9. The Killing of the Pig

mong the rituals in the village of Falconara, none equaled in importance the killing of the pig. It was less the symbolism of the act--its heralding the approach of the holiday season--than the fact that the pig's death signified survival. Without the pig, the family would not have meat on the table during the dark part of the year when the cold winds blew down from the north and brought snow to the hills above the village.

     The killing of the pig occurred late fall after the townspeople quit their labor in the fields and began to prepare for winter. They had to wait until the coming of winter to kill the pig, since nobody in the village owned a refrigerator. Mussolini would bring electricity to Falconara in the 1930's, but even the wealthier families had little more than a cord and a single bulb to light the main room of their homes.

     The pigs were acquired each September, the second weekend of the month during the annual festival of the madonna del buonconsiglio, the village's main religious celebration, when merchants also came to town selling wares, including piglets. Each family would buy one pig. Nobody attempted to breed pigs, the raising of pigs being as much for

ceremony as for business. The townspeople would cultivate their newly purchased pig for one year plus two months for the ritual slaughter. In the meantime, they would have killed the pig purchased and fattened the previous year. The killing of the pig was something that you could count on, look forward to, and it brought structure to their otherwise meager lives in which the main activity for most of the year was to labor and sleep.

      The killing of the pig was an important act, not one to be taken lightly, therefore it could be entrusted only to the leader of the clan, the patriarch, which in the case of the Tocci family inevitably meant Francesco Tocci, nicknamed Chico.

      When it came time for the ritual killing, the pig was not merely clubbed over the head then butchered, because you do not do that to an animal who has lived beneath your home for fourteen months, who in a sense has become part of your family, a pet for your children. The deed was too important to be done in the dark, and without witnesses--although in retrospect, a simple blow on the head might have been kinder to the pig.

      Instead, the stronger men in the family would gather at the home on the ground floor where the pig was kept. They gathered solemnly, for this was not a duty to be taken lightly. Uncertain why he had become the center of attention, the pig would do little more than grunt uneasily. The memory of what had happened to his predecessor twelve months past had faded. Meanwhile, the eyes of those who appeared for the ritual would dart back and forth to ascertain that each of the participants was present and ready. There would be a moment of solemn anticipation before a head would nod ever so slightly. In the flash of an eyelid, so quick that the nod must have been anticipated rather than seen, a rope looped around one of the pig's legs causing the puzzled pig to be toppled to the ground. There would be a dreadful protest, the pig squealing with fear and anger, set upon by the men who bound his legs and carried him to the place where the slaughter would take place. The patriarch of the family, in this case Chico, did not participate in this preparation of the pig. As surgeon, he would appear only at the proper moment, to slit the pig's throat with a knife whose blade was fourteen inches long, its cutting edge honed to razor sharpness.

     The killing of the pig was only the start of the ritual that began with the first flow of blood as the knife with the fourteen-inch blade was drawn firmly across the pig's neck. With the possible exception of the pig's hooves, hardly any of the animal was wasted. The pig would be consumed almost in total. Even the red liquid running from the wound in the neck was collected in a cup and stirred to prevent it from coagulating, to be made later into blood pudding.

     After the pig was dead, the men lifted it into a wooden basin, so it could be soaked with boiling water, the whiskers scraped. Some of these whiskers were made into brushes for use while shaving. The pig's rear legs were pried apart and tied to a two by four and hung from the ceiling. The man in charge of butchering the pig then would slice the pig open from testacles to neck and strip the meat from the bones. The intestines were cleaned, boiled, soaked in fresh lemon juice, then reboiled and resoaked and eventually used as casings for the sausage. The large hunks of ham would be salted to preserve them. Other parts, such as the feet, would be pickled. Pig's fat was placed in jars to be used in cooking. Meat portions also would be presented to those families not fortunate enough to have their own pig: widows, poor people, the elderly, in the case of the Toccis, Sera and her two daughters. Other pieces of meat could be bartered for grain, potatoes, other needed goods. And so even after death, the pig remained with the family a long time. Spring would come before the last of its remains would have been thrown into the pot to make minestrone. Then through the warm months, as families labored in the fields from dawn to dusk, they could look forward to when the next pig would be slaughtered. Summer was a time without fresh meat in the village, unless a cow fell from a cliff and broke its leg.

     And so it had gone from year to year and from century to century in the small village. Who knows who slaughtered the first pig in Falconara; perhaps the seven families had brought the tradition with them from Albania. Chico would remain the head of the Tocci clan until one November in the late 1930's, when the pig was ready to be killed, and the men went to the basement and roped it and dumped it squealing into the wooden basin. Then they sent for Chico, by then aged over seventy, and he appeared still with mustache waxed, still with full head of curly hair, though white, still with soft eyes and gentle manner, but barely able to walk. They handed Chico the knife with its fourteen-inch blade, but as he grasped the knife and moved it to the neck of the squealing pig, his hand shook. For a moment he held the knife against the pig's neck, but in his old age Chico could not find the strength to sink the blade. Or perhaps he could not find the will, faced as he was in these late years with his own mortality. Finally, he handed the blade to Domenico DeLossa, the husband of one of his mistress Sera's daughters, the father of Carolina.

     “Er di la fine to Chico,” Francesco Tocci said. It has come, the end of Chico. He could no longer slay the pig, and so the leadership of the family passed on to another. Within a few years, Chico was dead.

Chapter 10 >

Falconara: A Family Odyssey

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