Floods, convents, and unpromising counts: Ida Pavan learns how to endure life, while Gianalberto mainly learns how to wait for it

Ironical crime novel: The Recipe of the Pelican Farmhouse. Chapter 2: Ida Pavan and the emotional education of an unlikely count

Ida Pavan was a small woman, worn by time like the walls of an old farmhouse that had endured rain, sun, and fog for decades, yet still stood upright with a resilience that defied explanation. She was seventy-eight years old and possessed an energy that, from the outside, felt almost like a provocation to logic: she moved quickly and precisely, with the calm urgency of someone who had learned as a child that time is a concrete thing—something that is consumed and never returned.

She had been born in the Polesine, a flat and stubborn land where the horizon is a line and, in winter, the sky seems to sink until it touches the fields. Her family were farmers, yes, but “farmers” was too gentle a word. It would have been more accurate to call them tenant farmers—people without land and without a house of their own, surviving by working other people’s fields, paying rent and debts with effort and silence. They were always one step behind life: one step behind bread, one step behind coal, one step behind shoes.

Hunger was not a sensation; it was background noise—one of those sounds that, if you live with it long enough, you stop noticing. And the cold did not stay outside. It was not something endured only in the fields: the cold entered the house, slipped through the cracks in the walls, lingered in the beds, in the hands, in the bones. Ida learned early on that “home” was a place where you sheltered from the worst, not a place where you felt good.

Then came the flood of 1951.

In the Polesine it is still remembered the way one remembers events that change both geography and character. The Po swelled like a wounded beast, and when the embankments gave way, the water did not enter—it invaded. It arrived with a terrifying calm, because water, when it decides to come, is never in a hurry. It spread across the fields, climbed into courtyards, entered stables, seeped into houses. It carried with it the smell of mud, rotting wood, wet straw, death, and a strange silence, broken only by distant cries, the braying of animals, and the sound of objects falling.

Ida was four years old. At that age you do not understand tragedy; you only understand that everything changes too fast. She saw her mother hastily packing what could be taken: a few rags, a blanket, a piece of stale bread. She saw her father with mud-covered hands and eyes injected with fear—a fear held back, because even fear, in certain families, is a luxury. The house filled with water, the floor disappeared beneath an opaque surface. Chairs floated, washbasins bumped against the walls, and the cold of the water crept upward like an illness.

They had to leave everything. Like so many other families, with the same desperate dignity: no one really cried, because crying takes time, and they only had urgency. The urgency to save their skin, the urgency to find a dry place, the urgency not to lose even what little remained—the children.

And Ida, at four years old, was the kind of “little” that weighs enormously when you have nothing. Not because her parents did not love her. It is that, under certain conditions, love shrinks into survival. And survival means making dirty choices—choices you do not talk about, choices that later leave a taste of iron on your tongue.

So, amid the chaos of the flood and the exodus, as villages turned into lines of people carrying bundles and animals on leashes, as the future narrowed to “today” and “tomorrow,” Ida became—without guilt and without culprits—more a mouth to feed than a daughter. A small mouth, certainly, but one more mouth.

They took her to the parish priest.

The village priest, together with the nuns, was gathering the most needy children. They lined them up, counted them, washed them as best they could, tried to give them a name and a destination. It was a rescue operation carried out with poor means and a tenacity that, in a way, resembled that of the tenant farmers: they too owned nothing, yet tried to hold the world together with their hands.

Ida did not understand right away. She thought it was a visit, a passage, something temporary. Children do not understand farewells until it is too late. The parents spoke little. There are words that, in certain families, are never spoken because they would make everything collapse. The priest nodded, the nuns took Ida by the hand, and her mother’s hand hesitated for a moment. Then it let go. A brief decision, a clean cut, made in the name of hope—that elsewhere Ida might at least be able to eat.

That was the beginning of her pilgrimage.

From parish to parish, from charitable association to charitable association, Ida migrated from Veneto to Lombardy as the desperate did back then: without a real departure and without a real arrival, moved rather than accompanied, passed from hand to hand like an urgent letter. She remembered stations, long corridors that smelled of soup, dormitories with aligned beds, the voices of nuns speaking softly and firmly, and that constant anxiety about behaving well—because being “good” was the only way not to be left behind.

She arrived in Pavia, at a convent of Poor Clare nuns.

The convent was a world apart: thick walls, high windows, rules that seemed written into the air. There, for the first time, Ida had a routine. It was not freedom, but it was stability. They woke early, cleaned, helped in the kitchen, learned to keep silent when required. The nuns were not cruel; they were strict in the way those with little time and many responsibilities know how to be. And they had a concrete mission: to keep those children alive, to turn them into “useful” people for someone.

When Ida turned eight, the abbess began to worry about the future of those small guests the way one worries about a supply that is running out. They could not stay there forever. The convent was not a family; it was a bridge. And a bridge, however solid, is meant to be crossed.

And so the abbess began to “place” the children with well-off families—homes that needed hands, but could also guarantee a bed, a hot meal, some clothes. It was an unwritten pact, a rough compromise: work in exchange for survival. For Ida, it meant another transfer, another cut, another “from today on.”

When they told her she would be going to the Lomellina, Ida did not even know what it was. She was taken there by train, with a small bundle and a name in her pocket. She arrived in Sommo Lomellina on a day of flat light, with air that smelled of water and earth, and the Marchetti farmhouse before her—large and severe, like something not open to discussion.

She was thus handed over to the family of Count Marchetti.

There was a different order in that house, an agricultural discipline that Ida immediately recognized—not because she had lived it, but because it was made of the same substance as her childhood—fatigue, rules, roles—only without hunger. And she, small as she was, quickly understood what was expected of her: no tears, no questions, no memories. Presence. Obedience. Usefulness.

And yet, as she crossed that threshold, Ida felt something she would not easily allow herself: not joy, not hope, but a simple and enormous relief. The smell of bread in the kitchen, a dry floor, a room that did not tremble with the wind. It was little, perhaps. But for a child from the Polesine who had seen water carry away a house and poverty carry away a childhood, that little was already a kind of fortune.

And it was there, within the walls of the Marchetti farmhouse—one day to be called the Pelican Farmhouse—that Ida Pavan began her second life. Not as a child, not quite as a daughter, but as a necessary presence. One of those whom no one openly thanks, yet who, without making noise, hold things together when everything else is already giving way.

For the counts, Ida did everything. At first a servant, nameless and without hours, then, as she grew, the countess’s personal maid—a role that gave her no power but responsibility, which was the only form of recognition granted to those who did not belong to the family. Ida worked in silence, with the attentive precision of someone who knows that, for people like her, a mistake is never just a mistake but a fault.

The Marchetti house was large, orderly, governed by ancient rhythms. Everything had its place, and every person their perimeter. Ida quickly learned to move without being noticed, to appear only when needed, to disappear immediately afterward. She had become part of the farmhouse’s human furnishings: indispensable and invisible, like a door no one notices until it is missing.

Then Gianalberto was born.

An unattractive child, let’s say it without unnecessary indulgence. Not tragically ugly, but ugly in that uncertain way that always leaves you wondering whether, growing up, he might improve. He had a strange cry, muffled, that sounded more like a suppressed laugh than a real wail. A sound that made one uncomfortable, because it did not truly call for help and did not express pain—it seemed like the ironic comment of someone not particularly eager to be in the world.

Perhaps even the countess realized it. Perhaps, in some corner of her conscience, she sensed that she had not put her full effort into producing that child and that the result, indeed, had not been excellent. But so be it: a son he was, and a son he would remain. And, not an insignificant detail, a count. Hierarchies, at least those, were not up for discussion.

Ida followed him from the very beginning. He was practically handed over to her, as one hands over a responsibility no one really wants to exercise fully. And Ida, who truly believed in divine punishments, began to suspect that this was one of them. Not a loud punishment, not a blatant misfortune, but a subtle trial, made of patience to be consumed day after day.

The child, already burdened with an unpronounceable name—Gianalberto, all stuck together, without breath—did nothing but sleep or stick his little fingers up his nose. Then he would spend interminable minutes, absorbed, observing on his fingers the product of his work with an almost scientific attention, as if studying a phenomenon worthy of reflection. Ida watched him, sighed, and cleaned him without comment. She had learned early on that commenting was useless.

The house overflowed with toys worthy of a count: hand-carved wooden rocking horses, gleaming little trains, balance bikes built to get him started earlier than others, tin soldiers lined up like small armies ready for a war that would never come. All useless. Gianalberto showed no interest in any of it. He preferred the dog’s cushion—warm and lived-in—and above all his favorite game: the meticulous removal of foreign bodies from his nose.

He was a child who did not ask, did not demand, did not dream out loud. He simply existed. And by existing, he occupied space without justifying it—an occupation that Ida, with her practical sense of life, already found suspicious.

As the years passed, the countess lost all interest in the little count. At first she tried to convince herself it was just a phase, that ambition would arrive later, that energy would suddenly manifest, like a late bloom. “For God’s sake,” she would exclaim to herself, “he must become a man!” But time passed, and Gianalberto remained the same: apathetic, distracted, impermeable to expectations.

During Sunday Mass, seated composedly in the parish church of Sommo, the countess sometimes found herself staring at the crucifix with unusual concentration. In the most intimate moments of recollection, when prayers became thoughts and thoughts became guilt, even she arrived at the idea Ida had silently held long before: that Gianalberto was a divine punishment.

Not a punishment for something specific, but for a collection of unnamed failings. A son without drive as a warning against pride, against the presumption of continuity, against the belief that noble blood alone is enough to guarantee a future.

Ida, who would never have said such things aloud, continued to raise him. She dressed him, washed him, accompanied him, observed him with a look halfway between resignation and a rough form of affection. She no longer judged him. She took him as he was, as she had learned to take life: without expecting miracles, but without ever stopping doing what was necessary.

And in that necessity—made of small repeated gestures and dense silences—Ida Pavan was already preparing, without knowing it, the only education Gianalberto would ever truly receive: that of someone who stays by your side even when you do not seem to deserve attention.

From one divine punishment to another, the poor count grew up. He grew in health, yes—robust enough, with no notable illnesses—but very little in education. As for books, let’s be honest, he was lazy. No—he was a donkey. Not a first-class donkey, the kind that makes headlines, but a slow, silent donkey who walks beside you without anyone finding the courage to do anything about it.

No teacher ever dared tell the countess what kind of material her son was made of. No one dared pronounce words like “slacker,” which would have been the most honest definition. Gianalberto was not a troublemaker, did not disturb the class, did not talk back. He was simply insipid—a child without jolts, without curiosity, without that minimal spark that allows an adult to say, “Here, we could start from this.”

Classes were passed one after another with suspicious regularity. Promotions rained down, but not for merit: out of respect, social duty, quiet living, to avoid awkward conversations in drawing rooms where tea was served with too much care to also host the truth. And so Gianalberto passed, advanced, rose in rank the way one ages: without doing anything specific, except resisting time.

When he left compulsory schooling to enter high school, no one truly celebrated, but no one protested either. The schoolbooks he kept in his room, after eight years of school, had a singular characteristic: when opened, they creaked. The glue of the binding was still intact, untouched, as if those volumes had been designed to be preserved rather than read. Gianalberto was secretly proud of them. He considered it a sign of great respect for culture: never having disturbed it.

At home he lived almost exclusively with Ida. His parents were there, of course, but like decorative presences. When they received guests—which still happened, more out of tradition than pleasure—they confined Gianalberto to the servants’ quarters. They had a precise and scarcely confessable fear: that he might open his mouth and say something inappropriate—not out of malice, but out of lack of filters. Silence, in that case, was considered a form of preventive good manners.

Ida, who loved him in her own way, tried to encourage him. With the concreteness of a woman who had seen water carry houses away and knew the world waits for no one, she told him to do what a fourteen-year-old normally did: go out, take a bike ride, invite a friend over, borrow a horse from his father to ride through the countryside, breathe, see something beyond the farmhouse walls—maybe even try kissing a girl.

Gianalberto nodded, promised vaguely, then did nothing.

He had stopped sticking his fingers up his nose, at least—a conquest Ida welcomed as a small educational victory. In exchange, he had developed a new habit. Every afternoon, with lazy punctuality, he went behind the farm, to the manure pit.

The manure pit was a large basin where the green remains of agricultural activity were accumulated: leaves, stalks, pruning waste, spent straw, chopped field residues. Over time, and thanks to the water draining from the fields, that material turned into excellent fertilizer. It was, in essence, a place where life ended only to begin again in another form.

The edges of the pit were a small world of their own. Toads and frogs lived there, invisible but noisy crickets, distracted butterflies, curious birds, opportunistic hens, cautious mice, and the occasional passing animal attracted by the result of that slow transformation. An undeclared ecosystem, ignored by humans and perfectly functional.

There Gianalberto would sit, always in the same spot. He would take out a leather notebook—a gift from his father, probably intended for very different purposes—and a pencil. And he would begin to count the animals he saw.

One. Two. Three.

He wrote slowly, with an almost meditative slowness. Not out of philosophical choice, but because writing and counting were, for him, an effort. Each number was the result of a small negotiation with fatigue. He was in no hurry. He never had been.

Ida, when she watched him from a distance, shook her head and sighed. She did not know whether that was a sign of some hidden vocation or just another way of avoiding the world. But, in doubt, she let him be. After all, she thought, better to count frogs than to cause damage.

And so, while everyone expected something from him that never arrived, Gianalberto grew up sitting on the edge of a manure pit, a pencil in hand and time in front of him. He did not learn much, it is true. But, without knowing it, he was already practicing the only discipline that would remain faithful to him for his entire life: the patient art of observing without intervening.

At his final exam he did, as was entirely predictable, a meager performance. Four words here, three there, one “I don’t know,” two “I don’t remember,” all distributed with disarming calm, as if time were his natural ally. The teachers exchanged disheartened and frightened looks, because, against all academic evidence, they would have to make a decision that had nothing to do with merit and everything to do with opportunity. Failing a Marchetti—a count, no less—was not an educational gesture; it was a political act. And no one on that committee had a vocation for martyrdom.

Gianalberto, meanwhile, sat there with a now full beard, broad shoulders, roguish blue eyes that seemed to promise much more than they ever delivered, and a lock of black hair rebelliously falling over his forehead. No pomade was needed; that lock had inherited his grandfather’s anarchic bend. In him, however, it was the only truly rebellious thing. For the rest, calm seas—a complete existential doldrum.

Having passed the exam—because he did, naturally—his classmates organized a graduation party on a barge moored on the Ticino, not far from Pontevecchio in Pavia. One of those ideas that, at eighteen, seem brilliant no matter what. Gianalberto arrived with the driver and a bottle of sweet wine from the Oltrepò Pavese, one of those delights to be drunk respectfully, sip by sip, letting the taste slowly cross mouth, palate, and stomach. He was convinced it was the most appropriate contribution to the evening.

It was the first party of his life, and the impact was traumatic. Music at an impossible volume, dim lights—no, a kind of thick darkness—and a concentration of hormones that alone could have kept the barge afloat without pontoons. There were people dancing, laughing, kissing, and others already several chapters ahead of the official plot of the evening.

He presented himself at the entrance. The security guard, a hulking man who looked like he disliked surprises, asked for his name. And Gianalberto fired off his verbal double-barrel, dry and breathless:

“Gianalbertomarchetti!”

The man stared at him for a long time, then slowly scanned the list. He found nothing. He looked up.

“First name, last name, and class… spell it out.”

Gianalberto obeyed, syllable by syllable, as if reading a Latin inscription. In the end, with a shrug, the bouncer concluded:

“Go on in.”

All the while following him with his eyes, as one watches rare animals at the zoo.

He went down a few steps and landed in a world that, in others’ intentions, was supposed to drag him into life. But his hormones did not start. They remained still, probably on strike. So Gianalberto began to walk around the barge, observing here and there, greeting people left and right, always with the bottle of Oltrepò wine in his hand, never once considering the rather sensible idea of setting it down at the bar.

He walked proudly in his brown corduroy jacket, sober tie, hunting vest, forest-green corduroy trousers with impeccable creases, and polished shoes with embroidered tips. An apparition from another time. He paid no attention to his classmates’ clothing—jeans, sneakers, miniskirts, tight T-shirts—nor did he seem disturbed by the displays of affection exchanged on the dimly lit sofas: kisses, wandering hands, great collective commitment.

After an hour he had already completed four full laps of the barge. He had greeted everyone. Literally everyone. And now he no longer knew what to do. How does one end a party when one has never really begun it?

The boldest and most erotic idea that came to his mind was to go to the bow to listen to the croaking of frogs along the river. A familiar, reassuring call. Too bad he did not have his faithful notebook. But even without numbers to jot down, he thought, the sound of frogs might be enough.

And so, while behind him youth made noise, Count Gianalberto Marchetti leaned over the dark Ticino, listening to life from afar, his bottle of wine still tightly in hand and the unmistakable feeling of having arrived, once again, in the right place… at the wrong time.