Barba Giovanni And The Sausage

Who would have thought that in Greci the Christmas was silent? My father was hidden in the last room of the house and he was covering his ears. My uncle and Barba Giovanni needed to kill the pig, chasing it around the garden along with our dogs. It was like a hunting feast in a much smaller universe. There were hundreds of pigs in the village gathered around in a concert of pain. The only day when my father was suffering as well. He would have never let us see his tears for the pig.

It is so cold outside. The trees are covered in ice. It feels like I am living in a world of frozen glass. I am curious about the hunting. I never saw it before but this time I am outside alone looking horrified at how the hunter slaughtered the poor creature. All that immense white for an instant has a hint of colour. The blood was spread all over the garden and in a moment the suffering was released and the concert was ended. It is again silent. My father is out from the house asking for a glass of grappa:

- Go and bring the shit from the basement, then take the bread card and buy the bread.

Although our kitchen was extremely simple, I really cannot find certain things. The bread card was a piece of paper like a small calendar encrypted with the number of the family members and the amount of bread you could buy in each day. I found it and I go to the bakery. There was a crowd of children every day in front of the bakery, waiting for the obligatory 200 grams, the maximum quanitity you could acquire for each person. Sometimes we fight for the place in the queue. I lose every time. My shoes are full of cold water. They are peiced becasue I wear them all the time. My hands are stuck to the bag and I can feel ice forming inside my nostrils. I never had a scarf. So I cannot fight anymore and I am waiting quietly for the last piece of bread that I can buy. I am looking up. The sky is aslo like glass. I have never seen it as clean and as deep. In the corner of the street, like a geyser, a red line of stars is jumping noisely into the horizon. All the eyes were pointing in that direction because this kind of image can only be seen on the National Day or on New Year's Eve. Can it be a firework? No. This time it is something new and dangerous. Everybody runs into the houses but I am not losing my place in the queue. If I am going back home without bread, I will be punished. But even so, the baker closed his shop and I have no choice but to return back home empty handed.

It is very difficult to walk home in winter adn on that day, it took an eternity. Every second in every corner of the village, I could hear a scream of a woman or of a child, restoring in this way that painful concert. But it was a human one this time. I could see my mother waiting for me at the door of our house. She is crying:

- Come quickly. Take your sisters and go immediately to the basement. Do not whisper a word.

- But mum, it is already much too cold in the basement. What am I going to cover Geo with and why are we going in the basement? The baker closed and it is not my fault, thinking that I am being punished for coming home without any bread.

- Shut up and do exactly what I told you. Your father and I will be there soon.

I enter the house to take my sisters. My family was gathered around the dead pig in our kitchen and Barba Giovanni tried to explain what was happening. God himself ran away in a helicopter from the central community building in Bucharest. The Father of the nation, the national hero, the commerade was hunted like a pig by the people that he starved in the last 25 years. Communist security opened fire against the people all over the country everywhere. Now I understand that the firework was not a firework but a river of bullets from automatic guns:

- Why did you not send them down, says Barba Giovanni to my mother. Today we are not making sausages anymore.

- Go now, says my mum full of anger.

I an taking a blanket, putting my sister in it, covering her well and along with my other 2 sisters, we descend to the basement. We are quiet:

- Hold her for a while and do not say anything. I am going out to see what is happening. I leave my baby sister in the hands of the oldest one. I open the small window of the basement and squeeze through it. I have my caterpult with me. I pick up some small rocks from the ground, place them in my pockets and run from the back yard into the street. On the way to the town hall I meet my best mates Dan , Vicky, Bep and Cesar:

- What in the name of God is happening?

- Who knows, The commerade was put down...

- Did somebody go to the town hall?

I feel like making my own revolution. I am going to destroy the portrait of the dictator with my caterpult, that icon who watched us every second of our lives and who we feared so much since the day that we were born. I will be proud to do it. I am standing here in front of it, looking at it with hatred:

- Don't do it. If he is not going to die.

- I am going to do it for not yet eating a sausage in my life, for being punished when I did not return home with bread and for those shoes with water in them.

The sound of the broken glass entered so deep in to my heart as I really felt that my own war against Ceausescu succeeded. I was so happy but I wished to cry, starved frozen but a real hero.

Barba Givanni was the sausage maker of the village. He has his own old italian traditional recipe: pork, a bit of beef, a sauce with garlic and a drop of red wine, all that in pure interstines. His sausages remained fresh from one Christmas to the next. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to eat them. Except for my father. This year was supposed to be our first sausage year as the pig was really big. It grew as though it knew that we would be released from that blind hunger in which we lived for all our lives.