My First Seven Years (Plus a Few More) by Dario Fo Read Free Book Online Page A

my mother with total naturalness, ‘but from my grandmother’s description I had no idea you were so young. Please come in. It’s my son. His temperature has gone up to forty degrees.’
    The doctor examined him, sounded his chest, tapped him all over his body. When he touched him on the skull, Fulvio gave a groan and shook his head. The doctor took a pair of scissors from his bag and began snipping the boy’s hair. In no time I saw my brother with a tonsure, like a monk! The doctor disinfected the bald patch with red liquid, picked up his scalpel and cut into the wound. Fulvio gave a scream like a train coming out of a tunnel. A few moments later, the doctor took his temperature, which fortunately had dropped considerably. He was out of danger.
    â€˜It was a very serious infection,’ was the doctor’s comment. ‘There was the risk of pernicious septicaemia, and maybe even worse. I’ll be back tomorrow to change the medication. I have left some gauze in the wound to clean it out. Give my good wishes to your grandmother. I’m really sorry but I don’t seem to remember where I met her.’
    â€˜Nowhere,’ replied Mamma.
    â€˜What do you mean?’
    â€˜She died three months ago, and she’s never been here.’
    The doctor fell silent … at that moment, he believed he had a mad woman on his hands. My mother went on with her explanation: ‘You see, I was on this seat, and my grandmother was sitting over there, on the bed, near my son. She spoke to me with a smile on her lips. “Pinin, Pinin, it’s me … don’t worry. Stop crying. A doctor will be along shortly, an excellent doctor, a professor of surgery … he’s travelling by motorbike, and in next to no time he’ll have your son as right as rain.”’
    My father tried to wave the whole business aside. ‘Poor thing, she’s been hallucinating.’
    â€˜It is odd,’ said the doctor. ‘Surgery is indeed my specialism. I am not the general practitioner, I was in Mugadino to visit my own father … it’s him who is the local doctor there. I am doing my specialism in Milan, at the Fatebenefratelli hospital, and I do hope to go into teaching. It is curious that your wife, even granted that she was in a state of trance, could have got all these details right. Very curious, worth researching, I would say.’
    â€˜Not as a fairground attraction, I hope,’ laughed my mother. ‘To tell the truth it’s not the first time this has happened to me. Before my grandmother died, I received news from a sister who died in childhood, and at other times from a great-grandfather whom I have never known.’
    â€˜Let the doctor get on his way. We’ve already put him out enough, getting him to rush round here.’
    â€˜My husband’s right. You must think I’m paranoiac, the way I’m buttonholing you, but I’m not mad.’
    â€˜That’s what all mad people say,’ Papà cut in.

CHAPTER 5
    My Grandparents
    I had two grandfathers. The first, my father’s father, was a giant of a man, almost one metre ninety in height. By trade he had always been a stone mason, like his father, grandfather and great-grandfather before him. In his village, he was known as Maister, in the sense of ‘master builder’. My father, too, as I have already mentioned, started life as a mason, and only after the 1915–18 war did he enrol at a technical institute and take up work on the railways. ‘We can drift into the most outlandish professions in this world,’ my father often remarked with ill-concealed pride, ‘but come what may we will remain a race of stone masons.’ His word for stone mason was comasin, which does not mean masons from Como but comes from faber cum macina, that is, workers who operate using machines – scaffolding, mobile frames, cranes, winches and so on. Perhaps mechanical