyll of writhing, entwining and groaning went on. The lights inside the house were magnified by the mirrors which projected the images onto the windows, increasing and multiplying them so as to give the impression that there were as many as three or four couples holding tightly to each other and rolling around as though in some dance.

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