A year in Monsummano

First of all I must tell you about Tilde. Elderly, small, a little curved, good-natured looking… To me, as a child in the 1960s, when I saw her for the first time she reminded me of the smiling old lady who still appears on certain boxes of cocoa powder. The somewhat curious name was diminutive of Clotilde, and for someone so named, if I have to be honest, it was always difficult for me to even imagine that she must once have been young. I met her in May 1984 in Pistoia, Tuscany, where life’s circumstances had taken me about a year earlier to temporary accommodation that was changed on average every two months until I met Tilde. She was a good woman, the room she was renting very decent, the price more than honest, the neighbours friendly, the area very quiet, and only one drawback: my new landlady was seventy-nine years old and finished, an age at which it can happen that one dies or, reconsidering one’s situation, prefers to have a caregiver in the house instead of a young student-worker. Two different hypotheses, especially from Tilde’s point of view, but both of which would have forced me to move again.
Forgive the coquetry and let me say that the results of my method were flattering and it took a good ten years before Tilde, one morning, showed the first sign of ageing. It was when she mentioned that it was better, after breakfast, that I at least wash my spoon. At almost ninety, she told me with a sigh, she no longer felt as gangly as when we had met. Which may have been true, but I knew: the pitiful doctor makes the stinking sore. Giving in on even that point would have pushed Tilde helplessly down the dangerous slope leading to inertia, physical weakness and, with unstoppable progression, mental weakness. Not being able to allow such misfortunes to weigh on my conscience, already pink with the remorse of not letting her mix honey and cappuccino, I was forced to deny her even the little help she asked for. It took a whole month to convince her of my reasons, then Tilde resigned herself and one fine day, when I returned home from work, I found the sink finally cleared of the thirty teaspoons that had accumulated there and that stubborn little head had stubbornly refused to wash.
I won’t say that it was all thanks to my steadfastness, but the fact is that Tilde got by remarkably well for another year before time got the better of her too. It happened in April 1995: an illness; the doctor’s intervention; the days suspended between hopes of recovery and fears of collapse; finally the overcoming of the crisis which, however, still changed the course of my life because Tilde, although fit again, decided to allocate my room to the person who would assist her from that day on.
As I bitterly realised, the ten years I had spent with Tilde had also been ten years for me who had turned 35 and, I had to admit, as a young student-worker I was no longer credible. Thinking about it a thousand times only served to tell me that I had no way out: the time had come for me to grow up.
When it comes, that moment profoundly changes our lives. The dreams, the naive ambitions, the carefree and melancholic hours of youth give way to the realism and common sense typical of adults. Life casts off the playful robes of Sundays spent playing football; of passionate reunions; of under-the-table naval battles during religion class; of Saturday nights at the disco or the cinema; of pizzas with friends late at night; of songs sung at the top of one’s voice in the night while driving home in the car of the first driver of the group, who, if it is summer, and the car is uncovered, will be remembered forever. From then on, sadly, bills and irons make their appearance; laundry to hang out and trolleys to push; condominium meetings and proxies even to the neighbour’s cat in order not to go. And to our friends (old or new) more and more often we will have to say that whoever doesn’t die will meet again and I’m sorry I didn’t call you and there really wasn’t time and look I had a period and as soon as there is a moment you have to see each other and now I have to leave you but I will call you as soon as possible and this Sunday I can’t but as soon as I can I’ll stop by. But the real trouble, from then on, is that we have to manage on our own. In simple terms (the only ones I can afford, by the way), life leaves us naked and unarmed in the face of post-industrial society and its pitfalls. And if sometimes it is a long and arduous process, sometimes it happens just like that, from one day to the next, without anyone having bothered to warn us. Something happens to us, perhaps an apparently insignificant little thing, and a few years later, looking back, we realise that this trivial little thing, which came in the night like a hag and sneaked up on us like a crook … Yes, it was nothing more than the passage from youth to adulthood. And not a metaphor, just the real passage!
The fact is that at the ripe old age of 35, I had to start looking for a house. Since I didn’t have one, I borrowed the motorbike from my friend Leonetto and began the ordeal between “free good condition”, “three-room third floor apartment”, “veranda terrace”, “ruin to be renovated with 5,000 square metres of olive grove attached” or the “farmhouse portion” which, judging by the price, if you ask for it at a restaurant instead of a steak you get a herd. Then there were also the attic apartments; the ‘terratettos’ free on three sides; the cottages from which two units with independent entrances could be obtained; the well-finished two-room flats on the ground floor and the flats under construction delivered ten months away. Then again the ‘small one-room loft apartment complete with service’, the ‘excellent comforted arranged on three levels’ and the liar ‘rented with executive eviction comforted quiet’. However comforted, how could it be quiet with executive eviction?
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Editorial note

‘A Year in Monsummano’ is a novel with roots. In a first draft and under the different title of ‘A Year in Monsummano’ it circulated in 1996 among friends and acquaintances. A second draft was published in 2000 by the publisher Transeuropa. In 2023, by cutting a lot and also ‘cannibalising’ other texts of mine, what can be counted as the eighth draft of the 1996 text took shape, but also as the first of a significantly new work and therefore deserving of a different title.