Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

C describes Sardinia’s mountainous interior as ‘purgatory’; there’s nothing there, apparently, just sheep, rocks and trees, and heaven forbid that you run out of petrol. On the map it’s mostly blank space, with small settlements linked by kinking roads marked in white – all the yellow roads, the big ones, run around the outside of the island.

But C is from the coast, so biased against his hick country cousins. He is taking me to Mamoiada to see their strange carnival. There is some question about whether this is advisable as a blood feud is raging in a nearby town, and three men were killed last month.

Of course when we arrive it doesn’t look Godfathery at all; just a rather ordinary little town – low, dry-stone walls, old houses of stone and new ones of breeze blocks, one cafe with communist posters and another painted bright orange, lemon trees brightening up shabby yards.

The men of the town have turned out in their traditional costume of dark velvet suits, sturdy shoes and flat caps. The equivalent outfit for women is a black and white dress with a bonnet, apparently, but nobody is wearing it. In Asia, it’s always the women who wear traditional dress, while the men are in cheap modern clothes; in Italy it seems to be the other way around.

Carnivale takes place all over Italy, but is everywhere different; in sophisticated Venice, for example, it is a time for peacocking in delicate porcelain masks. Here, appropriately for the setting, it is more pagan and gnarly.

A few dozen men dress up and parade as ‘Mamuthones’. They wear sinister, black wooden masks with hooked noses, beetle brows and pointed chins, and a shaggy sheepskin coat. All down the back of this coat bells face out like barnacles on a rock, with a big bell at each shoulder giving the wearer the look of a muscular hunchback. These are the negative figures, or bad spirits.

The positive figures, the ‘Issahadores’, walk in front. Here they come, looking rather dandyish in delicate white masks, red jackets and white trousers. They carry lassoos which they use, with some skill, to loop girls in the crowd. The girl either takes the lassoo off or lets herself be gently pulled in and kissed on the cheek.

They target any girl with a camera. A lady on a balcony is lassooed; she tosses the rope down but is re roped by another Issahadore, and by the time she has dealt with that, the first has re-roped her – much to the crowd’s amusement. I imagine this part of things was once a bit more full-on but what I saw was all very polite.

Though these guys are technically the leaders they seem pallid compared to the glowering menace of the bell wearers. The Mamuthones parade in two lines, and every three steps make, in unison, a lop-sided jumping stamp, to ring the bells. A shiver of excitement tinged with trepidation passes through the crowd. The men come forward, pounding their pagan beat – those bells do not tinkle but toll, a great dolorous thump, and the beetle-browed masks look doleful and remorseless.

Thump! The crowd parts and they come through it like an invading army, and the big bells on the shoulders of their bristling coats look like armour. Thump! The eyes deep behind the mask look straight ahead. Step, step, step, thump! – and the shaggy troops pass by.

Many of the locals are in fancy dress, as clowns of witches or so on. Lads ride around on horseback, messing about like boy racers. Their whips, says C, are made of stretched and dried bull penises. Some of the young people are very beautiful – to me the sight of very attractive people in rural backwaters always looks incongruous, and tinged with pathos, though I guess that is my big city prejudices.

C takes me to a house serving refreshments and we sit by a fireplace eating toasting pecorino cheese. The local wine is thick and strong and dry – apparently only wine made on the plains can be sweet – it seems appropriate. A woman is told about me and says, ‘Oh you are a writer! Come and tell everyone about our festival! And’ – pointing at the mildewed walls and open door – ‘our fine houses and our air conditioning!’

We try to go to the little museum but are told to come back in a few hours as the directors are having serious discussions. All of Italy seems to be having serious discussions. The government has just collapsed; I saw the Italian parliament on TV and it looked like a football crowd faced with a disputed penalty – guys shouting, scuffling, waving scarves. Carlo’s town does not have a mayor thanks to local disagreements; it does not have a carnival because of arguments over who should pay. Italy is in crisis, apparently, suffering a malaise brought about by political and economic stagnation – and everyone has an opinion about what needs to be done, and no one can agree.

Trying to be encouraging, I suggest that Ireland’s economic miracle could provide a model. ‘Everyone tells us about Ireland,’ he replies, ‘but here in Sardinia no way forward is possible, because we cannot work together; we have a saying: ‘one hundred Sardinians makes one hundred chiefs.’’

As if to illustrate his point, it turns out that the paraders have argued, and split into two camps, and instead of going through the main street together, they go one after the other, as two separate groups.

Never mind; in the evening, after they’ve hit the bars, they go back up the street together in a fug of drunken camaraderie. So maybe that’s the answer to Italy’s problems; get them drunk and hit their heads together.

The preparations for a traditional sardinian festival.

Few musicians, surely, make their instrument before the performance. But that’s what Franco Tolu is doing, fitting together and holing slender lengths of reed. ‘When you’ve been making launeddas pipes for thirty years,’ he says, ‘it doesn’t take thirty minutes.’

Now he is shaping the trickiest bit, the mouthpieces, or canellino. With a pocketknife he chips two tongues into stubby reeds. He weighs them down with beeswax that was kept warm and pliant under his arm. The finished article is three pipes; two short, five-holed chanters and one long drone.

He tests it, puffing out his cheeks and blowing through all three at once. I never heard so much noise from so slight an instrument, it’s like having an elephant trumpet in your ear. The chanters make a melody, the drone a doleful wail. The pipes use the same principle as bagpipes but instead of a separate bladder, the musician fills his cheeks with air. Meanwhile, he breathes through his nose. If that sounds tricky, it is; Franco says that ‘if you don’t learn the launeddas as a child, you never will’. But he isn’t satisfied with the tone, and adds more beeswax.

I’m in the small town of Maracalagonis on the outskirts of Cagliari in southern Sardinia. While the celebrities head north to the glamorous Costa Smeralda the real heart of the island beats in little towns like this one, where an extraordinary cultural continuity is practised. Yesterday, in Cagliari’s archaeological museum, I saw a bronze figurine of a man playing a three piped instrument exactly like the one I’ve just seen made. It’s from the Nuraghic Culture, and it’s over two thousand years old.

Here, in an attractive shady courtyard, workers are preparing for Sa Festa, a feast and a show put on for local weddings and, increasingly, curious visitors. A couple of capped men roast boar piglets on spits over a crackling open fire. The pig’s skin has been lashed with thyme to strip the hairs off. Long skirted women lay out bowls of olives on crisp white tablecloths. A girl slits and curls dough to make fanciful baroque whirls. When glazed and fired, the surrealist buns will be used as decoration. She makes for me a traditional Sardinian easter egg – a flat figure of a dough woman with a wide skirt, with a boiled egg affixed over the stomach with a strip of dough. It seems bluntly pagan.

There are still a few hours before the feast is set to begin so I go for aperitif with Carlo, the manager’s son. Maracalagonis is languid in the afternoon heat. Old women sit in the shade of palm trees outside the church and young toughs stand outside bars with beers and cigarettes – the men aren’t being ominous, just law abiding, smoking being banned inside.

The bodywork of Carlo’s car is heavily scratched from trying to negotiate the town’s narrow alleyways. Over a mirto, the Sardinian liqueur made from myrtle berries, Carlo explains how the Sa Festa venture snowballed from a venue for local celebrations into a tourist attraction that can host three hundred guests in one night. He feels that this is an exception; generally the Sardinians of the south are not good at making others aware of their rich culture, and blames their insular nature.

Island races usually go out and explore the world, but not the poor Sardinians; for them, the world came and beat them up. So they retreated to the hills and looked in rather than out, over the centuries developing a culture that is rich and, to outsiders, rather strange. I think of the pictures I have seen of village festivals, where men swathed in heavy goat skins stamp and jump to make the bells hanging from their body ring. In seems a long way from the urbane sophistication of the mainland. They must be doing something right, however; these inland Sards are some of the longest living people in the world. Carlo’s convinced that that is the benefit of their diet.

We visit the Coronas, three generations of sweet makers, who are busy making Sa Festa’s exquisite deserts, with sure hands that don’t need measuring tools to get the right quantities.

Laetitia, the youngest at eighteen, is making is making amaretti cakes. She explains that nowadays most people mix the ground almonds with wheat, and decries the practise. The almonds she’s using have been roast in the wood fired oven in the courtyard then ground with a pestle and mortar.

Her mother, Christina, is making a star cake by pouring caramelised sugar, almonds and lemon peel into a wooden mould. As well as the delicious roasting almonds, I can smell oranges – Anna, the eighty four year old matriach, is grating dried peel. She’ll use it in Pardulas, little cakes make with ricotta cheese and saffron. It’s a charming cottage operation, and the ladies won’t let me leave until I’ve sampled everything.

Back at the courtyard, juniper branches have been spread across the entrance way, and their delicious fragrance is released as they are stepped on. The dancers have arrived, and are changing into the Sardinian traditional dress of long black skirts and waistcoats. Carlo tells me that not so long ago it was common to see villagers in traditional dress, but now they only wear it on special occasions.

In a side hall, the pasta operation is in full flow. One cook is whipping up fregola. It’s simply stone ground wheat mixed with water and agitated by hand until it adheres into little pellets. It’s one of the oldest forms of pasta, a staple of the Sardinian kitchen first imported from north Africa. It sounds simple to make, but there’s more to it than it looks, as I discover when I give it a go. The tricky bit is getting the lumps all about the same size. The cook reminds me to always whisk anti-clockwise and pretends I’m doing well.

Malloredus shells are being made by pressing a sheet of pasta against a basket, then rolling up finger sized smidgons. A third cook is making ravioli, moulding a paste of three kinds of cheese and folding it into a pasta package. It all looks absolutely delicious, and Iﾕm impressed with the care and dedication.

I ask Carlo what the Sardinian is for free range and organic and he doesn’t even understand the question; everything is free range and organic, so he don’t even understand the concept. He advises me not to eat too much of the sausages now sizzling in a long spiral over the fire, or the ravioli now being ladled with rich sauce, as I must leave space for the boar; it’s rich and gamey and has little fat. By now, I’m feeling incredibly hungry, and glad that the guests are starting to turn up.

Most are Italian tourists, who have paid only forty Euros for this four course feast. As they arrive they are serenaded by Franco Tulo with his langueaddas. They are given a glass of wine, Moscato (sweet) or Malvasia (dry), made from a grape that the Romans would have used.

An accordionist and a guitarist play folk songs as the chefs, now changed into traditional dress, dish out the antipasti. The spits are hoisted up like pennants, three pigs impaled on each, to great applause. Carlo proposes a toast, Franco plays a jig, the skirts of the dancers rustle as they prepare themselves, and the party starts.

| The Italian magazine | Jan 07 |