Tim Parks - Italian Neighbours - An Englishman in Verona
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- Название:Italian Neighbours: An Englishman in Verona
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- Издательство:Random House UK
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- Год:2012
- ISBN:9781446485576
- Рейтинг книги:5 / 5. Голосов: 1
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‘We didn’t have another child’, Orietta tells a rather bitter Lara, ‘because it wouldn’t have been fair to you. How could we have given you everything you need?’
A certain Antonio and Sabrina come to talk to Lucilla about the possibility of buying our flat. Their voices boom in the hallway. They now have jobs in the Banca Popolare di Verona in town. But they can’t get married until they have bought a flat. And when they buy a flat it must be within walking distance of his parents. They have been looking for more than a year. Via Colombare would be ideal. Antonio’s father is with them. A gruff dialect voice. Money isn’t a problem, he says, and promises ‘all in cash’.
The Veronese don’t usually look for cheap ‘first homes’ as the English do. Indeed, the very notion of first and second is in naked contradiction to the word home, isn’t it? Because a home is for always, for keeps. Looking for a ‘first home’ would thus be as absurd as looking for a ‘first wife’. And while one might eventually fall out with one’s wife and desire to change her, it’s extremely unlikely that one would ever want to change one’s home. Only a bomb could shift the people in Via Colombare from theirs. No, you protect your home with iron railings, remote-controlled gates, shock-resistant glass, armoured doors and locking shutters. It’s your palace, your bunker, your life sentence Even the modern Giampaolo will never leave Via Colombare, although his company has offered him positions in Rome and New York. For where would Orietta be without the marble and ceramics she has polished so often? The carefully chosen bathroom porcelain. ‘ Aggràppati al mattone ,’ says a character in Natalia Ginzburg’s, La casa e la città , when her brother announces he intends to sell his flat: ‘Cling on to the bricks.’
The upshot is that most of the people buying in Montecchio are youngsters being eased (regretfully) out of the old nest (to a place not too far down the road). Antonio’s gruff father will pay a fortune to sort out his child. While he himself lives in a decrepit cave of a place off the main square. Because this is what parents must do for their children.
Understandably then, the people at the prenatal course we go to in town are all at their first child. And their last, is the general consensus. For the most part they are reserved and serious. Veronese. A poster shows a pregnant beauty in flimsy, fashionable nightdress looking out of a window into some spiritual distance of motherhood and self-realisation, the faintest smile on her face. On the wall opposite, a smaller photograph shows the blood and gore of birth itself. There is a crucifix of course, although I haven’t spied a Madonna yet, which is odd.
An attractive woman social worker arrives and, sitting on a stool, discusses at length all the clothes we must prepare for the esserino when he arrives. She smiles constantly as she talks and a relentless use of diminutives generates a warm, cosy feeling in her audience. It’s something I’m going to have to get used to over the next few years: la gambina, la testina, il braccino, il piedino, le manine, i ditini, la boccucia, le spallucce, i ginocchietti, il nasino, il sederino ; and then the clothes: la tutina, le scarpine, il vestitino, i guantini, il maglioncino, il giubbottino, i pantaloncini … Together they create an overwhelming impression of lovable tininess to be cuddled and coddled and kissed and tweeked and generally thoroughly and triumphantly spoilt.
The previous evening we had seen a news programme showing Italian sailors setting off for their UN mission to Beirut. The camera zoomed in on a young southern boy weeping his heart out at the rail as his ship pulled away. And it didn’t take a lip reader to hear what he was screaming to that crowd on the dock. ‘ Mammaaaaa! Mammaaaaa !’ His face was broken up with fierce emotion. ‘ Mammina !’ In a way it’s wonderful, this lack of shame.
And when we come out of the prenatal course at nine o’clock, full of warm feelings about our child to be, there are young conscript soldiers everywhere, monopolising the phones in the main square in an attempt to get a call through to Mamma before they have to return to their barracks. Verona is a big army town with two major barracks. One of these is out on the road to Montecchio, so that our bus going home is packed despite the hour. And the same boys who, five minutes ago, were desperately trying to get through to their mums are now rowdy and rough, jostling the one or two Montecchio girls on the bus, hoping perhaps to find the future mamma of their own only child. But the girls won’t answer back. There seems to be a kind of rule that the locals will have nothing to do with the soldiers.
‘Signor Tino, Signora Rita!’ As our key clunks, Lucilla emerges from her door in a state of some excitement. She’s in the pink brushed nylon dressing-gown, her television grinding out its variety show behind her. Do we know, she shouts, can we for one moment imagine, what Signora Marta has just done? Obviously we cannot. Do we know what she had the brazen cheek to do this very afternoon? No, it’s beyond us. She telephoned, she telephoned to suggest that they both give up the court case, sell the flat and go halves on the money.
‘ O Dio !’ Rita says coolly. I close my eyes. This is it. Eviction.
‘It means she’s guilty!’ Lucilla is winding herself up into her usual semi-hysteria. ‘Guilty, guilty, guilty! It means she knows she can never win in court. Because the flat is mine. It’s mine. It was built with my money and the professore left it to me, if only they hadn’t destroyed his will. È mio, mio, mio !’
If she switched some of the time and resources presently allocated to cleaning to dental care, it would be much easier to talk to Lucilla at moments like this.
‘So what did you do?’ Rita asks.
I hold my breath.
‘ Le ho detto mai — never. Mai mai mai mai . Because she is evil. Maligna! Una carogna !’
And we are safe again. You can rely on Lucilla.
Upstairs my frate indovino tells me that I must be ‘parsimonious with hatred’, as hatred nourishes itself with my blood, my hopes, my life. I also notice that every single page of the calendar carries an ad for a book called ‘ Cara Mamma …’ written by none other than the frate indovino himself. On the page for May it says:
‘Looking for a present for your sweetheart and mother-to-be … why not give her the fantastic, CARA MAMMA … It’s worth more than any gold ring … and it costs much less.’
34. Giugno
THE MONTH OF June is breathtaking, mainly because of the poppies. The corn stands thick in the broad fields of the pianura , or bristles in undulating strips between rows of cherry trees and vines up on the hills. It is light green at first, turning a duller, denser colour through May as it grows. Until, with the first truly hot days around the beginning of June, the green is suddenly transformed into a sizzling carpet of red, laid by some magical hand (while you were having your siesta it seems) to usher in the summer. It’s quite overwhelming. We walk for hours up the valley to absorb field after field of it. Or we cycle southwards into the plain. The dazzling, dazzling red stretches majestically away, waving above the corn, miragelike, desperately intense, seductive, screaming life as colours will.
Giuliano and Girolamo are not impressed. It’s a great pity these scientists haven’t found a good spray to get the poppies without damaging the corn, they say. Or I think they say. I can never be 100 per cent sure I have understood these two old farmers. We find them up on the hill with their tractor, dousing the cherry trees one last time before harvest. The marginally younger Girolamo is at the wheel, steering between the terraces; bent forward at 45°, Giuliano stumbles along beside him. From a tank trailed behind the tractor, clouds of filthy-smelling chemicals steam up into thick foliage where here and there ripe cherries peep. I ask Girolamo how he measures the dosages he’s giving. He shrugs his shoulders. He just sprays a lot, he says. They need a lot of spray to keep the maggots out. He comes down with us to mix the next tankload in the farmyard and it’s clear he does so ad occhio , by guesswork. I remind myself I must tell the ecological Giampaolo just to see him shake his head. Giampaolo has now collected a huge number of snails from our sad lettuce patch and imprisoned them in a bucket with a pane of glass on top, but can’t decide if it’s worth the effort to wash and eat them.
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