Italian Neighbours

by Tim Parks

  We had just begun to hear the strains of jolly accordion music when we came across the ascetic Lorenzo, standing thigh-deep in the larger of the two ditches, almost a river at this point, patiently hacking away under water with a sickle tied to a long metal pole.

  He is cutting the choking underwater weeds, he explains, which are a result of excess oxygen in the water due to extravagant use of fertilisers up on the hills, plus the dumping of waste by pig breeders.

  Off his own bat?

  He laughs: he and some friends have formed a co-operative, a non-profitmaking company, which is paid by the council to keep the village’s streams and ditches in good order. It’s a victory won after a decade of protest about public lack of concern for the local ecology.

  But isn’t it cold in the ditch? A great clump of weeds detaches itself from the bottom and floats clear with the current. Lorenzo has a big bag tied to his belt into which he drops a muddy Coca-Cola bottle.

  Not at all. The water is warmer than the air, and he has his waders on. He likes the job. But has decided to leave Montecchio.

  Lorenzo has ginger hair, tightly curled, and a thin nose. Despite having left the Jesuits, his sharp features betray the stubbornness of the man with a cause.

  Because the people here are so traditional, he says, so timid, so cynical, so set in their ways. They’re never willing to get out there and fight the environmental battle. Lorenzo turns out to be another of those Italians who aspire to escape provincial claustrophobia.

  ‘I’m thinking of going abroad,’ he says, just as Bepi does, although the two people couldn’t be more different.

  First he tried the Church, he said, where they wouldn’t allow you to have a single thought of your own. And now it’s not much different in the end trying to improve the situation here in Montecchio. Every new idea is greeted with suspicion.

  He begins to press us to come to the next meeting about the flyover the council are planning to build right by the hill with the castle. Feeling guilty, we agree to come – the cause is certainly a good one – but to change the subject we ask him what the accordion music is. Lorenzo gives us directions to the Centro Primo Maggio.

  The path ends in a flight of steps climbing to a road where cars chase down a desperately narrow, crooked strip of tarmac with no space for a pavement below the tall walls of three- and four-storey houses. Opposite the path, however, the houses end and the road opens up into the village’s second lake, which is much like the Laghetto Squarà, although without the Roman blocks. A battered crash barrier stops the hurrying cars from falling in. To the left of the lake are the gates to a large old factory covering acres of land. This was once a tannery. Now Mondadori, Italy’s largest printers, are using it as a paper-storage warehouse. You thus step out from the path to find a huge German truck with two trailers rumbling back and forward to try and get out of the gate, around the crash barrier by the lake, and then on into the forbiddingly narrow canyon of the street beyond.

  The other side of the lake there’s a grassy pasture, and to the right, a group of case popolari, council flats. We walk down towards them and towards the sound of music. Other people are converging there too, in carnival outfit. Or, rather, the adults are for the most part in plain clothes while their little children are fairy queens and assault robots. Carnival is fairly tame in Montecchio. So tame we didn’t even know the procession was today. In any event, no inhibitions are being dropped behind demonic masks. For a more extravagant celebration people will go to Verona, where bizarre floats wind through the streets for hours and youths cover shop windows in shaving foam.

  The case popolari look really OK. True, the stucco is cracking here and there and the balconies are smaller than they might be, but by London standards they look fine. And the people living in them seem to be doing all right too. There are plenty of expensive cars about. Like the statale (and very often he is a statale), your casa popolare occupant is on to a good deal. He pays a rent way below the market rate and, after twenty-five years, the flat will automatically become his. Meanwhile, he polishes his Alfetta. The only drawback being that, ten years after the place was built, the council still hasn’t found the money to put in pavements or asphalt the parking spaces. The ground is grit and stones. One thus has to wash one’s Alfetta rather more often than even an Italian might want.

  And the little princesses are getting their silver slippers dirty. The accordion speeds up. We follow a small d’Artagnan through the estate to find, on the other side, just where the country begins, a rusty green gate in a sagging fence and the legend, ‘Centro Primo Maggio’. Inside, under a bare pergola, a small group of middle-aged men in Sunday best are playing accordion, guitar and drums. Despite changing tune every couple of minutes, the sound and rhythm is always the same: Der-der-der-der, di dum, diddy dum, diddy dum, der der der der, di dum, diddy dum, diddy dum … A table is stacked with paper cups; there are big plastic bottles of lemonade at one end and even bigger bottles of wine at the other. In the middle are plates of galani, fried dough cakes dunked in icing sugar. The children hurl handfuls of confetti, some of which gets in my wine. And a little boy bursts into tears because he has got his Zorro outfit dirty.

  Then the Re Magnaron, the carnival leader, arrives. The magnaron is a tiny fish that swims about in the dikes and ditches here and once formed the traditional carnival dish. With his scaly head and sequinned cloak, the man playing the role looks like something from a Ben Jonson masque. Guffawing loudly, tossing clouds of confetti, he leads off the fifty or so cowboys, penguins, batmen and fairy queens on their infant procession through the village. But we have already fallen in love with the Centro Primo Maggio and decide to stay behind. There will be time for the parades when we have our own children.

  It began as a Communist Party social club. Immediately to the left of the gate is a large low prefab with bar, cluttered tables, a pair of space-invader machines, a copy of Unità, the Communist paper, a poster of Berlinguer, a hammer and sickle, and an assortment of those ubiquitous old Montecchio men with their hats and wine bottles. Playing cards. Opposite the hut is the pergola, perhaps twenty yards long, vine tendrils stretching over a curving iron frame to offer a shady space on summer days and a small dance floor for festive evenings. There is a strip of cement for bowls, which is fenced in to prevent the heavy balls from flying out at passers by. A notice exhorts customers not to argue. Beyond, a very large scrubby lawn is scattered with rickety chairs and tables as far as the flood embankment and emergency ditch fifty yards away. To one side of this lawn a big barbecuing stand prepares hot sausage meat, bruschetta and aubergine slices on toast for lunch. Then there are a couple of tennis courts, a children’s playground, a cement table for ping-pong and, at the very end of the complex, an ambitious dirt track for BMX bikes. For the Communists must appeal to the younger generation, too.

  But it is not the facilities which make Centro Primo Maggio what it is. I haven’t spent a hundred lazy Saturday afternoons here for that. It’s the extremely attractive atmosphere of laissez-faire, the civilised and gentle nature of the people who use the place. There’s nothing aggressive in the culture of Montecchio’s working and peasant classes. At least, not that I have observed. And if they drink too much, they do it slowly, sitting on the veranda of the prefab, watching the crimson wink of Bardolino in the sunshine. They are at ease, relaxed, there is never the slightest threat of hurry or unpleasantness. Nor does one experience that sense of claustrophobia you get in downtown middle-class Verona, and even in Pasticceria Maggia sometimes, that obsession with fashion and elegance, fur and leather, the scrubbed faces of the men, the heavy make-up of the women, the crinkly dyed blond of respectable girls fanning out on to sheepskin shoulders, the hubbub of posh Veneto la-di-da.

  None of this at Centro Primo Maggio. It’s the sort of place, I have sometimes thought, that Orwell must have dreamed of. You salute your faith-healing barber who clearly appreciates you more now you have admitted to sensing a tingling feeling when his fingers touc
h your head. You salute the shoemender, who runs a little Elvis Presley fan club and has pictures of the King all over his tiny shop. You wave to the supermarket boys as they play tennis, the girls who serve in Bepi’s shop. And Ercole, tall, lantern-jawed, who fills up your car at the local pump and ran as an indipendente di Sinistra at the last elections, nods to you as he helps the younger boys with their bikes. Prices are comparatively low, although it would be a mistake to buy a cappuccino here. Wine or espresso or both are the thing. Just inside the door of the prefab, a small space is made available for a couple of marocchini to show their wares without going about and bothering people. And there’s a black man selling cheap leather goods and Russian watches. You pick up your wine, take it out into the garden and wonder how long you can resist the smell of sizzling pork and aubergines.

  Not that there aren’t encroachments from the modern yuppie Italy and its well-healed pieties: the anxious mothers, for example, who are watching their children do as tennis teacher tells them on the new, carefully groomed, clay courts; and then the bright young men who have just finished playing and are ordering, instead of beer or wine, the fashionable, healthy, super-vitaminised mineral drinks heavily advertised on television. They are so conscious of their virtue, these young men, as they discuss the technicalities of their game with TV-expert solemnity, I feel almost sorry for them. Outside, hordes of eight-year-olds in the uniform of the Montecchio biking club are strapping on their helmets before tackling the BMX course. Every single girl and boy has his or her special biking shoes, biking pants, biking gloves …

  But it all coexists so happily at Centro Primo Maggio: as if the contemporary fads were nothing more than pink froth on the same old blood-red wine. And it’s fun watching the bowls, or on summer evenings the people dancing to the squelchy tunes of the accordion beneath the now fragrant pergola: der der der der, di dum, diddy dum, diddy dum …

  Whenever I go, I always feel this is Montecchio at its best.

  28

  Il frate indovino

  ANOTHER THING THAT raised my status in Via Colombare, and at number 10 in particular, was the fact that I was the only man around one morning when disaster struck. We were sitting in the kitchen. The news was reminding us it was time to make our VAT declaration. It is touching the way the public service seeks to prod the citizens’ memory in this way. Such and such a category, the newscaster tells you – artisans, shopkeepers, solicitors – has just three days to make such and such a declaration. Or: people with cars registered in January have just a week to pay their car tax, although there may be a reprieve since not enough forms are presently available.

  The apologetic Roman voice was suddenly interrupted by a pounding on the front door. Lucilla, in her pink, brushed nylon dressing-gown, face harrowed by melodrama, was hopping from one foot to the other on the landing by the remains of her Christmas poinsettia. She had been unable to get Vittorina to come to her door.

  This then was what all the shouting had been about earlier on.

  Had she tried the phone? Vittorina has a phone by her bed. Lucilla rushed back into her flat and was so upset she couldn’t dial the number. ‘Che agitassión, che agitassión, Signor Tino!’ she cried. We helped her. A tubby hand grabbed the receiver. There was no answer.

  Could Vittorina be out?

  No. Lucilla claimed she had heard her moaning behind the door. At which Rita phoned for an ambulance while I rushed downstairs. Orietta came out, and whereas I would have imagined this was just the kind of thing that would have brought on her palpitations, she was in fact very cool and sensible. We must try and get into the flat. Lucilla’s spare keys perhaps? But Vittorina had left her own in the door inside. So, a window, Orietta suggested.

  I went outside and pulled myself up on to Vittorina’s terrace balcony beneath which I had watered grass all the long summer before. Forcing apart the slats of her shutter just a crack, I was able to see that the french window behind was open to let some air in. I asked Orietta if she had such a thing as a breadknife and she hurried off to find one. It was late February. Rain was falling in the street behind me, and, unusually for these parts, there was wind with it. I remember the cheese van turned the corner with a coolly megaphoned ‘Formaggi!’ Then Orietta brought out a selection of useful-looking knives and only a very few moments later I had sawed two small squares out of the plastic slats so as to be able to reach in and release the catches inside. I heaved the shutter up a little, crawled underneath, and found Vittorina stretched limply on her cold dining-room tiles in nineteenth-century underwear.

  On being let in, Lucilla had a fit of hysteria. It was plain she could already see herself beating her fists on the coffin. She howled out loud and tugged at her short hennaed grey hair to feel the pain. Neighbours rushed in from the street. Together we got Vittorina into a sitting position on an armchair. The women rubbed her hands and feet. Others comforted Lucilla and helped her loosen off her girdle.

  Somewhat embarrassed, I decided I had better retire to the kitchen until the ambulance came. It was thus that I found myself reading a rather odd calendar pinned to the door of one of Vittorina’s freshly carpented cupboards. Il calendario del frate indovino, it said. And this immediately struck me as curious, for a frate is a priest, a friar (the calendar was published by a religious order), while an indovino is a decidedly secular fortune-teller. Another peculiar thing was the way the colours and graphics of the poster-size pages seemed to come straight out of the early sixties (old cornflakes-box illustrations spring to mind), whereas the dates referred unequivocally to today. In the middle of the page were the days of the month, each with its saint’s name in bold type followed by runner-up saints in small print: i.e., 1 March, SAN SILVIO, Sant’Albino, Sant’Ercolano. Then, around the calendar proper, a series of different coloured boxes offered oodles of advice, predictions, maxims and mottoes, information for farmers, satirical jokes, cartoons and ominous sayings. Plenty for me to while away five minutes with:

  ‘Seeding: given a waning moon, now is the time to plant peas, beets and spinach in a sheltered area.’

  ‘Women: Die-hard reactionaries refuse to recognise that in a Christian society women have responsibilities as great as those of men, and sometimes greater. Like motherhood.’

  I wondered quite who the reactionary here might be. And if the piece on seeding had been written by the indovino persona, was the comment on women the work of the frate? Vittorina of course had had no children, no motherhood to justify her femininity. Nor even virginity. Although she subscribed to this same potent mix of the religious and secular: the quote from the Bible and the day’s horoscope beside. And then my eye caught this disquieting reflection:

  ‘Thought for the Day. Every morning in Africa the gazelle wakes up and knows he will have to run faster than the lion if he is not to be killed. Every morning in Africa the lion wakes up and knows he will have to run faster than the gazelle if he is not to die of hunger. When the sun rises, it doesn’t matter if you’re a gazelle or a lion, you’d better start running.’

  Clearly this boded ill indeed for poor Vittorina.

  The Croce Verde ambulance arrived, an orderly offered a possible diagnosis of stroke, Vittorina was swathed in blankets and carried off. The stretcher-bearers refused to let the sobbing Lucilla into the vehicle so a neighbour, the insurance salesman’s sister, one of Via Colombare’s zitelle, travelled with her. At the last moment, Orietta hurried out with a plastic bag containing nightdress, cutlery, soap, towel and toilet paper, all of which Vittorina would need if she was to stay in hospital for any length of time. Lucilla retired to her bed with its pink canopies and called the doctor to come and measure her blood pressure, slipping the man 20, 000 Lire for doing what the state already paid him to do. Imaginatively, he prescribed tranquillisers. ‘Troppo gentile,’ Lucilla told him and called us in to ask if we would go and get her prescription.

  The chemist is still a figure of some authority in provincial Italian society. A long queue of people with no time to
go to the doctor were thus waiting for his advice. And, unfortunately, there is only one chemist in Montecchio since the local council has not given permission for another to open. This gives our chemist a powerful monopoly, especially since such simple products as aspirins, milk of magnesia and the like can only be sold by chemists. The prescription charge is around two pounds, then you pay a percentage of the cost of the product, this depending on the nature of the medicine required and your own particular status.

  The process is complicated. The chemist has what looks like a plasticised log table on the counter and taps on a calculator, doing percentages, adding and subtracting. I wait, but then the woman in front of me doesn’t have a prescription for the Valium she wants. Which must only be sold under prescription of course. Sotto voce, a long argument begins. Per favore, dottore, she pleads. After furtive glances to check who is in the shop, he finally gives her what he shouldn’t. At the full price. Then he asks me to sign two petitions, one to have the flood ditch outside paved over for more convenient parking, another to complain that the government is being very late in making its payments to chemists for medicines sold under prescription. Politely, I refuse. Down south, in Calabria, I think, there is an area where pretty well every chemist has been kidnapped at some time over the last few years. Ransom payments have not presented an insuperable problem. Walking home, I observe that I am already feeling that peculiarly Italian envy of the more fortunate employment categories.

  We go and visit Vittorina in hospital. The building compares well with the National Health ones I knew, although there are a few beds in the corridors. The nurses are mainly small, slim, southern men and wear green pyjama affairs and slip-on clogs. At night Marisa has been sitting on a straight-backed chair by Vittorina’s side. Almost everybody who is seriously ill has a relative spending the night with them.