by Polly Coles
I remain calm. It is clear to me that good-natured Freddie has given up trying because Martina never gives him a scrap of encouragement or recognition. It has led to the inevitable vicious circle of poor motivation, poor performance and angry recrimination. Taking a deep breath, I go in carefully.
‘I just feel – er – that if we could all – um – give him the feeling that we know he’s been trying harder, he might – er – feel a bit more motivated.’
Martina’s ever-unsmiling mouth turns down even further at the edges. Her voice has a peculiarly thin, harsh quality.
‘Eh! And then, Signora, if I tell him he’s done something well, what will he do the next day?’ – she pauses, rhetorically, then gives me the definitive answer: ‘Nothing!’
Her expression is one of triumph, as though she has played an unbeatable psychological trump card.
I look at Martina and realize, with despair, that she and I have exactly opposite philosophies of human nature and that there is nothing more to be said. I realize, as generations of Italians have done before me, that I’m on my own now.
Some time later Alberto and I are in the headmaster’s office at Michael’s school. Due to a bureaucratic error we were the only parents in his year not to have been informed of a critical last-minute change in the hours of our son’s class. It has been decided that the twenty-four boys and three girls, all aged between twelve and thirteen, will have a school day that starts at 8 a.m. and goes through to 2 p.m., with a couple of ten-minute breaks, during which they will remain in the classroom.
This, it seems to me, is not merely folly, but also cruelty. All the evidence shows that children need to move in order to be able to learn; that by stimulating their bodies, you stimulate their brains. We do not want Michael to remain in this group and the school has previously assured us that they would inform us of any changes in time to move him before the start of term. There is a spare place in a parallel class because another boy has recently been moved, at his parents’ request, into a different group. It seems logical that our son should take up the vacated position in that class.
We go along to the meeting relaxed and sure that we can sort it out, concerned only for Michael’s well-being. Our assumption, it quickly becomes apparent, is seen by the headmaster as verging on the criminal. This man is not here for the well-being of the children; he is here to run an institution. And more than anything, he is here to win at all costs.
Serpini is a skinny little man with wire-rimmed spectacles that glint coldly. He wears over-sized and over-pressed jeans in a bid for the nonchalantly informal look. His style, it must be said, is more of a rat than a rottweiler, but when we make our request, he none the less goes, spectacularly, for the jugular, accelerating from nought to a hundred in seconds, leaning over his large desk and screeching at us, in his nasal voice, that he will not move our son under any circumstances, despite the fact that we are in this situation because of a mistake made by the school.
We have not, until now, brought up the subject of the other boy who moved classes, but under this barrage of abuse we exchange glances and Alberto pitches in:
‘But headmaster, what about Luigi Pavoletti?’
‘Who?’ Serpini hisses, suddenly still.
‘Luigi Pavoletti. His parents requested that he be moved last week and you agreed. That means there are now twenty-seven children in one class and twenty-two in the other. So doesn’t it make sense to move Michael into the smaller class, into Luigi’s place?’
The headmaster looks at us through his steely spectacles. His voice is tight and snide.
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about. How can you expect me to know what every child in this school is doing?’
I am in no doubt whatsoever that we are being shamelessly, flagrantly lied to.
‘Well,’ Alberto continues in an unnaturally measured tone, ‘perhaps the deputy head knows something about it.’ He turns to Girardini, the head’s bulky sidekick in a suit, who is also present. The deputy stares back, impassive.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he says.
The next day, determined to get justice by appealing to a higher authority than the headmaster, Alberto and I go to the Regional Education Office on the mainland. The bus rattles over the causeway, leaving the towers and canals of Venice behind. Looking out over the mudflats of the Lagoon, I think how the Venetian dream lasts only as long as you can keep it detached from reality and, most particularly, from the reality of modern Italy.
The office is in a grey concrete building in the suburbs of Mestre: the Giant’s Castle in its somewhat brutalist 1970s incarnation. It is attached to a large secondary school and noisy flocks of kids are coming out of the gates as we arrive. We find our way, through endless corridors, and are, at last, shown in to see the regional co-ordinator. He does not look up as we enter, but continues to type intently. We sit down on the chairs next to his desk and wait.
The man is working among toppling heaps of documents, letters, books. His shirt sleeves are rolled up, his tie loosened, his jacket thrown over the back of the chair. He looks like a journalist in a Manhattan newspaper office, circa 1951, hunched over his clacking typewriter as he races for a deadline, tight-faced, chain-smoking. When he eventually stops typing and turns to us, his lumpy face is exhausted and unsmiling. We tell him our story.
It is immediately clear that the arrival of real parents of real children in the education office is a rare event – perhaps even unprecedented. The man is visibly irritated that we should be interrupting him as he tries so desperately to get on top of his mountainous workload. But we hold steady: we are convinced that we have a good case; that we are reasonable parents whose right it is to seek the best for their child.
After we have explained our predicament, he softens a little and concedes that what we are saying makes sense and that he will see what he can do.
‘But I can’t promise anything,’ he warns us wearily. ‘The head teacher has the ultimate power.’
A week later, we call him again.
‘I think you are in the right,’ he tells Alberto. ‘But the head won’t move on it. I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do.’
Michael continues to struggle with his difficult class and the insane hours and becomes more and more unhappy. My sense of injustice is unbearable: my son is suffering entirely unnecessarily because of the aggressive pride of someone who could so easily have helped him. The anger just won’t go away.
‘For the first time in my life,’ I tell my friend Enrico, ‘I find myself in a situation where I have an entirely reasonable case and the one person with the power to help me, refuses – out of pure, malicious pride – to do anything and then, worst of all, looks me straight in the eye and flagrantly and unashamedly lies. The sense of powerlessness is unbearable.’
Enrico smiles sadly.
‘Welcome to Italy,’ he says.
The Art of Arguing
IAM IN a public place – a post office, perhaps, or a sports centre or a school. There is somebody on the other side of the desk, usually a woman. The conversation goes as follows:
Me: Signora, please could you help me to … fill out this form/pay this bill/subscribe to this service/sign my child up for this course …
Person behind desk (unsmiling): ‘Hmmm … No … I don’t think that’s going to be possible. [Silence.] Hmm … No. No. Impossible. [Shuffles through papers.] Well, let’s see. It might be possible. If you come back tomorrow at the same time, I could speak to the (boss/head teacher/chief secretary). But I can’t guarantee anything. I’ll have to look for the papers and I don’t know if I’ll have time …’
*
The woman behind the desk has not done her job properly unless your eventual victory feels like an anticlimactic failure. What becomes fast apparent to me is that, regardless of individual temperament, one rule reigns supreme throughout Italian officialdom: for the person behind the desk everything is too much trouble.
‘What y
ou have to understand about Italy,’ my friend Silvia tells me, ‘is that we are so frustrated and exhausted by the byzantine intricacies of our bureaucracy that the only hope we have of retaining any personal pride lies in flexing our muscles, whenever and wherever we can. If you can’t beat them, you join them.’
We are sitting in the campo on a warm evening, drinking the Venetian aperitif Spritz; the milling people, the children playing, the soft light on the red-brick façades of the ancient buildings could not be more peaceful or harmonious.
‘Either that,’ Silvia adds, ‘or one just gives up the fight and gets on with eating and drinking and living well from day to day, like everybody else.’
With the passing weeks, I begin to learn how to deal with people in positions of greater or lesser bureaucratic power. As with so much else there is a simple rule of thumb for a British person living in Italy: think of how you would approach the situation at home and then think of its opposite and you will have the Italian way. Whilst in Britain the notion that one is innocent until proved guilty is largely current, Italy works on the opposite principal: here, you are guilty until proven innocent. These beliefs run very deep indeed.
So, when you go into a post office and ask for a form to transfer money to pay for your child’s school trip and the woman behind the counter looks at you as though you are a dangerous sex offender and speaks to you with lip-curling disdain, feel no surprise, do not weaken: STAND YOUR GROUND. Repeat the mantra: in Italy, you are guilty until proved innocent. Hold faith with the fact that in half an hour’s time, after endless discussion and protracted negotiation, after much head shaking and many gloomy pronouncements that you are requesting the impossible, you are in fact very likely to achieve what you want after all – and more, so much more, the lady behind the counter will be your new best friend, and will be telling you about her mother and her varicose veins and what her son eats for breakfast.
The comedy of the quintessentially British Fawlty Towers lies in the fact that both Basil Fawlty and his hotel guests become incandescent with frustration when they do not get what they want. It is a perfect vignette of the self-righteous conviction of the British that justice will be done. This is the privilege of the law-givers.
Centuries of frustration in the face of power have caused a different character mutation on the Italian peninsula. Here, where there often appears to be little hope of justice, people go to operatically stylized excesses of fury – so far, so Fawlty – but then, minutes later, might ask their adversary to join them in a glass of wine, as though resigned, from the outset, to failure. I first see this when I go to our local dry cleaner with Alberto, who is, under normal circumstances, a reserved man.
He has brought with him a jacket which was marked in the cleaning process and he is determined to get his money back. Standing behind the counter is a cuboid Venetian signora with ferociously bleached and structured hair. Her heavily made-up face is a powdery brick-red. She wears a white nylon coat, with a large pale pink bow tied jauntily at her left shoulder and she stands, with both hands planted firmly on the counter, against a looped backdrop of freshly laundered sheets, like an ageing courtesan in a baroque masque. Her long nails, splayed out on the counter, are lacquered as red as a samurai helmet.
This fearsome appearance does not augur well, but Alberto explains politely to her what has happened. The signora is not, however, to be moved. It is impossible, she tells him, that this mark could have been made on her premises: clearly, the jacket was already stained when he brought it in to be cleaned.
Softly spoken Alberto is, at first, firm; he progresses to indignation and, before much longer, he is arguing fiercely. When it seems to me that the discussion can go no further, something in this mild-mannered man snaps and he undergoes a spectacular oratorical transformation. He turns his back on the woman behind the counter, lifts his jacket up high and addresses, in ringing tones, the by-now long queue of polished elderly matrons, in tweed suits, waiting to dispatch their cleaning.
‘Signore!’ Alberto flourishes the jacket violently. ‘Signore! Would YOU bring your clothes to a dry cleaner that left them in THIS condition?!’
The matrons cluck and tut and shake their well-coiffed heads: most certainly not; never; outrageous. At which, Alberto, who knows that he has already lost the battle, bundles up his jacket and storms out of the shop. The matrons stay stolidly in line and the morning’s dry cleaning business goes on.
This kind of scene is, I suppose, both good entertainment and somehow cathartic for the individuals involved. Given that in Italy there is an expectation that things will never, ever go your way, this theatrical integration of hopelessness into daily life must at least allow people to release a bit of the pressure.
My friend Giovanni, a professor of history, has a long-running war going with a baker whose shop is in a narrow calle near the university. The bakery, which has been in the same family for generations, looks like an extension of the family home, a living room eccentrically furnished with a glass counter, scales and wooden bins full of bread. There is a plasterwork Virgin Mary, a little tipsily attached to the wall, raising her hand in benediction; there are photographs of the grandchildren, a football team banner, postcards sent back from holidays around the world. Behind the counter, in a prominent position, there is also a large picture of Mussolini, glaring out at the shop and all who enter.
Every couple of months, Giovanni, who is on a mission, marches into the bakery, puffing emphatically on his cigar.
‘Give me thirty rolls!’ he says to the baker, an elderly, bullish-looking man, behind the counter.
Thirty rolls take up several large paper bags; slowly, the baker turns to the floury bread bins and fills the bags up, one by one. Then, he lays them on the glass counter. It is at this point that Giovanni suddenly raises both hands in dramatized horror, puffs extra hard on his cigar, and exclaims:
‘Ah! But wait a minute! I have just seen that disgraceful picture of the fascist dictator displayed on your wall! I cannot possibly buy bread from you, ever again!’ and stamps off the premises.
It is surprising that after a mere two months the cussed baker, a sharp-eyed Venetian who surely misses nothing, seems to have forgotten Giovanni’s face and goes through the whole business of bagging up the rolls again. I understand why Giovanni continues this ritual, but what is in it for the fascist baker? A pleasure in the theatre, perhaps, or the dogged hope that this time he might just flog the goods to the troublesome lefty?
It seems to me that these apparently personal differences of opinion are markers of wider historical realities. Where Alberto sometimes appears to me unremittingly cynical about other people’s motivations, I seem to him stupidly naïve in my perennial assumption of good intentions or, at the very worse, unconsciously bad behaviour. We are, in our small ways, re-enacting the larger, older dramas that have gone to create certain national characteristics and which, in turn – and over decades or centuries – have mulched down into individual character traits.
The Italian peninsula, where Alberto was born and bred, has seen almost two millennia of continuous political turbulence: repeated invasions by foreign powers and the fragmentation, until just over 150 years ago, into small, often warring political entities. This has created a culture that can appear to my English eyes chronically suspicious, always glancing over its shoulder in anticipation of the knife in the back. Machiavelli was, of course, a Florentine.
I, on the other hand, am the product of a country that has not been successfully invaded in a thousand years, during which time it spread itself around the entire globe, ruling and exploiting with a calm and leisurely conviction of its own righteousness. Now, the British Empire has gone, but the reach and power of the English language continues to go from strength to strength. We have a way to go yet before we feel entirely sidelined.
Is it any wonder, then, that Alberto goes for the dry-cleaning lady’s jugular, while I blush with embarrassment at the brouhaha and observe, a little patronizing
ly, the Grand Opera of it all?
The Politics of Washing
THE PULLEY LINE extends from a hook on our building, across a courtyard, to another hook on the opposite palazzo. In order to peg out the clothes I have to lean from our fourth floor window. The ledge is at the level of my hips; this places the central point of gravity rather lower in my body than feels secure and means that hanging out the washing, that most mindless of operations, is accompanied by a nasty fluttering in the stomach, a vicious tingling in the fingertips and a distinct sense that the distribution of weight could shift at any moment so that I will topple headlong down into the bleak little walled garden of my neighbour, Signora Zambon. Even if I succeed in keeping my balance there is still the risk that plastic pegs, knickers and socks might slip from my hands and parachute down on to the head of the signora who has already informed me leadenly:
‘The garden is mine,’ as if convinced that it is only a matter of time before I storm her balding square of grass with my barbarian brood and lay claim to it.
In the early days, as I tremulously hang out clothes, then release the line a little at a time to make space for the next towel or tee-shirt, I am suddenly aware of being watched. Glancing to the right, I half jump out of my skin at the sight of an old woman, smoking intently – almost, I feel, malevolently – and staring beadily out of her window. I duck back inside as though caught in some guilty act.
A little later, I look across to another building, about 50 metres away. Clearly visible through his open window, a handsome young man in shorts lounges on his bed in the hot afternoon sun, as oblivious to me as I was to the smoking crone.
This crone, in fact, later turns out to be an invention of my own, a scrap of pure paranoia. After several months, I realize that the window where she appeared belongs, in fact, to the kitchen of our neighbour Pio and that the smoker was his by no means aged companion Alessia, a lively psychoanalyst.