Italian Neighbours

by Tim Parks

  But Vittorina is recovering fast. She’s sitting up and smiling. It’s just that she can’t move her left arm or leg. In a slurred voice she is embarrassingly profuse in her thanks. She does hope Lucilla will let us keep the flat. And driving home, it occurs to us that, yes, we do have a strong card to play here. I will point out to Lucilla that since I mostly work at home I am generally on hand to deal with the kind of emergencies that might befall old and ailing women. Whereas a new tenant, even one as capable and gentile as Signor Giampaolo, would probably not be.

  Always assuming Lucilla wins, or that the case is ever settled at all.

  Arriving back in Montecchio, we noticed a small knot of people outside the church, elderly women and children, one or two of the latter furiously rubbing their foreheads. How odd. Until we recalled it was Ash Wednesday. ‘From dust you came and to dust you shall return.’ Don Guido had been signing the cross in ash on their foreheads. This was one religious festival that it was as well perhaps Vittorina had missed.

  Although death, as they like to say, is not always unwelcome. And if the saga of Marta vs. Lucilla was to be interminable, it was not long after Vittorina’s return home that the final curtain did at last fall on another long-running drama. The weather had turned rough: spring storms, March winds. And, at night, when the wind blew, you couldn’t keep the shutters down because the plastic slats would rattle irksomely. This meant that if Vega chose to bark, five, six metres from our window, the noise was even louder. It seemed to ring in your skull.

  One night we were kept awake for ages as the dog yelped, howled and bayed; railing at the stormy wind we imagined, participating in her doggy way in the change of the seasons, the approaching equinox. Right through the small hours it went on, urgent and tortured, as if the creature were barking inside your brain, tugging you back from the threshold of sleep with its teeth. How we moaned and swore and wondered at our own impotence. Until the following morning, wearily cleaning my own teeth before some lesson, I pushed open the frosted glass of the bathroom window, for no other reason really than to feel the air on my face and see the world I knew was there. Except that today it wasn’t, quite. For under the budding cachi tree was stretched, as if in sacrificial offering, the horribly distorted corpse of our canine tormentor. Poisoned.

  Rita! Rita! A moment’s delighted celebration, an enthusiastic embrace. At last, at last! Someone had done for the mutt! How splendid life was going to be!

  And then came the first doubts. Everybody must imagine it was us. Oh no! The Negretti family were only too aware how much Vega disturbed us. We had talked quite openly about poisoning the creature. And there had been those phone calls we’d made. In the early hours. If nothing else they must make us the prime suspects. Not that we feared Rocco Negretti would go to the police. It wasn’t his style. But what if some stupid vendetta were to begin? After all we had the cat now. Would it be safe for her to go out?

  That evening we talked to Giampaolo and Orietta. Vega, they had heard through the grapevine, had definitely been poisoned, but nobody knew whom by. They looked at us intently. We denied any knowledge. There was a rumour, they said, that the animal had eaten some rat poison Negretti had used in his cellar. But this seemed extremely unlikely, given that the dog was never allowed into the house. Vittorina, grim faced, mouth twisted as she spoke, was mysterious: ‘That animal got on one too many people’s nerves,’ she said darkly. Across from my study window, the old skull-face between lace curtains was sibylline as death itself.

  Other inhabitants of Via Colombare seemed not so much reticent as genuinely uninterested. Who cared who had killed old Negretti’s dog, as long as the next one he got didn’t bark so much?

  We mulled over this strange case of wish fulfilment for some time. And watched our cat carefully. Nothing happened. In the end our conclusion was that Negretti must have poisoned the animal himself to be rid of it. For only forty-eight hours after Vega’s death he came home with a huge black Doberman and launched into a breeding experiment that is still going on to this day. The sight of the great black creature terrified us at first; how loud would this monster bark? Until we realised that a Montecchiese breeding a dog is quite a different proposition from a Montecchiese merely keeping a dog. For a breeding dog is worth money and hence deserves respect. With the result that first Ursa and later Sirio, Musca and Canope (this obsession with the night sky was one of the more attractive sides to Negretti’s character) were well fed, regularly brushed, and barked very little at night.

  29

  Primavera

  I DON’T KNOW why, but I picked up a copy of the frate indovino calendar myself. I had noticed it hanging in three or four houses now. It seemed popular in a sort of Reader’s Digest, ready-source-of-wisdom way. And who would be without a ready source of wisdom? Thus, come spring-time, an entry entitled Per Tutti tells me: ‘Remember that love exists regardless of age, and that the love that lasts longest is also the strongest. However, we should also remember that young people are a constant prey to sexual impulses, especially at certain times of the year. Fortunately, these can be quietened and actually disappear in individuals who manage to establish loyal relationships with their parents, their true friends, and their spiritual guides.’

  A world where adolescents are not troubled by sexual impulses! One’s first reaction is to burst out laughing, to assume that our frate is way out on a celibate limb here. Who could ever want such a thing? Yet when I begin to pay attention, it does seem that a very large proportion of my students at the university not only do seem to want, but actually appear to have achieved the God-fearing serenity he describes. And a fair number of youths in Montecchio too. There is a decorousness and calm about them at once admirable and disturbing. ‘No, I don’t want to leave home,’ they tell you. ‘I like living with mamma e papà. There’s nothing I’d like to do that I can’t do at home.’ Or ‘Francesca and I will get married and live together in about five years’ time when I pass the state exam to become an accountant in my home village of Buttapietra.’ They seem quite untroubled by matters sexual.

  I ask how many of my students go to Mass (one can pretend this is a linguistic exercise when teaching English). More than half regularly and most of the rest occasionally. Yes, they go with their parents. Even their grandparents. (Of course, in a way, this is wonderful, even enviable.) I ask what they did last weekend, and hear from three or four students that they went on a spiritual retreat. To be together and pray for peace. The girls dress with Latin elegance and seem very self-composed. But Friday night they went to a discothèque. Oh yes, Federica, and what did you wear? (revision of chapter 4). Black skirt, black tights. And you Cristina? Black skirt, black tights. And you, Monica? Black skirt, black tights. Do the boys wear ties when they go to discothèques? Some do, some don’t. And what did you have to drink? Fanta, Coca-Cola. No wine? No wine.

  One constantly suspects that some cover-up job is going on. Something you can’t understand is happening. Surely they can’t all be like this, so very sure of themselves, untroubled by life’s passing. And I ask questions at random. How did you get to the discothèque? In papà’s car. What kind of car does he have? A Mercedes estate. Oh, and how long did you stay? Till two in the morning. And does anything actually happen at these discothèques? What do you mean, happen?

  Is this truly serenity, the wise calm of the youth who has a good relationship with loyal friends, sensible parents and spiritual guide? Or reticence and obtusity? And how does it square up with those unmarried mothers of Montecchio, disconsolately pushing their prams around the broken fountain of Piazza Buccari?

  ‘By far the most widely practised method of contraception in Italy’, explains Maria Grazia in her sanitaria (she loves these conversations), ‘is coitus interruptus. You know? Not something young men are notoriously good at.’ A rueful expression crosses her face. ‘And then spring comes so suddenly here.’

  It certainly does. Late March, early April’s the time: San Francesco, San Sisto, Sant’Isido
ro … The lingering mists, the cold colourless days, the heavy rains are suddenly gone. The sun powers through, so hot you find you’re desperately overdressed. And the women would have loved to wear their furs just one last time. But it’s too late. You wake one morning – San Celestino my calendar tells me – and the sky is awhirl with swifts and swallows. How they liven up the hills and farms and river bridges with their voracious, darting search for food, and sex presumably. Cherry and peach blossom simply explode. All the trees at once. Line after line of them up the hills between the still gaunt vines. Already the bees are crawling in and out of sugary petals. The polythene comes off the lemon trees. The earth releases all its pent-up smells. And in the evening dusk, white cherry flowers glow like beacons, to the croaking of a thousand frogs converging on Montecchio’s ditches – to lay their spawn.

  How loud those frogs will croak! It’s obscene! And no wonder that one or two of the less-well-spiritually-guided tend to fall by the wayside: in the soft grass, the primroses and periwinkles. After all, the frate indovino did warn that there were vulnerable times of the year.

  At number 10, a condominium garden committee agrees to have a man come in and prune all our flowering shrubs just before they can bloom. He cuts and clips, returning a year’s growth to austere geometric shapes. And the buds had looked so promising. Rita is furious and sticks the cuttings in jars about the flat. If she had had more time, Lucilla says, she would have moved the hibiscus the other side of the little cypress. But what with Vittorina being ill …

  On Palm Sunday everybody comes out of Mass with olive branches in their hands. Specially blessed by Don Guido. The children make a pretty picture. Their well-dressed parents look rather sheepish. Il frate indovino says:

  La domenica dell’olivo, ogni ucello fa il suo nido,

  e se gocciola la frasca, sarà bello il dì di Pasqua.

  (On Palm Sunday, all the birds their nests do lay And if the branch drips rain, Easter will be fine again.)

  In the event, la domenica dell’olivo is fine this year, and likewise Pasqua. So much for our indovino.

  On Easter Monday, Pasquetta, as it’s called, the tradition is to set off into the hills for a mammoth picnic with barbecue equipment and bottles of wine. As always, the formula of religious festival plus heavy eating appears to be invincible. Everybody is on the move with hampers and ice-boxes. Marisa and Leone take the two old ladies up to Cancello. Bepi is throwing a party on his grounds at Rivoli. More modestly, we walk along the valley to Mizzole with Giampaolo, Orietta and a well-prepared picnic basket. As we cross the main road, a stream of cars drives by with sacks of charcoal strapped to luggage racks.

  Outside the village, the valley is luridly green today and the spring light, you notice as you saunter along, is different from in England, somehow. At first you think it’s clearer; perhaps because, after weeks of mist and rain, you can see the mountains again now, far far away. And it gives you a tremendous sense of space to see them there, still in their majestic winter white. But it’s not really a question of clarity. Nothing could be clearer than the light in England when a gusting wind is blowing every scrap of haze and exhaust away so that you feel you could see the whole length of the Edgware Road, if only you wanted to. Anyway, by ten o’clock, as seen from Montecchio, the Alps have already disappeared in a gathering heat haze. Visibility soon loses that sharp edge it will keep all day in windier climes.

  No, it’s the suffusedness of the light which gives the spring its power here, its distinctly erotic feel. Quite simply, the light seems to have got in everywhere, to be on all sides of everything. Perhaps because it bounces off the pastel stuccoes so, and the white limestone of the window surrounds, simmers dazzling on terracotta roofs, shoots off dusty grey asphalt – a light that is glare, haze and heat all together. So that clothes simply fall off the women. In the space of a couple of weeks we’ve gone from furs to thin blouses and fashion T-shirts. People move bathed in fragrant brilliance, which somehow gives you a feeling that things are happening in slow motion. For the light has that effect too. Especially if you are in the habit of taking three bottles of wine on a picnic, stretching out under the first cherry blossom and simply watching as the more adventurous hikers push on.

  And lying there, you hear your first cuckoo raise its cheeky call, and the larks twittering high in the sky, and the urgent hum of a thousand bees (for many orchards have their own hives), and the frogs and toads croaking shamelessly as they flop through the long grass to the water.

  What chance for spiritual guides at moments like this? Surely even the best of biblical armour can offer no real immunity to such a strident call to be living and doing. What hope for Montecchio’s Catholic youth? The frate indovino must be tearing his tonsure.

  Then across the heavily scented grass comes an insistent modulated drone. Nearer and nearer, louder and louder. Until all at once a leatherclad figure bursts out of a nearby ditch, roars through the vineyard where we are picnicking, and attacks the first slope of the hill in a spray of dirt and stones. Followed by another, and another, and another …

  For ironically, it’s science that comes to the old Church’s aid. There is the internal-combustion engine. With the same ritual inevitability that lifts the sun higher every day and draws the sap up in the trees, the local adolescents answer migrant birds and reawakened bees with a great shriek of unsilenced mopeds and motorbikes. Throttles are opened and closed, opened and closed, revving rhythmically in the spring air. Cannily, Don Guido, a man who knows the lesser of two evils when he sees it, permits the lads to go round and round the church car park in frenzied circles. Then they race to Un panino due’s for a slice of pizza, then to Giulia’s at the other side of the village for Coca-Cola fresh from the fridge. While, back in Via Colombare, the Negretti boys gun their mother’s Cinquecento jerking back and forth, back and forth across the big terrace among the broken flowerpots and clothes pegs: three yards in reverse, a great screeching of brakes, three yards in first, three yards in reverse, three yards in first. The blue smell blots out all the stirring scents of the air. The noise drowns the seductive cries of the ambulanti with their seasonal offers of deckchairs and skimpy beach wear.

  Walking the winding pavementless village streets to the bar of an evening becomes hazardous. Hoards of motorini scream by, rearing up on their back wheels, skidding and swerving. Could this be, one wonders, some pact between Fiat and the Holy See, a conspiracy to displace the libido of Latin adolescence and restrict casualties in the spring offensive to a minimum? Orietta confides that she and Giampaolo are now worried about Lara who has taken to hanging around with the moped brigade outside the church and is reported to have been seen holding the hand of a tall blond boy. I suggest she should consider herself reassured.

  Mid-April. We cycle through a cherry-blossom countryside. Walking in the hills the hedgerows are so full of primroses, narcissi, violets, hyacinths, it’s almost unbearable. The strips of winter corn are shooting up. Everybody’s busy with their vegetable patches. The farmers are spraying their trees with the usual assortment of noxious chemicals.

  And then it turns cold and rains again. Not only rains, but sleets, for an hour or two actually snows. The snow lies ice-white on the white cherry blossom. Old Marini shakes his head. Not a year for fruit, he says.

  Giampaolo is shaking his head too. It is almost time for us to bottle the prosecco he has been keeping in three huge wicker-covered demijohns down in his cellar. The problem being that prosecco should always be bottled when the atmospheric pressure is high or rising. This sudden return to winter is a disaster.

  But the weather is going to be good next week, I tell him. I have heard the long-range forecast. All we have to do is hang on and we’ll have sun and blue skies again. The pressure will rise.

  He frowns, twists his mouth.

  What’s the problem?

  Prosecco should really be bottled with a waxing moon too, he says. And the full moon is Sunday. He knows the weather is supposed to be fine ne
xt week, but by then the moon will be waning.

  I protest that I thought he was a man of science. Surely his encyclopaedia doesn’t come any of this lunar stuff. This is the realm of the frate indovino.

  Giampaolo is such a nice man because he knows when he is being ribbed and rather enjoys it, yet at the same time persists perfectly seriously with his line of argument. His encyclopaedia, he says, doesn’t actually say anything about bottling prosecco. But the fact is that he has a certain amount of respect for popular wisdom. He believes that some day the scientists will find some reason behind the farmer’s attention to the moon. More pertinently, we have spent quite a lot of money on our sixty litres of prosecco and he doesn’t want to risk its coming out wrong.

  But what could happen?

  It might turn out flat, he tells me glumly. It’s the waxing moon that makes it bubbly.

  Well, I’m as anxious to avoid that as he is. For the next few days, every time I meet him, on the stairs, in the garage, or out on the lawn trying to remember where he put his bulbs so we won’t mow over them (for we’ll have to start mowing the lawn again now) – every time I meet him, our conversation is about rising and falling pressures, waxing and waning moons.

  Couldn’t we just wait for the next waxing moon?

  We could. But that will take us to mid-May. It will be absolutely our last chance. Otherwise the fermentation process will have gone on for too long.

  Giampaolo hangs a barometer on his balcony and wears a worried look. We discuss the expediency of bottling willy-nilly on the last day of this waxing moon, regardless of pressure. My own instinct is to bank on the atmospherics, rather than the moon. He looks at me, wondering if I know something. I hasten to assure him I don’t. He must decide. Or perhaps he should ask old Marini. No, these Montecchiesi, Giampaolo tells me, only deal with local wines. They would have no idea what to do with a prosecco. Thus, while worrying about the moon, he nevertheless manages to express his Venetian, modern man’s superiority to the provincial locals.