Free My First Seven Years (Plus a Few More) by Dario Fo Page B

the equipment, I took the lorry up there to the top of the road which sweeps down … and away we go!, full steam ahead towards the lakeside, dragging behind me the fishing line which is now soaring up into the sky like a kite. The lorry reaches the quay: screech of breaks, and VROOOOM, the huge mast cracks like a whip and hurls the line out towards the centre of the lake, distributing the baited hooks and the floats with great precision.
    â€˜It was all just as I had expected. A wind got up from the land and pushed the bait and floats further out into the lake. The high waves made the water turn dark blue. “Here we go,” I shouted, “in no time whole shoals of them’ll be biting,” and in fact next thing the floats were going under like ducks after fish. This is the moment. I get onto the lorry and get ready to start pulling in the line. Right! Gently does it if we’re not to break the cord. I start off up the road, the pylon bends so far over that my heart skips a beat, but it holds. Pull, pull … fish, fish! Not a one! And yet I must have caught something! What could possibly be dragging with such force? Christ in heaven, I had caught the bells from the church tower in Cannero … on the other side of the lake!’
    But the real master of the story-tellers was undoubtedly Ravanèl, who owed his nickname to the fact that he had a shock of bright red hair that made him resemble a ravanello, a radish. The stories he told were nearly all dramatisations of an event which had really occurred, perhaps even recently, and was thus still in everyone’s memory. He would start off, for instance, with the tale of someone who had gone mad. They had come to take him away in the morning, dragging him down from the bell-tower where he was roosted, pissing with considerable panache on the faithful below as they walked in procession on some saint’s day. They loaded him onto the specially padded van for the insane, the one which the council had made available for emergency transport to the mental asylum in Varese. The glass-blower’s trade, it has been established, is a cause of silicosis, which can lead to bouts of madness. It was for that reason that the Valtravaglia could boast the highest output of madmen on the entire lake.
    On this subject, I remember the story of a man who got it into his head that he could fly. There was another one about a man who used to walk around in the nude with a suit painted onto his skin. Then there was the man who had jumped off a bridge or the one who had burned down his house after hanging all his hens.
    Generally madness was a pretext to talk about the people who surrounded the madman: the priest who wanted to bless or exorcise him, the doctor who said it was all a matter of sexual depression, and so on … right up to the mayor, the wife, her lover, the police sergeant.
    The figure of the other, of the unpredictable, of the illogical has always held a fascination for me, but what interested me most was achieving mastery of the techniques of story-telling itself.
    Take, for instance, another narrator who was always playing billiards, a game he loved. He was known as ‘Braces’: he was tall and thin, and always wore two garish, red elastic straps to hold up his trousers. He was also called ‘Sorry Braces’ because before every game he would put on an overall so as not to wear out his trousers by rubbing them against the edge of the billiards table. As the game progressed, using as a pretext some phrase uttered by his opponent, he would stop the game for a moment to introduce some incident, some story. He would circle round the table, eyeing the balls and telling his story at the same time, carrying on with the performance as he prepared his shot. The game no longer existed: all that mattered was the tale. He played on heedlessly, scrutinising the green table and never putting down the cue which, as he went on narrating,