Tim Parks - Italian Neighbours - An Englishman in Verona

Bottling turns out to be both boring and demanding. The siphon nozzle goes down into the first of a hundred and more bottles. The wine flows slowly, but you have to keep an eye on it so as to stop it at three or four centimetres from the top. Meantime, you’re checking that the next bottle has been primed, or, once the process is underway, trying to cork the bottles you’ve already filled. With a dipstick, Giampaolo examines the wine in the other demijohns and tells bottling stories. How the year before last, for example, all but two of the prosecco bottles came out flat and were more or less undrinkable. Although he’d had excellent atmospheric and lunar co-operation. This is just one of those imponderables that make it so exciting.

I ask him why the prosecco I buy from the supermarket, admittedly at three times the price, is never flat, despite the fact that the bottling factory can hardly be observing the moon and the barometer. Additives, he says contemptuously. Sugar, fizzing agents. Give you a hangover. That’s why shop-bought prosecco can never equal the perfect home-bottled variety, just as Bepi’s vegetables are never at the same level as those grown in the garden without any pesticides.

Although this particular choice of comparison hardly seems to warrant the gleam of faith and enthusiasm now shining in Giampaolo’s eyes, the delicious fumes are sufficient to quell any further objections and keep me more or less merrily at work for the rest of the morning. At least, I reflect, we have escaped the assault on the garage, which we might otherwise have been expected to get involved in. Leaving the cellar in a daze towards lunchtime, we find Lucilla shovelling up bleach-sodden sawdust in an atmosphere suggesting chemical warfare. The ferocious vapours cut right through our tipsiness, would quite probably clear the nose of a man long after he had ceased to be eligible for a certificate of esistenza in vita . ‘Signor Giampaolo, Signor Tino!’ the old woman calls to us. ‘See, all the tyremarks and oil stains are gone!’ Likewise gone is Vittorina who apparently felt faint. Orietta has her kerchief round her mouth, her eyes streaming.

IS IT A complete coincidence that the fiaccolata occurs toward the end of May, only a few days before tax declarations are due? ‘The financial administration’, says the form in front of me on the kitchen table, ‘has tried to streamline and simplify the contributor’s obligations …’ There follow sixty-four pages of instructions on how I am to fill in my income-tax return, not many of them easily comprehensible, some referring me to paragraphs and articles of laws which I should apparently somehow procure and study. So that I am just reflecting that I will, after all, have to go to an accountant, when a faint murmur of ‘ Ave, Ave Maria ,’ takes me out on to my balcony.

It’s a balmy, almost summery evening. The cherry blossom has long gone. The foliage is thick on everything but vines and fig trees. Winter’s dry sticks are no longer in evidence; new ivies twine the fences, smothering sharpness and starkness under soft leaves. And all the street’s roses have flowered at once, small bright blossoms climbing up stuccoed walls. But not up the railings. Good iron railings must be kept clear. Our cat, who goes by the name of Toro, is scratching at Marini’s cypress tree. The swallows whirl about the rooftops in a hurry to catch their supper before retiring. And Simone’s car has just drawn up in the street below, when, from round the corner into the curdling twilight, turn the first of a candlelit procession, the fiaccolata .

They are coming from the village end of the street, the derelict factory end, led by Don Guido and chanting Ave Maria . They are enjoying holding their candles. Among them, as they approach our house, are most of the people I regularly see in the street: Mario, the insurance salesman and his zitella sister; old Marini, the Lovatos, man and wife, daughter and son-in-law; the salmon-faced mechanic; the wife and children of the man with the Alfa 75, although not the busy imprenditore himself; the elderly, bent, straw-hatted fellow who the mongol-looking woman plants on a chair outside her front door of a morning; Lara with various youths usually to be seen straddling their mopeds, bags of crisps in hand; the woman with the twig broom, of course.

With others from the village, there are perhaps a hundred people altogether, walking rather self-consciously along Via Colombare through the gathering dark towards the Madonnina at the far end. The patient little statue has been freshly painted and a small electric light adds to the halo effect. A bunch of spring flowers has been placed on the ledge below.

Vittorina goes down to join the chanters. Lucilla does not. She comes out on to her balcony for a moment to nod to everybody, then goes back inside where the business of entertaining ex-carabiniere Simone is doubtless a demanding one. The dirge grows louder and, as always at this hour, bats begin to flit back and forth, taking over the warm skies from the swallows in a peculiarly appropriate changing of the guard. They swoop below the eaves filling the darkness above the procession’s slow candles with quick, demonic life.

Disappointingly, just as the picture is at its most evocative, the street lights go on, reducing the candles to pinpoints. And, immediately afterwards, any mystery that might have persisted is promptly dispelled when, having reached the Madonnina, an amplifier and microphone appear from somewhere for Don Guido to speak into. His uninspiring voice thus has a loud electronic ring to it, with now and then a whine of feedback. And he speaks for almost twenty minutes. What he actually says I don’t know, for the words are as distorted as they are loud and uninflected and, after a few moments, I cease to pay attention. In any event, it seems unlikely he will have any useful advice on how I’m to fill in my tax forms. Nor do I imagine that my joining in the ceremony will afford me any particular protection against eventual errors I might make. And I go back inside to wade through the sixty-four pages of instructions.

The alignment of social forces vis-à-vis the payment of taxes is not quite perhaps what one would have imagined. Of course, the radio news has been reminding us with some insistency these last few days of our forthcoming civic duty as contribuenti . But not so the calendar of the frate indovino , who, despite his conservative attitudes on such questions as women and the family, despite his frequent appeals on behalf of all kinds of missions, does not hesitate to tell me at this crucial moment in the financial year that: ‘Italy is not, as the Constitution claims, “a Republic founded on labour” (of which there is less every day), but a Republic founded on taxes (of which there are more every day).’ Not satisfied with this inflammatory talk, he inserts, only shortly before the declaration deadline, the reflection: ‘The criminal is not obliged to testify against himself. The taxpayer is.’

What is the Church’s position here? Far from generating a sense of guilt in the would-be evader, the frate indovino seems to assume an attitude of solidarity with an oppressed population, as if we were still in the days when spendthrift Bourbon princes sent heavily escorted bailiffs about to wring the last centesimo out of a starving peasantry. The complicity will stop when we get back to sex of course, but on questions of rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, our Rovigo-based friar has a demagogue’s infallible eye for the popular line. ‘To make sure that VAT is collected,’ he winds up the section entitled ‘Predictions’, ‘the Italian government intends to subject the Italian people to a machine that most nearly approximates a meat mincer.’ It’s as if, tipping us a wink, he were saying, ‘Don’t worry folks, do as you feel with your declaration and the Church will be on hand to shrive your peccadilloes afterwards.’