Italian Neighbours

by Tim Parks

  The Christian Democrat’s annual festival is called La festa dell’amicizia, The Festival of Friendship: good friends, good contacts, an aura of universal love and piety. With a subtle shift of emphasis, the Communists call theirs La festa dell’unità, The Festival of Unity. Conjuring up images of rump solidarity, a last stand. In the event, both festivals mean barbecue food and wine, dancing in front of a noisy band (the same one, quite probably) and lines of booths where trivial skills are rewarded with soft toys. If you go to the one you may as well go to the other too. As everybody does, in fact. Because both are a lot of fun.

  My wife goes to see the priest who preaches to the faithful week in week out; Don Guido, the small, bespectacled, faintly squinting character who smelt something rotten in Bepi’s shop. He sits behind his large desk in his modern canonica next to the new red-brick church which he himself had built.

  What can he do to help?

  Rita (for her sins perhaps?) is translating into Italian an American book about the papacy. The book quotes extensively in English from various encyclicals. Does Don Guido by any chance have copies of these encyclicals in Italian? She ought to use the originals, not translate them back herself. And she knows encyclicals are automatically sent out to all priests.

  Don Guido has his black cassock on, loose about the shoulders, tight about the stomach. He makes a gesture, at once sly and resigned, of raising his hands, palms upwards. Yes, he gets all the encyclicals. And when they arrive he files them away – in the bin. He smiles. That’s how it is. A modern priest doesn’t have time for encyclicals, he has to deal with real life as it is.

  While he is smiling, Rita notices something odd about the desk. Under that glass top he just raised his hands from to make his ironic gesture, are line upon line of tiny photographs. Photographs of faces. Passport size. And they are turned so as to look, not at the desk’s usual occupant, but the other way, toward the supplicant, the interviewee. Rita recognises a face and draws a breath. They are Montecchio’s recent dead staring up from the priest’s glass-topped desk. ‘Riflettete,’ says a little piece of card he has propped up: ‘Think about it.’

  Turning to leave she sees there is a photocopier in one corner. A notice says: ‘Copies are free, but contributions are not refused.’

  A popular private midwife in the village has the same line. Her prenatal examinations are free, but if people want to give her something … Women ask other women how much they should give. Not less than 50,000 a check-up.

  Perhaps inevitably, the figure of the priest attracts all kind of stories, some probably apocryphal, some not. Famous for his careless driving, it is rumoured that late one night Don Guido had to call on a farmer to get a tractor to pull him out of a ditch. And in his car was an adolescent boy who had no cause to be there. Others maintain he has had more than one girl around the village. Recently, the canonica was robbed and poor Don Guido bound, beaten and gagged. All the same, he did not report the matter to the police. Why not? Because his son was involved, wasn’t he …

  Or so the rumour goes. But one quickly gets the impression that this is merely the kind of thing people like to say about village priests. The combination of celibate status and social prominence is too inviting for the fable-monger. And then it’s important for the congregation that the priest be a wholesome sinner like themselves. Just as it is important for them that the men in the tax office take bribes … Certainly I have never met anyone who pretended to be shocked.

  One evening in Via Colombare, Giampaolo adds a new element to the Don Guido dossier by confirming that the priest has made something of a mission of going to preach to the prostitutes who hang around on the sheepskin seats of their white Mercedes near the station in Verona. Giampaolo admires him for this and feels he is valido as a priest and discreto as a preacher. The relativo aspect would appear to be that Giampaolo sees the Church as one of the conservative elements that keeps the local mentality so provincial. ‘After all, prostitutes do have a social function,’ he reminds us very seriously.

  More prosaically, Don Guido keeps rabbits (also white and furry) behind the church, and hens and ducks too. When he meets children in the street he pulls boiled sweets from his pocket and tousles their hair. Then invites them to come and see his rabbits.

  For Lucilla, Don Guido is a great religious intellectual, a kind, generous man, another person she can endlessly find troppo gentile. Especially now he has agreed to testify to how she nursed Maria Rosa those months after il professore died. A major point in her favour when it comes to authenticating the scribbled will.

  Vittorina pays Don Guido to say Masses for her dead husband. She likes to light candles at twilight and mutter her rosary in the fat, waxy smoke. She buys any number of the religious publications displayed near the door. Miracles upon miracles of the saints.

  Orietta is thankful to Don Guido because when, in confession, she told him she used contraceptives, he told her to act according to conscience. It was between her and God. There is concern and disbelief over another excellent bottle of Giampaolo’s prosecco, when I point out that this is one of the main precepts of Protestantism.

  But Don Guido is a little less Protestant when he goes to talk to Maria Grazia, the busty herbal specialist next to Bepi’s who can advise such efficacious tisane. Her shop is officially a sanitaria, a sort of chemist’s, but without the pharmaceutical side. It sells baby equipment, basic orthopaedic aids, elastic stockings, corsets, maternity bras, bandages, Elastoplast … and condoms. Don Guido complains that being the fine churchwoman she is, she shouldn’t be selling contraceptives. Maria Grazia thus has the unenviable problem of trying to reconcile genuine religious devotion with social conscience and commercial flair. She goes on selling her condoms. And, what’s more, at less than the manufacturer’s list price. When the representative comes round, he tells her the local chemist has complained. He knows she is undercutting him on the price. He sent a spy to buy some. The representative says she will have to comply with the list price, or he won’t bring them. But Maria Grazia continues to sell at the lower price to people she knows. Because it is ridiculous that a condom should cost twice or three times as much in Italy as it does in other parts of Europe.

  Does the Pope’s strong stand on contraceptives have anything to do with Don Guido’s complaints? Or is he a good friend of the chemist’s? In any event we discover that Maria Grazia rushed into marriage as a result of an unwanted pregnancy. She had meant to be a doctor.

  The Scholl sandals representative also tells Maria Grazia that the chemist has complained about her undercutting him. It is concorrenza sleale, unfair competition. She must comply.

  A Corriere della Sera article shows that Italian shopkeepers have the highest margins in Europe.

  Maria Grazia tells us that when she opened her shop, the first sanitaria in Montecchio, she couldn’t understand why so many old women would come in asking for large, sterilised sponge gloves, right handed. Later she realised it was because they did not want to touch themselves ‘in that place’, when they took their bidets.

  When a tax inspector comes to see if Maria Grazia uses her electronic till and gives receipts that correspond to the price paid, you can always tell, she says, because they hang around a few minutes, looking a bit lost, then choose the cheapest item in the shop, the herbal chewing gum she has on the counter, for example. She gives the man his receipt and promptly phones up a couple of other shopkeepers to pass on the message. If they haven’t already called her. But not the chemist. Who is opening his own herb section now.

  The inspector then goes on to Un panino due’s and asks him if he has the pane comune whose price is fixed by the government and used to determine the rate of inflation. A baker is obliged by law to have this bread. So the old man pulls out the one bag he bakes a day just in case the inspector comes. The government has fixed the price too low and anyway nobody asks for the stuff. Maria Grazia says it has no bran in it and makes you constipated.

  Speaking about health, I ask
Giampaolo jokingly if he doesn’t suffer from tachycardia like his wife. He drinks so much coffee. Perfectly poker-faced, he says no, he suffers from extra sistole. He is having a series of tests done at the hospital. I have to consult my dictionary later to discover that this simply means he sometimes misses a beat.

  Orietta, meanwhile, has been missing more than one beat recently, because they have changed the refuse-collection system. In the past, a man came down Via Colombare on a bicycle affair behind a huge bin. He emptied the street’s rubbish into it, then pedalled off to unload the lot into a truck. There was something very Dickensian about it. But now they have introduced the cassonetto, a very large fibreglass container on wheels with lids opening on top and fluorescent reflectors on the side. There’s one every twenty or so houses. You take out your rubbish and next day the truck comes by, lifts the container with automatic arms and tips it up into its press. A jet of hot water washes the fibreglass inside, then it is lowered back into place again.

  All of which seems marvellously efficient to me. The best refuse service I have ever seen. The truck passes regularly three times a week.

  But the woman at number 8, wails Orietta, keeps moving the wheeled cassonetto so that it’s always opposite our flat. And when it gets full, the lid won’t close any more. The smell could bring germs and disease and death!

  Emptying her own rubbish, Orietta heaves the heavy container with rubber-gloved hands back toward number 8. Emptying hers, the mongol-looking woman at number 8 rolls it back toward number 10. Back and forth. Back and forth.

  Don Guido drives by in his battered car to bless a house restored without building permission. He will also do exorcisms and disinfestations. On San Biagio’s day he blesses the village’s children so that they won’t get sore throats. Just this week, though, he has installed the first two black people to arrive in Montecchio in one of the flats the church keeps for the poor. A gesture of true charity in racist Veneto.

  ‘WE SAY NO TO A MULTIRACIAL SOCIETY’ appears on a wall by Laghetto Squarà near the flat. Other graffiti complain about pollution from chicken factory farms. A truck from Germany has parked behind, come to pick up the things that stink so much in the chemical plant, whose owner is prominent in Don Guido’s congregation …

  And so one could go on and on. Rambling back and forth through Montecchio, dodging the fast cars and wobbling bicycles. For everything links to everything else: the priest, the sanitaria, Bepi, the political parties, the cassonetto, the mopeds and the huddles of youths in the night …

  There is no one characteristic which makes Montecchio Montecchio, Italy Italy, or the Italians Italian. And yet, as in any place, the slow accumulation of details does gradually form a sort of mesh or matrix. There is this constant entangling, as though in the weaving of a tapestry or net. And the more entangled and connected it all is, the more inevitable it comes to seem. It takes on the weight, the impenetrability of a dense contingent world. Yes, you tell yourself, it had to be so, because this is what this place is like. The barber believes himself a faith healer, but never gives you a receipt. You open an account at the bank and ask what the interest rate is but, instead of telling you, they say, what interest rate do you want, what do you do, who is your employer? Health is desperately, desperately important, but the air is laden with industrial smells every morning. Everybody likes the Pope, and racism thrives. But of course. What did you expect? This is Montecchio. And perhaps the best test of initiation is whether, on being presented with some new element, you immediately have a sense of its belonging here, of its being a new manifestation of the same matrix, rather than just another alien fact, another surprise.

  On a mild autumn morning you see a young woman in a seal fur climb out of a sky-blue Panda and start to fight with her remote control driveway gate which won’t open. And you understand why she has a fur and why she has a Panda and why she paid more for her coat than her car. You also understand why she has a huge iron remote-control gate outside a modest house. You even have a fairly good idea why it’s not working. She salutes you with a friendly smile. She’s nice. You help her. She curses in dialect. Finally, the thing starts rolling and she drives off the few hundred metres to church.

  Then toward the end of October, as I morti, the Day of the Dead, approaches, flowers appear in one of the village’s back streets decorating a little stone plaque in a wall, behind which a chained dog laps water from an old bidet. You hadn’t noticed the plaque until the flowers appeared. It says: ‘Qui, sotto piombo nemico, caddero due patrioti.’ ‘Here died two patriots, slain by enemy lead.’ And you think of the old men in the Communists’ office behind their two-litre bottles, of Lucilla begging on the streets of Vicenza, and Tosi counting out his bread rolls for acres of land: ‘Un panino, due …’

  19

  I morti

  TO PUT YOUR car in the garage under Via Colombare 10, you inch along a crazy-paved drive the opposite side of the palazzina to the garden, then down a steep ramp behind the building and sharp sharp left into the garage. Among the many early morning sounds, as I sit at my desk translating sales forecasts for marble granulates, comes the roaring of a small motor, tackling the ramp from the garage. Suddenly, the roar dies; instead there’s a sharp whine, then a puttering, almost immediately beneath my window. Then the whole noisy business repeats itself.

  I don’t normally go out on to the back balcony above the ramp. I don’t go out because, directly opposite, across Negretti’s garden where Vega tugs her chain, is a thin, tall crooked house like something from a children’s book; the witch’s house: flaking stucco, battered shutters, grubby lace curtains awry. And at the window exactly on a level with mine, an old old woman with long face, skin shrunken on to her cheekbones, and black shawl pulled tight about her hair, is constantly looking out, so that if I step on to the balcony my eye inevitably meets hers. Upon which, a ghost, very definitely a ghost of a smile will cross her face. My salute is hollow. The experience is not unlike seeing Don Guido’s photographs of the recently dead. And, in fact, today is All Saints’ Day, or as the Italians more commonly call it, I morti, the dead.

  But the unusual sound of this car – roar, whine, putter, putter, putter, roar, whine, putter, putter, putter – is too intriguing, and I head for the balcony, studiously avoiding that ancient gaze.

  It is the first time in the four months since we came to Via Colombare that Lucilla has got her car out. From above I can just see that the back seat of the tiny Fiat is full of flowers. She has a fair few cemeteries to visit today.

  If she can get the car up the ramp.

  On the flat patch at the bottom outside the garage she revs it furiously. With the choke full out, the air turns Fiat blue. The engine is racing. And off comes the clutch with a jerk. The car shoots up the ramp. But at the top she must turn sharply right to fit in between the railings and the wall of the house. Racing up so fast, she loses her nerve and hits the brake. The car stalls and comes whining back down the ramp, careering about dangerously close to the outer wall that shores up the garden, coming to rest askew on the patch at the bottom. Immediately, she turns on the engine again, putter, putter, putter, and is presumably getting up courage for the next attack.

  After watching the show through two or three times, I go down to help. The car isn’t warm enough, she explains. I nod in agreement. Would she like me to try? Troppo gentile, Signor Tino, troppo gentile! Although the car is not old, the white paintwork is dull and cracked. Giampaolo has explained to me that this is because she uses some old industrial cleaning fluids she has to wash it. Lucilla’s approach to cleaning is nothing if not radical. Only a few days ago we saw her wash out the canary cage by simply holding it under the garden tap. With the canary inside. Flapping about terrified.

  The Fiat 126 is a minuscule car. Lucilla has the problem of reconciling the physical needs resulting from short legs and great girth. If she moves the seat too far back she can’t touch the pedals, if she moves it too far forward she is squashed against the steering
wheel. I telescope myself to about half my normal height and climb in. There is a fresh smell of crysanthemums: flowers for her dead husband, flowers for her dead child, flowers for her dead brother, Vittorina’s husband, flowers for il professore, flowers for Maria Rosa. I waggle the gear stick. In the centre of the driving wheel she has stuck a crucifix, in the well of the speedometer, completely obscuring it, a Madonna.

  When I’ve got the thing out on the street, like a teacher giving a good boy a reward, she says she’d been meaning to tell me that if I want to, I can start using the professore’s place in the garage now; yes, I can tuck in between the heap of firewood for taverna evenings and the pillars with their memorials of the dead. I am duly grateful. Vittorina arrives in a very sombre black coat with velvetty tassles and the two elderly women set off on their lugubrious rounds.

  How the Italians love their dead! I cari morticelli, the dear deadikins! Shortly after lunch, out of curiosity, we wander along to the cemetery, which lies just to one side of the industrial estate. As with a first communion at the church, the small cemetery car park is full and scores of vehicles have overflowed into the villas and factories of the industrial estate, and even out on to the main road to Mizzole. It’s a public holiday. Some cars have out-of-town plates from as far away as Tuscany, Piedmont. For it is important to visit your dead, however far afield they may be. And it is important to do so today, on this Day of the Dead. For one must have a sense of occasion, of formality, of rhythm. November is the dead time of the year; the leaves are falling, the soil is cold and bare; one visits one’s dead. Giampaolo, for example, has taken his twin carburettor Giulietta to Venice to get a boat out to the island cemetery where his father is buried. Lucilla will even now be terrorising traffic on the road to Vicenza, Vittorina muttering her rosary beside her. One thus fulfils a duty, which is also a natural thing, not a burden, and then it is over. The fact that everybody else is doing the same duty at the same time certainly makes it more attractive.