ON THE TWENTIETH OF the month we were all awakened shortly after dawn by the most tremendous racket. It was the rattle of small arms, a battlefield sound of the kind to be heard when a fighting patrol has run into difficulties, its members have become separated, and are letting fly in a sporadic and unconcerted fashion, usually with little result, at anything that moves.
I got up and threw open the shutter of a rear window, with partial views of the fields to the left and the right and most of Veii below showing through the oaks and chestnuts across the river. In the distance I noticed, spread across this panorama, several small groups of two or three men carrying guns. At the bottom of the garden itself two men crouched in a kind of trench which had not been there the day before, while a third, hidden behind a shrub a few yards away, cranked a handle attached to a piece of apparatus like an adjustable lamp standard which flashed the sun’s rays in all directions through mirrors fixed at its top. Guns were popping all over the landscape, some far off and some from concealed positions quite near me in the garden. The targets, I realized, were certainly birds, although minutes passed before I spotted one under concentrated fire, and this was very small. There was no doubt about it that a large number of guns were involved, of which not a few had not hesitated to violate our privacy.
I went up through the house and crossed the road to the bar. The lantern-jawed and introspective owner, Primo, was filling tiny glasses with brandy to be served to customers kitted out in the most extraordinary sporting gear, one of them, with a markedly Italian cast of features, in a kilt. The owner gave me a dank look and said, ‘Eh?’ I held up a finger and he passed over a glass. A daughter had been called in to help, and I managed to catch her eye. ‘What’s going on out there?’ I asked. ‘The season,’ she said, ‘starts today.’
The Count was off on his morning walk down the Via Baronale with his grizzled asthmatic Alsatian called Hannibal which he had imported from England and allowed no one to address except in English. ‘It’s purgatory,’ he said. ‘Lasts at least two weeks so you may as well get used to it. Better buy ear-plugs if you enjoy a morning lie-in.’ He felt it necessary to warn me. ‘These people are a law unto themselves. Of course they’ve taken over your garden. Your problem is to keep them from taking pot-shots through the windows of the house. The vineyards have to employ guards to keep them out. They not only shoot all the birds but eat the grapes. Better not complain. In this village they grin and bear it.’
For half the day the guns popped and crackled, shot pattered on the roof and occasionally tapped at a window. Someone brought my binoculars, and I saw a fat man throw down what looked like a modern assault weapon to chase after a tiny fluttering bird with some life still in it, and then lose part of his trousers on a wire fence. It is normal for participants on such Roman occasions to shoot each other, and one of the guns went down as though poleaxed, although I was later to learn that he had only lost the top of a thumb.
Suddenly a silence that had hardly been disturbed in 2,500 years settled about us. It was midday when by immemorial custom shooting stopped until two hours before sundown, when birds would be prospecting among the surrounding trees for somewhere to roost. The second part of the day’s entertainment awaited in the form of ritual spaghetti already cooking in cauldrons over fires stoked with wood confiscated by foraging parties in local gardens. The scarifying wine accompanying this was by tradition an early pressing of the year’s vintage, its fermentation arrested by chemicals, and charged with raw grappa. The exaltation close to fury produced by a mug of this lasted for about half an hour, and was followed by sedation and often sleep. In the lucid interval the hunters dashed about reliving their recent experiences, boasting of triumphs, recalling the extraordinary rarity of birds who had narrowly survived their fusillades, and describing how others, equally rare, had fallen from the sky when outside what was accepted as effective range.
Besides binoculars I was carrying a camera and was implored by the hunters to photograph them holding up the little bundles of blood-splashed feathers, averaging, they said, 150 grammes in weight, which the morning’s sport had yielded. The migrants which had chosen this precarious route to the safe havens of Africa were almost all small, speckled, unremarkable birds of the bunting family, although mixed in with them an occasional goldfinch or a warbler dangled from its tiny claws. Separate were the water wagtails shot from cunningly prepared ambush along the river bank, and the perquisite of a sporting syndicate having some affiliation with a charitable group known as ‘The Drop of Milk’.
I was called away at about this time to deal with the first garbage collection from the house. This was remarkable for the livery worn by the two men employed on the job, and the grandeur of their vehicle. I took it at first to be a fire engine, except that it had an electrically raised and lowered top. Resplendent in scarlet paintwork, it was lettered in bold black initials SPQR, standing for the Senators and People of Rome, and was clearly some miles off course at this point. Annunziata, the maid we shared with the Count, who had arranged the collection, explained that the villagers themselves simply threw their rubbish and unwanted objects into the nearest field, and that this service was only available to the upper crust of La Storta and the castle of Isola Farnese. ‘That’s the way it is here, sir. The rich and the poor. If you’re rich you do nothing. If you’re poor you work for nothing. Take the case of the Count. With respect, what does he do? He grows parsley and when it’s ready the priest’s horse jumps over the wall and gobbles it up.’
At round about six in the evening the shooting started again, and although Annunziata warned me that most of the guns would still be drunk I wandered down the garden to see what was going on. There were fewer birds than in the early morning, but they were larger and more important by local standards, many of them being starlings whose small, mangled corpses would attract admiration and command a high price when they hung among the dishevelled bunches of sparrows on the stalls of the local markets in the days to come. The starlings foolishly congregated in the hope of roosting in the trees of the wooded ravine to the north-east of the house, and here the hunters blazed away at them as soon as they settled, but with little success. While studying this action through the binoculars I was suddenly aware of the presence of the Roman garbage lorry stationary in the road running along the ravine. It would shortly be dusk and the blatant scarlet of the municipal lorry was dignified and enriched in the waning light. Now only rarely was the sound of a stray shot to be heard, and it was evident that the day’s sport was at an end; cars’ horns bleating impatiently summoned the last of the laggards from the slopes. With that, faintly, I heard the lorry’s engine start up, watched it manoeuvre into position with its back to the ravine, saw a door lift and the following cataract of black sacks and broken furniture go over the edge.
Back in the Via Baronale I was lucky enough to witness an extraordinary ritual. A kingfisher had fallen to one of the guns, an event of extreme rarity likely to happen once in a season, and at the moment of my arrival a crumpled handful of feathers, still glistening in the half light, was being passed from hand to hand amid cries of astonishment, congratulation and delight. The custom in such cases was for the successful sportsman to swallow the eyes, and this he did, washed down in a glass of brandy, to the sounding of car horns and shouts of applause.
The shooting party departed, watched in silence and with on the whole expressionless faces by the men of the village, whose only voiced criticism was that 300 lire could be spent on a single cartridge required to kill a sparrow offered for sale in the market for one sixth of the price.
Annunziata was on her way back to her house carrying the Countess’s personal garments to be laundered at home where she could keep an eye on her children. Her wash-house was fitted with the laborious Victorian equipment her employer insisted be used in this case. She had been a beautiful girl, but was now greying, with a distraught expression, and over-muscular arms, and carried with her an inescapable odour of soap.
Staring after the departing cars, she said, ‘Good riddance to the sods.’
‘Don’t you like them?’
‘Well, who would? Did you hear them down by the river? They ran out of birds, so they shot all the frogs. Can you wonder we vote Communist?’
I brought up the matter of garbage being tipped into the ravine. She seemed surprised. ‘Naturally,’ she said. ‘It’s the easy way.’
‘They’ll fill up the ravine in the end,’ I said.
‘Not in our time.’