by Tim Parks
The previous evening we had seen a news programme showing Italian sailors setting off for their UN mission to Beirut. The camera zoomed in on a young southern boy weeping his heart out at the rail as his ship pulled away. And it didn’t take a lip reader to hear what he was screaming to that crowd on the dock. ‘Mammaaaaa! Mammaaaaa!’ His face was broken up with fierce emotion. ‘Mammina!’ In a way it’s wonderful, this lack of shame.
And when we come out of the prenatal course at nine o’clock, full of warm feelings about our child to be, there are young conscript soldiers everywhere, monopolising the phones in the main square in an attempt to get a call through to Mamma before they have to return to their barracks. Verona is a big army town with two major barracks. One of these is out on the road to Montecchio, so that our bus going home is packed despite the hour. And the same boys who, five minutes ago, were desperately trying to get through to their mums are now rowdy and rough, jostling the one or two Montecchio girls on the bus, hoping perhaps to find the future mamma of their own only child. But the girls won’t answer back. There seems to be a kind of rule that the locals will have nothing to do with the soldiers.
‘Signor Tino, Signora Rita!’ As our key clunks, Lucilla emerges from her door in a state of some excitement. She’s in the pink brushed nylon dressing-gown, her television grinding out its variety show behind her. Do we know, she shouts, can we for one moment imagine, what Signora Marta has just done? Obviously we cannot. Do we know what she had the brazen cheek to do this very afternoon? No, it’s beyond us. She telephoned, she telephoned to suggest that they both give up the court case, sell the flat and go halves on the money.
‘O Dio!’ Rita says coolly. I close my eyes. This is it. Eviction.
‘It means she’s guilty!’ Lucilla is winding herself up into her usual semi-hysteria. ‘Guilty, guilty, guilty! It means she knows she can never win in court. Because the flat is mine. It’s mine. It was built with my money and the professore left it to me, if only they hadn’t destroyed his will. È mio, mio, mio!’
If she switched some of the time and resources presently allocated to cleaning to dental care, it would be much easier to talk to Lucilla at moments like this.
‘So what did you do?’ Rita asks.
I hold my breath.
‘Le ho detto mai – never. Mai mai mai mai. Because she is evil. Maligna! Una carogna!’
And we are safe again. You can rely on Lucilla.
Upstairs my frate indovino tells me that I must be ‘parsimonious with hatred’, as hatred nourishes itself with my blood, my hopes, my life. I also notice that every single page of the calendar carries an ad for a book called ‘Cara Mamma …’ written by none other than the frate indovino himself. On the page for May it says:
‘Looking for a present for your sweetheart and mother-to-be … why not give her the fantastic, CARA MAMMA … It’s worth more than any gold ring … and it costs much less.’
34
Giugno
THE MONTH OF June is breathtaking, mainly because of the poppies. The corn stands thick in the broad fields of the pianura, or bristles in undulating strips between rows of cherry trees and vines up on the hills. It is light green at first, turning a duller, denser colour through May as it grows. Until, with the first truly hot days around the beginning of June, the green is suddenly transformed into a sizzling carpet of red, laid by some magical hand (while you were having your siesta it seems) to usher in the summer. It’s quite overwhelming. We walk for hours up the valley to absorb field after field of it. Or we cycle southwards into the plain. The dazzling, dazzling red stretches majestically away, waving above the corn, miragelike, desperately intense, seductive, screaming life as colours will.
Giuliano and Girolamo are not impressed. It’s a great pity these scientists haven’t found a good spray to get the poppies without damaging the corn, they say. Or I think they say. I can never be 100 per cent sure I have understood these two old farmers. We find them up on the hill with their tractor, dousing the cherry trees one last time before harvest. The marginally younger Girolamo is at the wheel, steering between the terraces; bent forward at 45°, Giuliano stumbles along beside him. From a tank trailed behind the tractor, clouds of filthy-smelling chemicals steam up into thick foliage where here and there ripe cherries peep. I ask Girolamo how he measures the dosages he’s giving. He shrugs his shoulders. He just sprays a lot, he says. They need a lot of spray to keep the maggots out. He comes down with us to mix the next tankload in the farmyard and it’s clear he does so ad occhio, by guesswork. I remind myself I must tell the ecological Giampaolo just to see him shake his head. Giampaolo has now collected a huge number of snails from our sad lettuce patch and imprisoned them in a bucket with a pane of glass on top, but can’t decide if it’s worth the effort to wash and eat them.
Ciliegge avelenate – Poisoned Cherries – proclaim crudely daubed notices in all the orchards from Montecchio to Mizzole, trying to scare off scavengers by warning of noxious spraying. From the sound of giggling children in the leaves, the ruse would appear to be no more effective than the empty tin cans and strips of plastic strung up against the birds. Ciliegge avelenate – when Rita points it out, I am delighted to notice that the dialect-speaking locals have no better grasp of the use of double letters than I do. It should be, ciliege avvelenate.
Bepi doesn’t stock cherries in his shop, because everybody, he says, either has a tree in their garden or steals from the orchards. As usual, his reflection comes complete with a tone and expression which suggest his disillusionment at the local situation (beneath contempt) and his confidence that he is smart enough to keep a step ahead all the same. Indeed, very few of the shops sell cherries. The farmers, it seems, mostly export their fruit to Austria and Germany. They have quotas to meet and the harvest was bad this year, thanks to that late flurry of snow. With the result that, despite all these hills upon hills of orchards, I personally end up eating very few cherries indeed. There are none at Via Colombare 10 of course, because fruit trees are very much a peasant thing, not part of a city person’s garden …
‘How long is it now?’ the woman with the twig broom rushes out to ask, as we return from a shopping expedition. Everyone wants to talk to Rita. There is a ground swell of solidarity which rises with the curve of her belly. We are just a few yards from where the Madonnina is clutching her own son. Beside the statue, a notice has gone up to tell us the name of the builder who will be converting the orchard behind into terraced housing. Like all notices in Italy it gives the reference number, section and paragraph of whatever law it is sanctions whatever is being announced.
‘Another two weeks,’ Rita says. ‘Election day more or less.’
This stout zitella’s brow knits as she thinks and calculates. ‘The full moon won’t be until a week after that. The third I think.’
I smile politely.
Lucilla and Vittorina are disappointed because they are going to be away. Their annual holiday. They have us over to say goodbye and show us photographs of a multi-storied modern hotel on the Adriatic coast north of Venice where they go every year. No more those magnificent adventures – Vienna, Prague – with il professore. Lucilla’s wistful face is clownish this evening behind approximate make-up. The photo shows miles of beach and the usual evenly spaced rows of brilliant sunshades, ten deep, all the same green and purple pattern, like soldiers on parade. ‘The sea air is so good for one’s pressure,’ Lucilla is confiding to Rita. ‘That’s why we go.’ Vittorina, with her rather dazed post-ictus expression and ever thinning hair, manages a faint, squeaky laugh, twisting her mouth. ‘Lucilla only goes for the men,’ she croaks. ‘Sitting in the bar chatting up men in the evening. And wearing her bikini on the beach naturally.’ The image is so bizarre one would like to ask for confirmation. But how? Far from chiding her sister-in-law, Lucilla grins a grin of unqualified self-satisfaction. She has invested a lot in this image of herself as femme fatale. She and Vittorina are a good act.
But on popping do
wnstairs to enquire of Giampaolo whether I can start opening my prosecco bottles yet, it is to find the Visentinis seriously concerned. And precisely about the question of Lucilla and Vittorina’s holiday. Because, yes, sea air is good for high blood pressure, since the atmospherics tend to lower it, so the sea suits Lucilla and always has, but it is most definitely controindicato, i.e., a bad idea, for low blood pressure, which is Vittorina’s more serious problem. Vittorina should really go to the mountains, since atmospherics there tend to raise pressure. Orietta can’t understand why the doctor, who came today, hasn’t explained this to them. There is general agreement that the man just takes his money and runs.
For a while voices are urgent and low. Giampaolo and Orietta see the situation as posing a real moral dilemma. Ought they to go and enlighten the two women, encourage them to change destination, at the risk of merely making Vittorina anxious without actually convincing Lucilla, who always has the last word and is very eager to go to the sea and talk volubly to bronzed widowers on deckchairs? Or should they leave be and let the women have their fun, despite concern that the climate could bring on the notoriously fatal second stroke? Really, it was up to the doctor to talk to them about this …
Forgetting my prosecco, I get drawn into a discussion about the Visentini’s own holiday, still to be settled. And, like every Montecchio conversation on the subject, it soon develops into a rehearsal of the pros and cons of the invigorating mountains, the enervating sea. For any other destination is just too hot in holidaytime when factories and offices close. Only a foreigner, for example, would visit Florence or Rome in August, or embark on some walking tour of Tuscany.
Giampaolo declares himself for the mountains, the cool air, the great unspoilt panoramas, the brisk walks, the modern man’s righteous ecological pride when he doesn’t throw away a sandwich wrapper but tucks it back in his knapsack. Orietta is for the sea and lazy days under a sunshade which will never bring on her heart murmur, copies of her favourite women’s magazines, evening barbecues with other members of the holiday village, in Puglia, Calabria, beneath palm trees. Lara just begs and begs to be sent somewhere else, anywhere, on some camp or something, it doesn’t matter, so long as she can go on holiday without the family. But Orietta would worry too much.
In the end, as it turns out, Orietta will get her way on all fronts. Giampaolo will go to the travel agency at the last minute in a calculated piece of brinkmanship, hoping to pick up a cut-price place in an undersubscribed holiday village, a cancellation with any luck. Then, doing everything at the same time as they always do, he and twenty million other Italians will load the car in early August to face a seven-hundred kilometre drive in blazing sunshine with miles of tailbacks at every toll booth. But at least the expedition will justify the twin carburettor …
Bepi scorns them all, these provincials. For his first holiday since he set up shop, he goes off to the Seychelles. Where he meets more Italian greengrocers than he does at the market of a morning. Paradoxically, he seems quite pleased about this. He has made some useful contacts. New suppliers. Sheep’s cheese from a distributor in Lessinia. And, on returning, he asks me to translate a letter for a friend he made there who wants to get in touch with a native girl he fell in love with. The letter is touchingly ingenuous, swearing the writer’s determination to go back next year. Bepi seems very eager for me to finish it. His big burly presence and bright green eyes are extraordinary somehow against the funereal backdrop of Patuzzi’s bookcase. I tap it out for him: the girl’s beauty, their unending love. He watches the letters appear in sickly yellow on my processor screen. Is English the language he will have to learn to speak to girls? Somehow I already know he will not go back.
And, no, you can’t open those bottles yet, Giampaolo says, when I go down to ask him again. Not for another three weeks. There is an element of masochism about it, a casting about for virtue and self-esteem. His dipendente’s long-suffering life. If he just bought the stuff from the shop, he wouldn’t have to survive this two-month period without. But having decided to bottle his own – because then it’s the real thing, alive, not pasteurized and dead on a supermarket shelf – he will never go out and buy a case or so to tide him over. It’s a point of honour. And he’s rather disappointed when I do. Only to savour the difference when ours is ready, I tell him.
35
Elezioni
IT IS AS summer gets into full swing that you are reminded you are living in a foreign country. A strange breed of wasps, more than an inch long, have made their nest in the eaves above our balcony and will occasionally whirr into the flat causing intense alarm. Opposite the church we see a snake, head held high, sliding rapidly along the wall of the flood-emergency dike. Typing away on il professore’s desk, I become aware that a baby lizard has come in through the french window and is soaking up the sunshine on the tiles by my feet. Outside, freed from their winter covers, lemon and orange trees flourish again in tubs by lowly back doors shrouded with bead curtains against the flies.
Meanwhile, Montecchio is being made ugly by preparations for the forthcoming general and local elections. It even seems possible that our child could be born right on polling day, although what kind of omen this might be I don’t know. The local council erects long lines of ramshackle scaffolding outside the church and in the main square. These are then hung with laminated billboards rusting with age, thus giving the political parties free advertising space. At least fifty metres of scaffolding and sheet metal are required just to make sure that every party will get a look in. For, of course, there are many.
It was my first Italian general election and, despite the imminent domestic upheaval, I was eager to get a handle on the political life of my adopted country. I read all the editorials in national and local newspapers, I spoke about it to everybody I knew, I went to meetings in the local library. I thus passed from confusion, to disbelief, to further confusion, and, ultimately, a quiescent state of total disillusionment. Which I have maintained ever since.
Of course, every nation is disillusioned with its politicians. Everybody is half aware that a politician can never represent the people who voted for him, for the simple reason that anybody who stands for election is fundamentally different from the mass of people who don’t. And if he isn’t when he decides to stand, he most certainly will be once elected. The idea of a representative parliament is a pipedream. However, in the other countries I have lived in, one is at least left with the consolation of choosing between, if not different ideologies, then at least different emphases. This party will spend more, this less, this party believes in social security, this doesn’t, etc. etc. So that elections can be expected to focus (reductively perhaps, but usefully) around some issue like, should we give more money to the health service, should we possess nuclear weapons, and so on. There is also the government’s record. The governing party has done this, this and this. Do you like it, or don’t you? Italian elections have none of this refreshing naïvety.
In the early days – heady May and the first half of June – most comment in the newspapers and on TV seemed to be concentrated on which member of the five-party coalition had been responsible for bringing the government down and provoking these early elections. Given that the public generally perceives elections as a great evil (if only because the squares are cluttered with scaffolding, and the TV monopolised by dull talk shows), this is a matter of some importance. Apportioning blame could prove a potentially effective weapon.
So, were the Socialists right to vote against such and such a clause of such and such a bill (usually something quite obscure)? Were the Christian Democrats right to insist on this clause and make it an issue of confidence when they knew the Socialists would vote against it and the Liberals abstain? Why did the Republican Party minister attack a government policy he had just subscribed to in a cabinet meeting? Why wouldn’t the Social Democrats agree with the others as to who should be chairman of some bank or TV network? And so it goes on. Blame is never effectively apportioned. In the
eyes of your average Montecchiese they are all responsible. They become responsible the moment they are elected. And anyway it wouldn’t have mattered if such and such a clause of such a bill had been passed, since everybody would have ignored it just the same.
The Socialists, a Modern Party for a Modern Italy’ – Bettino Craxi, their leader, is pictured with somebody behind him working on a computer. Despite the fact that their emblem is a carnation, the Socialists are using green posters this year to steal a march on the Greens. Who have unfortunately split into the Rainbow Greens and the Smiling Sun Greens and are arguing heatedly about who was responsible. ‘A New Role for Women in a Fair Society’, says the Communists’ poster. But will it cut much ice in la strada delle zitelle?
All in all, there is a curious lack of imagination about this advertising. Especially given the Italians’ usual verve and flare for such things. A weariness. As if none of it really mattered. ‘Working toward a United Europe’, boasts the Christian Democratic Party. But then so, if we’re to take them at their word, are the Social Democrats. The Republicans trumpet their ‘Honesty and Integrity’, clearly hinting what everybody already knows, that the others have neither. But then do the Republicans? And is it what people want? The Movimento Sociale, inheritors of the fascist tradition, think it is. ‘Firm Government and an End to Corruption’, they proclaim. Well, it’s a step forward from the ‘Credere, Ubbidire, Combattere!’ – ‘Believe, Obey, Fight!’ – of their predecessors, a motto still provocatively visible under a thin coat of whitewash on the town hall of a nearby village. ‘The Right Choice’, say the Liberals about themselves, feeling that no further explanation is necessary. Or perhaps possible. ‘Towards a Real Alternative’, plead the Communists, their hammer and sickle reduced to a sixpence. ‘Stability, Prosperity’, thunder back the Christian Democrats, making much of their own emblem of the Crusader’s red cross on a white shield. Well, who would ever argue with stability and prosperity?