Italian Neighbours

by Tim Parks

  This silent winter fog, that suffocating summer afa, they must play their part in forming the local character. The seasons here don’t offer the exhilarating heroism of battling through strong winds, horizontal sleet, deep floods and snow-drifts, the glorious centuries of stormy weather the British can boast. Instead, the inhabitant of the North Italian Plain faces these long long periods of relentless attrition, a loss of sunshine, of visual clarity, coupled with oppressive heat in summer and damp, penetrating cold in winter. Never the kaleidoscopic movement and brusque surprises of an English cloud formation. For day after day, heaven and earth remain inert, motionless, in an anaemic torpor. The taciturn Veneto, a research student at the hospital tells me, consumes twice as many pharmaceuticals per head as other more fortunate areas of the peninsula.

  Orietta is popping pills for her tachycardia as we prepare for the New Year’s Eve celebration in the taverna. Lucilla knocks on our door and asks Rita to come and read the instructions in tiny print inside the box of some medicine or other. For her blood pressure. Could it combine nastily with the other drugs she is taking for her constipation? Vittorina won’t take the pills she has been prescribed for her low pressure, counting rather on San Gaspare. Giampaolo, meanwhile, is congratulating himself on having decided to go for the flu vaccination this year. Everybody at the office has been down but him. Taking sick leave most likely, Orietta thinks wrily, the dipendente’s only revenge. Sitting together in their flat, Giampaolo constantly fiddling with the remote control of the aerial on the roof, we watch the President’s New Year message, in which, referring to the recent devastating bomb on a train in a tunnel between Florence and Bologna, he makes the famous remark: ‘They tell me that the secret services are honest, they tell me they are working non-stop to find the culprits …’ Later there is to be something live from the Moulin Rouge which Giampaolo shows a lingering interest in. There’s so much enticing soft porn on Italian TV. But now it’s time to go down to the taverna for a big barbecue and plenty of wine and prosecco.

  Towards midnight the fireworks begin to crackle in earnest. It sounds like a gun battle. Nearer to home, the Negretti’s adolescent boys have bought a full-scale discothèque outfit and installed it in their two-car garage where they are making other young Montecchiesi pay a couple of thousand Lire for the pleasure of sixteen-year-old Mario’s disc-jockeying. Every time we stop talking in the taverna we are assailed by the line: ‘Up, down, like a yo-yo, life is just a giddy up and go go.’ Lara asks me what it means but I refuse to translate. It’s too stupid. The reinforced cement columns throb. Heaven knows how Vittorina and Lucilla are managing to watch their variety shows upstairs. Giampaolo tells me that legally he could phone the carabinieri and get them over, since doubtless the noise is above legally established decibel thresholds and the Negretti certainly don’t have a licence for holding public gatherings. However, he feels this would be unkind at New Year. I ask him how he decides whether to call the carabinieri rather than the polizia. Do they have different duties? He tells me that their duties are exactly the same, indeed they frequently compete, and refuse to share information in the hope of arriving at their criminal first. He calls the carabinieri merely from personal choice and because their station is a kilometre or two nearer. Isn’t our Margaret Thatcher always talking about personal choice?

  Towards one o’clock we go upstairs. The fog has lifted, as it sometimes will at night. The air is quite clear at four or five degrees below zero. From our balcony we can see rockets rising into the sky from surrounding villages. The restaurants offering their New Year’s cenone at 200, 000 Lire a head will still be packed. Tomorrow’s news will tell us exactly how many people the fireworks and celebratory gunfire killed in Naples, how many people who paid for their cenone in advance turned up to find the restaurant closed, the proprietor gone forever, how many people driving back at dawn in thickening fog went into walls and ditches. Obliged to put up with Mario Negretti’s disc-jockeying into the early hours, we while away the time with the 1, 000 piece jigsaw the Visentini have given us, showing the snowy peaks north of this fog.

  The following morning, the Visentini are off early to see their relatives in Venice, but Giampaolo has left precise instructions that I must go and see Lucilla before ten o’clock. I will be the only man in the house and it is bad luck for a woman to see another woman first on New Year’s day. Thus, before Lucilla can go downstairs to chat with Vittorina, I will have to go and greet her. Interestingly, the more religious, mysterious Vittorina doesn’t insist on observing this superstition, while for Lucilla it’s a matter of life or death. When I mentioned this paradox to Vittorina a couple of weeks later, I actually got a squeaky giggle out of her. Cilla just wants to see a man, she said.

  And, indeed, when I knocked and announced myself, Lucilla was in a state of suggestive déshabillé which twenty years ago might still have turned an ambulante’s head. Buona fine, buon principio, troppo gentile, Signor Tino. I bend down to kiss her on both made-up cheeks and she tells me she hasn’t even been answering the phone in case it is a woman. Actually, she’s not sure if the phone counts, but she thought she’d be safe. As always, she insists I come in. Do I know how best to look after the plants she has been given? Four stelle di Natale (poinsettias), a traditional Christmas gift, are lined up on the tiled floor, still in their transparent plastic wraps. They are so beautiful, but somehow she can never keep them for more than a month or so. Si, si grazie, she did get her seven bras, troppo gentile of me to ask, although she wasn’t entirely satisfied. Il professore, on the other hand, knew everything about plants. He used to advise her as to how …

  Two weeks after these New Year celebrations, we receive a letter from Lucilla’s lawyer advising us in the most grandiloquent terms that from now on we are to pay our rent to her. We show our ignorance of such matters by not appreciating that we could perfectly well ignore this. I immediately telephone Signora Marta, who says she will get her lawyer to send us a further letter ordering us to continue to pay to her and quoting the various articles of the law which justify this approach. ‘And how is the old lady?’ she enquires as always. ‘She must be seventy something after all, why doesn’t she just enjoy her old age?’ I tell her that while Vittorina has been quite ill of late, Lucilla is doing just fine. Marta says that she herself is so upset by having these criminal proceedings brought against her, she is now being forced to take an assortment of tranquillisers. When she wins the case she will sue Lucilla for damages.

  After which, the legal war goes on with letter following letter. The first court hearing is finally held, then promptly adjourned – because Marta’s lawyer doesn’t turn up. A date some three months away is fixed. It is impossible for us not to reflect how all this is playing into our hands. Not only will nobody be able to sell the place until the case is settled, but it would take a very courageous Marta indeed to raise our rent in these circumstances. The affair seems to be without either fine or principio which can only be buono for us.

  26

  Strada delle zitelle

  I DATE OUR final acceptance as first-class citizens of Via Colombare to the moment when it became generally known that Rita was to have a baby. It would have been Carnival time, February, the shops full of monster masks and d’Artagnan outfits for five-year-olds. It was also around then that we discovered the Centro Primo Maggio, a place which has always made me feel that little bit happier about living in Montecchio.

  Rita wanted tests done at the hospital and asked Orietta how to go about it. No one could have been better informed. Nor more delighted about the news. A baby in number 10, Meraviglioso! Giampaolo, too, was genuinely delighted. His serious man’s face broke up into excited boyishness. The vibrations in this spic-and-span, austerely stylish apartment were suddenly very cosy indeed. Lara almost jumped for joy. The little brother or sister she hadn’t had, she cried!

  Of course, the Visentini were discretion itself. They respected your privacy, spoke to no one. It was a point of honour. With them a
ny remark, however banal was considered highly confidential. But about ten minutes after Rita had mentioned the development to Lucilla (since every secretive society must have its source of gossip), the whole of Via Colombare was informed. And our social status rose vertiginously. We were no longer two fly-by-nights who did strange jobs and brought queer visitors in scruffy cars with foreign plates. We were responsible people putting down roots. We were creating a family and thus probably Christian even if we didn’t go to Mass. Walking along the street now, there was no question of people not responding to my ‘buon giorno’ and ‘buona sera’. On the contrary, everybody smiled their complicity. Rita was buttonholed by women who had barely spoken to her before. When was it due? Was she suffering from morning sickness? Did we want a boy or a girl? Which hospital were we thinking of going to … Heads nodded sagely in the cold air. For there was no fog now, just a long dull wait for spring. After which, the baby.

  Anyway, it would probably be a girl. Yes it would certainly be a girl. Why? Because every child born in Via Colombare in the last few years had been a girl. And oddly enough all their names started with ‘M’: Marta, Monica, Milena … Perhaps we could call ours Mariangela, or Miranda. Although not that many children had been born in the last ten years, of course, because not only was this the street of the little girls (at this very moment playing volleyball over railings in winter sunshine), but it was also la strada delle zitelle, the street of the old maids.

  It hadn’t occurred to us before, but now one came to think of it there was a marked preponderance of unmarried, middle-aged women in the street: the woman with the twig broom, for example, and her slimmer sister; then the dark-haired sprightly sister of the insurance pedlar; and the woman at the corner by the Madonnina who sat at her window behind a loom and had a dog on a chain outside which barked ferociously behind tall iron gates and appeared to answer to the name of Book.

  ‘Perhaps it’s because of the Virgin,’ the woman with the twig broom laughed, all of a sudden on very easy terms. She had wiry permed blond hair and a fierce mole at the base of her nose. We didn’t understand. ‘The Madonnina,’ she said, pointing to the statue with its patient sad face. And she added with a note of disappointment, ‘I don’t suppose you’ll be leaving number 10 now, my nephew will have to buy in the co-operative.’

  Walking back home, I objected to Rita that the Virgin had surely only been a virgin prior to the birth of Christ. After that she had had other children whom Jesus referred to as his brothers. It was thus unlikely that she would want to influence the women of Via Colombare to become old maids. Rita told me I was wrong. The Virgin had never had other children. But I have a whole youth of church attendance and Bible studies behind me. I was sure. ‘And Joseph?’ I asked. ‘What became of him then?’ We were walking by the low pink wall of old Marini’s garden. He was pruning his fruit trees.

  ‘Celibate.’

  ‘But if …’

  ‘Well, he could hardly go to bed with the mother of Christ, could he?’

  I’d never thought about it quite in this crude way. I suggested we go and talk to Don Guido about it. Even if he chucked away his encyclicals he could surely clear up this one for us.

  But in the end it was enough to enquire of an authority like Vittorina. Yes of course the Virgin had remained a virgin for the rest of her life. Anything else was unthinkable. Otherwise how could she be the model of virtue? She would come down to our level. The old woman, herself childless, seemed genuinely puzzled that anyone should have imagined otherwise.

  I quote this banal misunderstanding merely to show how even a supposedly well-educated Protestant like myself can for so long be unaware of some key piece of dogma underpinning the Catholic culture he is living in. Joseph had thus been forgotten. Jesus hadn’t had any brothers, as I had been taught. Mary was the model of celibacy, which was a blessed virtue. She had somehow managed to combine this self-denial with pious motherhood, thus making herself the perfect woman. Indeed, a statue of hers was still reputed to be crying in Cologna Veneta after more than three months, although the priests were refusing to allow the tears to be analysed. Radio Santa Teresa had discussed the matter, but without ever taking on the question as to why the virgin might be crying. Because she was still unhappy about her son’s crucifixion despite his resurrection? Because the local congregation was sinful? Or to demonstrate that devotional images were more than mere blocks of wood or stone? Sometimes Radio Santa Teresa would broadcast a whole rosary repeating Santa Maria, Madre di Dio, time after time. It was quite relaxing. And now the virgin was also being held responsible for the preponderance of female births in Via Colombare. And likewise for the fact that so many of the women in Via Colombare remained unmarried …

  Naturally, I began to hope that our baby would be a boy (as the Virgin’s had been, come to think of it).

  But such a hope was precisely what was expected of me anyway. ‘I imagine you’ll be wanting a maschio, Signor Tino?’ Lucilla said. ‘It’s only natural for a man to want a maschio.’ And she laughed, as if to say, ‘Too bad for you the creature was conceived in Via Colombare of all places.’

  I thus decided to say to other inhabitants of the street that I would rather like to have a girl, while secretly hoping we would have a boy, and at the same time feeling irritated with myself for getting drawn into this superstitious mare’s nest, which in the end nobody on Via Colombare particularly cared about, just as none of them particularly cared whether the Pope insisted that contraception was murder, or whether a visiting priest had once dared to tell them not to come forward for the host if they hadn’t paid their taxes. There is this magical duplicity about Italians. I’ll never get used to it. You think they’re superstitious bigots, but then they’re more open-minded than you are. None of them would ever have criticised Christ for plucking his ears of corn on the Sabbath. It’s as if they were a nation of Protestants, or even free-thinkers, who just happened to be deeply attached, for reasons of style and aesthetics, to the Catholic way of worship. Because they appreciate its richness. It fills their lives.

  But a more pressing question than the sex of the child was whether we should use public or private health care for this pregnancy. Giampaolo Visentini, being the new man, favoured use of a public health system which was, he claimed, extremely valido, although he appreciated that some people might doubt that. Indeed, he himself had paid privately when Lara had had to see a dermatologist over a rash she’d had, because the waiting list at the state hospital was so long. And he’d been furious, he added, when the consultant’s secretary had not given him a receipt after he’d paid his 70, 000 Lire.

  The problem, Orietta explained, was that if you went to the hospital for your visits, you couldn’t guarantee seeing the same gynaecologist every time, nor could you know whether he’d be there when the child was born. The doctors had plainly decided on this system in order to further their private practices outside the hospital.

  We were thus persuaded to go private. A gynaecologist di fiducia was recommended by a friend and we went. Disconcertingly, despite having an appointment, we had to wait just as long as one usually waits in the doctor’s surgery. Then at the end of his examination, the little man who went by the apt name of Dolcetta prescribed a list of tests so long we wondered if there would be time in the remaining six months to perform them all. And since a scan was urgent, he said, we should do that privately too, not waste time at the hospital; and he gave us the name of a clinic, where, we very quickly discovered, he himself worked, and presumably took a cut of the 100, 000 or more they wanted for a scan. At which Rita decided to drop the man and go for the lowest of the low, a health service gynaecologist who came to the small public clinic in Montecchio once a week. Not being a hospital consultant or even a hospital doctor, his assistance was generally spurned and making an appointment was refreshingly easy. The man turned out to be a southerner with a light, jolly patter, and a determination, he surprisingly boasted, to make the public system work. We couldn’t have been b
etter served.

  27

  Centro Primo Maggio

  IT WAS ACCORDION music which first drew us to Centro Primo Maggio. We were walking along a little footpath that leads off the main road behind the new church where Don Guido keeps his rabbits and hens. Running between two deep ditches, the path is ill-kept: to the left is a patchwork of vegetable allotments behind crumbling houses, plastic bags over warm-weather plants, plane trees pruned to knobbly trunks, dogs on chains, skulking cats, and a complex crisscrossing of lively streams. I am conscious, as I describe this, that it does not sound especially attractive, whereas in fact the rich haphazardness of it all and the general rejection of any recognisable geometry is constantly picturesque. Someone has built a little raft to push from one side of a ditch to the other: a chair strapped to a wooden door over petrol-can floats. There’s an old man in his allotment asleep in a decaying armchair with a hat and a bottle of wine. A woman is dropping sprigs of rosemary into her apron. On precarious scaffolding, an older workman and young apprentice chip at the ruined stucco of a house. And there is bric-à-brac from the past: a complicated pattern of stone walls guides one of the streams into an old sheep dip; here and there steps lead from a house down to the water and a large, flat scouring stone. A sturdy middle-aged woman will appear, and descend the steps with a red plastic basket full of dirty laundry. Where the houses back right on to the water, you see pipes gushing out suspicious effluents into the stream. All these people have colour TVs and decent cars.