Pig Man’s real name was Roland Trucchi. The children who studied in the Convento di Ossucio gave him that name, they said, because he was the man who would slaughter the pigs and sheep that were brought down from the Refugio near Croce. In actual fact, the name was rather cruelly derived from Roland Trucchi’s appearance, and as it seemed rather fitting, the parents of the children also began to refer to him as Pig Man, although never to his face.
Roland was a stout man, barrel-chested, with thick hairy arms that bulged out of the sleeves of his plaid shirts. What little neck he had was covered by a flap of hair, cut into a rough bowl-shape like that of a five year-old boy. He wore dense glasses that poked out from his straw-like fringe, and his eyes were fixed with the nonjudgemental expression of a man who had spent his life happily engaged in simple labour.
His presence on one of the steep wooden staircases leading up into the Oratorio could be detected by the sound of heavy, shambling footfalls and the jangling of the keys that hung perpetually from the back pocket of his trousers. The children, most of whom came from the surrounding towns on the Western fork of the lake, would catch the smell of tallow on his clothes, and whisper about the smell of ‘dead pig’ that would linger in the room after Pig Man had left.
Madre Elena, responsible for the running of the convent, didn’t like Roland coming into the classrooms whilst the children were studying. Not for the smell, of course, but because the boys would seize on Roland’s visits as an ideal distraction, and ask him macabre questions about how he’d killed the latest batch of pigs. Roland, who ate meat at every meal and thought the art of efficient slaughter was something that all children should know about, would answer bluntly, never sensing the significance of the stony glances that Madres Elena would shoot at him from behind their desks. The other boys would pick up cue and ask more questions about internal organs or death cries in order to stall the class, and Roland would stand and answer matter-of-factly, his arms hanging either side of his belly, until one of the Madres would politely apologise for the children’s behaviour and ‘allow Signor Roland to leave the room in peace’.
Roland’s job at the convent, located on an island just offshore from Menaggio, Lake Como, was that of caretaker/ groundskeeper. It was only a small nunnery, but the Sisters of Ossucio liked to keep it pristine and immaculate. Perhaps this was for the benefit of the various Padri or Obispi who would visit for a week or so of ritiro throughout the year, or perhaps it was the case that, whilst these women devoted the entirety of their lives to God – their thoughts, their prayers, their femininity – it suddenly became much more important that everything around them was presentable, in order and offering no reminder of the natural chaos of the world. The Sisters lived a secluded, low-key existence, and in their darkest moments, such a thing as a misplaced hymnal or a key hanging on the wrong peg could call all of their life’s work into question.
Roland, however, brought a comforting and uncontroversial presence to the island.
He’d been raised in Croce, located up the mountain pass between lakes Como and Lugano, and, like many other children in the region, had been sent to the Oratorio every weekend by his parents. Roland had cared very little for bible studies or singing hymns with the other kids, but had enjoyed the time he’d had to walk around the handsome island alone, imagining that the whole thing belonged to him, that he was responsible for repelling fleets of invading Huns or Mongols that set sail from the banks of Menaggio or Varenna.
As he had grown older, inherited his parents’ land and fell into a life of small-scale agriculture, he would still bring meat and olive oil to the Sisters, and still take walks around the island, trimming the odd overhanging branch or sifting stray fish hooks from the rock shallows of the emerald lake. His life as a general tinkerer had given him a way with his hands, and it seemed natural that, when the previous caretaker had a stroke and retired to his Bellagio townhouse, Roland brought his tools down from Croce and filled the vacant position. It wasn’t a well-paid job, but those who worked for the church around Lake Como always seemed to inherit a plentiful supply of fresh, seasonal produce from the bountiful back gardens and fruit markets of Menaggio.
On this particular day, Roland had rowed to Menaggio to take some fresh pork cutlets and a letter that Madre Elena had written to Padre Angelo di Valsolda, who was in residence at the town church. He then went to pick up a large bag of ripe figs from Signora Bazzolo in the shoe shop, and some thick bunches of basil, oregano and salvia from Signor Carella, who owned the restaurant that overlooked the lake.
He returned to the island in the midday sun, mooring his boat to a wooden pole and leaving the bag of figs and herbs on the windowsill of the communal kitchen.
Now, although he often rode back to Croce on his dirt bike in the evenings, he did have his own small room above the food preparation building, and it was there that he headed to pick out a fresh shirt, into which he would change after showering.
Sister Francesca, the youngest of the Ossucio nuns, had lived on the island of for six years. She’d decided to dedicate her life to God at a relatively young age, having grown up away from her parents in a Catholic all-girls school near Genova. She’d never expected much from life, and what she’d always wanted was that that she’d always known – security, structure and a reassuring sense of belonging. She didn’t have a high-school education like the other Sisters, and so wasn’t responsible for teaching the children. But she made herself useful in directing the house-cleaning rituals that took place every morning and evening, and spent the rest of her day cooking, sewing or maintaining the candles and flowers in the chapel. The other Sisters in the convent, the Madre in particular, liked her for her quiet and nervous demeanour, which prevented her from being a threat to their preferred way of doing small, everyday things on Ossucio. Her pleasures were simple – good food, a walk by the lake and waking up early to pray in the candlelight.
Sister Francesca was in the kitchen when she heard Signor Roland’s heavy footsteps and saw him leave the bag on the kitchen windowsill. She used some of the oregano and salvia to boil a tea for Sister Chiara, who had been complaining of an upset stomach from the previous night’s Melanzana alla Parmigiana. Realising that she’d left the tea strainer on her dresser upstairs, Sister Francesca walked to her room to collect it.
The late summer sun hovered directly above the island, and not even the tall cypress trees could shade the convent from its dry, withering heat. Sister Francesca opened the shuttered blinds of her window to let in some of the freshwater breeze that blew in from across the lake. Her eye was immediately drawn to the window opposite hers, above the food production building.
Signor Roland had returned from his shower with a towel around his waist. His hair hung in wet strands about his face, and the sun’s rays carved shafts of falling vapour into the room behind him. The Sister’s eyes lingered on Roland’s flabby skin, which glistened with a reddish-pink hue, and then travelled up to his large biceps, which had been pumped full of blood from the days rowing. She saw how his shoulders looked without the cover of a plaid shirt, the red V-shape where the sun had caught his neck.
Roland had taken off his glasses, and it was for this reason that when he looked at Sister Francesca, all he saw was a white shape – a table cloth or a gently swaying towel – hanging in the window frame. Thus, he dropped his own towel and stomped over to his bed, where he had layed out his clothes.
For the first time in her life, Sister Francesca was struck by how the frame of a man’s back receeded and then curved outwards into a stack of, in Roland’s case, large, Rubenesque buttocks. She marvelled at how a man could stride around freely, so relaxed in the company of his own nudity, and, just before Roland hopped into his underwear, she saw – nay, felt – the swinging presence of a man’s sexual anatomy. Carnal images dropped into her mind and spread like inkblots. She longed to be alone in the room with Signor Roland, to be able to run her fingers along the contours of his back, to feel his strong hands holding her hips in place, moving in such a way that made her experience some new, otherwordly sensations that would be at once soft, heavy and irresistible.
The half-minute for which Sister Francesca stood rooted to the spot, unable to take her eyes away from the man’s flesh, seemed like a half-hour, and it was with a rush of shame that she slammed closed the shutters that she had only just opened, and sat at the end of her bed, shellshocked.
The image of Signor Roland’s body seared itself onto her brain, and she sat, helpless, as an obsession formed and began to expand slowly in her mind like warm dough. Whole segments of her childhood, particular recollections of sights and smells, could now be explained, retrospectively, by her lust for this man. Around this obsession her late-blooming sexuality would continue to grow, and it would, forever more, take the blissfully ignorant shape of Roland the Pig Man.
(Written in Chacas, Peru, in 2013.)