In Maremma

by David Leavitt

  “Oh, the little ones—piccini piccini? We call them cugini.”

  Ilvo smiled. “Now you see what we really think of our cousins;” he said.

  11

  SOMETIMES IN THE morning, on the way to Semproniano, we’d encounter a sheep jam. They had a way of appearing when you least expected them, and in the most inconvenient of places: on the other side of a harrowing hairpin turn, say, or on a bridge. We’d hit the brakes. Tolo, agitated by the rich odor of manure and urine, the music of bleats and baas, would start to bark madly, then try to dig his way through the back window. Meanwhile we’d idle. What else can you do when faced with a flock of forty ewes and a ram or two, their backs draped with coils of yellowing wool, like dreadlocks? Sometimes the sheep were alone; more often someone was leading them—an elderly farmer driving an equally elderly three-wheeled Ape (bee) or a woman on a Vespa (wasp). With a smile the shepherd or shepherdess would signal us forward—not to drive around but into the herd.

  The first time we did this, it seemed no less weird than dangerous. With every centimeter we’d move forward, we’d anticipate the moment when the car would touch the sheep, lambs’ legs would flatten under the wheels, wool would fly. And yet, at the crucial instant, the flock always did part, as the Red Sea parted for Moses.

  That was what passed for traffic there, in that valley where not a stoplight was to be found for miles and miles in any direction.

  12

  WHEN WE NEEDED or longed for “the city,” we went to Florence. Although Semproniano and Manciano were not far apart, people from Semproniano tended to regard Florence as their city while people from Manciano tended to regard Rome as theirs. Only once or twice during the years we lived in the country did we go to Florence for more than the day.

  The drive, via Scansano, Grosseto, Siena, and Poggi-bonsi (the skyline of San Gimignano in the distance), took close to three hours, so we always left before dawn; before the Bar Sport was open. This meant we usually had our first coffee somewhere on the outskirts of Siena. If Tolo was with us—Signer Pepe, his groomer, was in Florence—we’d get a plain croissant for him. (He would have liked to have had a caffe latte, too.) From there it was just an hour to Florence.

  Returning to a place where you have lived is faintly troubling, no matter how attached to it you are. We’d begin at Robiglio on Via dei Servi, where one found the best coffee and pastries in Florence. The baristi were named Marco and Marco. Duly fortified, we’d split up and do what we’d come to do: go to the bank (the wife of the director of which owned the apartment we had rented on Via dei Neri); go to the library of the British Institute to do research for whatever projects we were working on at the time; get our hair cut; look around in bookstores (the Paperback Exchange and the Libreria Internazionale Seeber and Feltrinelli) and music shops; buy Corn Flakes at Pegna and boxer shorts at the men’s shop in the building where we had lived; maybe meet for lunch at Yellow Bar on Via Proconsolo, where the actor who played the carriage driver in the film A Room with a View often had lunch—or, if we were meeting friends either from the city or out of town, at Coco Lezzone, famous for its farfalle con piselli and arista di maiale (roast pork stuffed with rosemary and whole cloves of garlic) and, it was said, for being Prince Charles’s favorite restaurant in Florence; and if it was winter, before leaving, we might have a hot chocolate with whipped cream at Rivoire on Piazza della Signoria—to fortify us for the drive home.

  13

  IN MARCH 2000, this article appeared in Italy Daily, a supplement to The International Herald Tribune. It says much about the poetry and madness of Italian bureaucracy:Highway police arrested ten people late Wednesday in Pescara, charging them with running a fraudulent drivers’ school that sold drivers’ licenses for up to five million lire each. Another thirty-two people were accused of participating in what authorities described as a cooperative that drew clients from around Italy, some of whom were reportedly almost blind. Italians frequently complain that obtaining a drivers’ license in Italy is difficult without attending costly schools. Foreign residents in Italy for more than one year are also expected to attend the schools and obtain a national license, regardless of their driving record.

  For us, the long process of getting licenses began shortly after we bought Podere Fiume. To live in the country, one has to have a car, and to own a car in Italy, one has to have an Italian patente di guida (driver’s license). This is simply the law. (To own a car you also have to be a legal resident of Italy, which is attested by the issuing of a carta d’identità, which requires you to have a permesso di soggiorno obtained from the questura of the province in which you wish to be resident, which requires you to have a visa, which you have to obtain in person from the Italian consular office closest to your official American residence: in DL’s case Los Angeles, in MM’s case Miami.) If you didn’t have an Italian driver’s license, your only options were either to ask an Italian friend to buy a car for you, then sign a document giving you the right to drive it, or to bring in a car from another country—yet if you did this, after four months you would still be obliged to replace the foreign license plates with Italian ones, which required an Italian license.

  Many countries have reciprocity agreements for licenses with Italy; the United States, unfortunately, is not one of them, since there is no federal driver’s license, and it would be bureaucratically untenable for Italy to make separate agreements with each of the fifty states. As a result, even drivers who, like us, had had licenses for almost a quarter of a century were compelled to take the driving test. In Italian.

  Wanting advice, we called Elizabeth, since we knew she had gotten an Italian license several years earlier. “Oh, it was easy,” she said. “I just paid someone to take the test for me.”

  “But how can someone take it for you?”

  “Only the oral part. What you do is you pretend you don’t speak English and explain that you’ve brought along a translator. Of course he isn’t really a translator. You mumble to him, and he answers all the questions. It costs about two million lire.”

  Neither of us was particularly keen to pay two million lire to a “translator.” Nor did we believe that we needed one, even if Elizabeth had. After all, we both spoke Italian. We were good drivers.

  A lawyer explained to us how we ought to proceed. Since obviously we didn’t want to go to a driving school, we needed first to get in touch with an agente. An agente was basically someone who made his living mediating between bureaucracies and human beings. Little of a practical nature could be done here without one, since the system was so baroque that learning to negotiate even a small region of it required years of study.

  The agente our friend recommended was named Bruno. He wore wraparound sunglasses and had a cashmere coat. To obtain licenses, he said, we would first have to complete a pratica (form). This would cost two hundred thousand lire. After that we would take an eye exam from a doctor who would then affirm that we were both in good health. This would cost one hundred and fifty thousand lire. After that, Bruno would make an appointment for us to take the oral exam. If we passed it, he would make an appointment for us to take the driving test—the one behind the wheel.

  Now the comedy began. First, we went to take the eye exam. The doctor who administered it turned out to be practically blind. (Perhaps he’d gotten his license in Pescara.) He could barely read our passports through his thick glasses or the clouds of smoke from his cigar. So far as we could tell, he was able to give the exam only because he had memorized the chart.

  Once we received the necessary certificates, Bruno made an appointment for us to take the teoria—the “theory” portion, given in the form of an oral exam. When? we asked. In a little more than two months, he told us. Two months! He shrugged—there was a long waiting list—and added that in France the wait was usually four months. Then he gave us foglie rose (pink slips of paper) permitting us to drive during the interval. He also gave us a manual of road regulations to study, along with a book of sample written tests
. These tests had a reputation forbeing almost sadistically difficult, mostly because they exalted the principle of the trick question. An example:

  When encountering this sign,

  1. One must decrease speed TRUE FALSE

  2. One must drive with prudence TRUE FALSE

  3. It is forbidden to pass TRUE FALSE

  One and two are true. Three, however, is false. When driving through a cunetta (dip in the road) it is, in fact, legal to pass, even though, quite obviously, one would be unwise to do so.

  Fortunately, we were not going to have to take the written quiz; a fact that did not in any way mitigate our anxiety. For two months we studied. Both of us, by nature, are studiers, and in fact, it proved to be well worth doing. After years of driving in Italy, we finally learned the meaning of certain enigmatic road signs:

  Obviously it is important to know what signs mean, just as it is important to know the basics of giving first aid after an accident. On the other hand, the many pages of the manual devoted to precedenza (right of way) demonstrated amply why this part of the exam was known as “theory.” After all, a drawing such as the one below, illustrating an intersection of five streets at which there is neither a stop sign, a stop light, nor a yield sign, and requiring the testee to adduce the sequence in which the various cars should give way to one another, has little to do with reality. Intersections of this sort, quite simply, do not exist, and even if they did, in Italy “right of way” belongs to the speediest, the most aggressive.

  Even so, we were determined to master the theory of precedenza, not only because we had to, but because, as theory, it had its own mysterious allure. Likewise we memorized the rules of passing (the most ignored of all on Italian roads), the basic mechanical principles of the car engine, and where it was and wasn’t permissible to park. We learned what the croce di Sant’Andrea means, and what distinguished railroad crossings con barriere from those without.

  At last, the morning of the test arrived. Having spent the night before in Rome, studying furiously in a hotel lobby, we drove out very early to the Motorizzazione Civile (Motor Vehicles Authority), the offices of which were located far from the center of the city, on the Via Salaria. Like many municipal buildings in Italy, the Motorizzazione was an imposing, ugly structure, its very architecture seemingly designed to bully and offend. The walls were of dirty stone, and there were NO DOGS signs posted everywhere. Inside the light was greasy. There was a distant sound of traffic, a smell of gasoline. The testing room was a large and windowless trapezoid, cluttered with chair-desks of the sort more commonly found in high schools. In a sort of antechamber, a United Nations General Assembly of examinees sat waiting. Most of them were accompanied by instructors from their driving schools, who quizzed them on precendenza even as they waited.

  DL was summoned first to the exam room, along with another American, a language teacher from Chicago who had already failed the test once. They spoke in English while the examiner, a prematurely elderly young man, read through their pratiche. With the language teacher, all appeared to be in order. Then the examiner opened DL’s file, placing his medical certificate alongside his passport. For several minutes he looked from the certificate to the passport, the passport to the certificate. Then he closed both and pushed them across the desk.

  “The medical certificate says that you were born in 1971,” he said. “The passport says you were born in 1961.”

  DL laughed. “Oh, that’s a mistake. I’m not surprised—you see, the doctor who gave me the eye exam was blind.”

  No laughter. Not even a smile.

  “Also your passport says that you were born in Pennsylvania, USA.”

  “That’s true.”

  “But your medical certificate says that you were born in Pittsburgh, USA.”

  “That’s also true. Pittsburgh is the city. Pennsylvania is the state.”

  “But they don’t agree. They must agree.”

  Here the language teacher entered the fray, assuring the examiner that DL was not lying: Pittsburgh really was a city in Pennsylvania. He went on to explain, with the remarkable calm of a teacher, that in America, the state of birth is always given on passports, just as in Italy the city of birth is given. No doubt the doctor put down the city in order to remain in accordance with Italian rules.

  “But they don’t agree,” the examiner repeated. “The documents must agree.”

  “Pittsburgh is the second largest city in Pennsylvania;” DL threw in hopefully.

  It was no use. The examiner was intractable. DL was ordered out and told to make a new appointment.

  When he told MM what had happened, MM looked at his own documents, and discovered the same discrepancy: his medical certificate said that he had been born in Biloxi, while his passport said that he had been born in Mississippi.

  We went to Bruno’s office. He was as implacable as the examiner was intractable. First he looked at the medical forms. Then he looked at the passports. “Well, the examiner was right,” he said after a moment. “This is the doctor’s fault. The documents must agree.”

  We thought about it. We grew calmer. Of course the documents must agree, we acknowledged. There was no reason to be angry with the examiner. He had ragione. He was just doing his job.

  Only hours later, once we were back at Podere Fiume, did we realize what really happened that morning: for a few moments we thought like Italians.

  Six weeks later, we returned to the Motorizzazione and this time actually took the test. MM went first, along with an Arab and an Albanian. For forty-five minutes, DL watched through an open door while the candidates sat hunched across the desk from the examiner, who made diagrams with his hands in the air. Not a word could be heard, though if one watched carefully one could see, intermittently, that MM was laughing.

  “Did you pass?” DL asked anxiously, when the three men emerged.

  “Sono promosso” (“I am promoted”), he said.

  It was now DL’s turn. While he and two other candidates—both Romanian—responded to questions in the trapezoid-shaped room, MM answered the questions of those who had yet to be tested. Tension fostered an atmosphere of intimacy. For a time MM, the Tunisian woman who worked at the Saudi Arabian embassy, and the elegant lady from Bangladesh formed a little community. Worriedly they listened while he told them what had been asked (why is it dangerous to drive quickly on a curve?) and what had not (nothing about precedenza; a sigh of collective relief). A quarter of an hour passed. All at once one of the Romanians came flying out of the room, as if he had quite literally been ejected. “Ha bocciato,” a driving teacher murmured darkly.

  “It’s the second time, too,” said another.

  Half an hour after that, his countryman stormed out. He too had failed. DL was now alone with the examiner. Another quarter of an hour passed—by now the women were beside themselves—when at last he came out.

  “Anch’io sono promosso,” he said—which meant only that he too had won the right to take another test.

  A few days later, we were talking with Pina and Giampaolo, who ran our favorite restaurant in Maremma—Il Mulino in Semproniano—about the driving test. “Why do they make it so hard to pass?” we asked.

  “It goes back to Fascism;” Giampaolo said. “In those days, the state was sadistic. The idea was to make private life as difficult as possible, to discourage independent thinking.”

  “And to encourage corruption,” Pina added. “Bribery. This way, people who worked for the state could make extra money.”

  The Fascist attitude also led to the invention of a whole industry: the industry of the agente.

  How odd that we were having this conversation in Tuscany, on a hilltop not far from the sea, on that lovely peninsula that was for centuries, quite literally, the mother of invention! After all, Italy gave us Leonardo da Vinci, and Galileo, and Marconi. Now most of that energy had been eaten up by the exigencies of contending with bureaucracy—contending with it, or evading it. If there were no longer poets in Ita
ly, it was because bureaucracy had slain or absorbed them.

  One month later.

  To take the “practical” driving exam, we first had to meet someone called “Signor Antonio” in the Olympic Village in Rome. Since we had to be there at eight AM, we left home at five. (How pointless it all seemed, driving to Rome in the dark to take a driving exam!)

  Although we had never been there before, getting to the proper piazza in the Villaggio Olimpico proved to be a piece of cake. Since we arrived at seven thirty, there was time for us to have a coffee before meeting up with Signor Antonio. Light was beginning to creep into the sky, which had an orange cast, later than it seemed it should have. This was the sirocco, that African wind that carries with it the sand of the Sahara, and that would worsen as the morning progressed, so that by the time we took the exam, it would be necessary to use headlights.

  Having had our coffee, and not finding Signor Antonio, we walked around. It was in the summer of 1960 that the XVII Olympic games were held in Rome, and in addition to the dormitories for the athletes, which were now depressing apartments (according to a placard, one had recently been “de-ratted and disinfested”), other reminders of the event included an unmown park strewn with hypodermics; a granite obelisk bearing the five interlocking rings representing the Olympics; and streets named for the participating nations, many of which (Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union) no longer existed. There was also a grimly lit pharmacy with a gigantic sign in its front window announcing a special on “Incontinence Diapers.”

  Presently Signor Antonio arrived, in a white Fiat 600. We exchanged pleasantries, after which MM drove, then DL. After half an hour, we were through—or so we thought—for we had been given to understand that Signor Antonio was the examiner. But he was not. Instead, he explained, he simply worked for one of the more than five hundred driving schools in Rome; his function was not to conduct the exam but to give us a quick “lesson”—which we thought was the exam—and to provide the car for the real exam. In Italy, one cannot legally take the exam in one’s own car. In Italy, one has to take the exam in a car specially outfitted with two sets of brakes—one for the driver and one for the forward passenger. (In retrospect, we thought of all the questions we should have asked. But then again, when the agente tells you, “Meet Signor Antonio at the Villaggio Olimpico,” why would you think to verify that he was the one who would dispense the license?)