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

I need a bit of vacation," I said after mature reflection.

Jo, never one to miss a trick, asked sarcastically, "A bit of vacation after two months at the shore?"

According to Jo I must be a man perennially on vacation because I spend part of the year working in the country, part in the mountains, and part at the shore. And to tell the truth, it's at the shore that my vacation becomes least vacation-like. In fact, from my little study in the country I can see a fair piece of the plains, and from my little study in the mountains I can see a lot of mountains, but at the shore all I can see is the tops of a lot of trees bounded off by a row of houses. They tell me that beyond the houses the sea begins. I have yet to see it, but the people who inform me of this interesting phenomenon are quite respectable, so I take it on faith.

This being the case, after many years of "working vacations" I felt the need of a bit of playing vacation.

Let me take a giant step into the past and explain that among the memories of my very distant happy childhood, first place goes to my grandmother Giuseppina's house. It's a marvelous house, something out of the fairy tales: square, squat, yellow with green shutters. No modern architect could ever succeed in creating a house as lovely, comfortable and rational--a great vaulted vestibule on the ground floor, with the kitchen and breakfast room to one side, and the pantry, stairs and library on the other. On the first floor, the same layout: vestibule, three large bedrooms, the large room containing wooden wardrobes, and the stairway leading to the granary, which has an airy, high ceiling, and oval windows.

At the ends of the ground-floor vestibule, there are two large doors with glassed-in porches. One at the north facing the tree-lined drive that leads to the gravel road carrying you across several kilometers of the property to a battered old country road. The south door opens on a courtyard; there is a jasmine tree trained around one side of the porch, and around the other a rosemary bush.

Across the courtyard there is a shack containing the wood pile, the well, the laundry with its stove, and a workroom. Opposite the shack there's a stable for the horse and a shed for the carriage. The fourth side of the courtyard is closed off by a large arbor of muscatel grapes. If you go through the arbor you'll see a field of medicinal herbs and grapevines that runs down to the banks of the river.

Surrounding the house there are shaggy old trees and a vast, untamed hedge that hides the sharecropper's cottage, stable, and workshed.

Inside my grandmother's house are buried the best days of my life. Every summer, when school was over, I went to spend the holidays with my grandmother Giuseppina. The moment I arrived I took off my shoes and didn't put them back on till I went home to begin school again.

When grandmother Giuseppina died she left the house to one of my mother's sisters, who in turn left it to her son. This cousin of mine had kept the house exactly as it had been and lived there with his family until his children finally dragged him off to the city. Before leaving the old house he had written me: "Why don't you come here and take a little holiday? You'll find the house unchanged from the time when you spent summers here. It grieves my heart to think of its being abandoned by everybody ..."

So we went there, and passing between the high hedges of the country lane, I experienced the immense joy of touring through a glory of dust, making pebbles skitter right and left. I found the house exactly as I had remembered it. The plants were older and more unruly, the yellow paint had gone a bit white. But then, so had I.

Inside, everything was in perfect order. The old sharecropper's wife was a good caretaker and treated everything with love and respect.

The minute she was inside the door, Jo gave a shriek. "There's no light!"

"That's right," I explained. "No electricity, therefore no motors, no icebox, no vacuum cleaner, no washing machine, no TV, no boiler. The only machine is a bottle-opener, which you will find hanging on the kitchen wall. No gas, but a wood-burning stove. No running water, but beside the sink a hook on which hangs a bucket. You make light by lighting up a kerosene lamp or a candle."

Jo went upstairs to explore the first floor and came down immediately, whimpering. "The bathroom!" she squeaked. "Where's the bathroom?"

"There is a bathroom," I said. "You take baths in the laundry. There's a pump from the well, a stove to heat the water, and a nice poplar-wood tub. Right next to it is the outhouse."

"And if you have to go at night ..." she babbled.

"The same as during the day. You come down the stairs, you leave the house, and you walk over to the outhouse."

Jo turned to Margherita, horrified. "Mrs. Guareschi, why aren't you saying anything?"

Margherita shrugged her shoulders. "The fact is, Jo, when I was little I lived in a house much worse than this because we lived in the city. Still, I don't think your own house ..."

"That doesn't make any difference!" Jo cut in. "Once you've achieved prosperity, why should you give it up? You don't take steps backwards!"

"Jo," I said softly, "you're convinced that Prosperity is made up of electrical appliances, central heating, TV, and so on. In reality you're simply at the mercy of an overpowering number of motors and mechanisms and all you need is a power failure for your entire household to fall apart. Here nothing can fall apart, no strike can affect the running of your household. Believe me, you need a holiday too. Progress makes you into a slave, and here one is free."

"Here we return to the age of cavemen!" Jo retorted. "What do you do at night if you don't have a TV or even a transistor radio?"

"You listen to the crickets and the frogs and the nightingales. Apart from everything else, they sing better than your Rock idols. If you don't like their music, the most classical in the world, then you can entertain yourself with your own thoughts."

"Rubbish!" the girl protested. "When the TV's on, I can think and then rethink what I see on TV. Just the way I do when I go to the movies. All by myself, what am I going to think?"

"Jo, wouldn't you like to become different people, live through this or that adventure?"

"Sure, but without TV and the movies how can I think about people I'd like to be or things I'd like to do? TV is the railroad to fantasy, after all."

"Perhaps, but a railroad that takes you where it wants to go. And it's no sure thing that the destination is worthwhile. You should think for yourself."

"Too tiring," Jo concluded.

We ate by the light of the kerosene lamp: a discreet, warm, restful light.

I found stacks of the Sunday News from 1899 to 1922; they made fascinating reading. It was so pleasant to be able to read about the things that were happening in the world around the time I was born.

I slept soundly and was awakened by a shout from Jo: "Smell it! Smell it!" I ran to the window. It was a fresh, clean morning filled with sunlight, and after so many years I smelled again the perfume of baking bread. I put some homely old clothes on and ran over to the sharecropper's house to watch them take the fresh bread out of the oven.

"We're the only people left in the neighborhood who make our bread at home," the sharecropper's old wife explained to me.

Even Jo had come down to watch the miracle of the bread from up close. Then Margherita came in.

I had put on my slippers, but I threw them off and found my feet again bare against the earth. The sensation lifted half a century off my shoulders. Then I filled a pail from the well pump and, with a fat hunk of bread tucked under my arm I went to look for the row of early grapes. I found it and as in the past picked the golden grapes, cleaned them, and threw them into the pail to remove the stems, the way my grandmother Giuseppina taught me to.

Fresh bread and grapes: a fabulous breakfast. I also found a peach tree, covered with fruit--the ugly kind that nobody seems to know tastes best.

From the distant house, a voice called to me.

"Coming, grandma!" I answered.

"Have you washed?"

"Yes, grandma," I lied shamelessly. "Even my neck and ears."

I walked as far as the river bank. From there, I would have whistled downstream and Gigi would have answered my whistle.

I stuck my fingers in my mouth and whistled. But Gigi didn't answer that time. Instead, I saw an old man with a large gray mustache appear on the road leading to the house hidden behind the bank of acacias. When he was closer to the bank I recognized him: it was Gigi's father. Just the same as he had been those many, many years ago. After a bit of huffing and puffing he climbed up the river bank and planted himself in front of me. "Giovanni," he said breathlessly. "I heard you, but I didn't whistle back because I can't waste my breath any more. Everybody has his own problems."

"Yours are much smaller than mine," I wanted to answer, "because you don't feel the need to come into my world, but I want to move into yours."

We had a long chat sitting on the bank of the river. Then I went back to the old house and wandered through it inch by inch, rediscovering thoughts and dreams that I had believed were lost.

That night, at dinner, Margherita said, "Yes, Giovanni, everything else can go, but I think we should at least have a telephone. Just think, if one suddenly got ill ..."

"But on the other hand, if one suddenly got well," Jo answered, "what would be the point of a telephone?"

A subtle observation that was strictly logical, and Margherita said, "This is true too."