CONTENTS

1) The Non- Camillo Books (Introduction)

2) Early Family Stories

3) Later Family Stories
- Introduction
.
- "The Pullover"
- "Passionaria..."
- "...All Began"
- "...Blackface"
- "Suspense"
- "Vacation..."
- "Ladies..."
- "Jo's Nose"

4) Drawing Room Farces

5) Notes from Prison Camp

One fine Wednesday is when it all began. The establishment (if you could call a complex of barracks sunk into an old abandoned cave an "establishment") was several kilometers from the nearest populated area, but it was easy to get to because, as had been explained to us, all you had to do was follow the odor.

In fact, once we had left the highway and were on our way down the first dirt road to the left, an acrid odor hit our noses. "It's not an odor," Margherita amended. "It's a stench. 'Odor' is too literary and doesn't convey the true effect. It's like the difference between 'distasteful' and 'disgusting.'"

The effect of the odor, which was in fact a stench of the most disgusting kind, as we slowly but surely crept toward its source, was that it increased in intensity inch by inch until even the car motor started to gag.

Anyhow, the establishment was a cluster of corrugated tin barracks aligned along the four sides of a huge workyard. From a smokestack gushed a dense yellow smoke with red trimmings. A heavy smoke that surged up to an impossibly low altitude, spread out, and settled down to form a lid over that infernal caldron. The gatekeeper, sensitive to bribes, answered our questions. The person we were interested in was a worker at this stink factory. It was around twelve noon. In a few minutes she would be coming out and he promised to point her out to us.

In the vast workyard there were moving shapes that, in their general outlines, recalled the human form. These were buzzing around large trucks and were loading, in a cloud of poisonous powder, sacks of the finished product, or unloading in a cloud of flies, bones, hooves, and other bovine and equine relics. Others were pushing around carts of one or the other mess.

"Look there, it's her!" the gatekeeper exclaimed after a while, opening the gatehouse door and pointing to one of the cart pushers.

"Which one, Giovanni?" Margherita asked me under her breath. "The one in front or the one behind?"

"The one behind," I answered. "The one in front is the wheelbarrow."

"Jo," the gatekeeper yelled from his window, "there're two people here looking for you."

"Okay!" it yelled back. The person answering to the name Jo didn't stop but made a nodding gesture, which proved my observation that the human being was the shape behind.

At that moment the siren began to shriek and instantly the person named Jo abandoned the wheelbarrow in the middle of the workyard and headed for the gatehouse.

"It certainly has quick reflexes," Margherita said. "It didn't lose a tenth of a second. It must be extremely efficient. That's why I'm guessing it's a 'she,' because there's no other way of knowing."

I couldn't disagree with her, because there was simply no objective basis on which to make an evaluation. The person was wearing overalls, a handkerchief around its neck, a second handkerchief knotted under its chin to cover its hair, a third handkerchief knotted behind its head to cover its face from its chin to its eyes. A bicyclist's beret, the beak turned around backwards, covered its forehead. Its eyes were covered by welder's goggles. Heavy gloves covered its hands and tall rubber boots its feet. I am, however, going to go along with Margherita's guess (and my own hindsight) and refer to this person as "she."

"Are you the people who want to talk to me?" she asked after she joined us.

"If your name is Miss Gioconda Cicon, yes," Margherita answered.

"It is, if you don't mind," she answered. "If you, instead of getting kicks riding around in a car, had to work up to your nose in this dust and this smell, you wouldn't be so concerned about elegance."

She had taken off her goggles and a few of the handkerchiefs and now we were certain that she was a woman.

"Now then, we," Margherita began, "are in need of a person--"

"If you're looking for a servant, you can get lost," Jo interrupted her. "I'm not going to be a chambermaid, not for a million lire a month. I have my professional pride and my independence and my own personality!"

I took command of the operation. "You've misunderstood us. We're not looking for a servant. We're looking for a person who is young, intelligent, polite, different, a person like you, in other words, to give some tone to our house, which is rather depressing and poorly arranged, and (no offense to my wife) badly organized and managed. Something more than an assistant, I think; in fact, an 'animator' if the term doesn't put you off."

It didn't put her off at all. "'Animator'? In what sense?" she said coolly.

"Look," I explained, "in the animated drawing industry, the animator is the man who gives life to the figures with a series of designs which describe every fraction of a movement that the figures must accomplish. In the, let us say, worldly realm, the animator is the person who, with her spirit, her communicative cordiality, her discoveries, gives life and liveliness to the dancing soirees and the musical comedies; who succeeds, in other words, in linking with invisible wires--"

"Franco Zeffirelli is the name," Jo cut in.

"Exactly!" I exclaimed. "We're going out of our minds looking for a female Zeffirelli to choreograph all the dissonances in our house and make life more bearable for us."

"On this basis, we can continue to discuss the idea," said Jo. "One thing before we start discussing details: if the house isn't in the city, no deal."

"It's in the country, but you will have at your disposal a small, charming Spider," I answered.

"Okay, since I've got a driver's license. Number Two: private bedroom with bath."

"All our bedrooms have their own bath."

"Three: personal TV with both channels. I have my own personality, my own interior world, my own inclinations and I don't want to suppress them by watching, for example, News Roundup on Channel Two when there's a Rita Pavone special on One, or vice versa. Four: personal transistor radio."

"It's fine with us."

"Do you have children?"

"Two. The boy is twenty-four years old, already gone from home, and married."

"That's good. That way I don't run the risk of marrying him myself. Anyhow I don't want any grandchildren underfoot."

"There aren't any grandchildren yet."

"Okay, but give me ample notice. What about the girl?"

"She's eighteen."

"A debutante?"

"No, she made her debut last month. Her birthday is in November."

"Your wife, is she understanding or authoritarian?"

"We've only been married twenty-five years and I don't yet know."

She laughed and asked us to follow her into the administrative offices. When we got her home, finally, she thought the house was passable and her personal room acceptable. The TV and transistor radio pleased her very much. At lunch we invited her to eat with us in the breakfast room. She said she wasn't prepared to give up her personal freedom and insisted on eating in the kitchen. She thought Margherita was an execrable cook and took over the kitchen herself. At night, after she finished her work she went to hide in her room. But around 8:30, when Margherita, Passionaria, and I took up position in front of the TV, the Animator reappeared.

"Isn't your TV working?" I asked.

"Yes, it works," she said drily. "However, if you don't mind, I'd rather not be treated like a leper. I shall watch TV with you. Besides, I like dialogue."

Thus the Animator began following the happenings on TV along with our family and still does. I have to say this to prevent some crackpot out there, following these little TV chronicles, from accusing us of being antisocial egoists who deny their dependents the most important rights.

"Tonight Marchesi's on," the Animator announced. "I'll watch the Carousel and then I'm going to bed. It's a real drag."

"I disagree," I objected. "That show is a smiling pause in the week's moroseness."

"More than a pause, it's a menopause," Margherita put in. "Given the age of the principal performers. And then Marchesi has become a bit rarefied, too literary, too intellectual. For example, will somebody please tell me the meaning of that poem we had last time: 'How charming / The poster / On the altar: / "We pray you / Will pray here."'"

I answered that it was a delicate question. "Marchesi is an unsuppressible punster. 'To Be Good or Prosper: the Village's Question'--apart from everything else, it has the grace and freshness of our local athletic club. It reminds me of Ernesto--he was a veritable cannon of puns. One day Ernesto, who was a bank clerk, had to go on an errand to the Bologna mint and I asked him a pick up for me a thousand freshly minted 10-lira notes for a practical joke I wanted to play. As soon as he got there, he turned in all the used and crumbly notes--including the 10,000-lira note I gave him--and sat down to wait for them to issue him new notes. Just then a flash fire broke out and they all evacuated the building, which was severely burned. So when Ernesto came home with no money, all he did was laugh and say, Gone with the Mint, Gone with the Mint."

"I don't understand," Margherita said nastily.

"You don't understand the joke, Gone with the Wind becomes Gone with the Mint?"

"What's this Ernesto doing now?"

"Now he tells stories on TV," Passionaria cut in. "Here's one. There's an animal in Tibet called a nam, similar to the gnu. A Buddhist priest was lost in the hills one day and it began to snow. As the nam was fond of the priest, it went off into the hills to search for him. A day later the nam returned, the poor priest clinging to its back. Naturally the nam would be rewarded for this, since the Tibetan villagers loved their priest as much as did the nam. So they decided to give the nam the food it loved most dearly and cover it with laurels and make a statue to honor it. The food it loved most dearly was hearts of gnu. On the appointed festival day the statue of the nam was unveiled, the nam itself was covered with laurel leaves, and finally the gnu heart was brought out. Unfortunately overnight some maggots had gotten into it and made holes throughout. But the nam was simply satisfied to have his favorite dish and ate it anyway. Ernesto ends the tale with its title: The Commended Nam Ate a Mealy Heart."

Margherita sat in stunned silence for a moment and then said, "Let us hope this Ernesto never shows his face at our door."