The Bell-Boy Read Online Free PDF Page B

by tasks of a more or less drudging nature. Many were the young refugees from art and language courses in Florence or Pisa who found their way there hoping to bliss out on long hours of sunshine and wine and meditation; but few there were prepared to spend a morning hoeing a maize field or coaxing a refractory mule up the eight hundred and ninety-four broad steps through the chill gloom of the forest. They left, mostly within days, to be replaced by others.
    Yet gradually over the years the Community did build itself up until almost all Valcognano’s houses had been restored and were lived in by people whose lives – apart from mantras and tantras and curious practices at dawn –differed very little from those of its original inhabitants. They sowed, they reaped, and often at night they sang songs around the fireside. Curiously, the Pure Lighters were largely free of the problems which typically afflict such enterprises and cause dissent and break-up. There were few scandals and jealousies, while the Italian authorities virtually ignored them. From the outset the Swami had made judicious donations to the parish in whose bailiwick Valcognano was, and the parroco was firmly on the Community’s side. Every so often he would make the three-hour walk up to the village and satisfy himself that there was no odour of brimstone about the place, no evidence of sorcery, no effigies of horned goats. The inhabitants didn’t strike him as practitioners of the black arts, appearing sober and healthy even if a little scruffy and given to expressions of happiness. They certainly plied him most generously with home-made bread, sheep’s cheese and cold-extracted oil of hyssop for his stones.
    It occurred to the priest to enquire as to the children’s education, but he was easily satisfied that they were being well taught since nearly all the adults turned out to have university degrees. Besides, the complications of enrolling them in the state educational system scarcely bore thinking about. The comune of which Valcognano was a part would have to send a scuolabus to fetch and return them daily, at all seasons and in all weathers. Since it was evident that no scuolabus could get up a mule track, the comune would have to build a road. Once there was a road there would have to be electricity, telephones, sewage disposal … Who knew where such spending would end? And all for an isolated hamlet of self-sufficient folk who treasured their isolation? It was pointless. Far better let the whole matter drop.
    So the Italian state left Valcognano to its eccentric but peaceable foreigners, except that every now and then a police helicopter might hover above the maize field to check that nobody had planted marijuana in the middle. As far asofficialdom was concerned Jason and Zoe and the other children were as unaccountable as gypsies but of no interest to the law, unlike the genuine gypsy children from Yugoslavia who plagued the peripheral wastelands of Milan and Turin with their pickpocketing rackets.
    Theirs had been a strange upbringing, reared as they were in a multicultural limbo. Dal they ate, and polenta and porridge; also curry and pasta, poppadoms, pizza and pudding. They were smallholders with wide horizons, too, for they were always travelling. Tessa would suddenly announce that next week they were going on retreat in Kashmir or to a disciple of the Swami’s in Thailand, or merely back to England to dun their capitalist turncoat of a father for more maintenance. Along the way they picked up what they could of formal learning. On the last visit but one Tessa had wangled both children a term’s schooling, but Jason especially had proved peculiar and it was not a success.
    As for money, well, the Hemonys paid as little attention to it as people do who have never had to worry. Tessa’s family were rich; she was an only child. It was true she had married a man without a bean, but he turned out to have a future. They had met at an ashram in