Italian Neighbours_An Englishman in Verona

by Tim Parks

  22

  Mussulmani

  ONE OF THE sharpest images winter conjures up here is that of dry sticks. It will be hard, perhaps, to sing the beauties of dry sticks, but I shall try.

  Maybe the fact that these sticks are seen against a blue sky is the first thing that need be said. For, after the autumn rains, much of winter in the Veneto is dry, bright and very blue: a crusty, colourless, cold ground under brilliant sunshine.

  The leaves finally fall in late November. They fall from the vines, leaving strong, gnarled shapes behind. They fall from the fruit trees, the peach and cherry orchards. There is no wind and the thin dark branches are perfectly still against the heavens with an almost shiny blackness of polished bark. Often, tin cans and strips of plastic have been tied among the twigs – to scare the birds when there was fruit. Now they look like decorations for a ragman’s ball. Along the edges of the fields, or winding along by ditches and streams, the fiercely cropped plane trees take on the despondent monumentality of surviving columns from some ruined portico.

  In the smaller farms on the hill slopes above, the rows of vines are often supported by the cherry trees. A horizontal wooden slat is strapped to the tree; four or five wires are stretched from one slat to the next, one tree to the next, and the vines, twisting and splintery, cling on between. When winter comes and the luxuriant summer foliage of pergola and cherry leaf is gone, the rude peasant mechanics of these slats and wires is left stark in the bright light, like the tangled rigging of some beached clipper. There are the complex twists and turns of natural growth, branches and twigs curving back on each other, then the sharp manmade angles of sawn wood, and the graceful physics of sagging wire swooping from slat to slat, to end in small unused coils round the last cherry bough. All of which is seen against the terraced climb of the hill, the silver green of olives higher up and the sombre vertical dark of the cypresses.

  Everywhere the contadini are cutting sticks. They prune the vines, moving slowly along the rows, arms constantly raised with knife and secateur. It must be tiring work. They bring out the year’s now reddish brown tendrils, hardening into sticks, and burn them in low bonfires in the fields. At the bottom of the hill, along the ditches, they cut the young branches from the nobbly heads of the plane trees and tie them into bundles such as old women carry in fairytales, then leave them to soak in streams or big water tanks sunk in the ground. Kept pliable, they will do for tying up next year’s vine shoots.

  And they prune the fruit trees and the olives, sawing off whole branches, dragging away huge tangles of wood in their tractor trailors to be cut up for firewood on the powersaw in the farmyard. As we walk, the hills echo monotonously with the squeal of steel discs slicing through wood. There is something mournful about it, a lament for the lost summer, for last year’s growth.

  They cut longer sticks from poplar and birch trees, poles three metres long perhaps, and these they strip and leave standing in clumps in their farmyard, to serve as fence posts and railings, vine supports, shafts for pitchfork or shovel. Tall, leaning at an angle against a barn whose two main beams are themselves resting on the cleft branches of two ancient cherry trees, the birch wood is a smooth blue grey in winter sunlight. The walls of the barn are old packing cases, boards, strips of corrugated iron, an assortment of planks which once served other purposes, a sheet of pink plastic, an iron bar. On the other side of the building, a cable is taut between the tarpaulin roof and a concrete post driven into the hill. Unlike the thriving cemetery, there has been only token observance of such notions as perpendicularity here. Why doesn’t the thing fall down, you wonder? Why doesn’t it blow away? I stand and stare: the winter branches, the canes and cut sticks poking at the sky, the beams resting on the cherry tree, the tracery of crisscrossing wires; such a tangle of man and nature, the antique and the provisional, the old seasonal rhythms and the shamelessly makeshift. When the leaves are gone it’s so clear.

  We are in the farm, not far from Via Colombare, where we pick up our eggs. A big German shepherd strains at the end of a chain which slides along a wire strung from barn to cowshed. Sixty plus, the farmer’s wife is in her slippers and dark woollen stockings. She speaks good Italian and is bright and witty. Her husband is in the office, she laughs, and her thumb indicates the cowshed, which forms one side of the ‘L’ of the house. We go in to chat for a moment. In fact, there are two farmers here, brothers, pushing seventy. Their lease runs out in a few years and then the land will most probably cease to be a farm and the builders will move in. A builder bought the place some years ago and is pulling all the strings he can to get permission to put houses here. Sooner or later some contact he has, some favour he has done for priest or politician, will prove the winning card. For, although the regional plan designates the land as agricultural ‘in perpetuity’, no one has any illusions. After all, the surveyors are already marking out the orchard at the bottom of Via Colombare.

  The cowshed is ancient, dark, with swallows’ nests in the beams and soiled ropes knotted to iron rings in the stone wall, polythene over the windows. The smell of the eight cows standing in their straw and shit is overpowering. Here they stand and sit all year. They are never let out. The terraced land with its fruit trees, vines, and strips of wheat or maize is not suitable for grazing. The men go out to mow grass for feed in summer, and in winter there is the hay in the ramshackle barn. They have one milking machine and the two urns they fill stand in a little stream behind the shed to await collection. Perhaps this sort of arrangement explains why in summer the milk here sometimes goes off almost as soon as one has bought it.

  Giuliano and Girolamo, they’re called. They wear dirty blue dungarees and brown felt hats. They speak in such fierce and garbled dialect that it is difficult to latch on to single words. One is merely left with a general impression of what has been said. Which may or may not be correct. Girolamo, the younger, but obviously the boss, is gritty and sarcastic. He likes to mock our city clothes and easy life. He scratches behind his ears, slaps a cow’s thigh, smiles the smile of the old fox. Ailing and very bent, Giuliano is sweeter, although virtually toothless. He has just had his prostate removed – his ‘prospera’ he amusingly calls it – and there are the usual detailed enquiries after health, all the more so because, before the operation, Rita recommended him to her brother who is a urologist at the hospital. Although this recommendation didn’t improve Giuliano’s lot in any significant way, a human contact is considered very important. It is a favour we have done them. Perhaps this is why they have agreed to sell us their eggs despite having an arrangement under which they’re supposed to deliver them all to a local shop. Or maybe they say that to everyone.

  Giuliano frequently carries a spade or hoe or just a pole around with him so he can lean on it. He is pleased I am English because it gives him an opportunity to reminisce about his prisoner-of-war years in Scotland and Wales, which seem to have been very happy ones. He lived with local farming people and they sent him out in the fields every day to do more or less what he does here: weed vegetables, cut grass. He settled in well. But when the war was over they gave him only twenty-four hours to decide whether to stay or return. And he would have stayed but for the thought of pasta. The thought of a plate of pasta put him on the boat back to Italy. I wonder if his toothless grin is meant to indicate that he appreciates what a caricature he is offering. Girolamo, on the other hand, returned from forced labour in a German factory, near dead with starvation. Even a plate of Scottish potatoes would have been good enough for him. He scorns his brother’s sentimentality.

  Because now Giuliano is complaining that the Ministry of Defence has stopped sending him his Christmas card. Every year after the war he used to get a Christmas card from the British government. Until that ‘Tachair’ came to power. She stopped it. Margaret’s cuts, we discover, struck deep all over the Continent. But it would be unkind, one reflects, to speculate out loud on what would have happened to a farm like this had she ever got her way over the Common Agricultu
ral Policy.

  It’s funny. These old farming people seem both suspicious of us and at the same time eager to take a break and have a chat. Occasionally, they invite us in for a glass of something. The big, nameless bottle with a strong dry wine stands in the middle of a long, scrubbed wooden table. The floor is bare stone, the walls powdery whitewash. There are straight-backed chairs and no armchair or sofa, but a huge colour television stands in one corner and two grandchildren are watching. It’s curious how impervious everybody is to the Rome accent of all the announcers.

  Since it’s Sunday, the conversation – not at my prompting I can assure you – gets on to religion. Rita explains we don’t go to church. The farmer’s wife says brightly that their son-in-law doesn’t go either, but that he is not a Jew. This is a little disconcerting, until we appreciate that all she means is that he is a believer, but that he doesn’t go regularly, just at Christmas and Easter: i.e., the only imaginable non-believer in her universe is a Jew, and her son-in-law is not one of those. Nor, she clearly assumes, are we. Her warm smile suggests an indulgent subtext: you young people are understandably a bit lazy and selfish, but later you will go to Mass every week just as we do.

  Rita, however, has an infuriating habit of being honest in conversations like this. ‘That’s not exactly the situation,’ she says.

  ‘You must be Protestants,’ says the well-travelled Giuliano, perhaps remembering bare Presbyterian pews in war-torn Galloway, comrades carving images of the Madonna.

  ‘Not exactly,’ Rita says again.

  ‘What then?’ Girolamo is scratching vigorously behind his ear, smiling his mocking, foxy smile. Every Sunday morning, as we make for the pasticceria, we see him and Giuliano heading off to Mass, awkward in their old smokeblue suits and dark ties.

  ‘Nothing,’ I finally join in. ‘We are nothing. We don’t go and that’s that.’

  ‘But you must be something. Everybody has some religion.’

  Girolamo turns out to have a conversational manner not unlike his German shepherd’s way of straining threateningly back and forth on its chain. He begins to mock us. Everybody has some master, even if it’s only money. What am I living for? I must be living for something, and that is my religion. So what is it? He sounds disconcertingly like sermons I used to listen to twenty-five years ago. But one feels it would be churlish and above all pointless to launch into an argument. For of course we both know what we know: his world of sticks and pruning, mine of town and translations.

  ‘You must have some religion,’ he insists, as if having cornered his prey. And he drains his wine belligerently.

  I can’t think what to say.

  ‘We’re mussulmani, Muslims,’ Rita solves the momentary embarrassment and raises a laugh from everybody. Although Girolamo continues to eye us darkly. Going back out into the farmyard, trying to change the subject, I ask him if he ever lets the dog loose from its chain. To which the old man casually replies with the common expression: ‘Non è mica un cristiano. He’s not a Christian, is he?’ Similarly when you rebuke a naughty child you might say: ‘So, are you a Christian, or a beast?’ For these are the only two categories of living creatures the old idiom allows: Christians and beasts. Apart from the Jews that is. I almost forgot.

  And when the world is going from bad to worse you can say: ‘Non c’è più religione.’ There’s no religion left any more. As if that were the problem. And you repeat it, shaking your head: ‘Non c’è più religione.’ It’s something Lucilla, with all her Madonnas and crucifixes and sacred hearts, has been saying a lot of late. Because Marta’s lawyer has managed to have the hearing over the presumed forgery of her will postponed for another three months. For the moment, things appear to be going swimmingly for us parvenu mussulmani.

  23

  La tredicesima

  WINTER IN VERONA means chestnuts toasting over coal braziers in Piazza Erbe; it means the crowded market for Santa Lucia where suspicious-looking gypsy folk sell every kind of candy, nougat and dried fruit from brash mobile caravans. It means shops and supermarkets full of huge, colourfully packaged panettoni with special offers on Johnnie Walker and local brandies.

  In Montecchio, winter means steam on the windows of the pasticceria, swollen watercourses, mist rising thick from Laghetto Squarà on frosty mornings, polythene bags over oleander bushes and lemon trees and Christmas decorations on the big cedar in the main square.

  In Via Colombare, winter means the stout woman with the twig broom sweeping away the leaves almost before they have fallen. It means old Lovato digging his square handkerchief of vegetable garden down almost a metre to let the frost right in. It means the genuine mink of the woman whose husband drives the Alfa 75 and the fake mink of the mongol-looking woman opposite who cleans offices in town.

  At number 10, winter means sweeping and mopping the stairs with the same monotonous regularity we watered the garden in summer. It means freezing to death because the roguish builder who put up this place installed tiny, inefficient radiators. It means a plastic Christmas tree appearing on the first landing and schlocky red and gold decorations pinned to the satin-finish wooden front doors. At night it means Vega wailing to the cold stars as he paces the frostbound soil outside, and the constant constant whine of Lucilla’s central-heating pump.

  Although each household has its own separate heating system, the boilers are not located in the flats but all together down in a tiny cellar; and Lucilla’s is mounted against the outer wall in correspondence to one of those reinforced concrete pillars. Thus, every time her system starts up, the building hums. And she keeps it on all night.

  Giampaolo goes upstairs to complain. As for everything else in Italy, there is a law about when you can and can’t turn on your central heating. It was brought in after one of the oil crises. You can’t turn on before 1 November and you must turn off after the end of March. During the day you can’t turn on before six in the morning and you must turn off after eleven in the evening. And between six and eleven you can’t have it on more than a total of twelve hours.

  Naturally, like the emergency provision about watering gardens, this law is generally ignored, except perhaps by the stingy owners of large blocks of flats where the rent collected is supposed to cover the cost of heating. Giampaolo, however, hopes to use the rules to play on Lucilla’s fears of authority and convince her to stop bothering us with the sound of her pump every night.

  It is typical perhaps of a dipendente, an encyclopaedia reader and a modern man to appeal to the law. And Giampaolo does seem to know them all, how far they are valido and how far their value is relativo. I can hear him talking politely and persuasively to her at her door, right outside our own. But on this occasion Lucilla isn’t impressed. Because her health is at stake. She has been coughing a lot. Then she is dieting, which makes her cold and constipated despite all the herb teas she is trying. When Giampaolo, polite as ever, backs down, she tells him he is troppo gentile and asks if he would like to come in and drink a glass of something with her. She is having trouble getting Telepace, the Vatican channel, on her TV …

  Winter. I sit at Patuzzi’s great desk where he must have leafed through many a sunny brochure on similarly bleak days, fantasising about the ever more exotic road signs he could pose beside. The temperature is well below zero, but the breath of the cadaverous woman opposite barely steams her window pane as she stares out with infinite patience. To one side, between her house and ours, a tangle of branches reaches up into the sky. It’s the one tree in Negretti’s garden. And on those branches are what I at first, in my ignorance, imagine to be oranges: beautiful big round abundant fruit hanging by invisible threads from a tracery of leafless black twigs above. In the staring twilight, they start to glow, reminding me of Marvell’s lines: ‘He hangs in shades the orange bright, Like golden lamps in a green night.’

  But we’re not in the Bermudas, despite Patuzzi’s ghost. And the evening isn’t green, but grey, a blue smoky grey. And of course these aren’t oranges at all, but
cachi, a very soft fruit with a peel like a plum’s, only thicker, and inside a lush pulp with a tremendously sensual texture and sticky sweet taste. They are the only fruit I know of I’ve never seen in a London greengrocery. They are too delicate to travel. Even Bepi doesn’t like stocking them because they ruin so easily. Negretti lets most of his fall to the ground in a blackening orange mush over dead leaves before telling his sons to go out and pick the last few. Then, one-handed as he is, he does a little pruning with a chainsaw. Twigs and branches fly. The old woman with her shawl watches impassive till evening deepens. Then she leans out and draws her decrepit shutters to, turning to give me a last wan smile before they close. It seems unlikely that her house has any central heating at all.

  Vittorina comes out of her Christmas-decorated door to find me mopping the stairs. For it is our turn. She is obviously disturbed to find me doing this menial work rather than my wife. Is Rita ill? If I had told her, she would have taken our turn. ‘No, she’s fine, but she has a rush translation job on,’ I explain. Clearly it is not sufficient explanation. Vittorina looks troubled; cleaning the stairs just isn’t a man’s job. Her husband Giosuè, for example, whose grave she is off to visit, never cleaned the stairs. I tell her how often I wish I’d been born into the world and values of fifty years before. She takes this perfectly seriously. And maybe it does have a little sniff of seriousness about it. For if there’s one thing I hate it’s cleaning these marble stairs, and reflecting how carefully Orietta and Giampaolo will look at them afterwards, how they notice if you don’t get your mop into the corners or if you sweep dust under doormats. I have heard them criticising Vittorina’s performance. There’s something that spells death for me in obsessive cleaning. The cemetery is a clean place. Could it be the English let their cemeteries get untidy so that they won’t remind us of death so much?