Italian Neighbors

by Tim Parks

  So many conversations in Italy follow these serpentine paths, with new laws and regulations constantly raising their ugly heads to turn the most obvious ways forward into dead ends. With the creeping sense of paranoia that results, you occasionally find that people have been imagining rules that don’t actually exist, simply because they seem to be the kind of thing the government would invent to make life more difficult and hence probably has. Was it really true, for example, that Marta would be obliged to register the number in her name. Couldn’t she register it in a child’s or grandmother’s? Or was it that if she did that they would then have to switch their residenza to Via Colombare with all the problems that entailed?

  I proceeded cautiously: when we left the flat, I said, if she asked us to leave it that is, and we rather hoped she wouldn’t because we liked it here, then this would presumably be because she had decided to sell it, or had found someone else to live in it, and in either case the new occupant would want to take over the phone, wouldn’t they?

  ‘Not if they already have one in their own name elsewhere,’ she came back. ‘Or if they want to retain residency in another province.’

  Who could have thought of this before starting the phone call? Then, when I had already given up and offered a cool arrivederci, she suggested by way of an olive branch: ‘I don’t mind writing to say that you live there, though, if you need to have residenza for other purposes.’

  How explain the elusive yet all-important significance of ‘residency’ to a Brit who merely lives where he lives and acts accordingly? Can we hazard a definition? Residency means that the state now recognises that you live where you live, or say you live (for example, in the province of X at such-and-such an address) and henceforth will distinguish you from all the people who live in another province, or country, or who do, yes, live in X but whom the state does not recognise as living where they live (in X), either because those people want to be recognised as living elsewhere (where they don’t live) and have managed by some wangle to achieve this, or because they can’t get hold of some precious documento that would allow them to demonstrate that they do in fact live where they live (in X), and must thus continue to be recognised as living where they no longer live (in Y or Z, for example).

  But does it actually matter? Well, yes. Once the state recognises that one lives where one lives, there are all kinds of benefits: the right to register your car in the area (otherwise you will have to travel to Y or Z to register it); the right to register with a local doctor; the right to apply for all kinds of local state jobs; the right to have access to certain services and benefits; the right to pay lower phone and utility bills; the right to vote; and, most importantly for us, a 2 per cent reduction on the amount of income tax withheld at source on free-lance services.

  ‘Va bene,’ I told Signora Marta, if she could write such a letter we would be very happy. ‘La ringrazio.’

  But I was puzzled. She hadn’t wanted a formal rent contract. I had half suspected that this was why she hadn’t wanted the phone number in our name: she didn’t want it to be in any way official that we lived here. And now, on the contrary, here she was offering to help us get residence. A calculated risk? Generosity?

  ‘The flat,’ Rita suggested, ‘is officially owned by Maria Rosa, who is gaga in a nursing home. How is anybody to know that we are paying into Marta’s account?’

  Still … Life is complicated. In any event the drift seems to be that the government makes well-meaning but complicated laws and people very sensibly get smart and get round them. For example, there was this business Marta had mentioned that second homes carry much higher utility bills – a popular tax-the-rich measure. However, it is quite common in Italy for the middle and even lower-middle classes to rent their real home in the city where they work and possess a small holiday flat (second home) by the sea, by one of the lakes, or in the mountains. Result: many people register themselves or their wives or children as resident in the holiday home, so as to avoid higher bills. This in turn will create all kinds of other problems. On election day, the registered residents will have to travel a couple of hundred miles to go and vote in some place whose local politics they know nothing about. So they don’t vote, you object. But, in Italy, if one doesn’t vote three times in succession, one loses certain rights … etc. etc. Bureaucracy is a huge tangle of sticky string in which every attempt to loosen one knot tightens another.

  And checks, or accertamenti, to make sure that each citizen is contributing his length of string to this tangle, are quite common. A few weeks after moving into Via Colombare, I went out on the balcony to see who had buzzed our bell and found a seriously fat man in uniform sitting on a moped with big dispatch boxes. Montecchio’s local vigile. Taking some papers out of one of these boxes, he asked me something. I asked him if he could please speak Italian. He politely switched from dialect to something more comprehensible, upon which it emerged that he had been asking me whether I lived where quite obviously I was living (wearing pyjamas, a piece of toast in my hand). I said I did. He then asked if he could come and see. And in my kitchen he explained at length about the tassa sui rifiuti, the rubbish-collection tax. This apparently was paid, not by the owner or even renter of a property, but by the head of the household actually living there whether or not resident –that is, they wanted the money and red tape was not a problem (similarly, it is perfectly normal for a foreigner to file an income-tax return without having a work permit). The person in question was me, I said. I would pay. He scratched his head, cocked it to one side, eyed me carefully from his tubby face. ‘Bon,’ he said.

  The vigile then wrote something amazingly painstakingly on his sheet of paper. While he worked, I noticed how clean his uniform was, how well-ironed his shirt, how white the little pouch on his belt. It was another day of sultry heat. Despite the weight of flesh beneath all these clothes and accessories, he was not sweating.

  He asked my name. Then asked me to spell it. Fair enough. We got through Parks quite rapidly, and were speeding through Timothy (Torino Imola Monza Otranto – I say it in my sleep sometimes) when we ran up against the age-old problem of Y which does not exist in the Italian alphabet. ‘Hotel, Epsilon.’ I finished. He hesitated, raised his head, blew out his cheeks and narrowed his eyes. What was epsilon? ‘Epsilon,’ I said, ‘is a letter.’ ‘Ah sì?’ he said. It was clear that he was used to having his leg pulled, and so had developed these mannerisms – the suspicion, the slow questioning, the stare – to make himself seem less gullible.

  Having studied me for a sufficient length of time, he decided I was not the type, said: ‘Sì, Sì, sì, d’accordo,’ and scribbled something down, I didn’t dare to ask him what. But then I had the idea of pulling out my English driving licence and offering it, ‘per una verifica’. Offended, he waved it away.

  ‘Residenza?’ he now enquired, for even if it had no bearing on my paying this tax or not it was important to write it down. Three or four times.

  I was applying for it, I said.

  ‘Stato di famiglia?’ (a document describing relationships within the family – who is the mother, the father, the head of the household, who the breadwinner, who dependent).

  I was waiting for my marriage certificate to arrive from England.

  ‘Profession?’ For everybody must be classified according to their profession.

  I told him teacher. Rather flatteringly he wrote down Professore.

  Then just as he was leaving I made the foolish mistake of remarking that we didn’t have this residency business in England.

  Again he was clearly concerned that he was being made fun of. There was the same cocking of the head, the puzzlement. He was one of those fat people who are terribly graceful, nimble almost, very aware of their bulk. He turned on his heel away from the door in almost a dance step, pushed back his cap and lowered himself on to a seat at my kitchen table. This was a serious matter.

  How was it possible, he asked, for us not to have residency?

  We didn�
�t.

  So what do you do? When you move.

  You move, I said.

  And the registration plates on the car?

  You leave them as they are.

  And your identity card?

  There are no identity cards.

  And the doctor?

  You go and register at the nearest surgery.

  He clearly didn’t believe me. It couldn’t be that easy. Not that I was lying. But I must be ingenuous. There was so much I hadn’t understood. He was wondering how he could prove this to me. He had prickly, Latin black hair cut short under his cap and he scratched at it slowly, tugged at the tubby lobe of an ear. Then he had me.

  How, he asked, would the post work?

  In what sense?

  How would they know where to bring it to, when you moved?

  I tried to be equable, offhand. Somebody wrote your address on an envelope, affixed a stamp of the appropriate denomination and the postal service would hopefully take it to that address and ask no questions.

  The man got up and left in polite disgust. Obviously it was not a country for vigili.

  I was not surprised a few weeks later when the first refuse bill arrived addressed to Parks Thimothj. As for the phone, if you open Verona’s very handsome telephone directory, you will still to this day find the name of Umberto Patuzzi covering up for whoever is enjoying the pleasure of SIP’s services at Via Colombare 10, Flat 3. Doubtless the gas bills are still in his name too. And the electricity bills, despite the curious fact that these actually include the modest charge of 7,000 Lire a year for the votive light over his grave … (second home?).

  7

  L’animale domestico

  JULY. DOG-DAYS. THE heat that is, and Vega.

  We had settled down in the flat, bought a few 100-watt bulbs, only to realise what an attraction they were to the moths and mosquitoes. We had got used to the tock-tock of midnight ping-pong from across the street, discovered that something of a breeze could be created by opening all the windows of the flat simultaneously and waggling one of the communicating doors, eaten our way through mountains of water-melons (to every season its antidote), and dedicated a shelf of the fridge to bowls of sliced peaches swimming in Valpolicella.

  We had even made our first tentative peace with Lucilla, offered our help around the house should she ever need it, assured her we would take no part in the court case pending in which Marta and Maria Rosa were to be accused of having dashed to il Professore’s bank security box only moments after his heart attack and burnt the will naming Lucilla as his sole heir.

  ‘But who was il professore?’

  ‘Why Umberto! Patuzzi! A wiser man never lived. A real professore.’

  As I had been for the vigile.

  ‘Un uomo squisito. His death was such a terrible blow.’ Tears had a way of forming rapidly in Lucilla’s veiny eyes. We shook our heads. And our assiduousness and sympathy (genuine, actually) had its reward in the reappearance, on about day ten, of the communal dustbin and the prospect of talks about one of those sacred spaces in the garage. Downstairs in the flat beneath our own (and hence opposite the Visentini) the more timid, perhaps dour Vittorina seemed ready to follow whatever lead her volcanic sister-in-law would suggest. All, or much, was coming right.

  There was just the problem that night after night our sleep was ruined by the howls of Vega scrabbling at his master’s shuttered door, while towards mid-afternoon, as I shifted from buttock to buttock in front of Patuzzi’s huge desk, translating papers for an international conference on the decline of opera, it was impossible not to notice a slight odour of dog faeces rising from the small patch of ground where the creature was kept imprisoned. I mentioned this on the stairs one day to Giampaolo. His surprising reaction was to phone the local carabinieri immediately. They came out very promptly, confirmed that there was a potential health hazard and warned the one-armed, fiercely eye-browed Signor Negretti that he’d better clean up his dog’s act.

  Negretti came out on to the terrace with his two teenage boys and hosed down the grassy area below where the dog was sometimes chained, sometimes free to roam for four or five metres in any direction. He hosed it for perhaps ten or fifteen minutes, directed a last squirt at the shambling, excited dog itself, then went indoors. After which all was left as presumably it always had been.

  Animals. Did I mention in the opening pages about somebody bundling a dog into the back of a car? Quite a normal sight on Via Colombare. The car will be a well-worn, dull green Fiat 128, the contadino’s car par excellence; the man will be wearing rubber boots and a straw hat with the name of the tractor company on its band. He will drive off with admirable caution, although without buckling his safety belt, if he has one. As the car passes you, muffled barking may be heard, or the thumping of the pointer’s tail against the petrol tank.

  But perhaps a better way into the relationship between Italians and animals might be to consider the normal translation of the English word ‘pet’. The Italian expression is: ‘animale domestico’. ‘Il cane è un animale domestico.’

  Well, in English one might feasibly say to one’s girlfriend, boyfriend, wife, husband, son, daughter – ‘What a pet you are!’ meaning, what a delightful, friendly, cuddly bundle of fun, pleasure and loyal friendship around the cosy hearth. And of course we have the fine word ‘petting’, which I have so often tried to explain to puzzled students. But could one, in Italian, say to one’s mate: ‘Che animale domestico che sei!’ No, this would be inadvisable. For it would mean, first that they were merely an animal, as distinguished from the more elevated, thinking, speaking and shotgun-toting Homo sapiens, and second that they were submissive, knew their place, didn’t bother anybody and barked only when supposed to. Even throwing in palliative adjectives – ‘che bell’animale domestico … che animale domestico carino’ – would not help in the least, since these could only be perceived as irony, thus adding insult to injury.

  In short, Italians think differently about their pets/animali domestici. In 99 per cent of cases they keep them outside; they do not like them coming into their houses and would not dream of having them sleep say, at the foot of their beds. The idea of one’s child being licked all over by a dog, as I was as a boy, would be unthinkably horrible to the modern Veronese mother (perhaps very reasonably so). But there is also something obsessive and exaggerated in this aversion, something which may have to do with the fact that it wasn’t so very long ago that many families in the country around Montecchio had goats in the kitchen and the cow stall opening on to the sitting-room for warmth. Proximity to any but the most expensive ‘luxury’ animals has become a sign of social backwardness. And hunting dogs like Vega are a mere utility. You don’t want them prancing into the house with their wet paws and dirty backsides. You use them when you go off shooting so they can bring back the uccellini which you eat in your taverna in nostalgic revelry at the joys of country life which you have wisely left behind. Otherwise you keep them chained in the yard.

  Outside our window, Vega barked, howled, moaned deep into the night. With that extraordinary insistence dogs sometimes have. Bark, bark, bark, bark, for hours on end. What were we to do about it?

  ‘Poison the thing,’ a student suggested at once.

  Poison. For weeks, months, it was to become an obsession. We noticed stories in the paper reporting dog poisonings. They seemed quite common. Almost the done thing. Somebody in a place called Bussolengo had killed more than twenty in a single evening. Well, we needn’t go that far. And I read Sciascia’s novel, A ciascuno il suo, where he mentions a whole Sicilian tradition of dog poisonings, a sort of low-order vendetta between rival huntsmen.

  We considered rat poison. And bought some. We studied the dosages. Twenty or thirty pellets in a meatball should be enough. But what if a child were to pick it up? Occasionally the Negretti had guests with small children who were left to ramble about the defecated garden area. A student whose father was a vet cheerfully suggested the easier solution of a sponge
soaked in meat juice. Apparently, the sponge expands enormously in the animal’s gut, blocking intestines and eventually leading to death. He knew people who had found this method very effective. Well, we had a small sponge in the bathroom which overlooked Vega’s little patch. Part of the Patuzzi heritage. Nothing would be easier.

  We observed the animal’s eating habits. She seemed perfectly used to having her food tossed at her from considerable distances. She was instinctively friendly, running to her master or his sons in the hope of a pat, which very occasionally, grudgingly, she got. Although sometimes it was kicks. On a sort of dry run, we tossed her a biscuit from the bathroom window. Immediately it was snapped up and appreciated.

  ‘The only problem with the sponge’, my knowledgeable student explained at another lesson, ‘is that the creature will die in unspeakable agony, and you’ll have to hear her howling like mad. Probably for a couple of days. Although of course it will be worth it in the end.’

  We couldn’t do it. At night, startled from sleep by bloodcurdling howls, we would feel that we could. I might go to the bathroom and squeeze the yellow sponge in my hand, feel how it contracted and expanded, sense how easy it would be, laden with the weight of the meat juice, to chuck it the three or four metres over the fence to the howling dog. But something prevented us. And we developed the alibi that it wasn’t the animal’s fault, it was the master’s, and we would kill the master if only such things were feasible. As a poor substitute for serious action we took to phoning casa Negretti whenever the dog woke us. After a couple of nights they left the phone off the hook.