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Dante’s Beach, Ravenna
All seven chickens we recently acquired are now laying eggs – except the one called Giovanna, which is walking with a limp thanks to our youngest child Giuseppe, who is ten. The other day, Giuseppe somehow shut Giovanna’s right foot in the back door as he shooed her out of the house.
These chickens are proving portentous. I am convinced they are the catalyst, if not the reason, for why our middle daughter, Magdalena, 17, has just split up with her boyfriend Simone after three years together.
Simone, a truly brilliant pianist, is terrified of chickens, a fairly common phobia apparently, though that is not why we got them. For years we dared not do so for fear that our dog Rocco, who is a rusty-brown-coloured Vizsla – a species bred to hunt birds – would slaughter the lot on sight. But he is old now and so we bit the bullet. Their arrival, however, has set in motion a chain of events and, as with the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914, who knows where it will all end?
We feared that even if we kept chickens locked up inside the stable, for example, it would make no difference. Rocco would just take up position outside and bark manically at them until they dropped dead from fright, as happened with two cockatiels we once had. In his desperation to kill anything with wings, I have seen him trying to behave like a cat and clamber up trees to get at birds he has spotted. Swallows dipping and diving to and from their nests in the barn would send him into a frenzy.
We used to have two more Vizslas and an ever so sweet-looking black retriever-like stray called Shiela, a present from Max the tramp, whose home was a cargo container in a nearby field. It soon became apparent why he wanted to be rid of her. Shiela was a ruthless killer. Vizslas are semi-aquatic, like otters, and the four dogs, with streetwise Shiela as pack leader, used to find ways to escape from our well-fenced land and go hunting. I once found the area outside the barn littered with the corpses of different types of duck that they must have brought back from a lake three miles away. They also managed – though it was never proven beyond reasonable doubt – to polish off a 30-strong flock of chickens belonging to a neighbor, a farmer called Dante, who thankfully did not make too much of a fuss. After all, it could have been foxes – or wolves.
Poor, poor dog. That his life should come to this: humiliated by chickens
The other dogs are all dead as a result of poisoning, probably from eating bits of meat laced with rat poison by local hunters, which my wife Carla is convinced they tossed over the fence on to our land in the dead of night. Certainly, it could not have been Dante, as we paid him for the chickens and I am pretty sure he is a benign presence.
Rocco has survived two poisonings, as we were able to get him to the vet in time for the vital vitamin K1 antidote jab. But he is now 13. When the chickens arrived we kept him on a lead just in case, but there was no need. Chickens are surprisingly aggressive eaters of anything, even each other, and these ones are so unfazed by Rocco that he is forced to gobble down his own food at breakneck speed as they huddle round him and peck his snout and try to steal it. Poor, poor dog. That his life should come to this: humiliated by chickens. He has started to follow me about and lie down on the floor near me in what is called my study. If I get up to go to another room, he comes too.
“Rocco’s following me about like death,” I announced to Carla and our six children at dinner. “Why me? Why not any of you?”
“Beh, ovvio, no?” replied Carla. “He senses that you and he are in the same boat.”
Samuel Johnson and Winston Churchill both suffered from periodic bouts of serious depression, which they used to call the black dog on their back. Well, in addition to that, I also have the brown dog by my side 24/7.
Magdalena and Simone met at the music school in Forlì, a 40-minute bus ride away, which they both attend. He looks like a cross between Roger Daltrey of the Who and Jim Morrison of the Doors. And, of course, away from school, he has a band in which he plays modern stuff on keyboards and dominates the situation as the leader. Here we go, I feared. Personally, I have always found rock and pop musicians insufferable. It is not simply my envy of their ability to play an instrument so well – and thus to pull women. They are a symptom of a diseased, narcissistic society. To start with, however, I was pleasantly surprised: here for once was a musician not sick with self-worship and who was even, I dared to believe, simpatico.
But in the end, the siren call of his music proved more powerful than the allure of his girlfriend and she had had enough. It was the chief chicken, Giulia, that made me see the writing was on the wall a couple of weeks ago. Magdalena and Simone were sitting at a table in the garden behind the house with two of her girlfriends, both musicians as well, when Giovanni Maria, our 14-year-old son, crept up behind Simone with Giulia in his arms. “Go on, stroke her!” he demanded. Simone leapt away in fear. But he was also angry. Magdalena and the other girls were burst out laughing.
Magdalena does not seem troubled by the end of the first love story of her life. I’m not sure if that is good or bad. And she has changed her WhatsApp photo from the smiling young faces of her and her boyfriend to her on a sofa cradling in her lap Giovanna, the chicken with the limp. I wonder what these chickens have got in store for us next.
