Tim Parks - Italian Neighbours - An Englishman in Verona

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In the bestselling Italian Neighbours, Tim Parks explores the idiosyncrasies and nuances of Italian culture. When Parks moved to Italy he found it irresistible; this book is a testament to his love of Italy and his attention to the details of everyday Italian life.

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Ciliegge avelenate — Poisoned Cherries — proclaim crudely daubed notices in all the orchards from Montecchio to Mizzole, trying to scare off scavengers by warning of noxious spraying. From the sound of giggling children in the leaves, the ruse would appear to be no more effective than the empty tin cans and strips of plastic strung up against the birds. Ciliegge avelenate — when Rita points it out, I am delighted to notice that the dialect-speaking locals have no better grasp of the use of double letters than I do. It should be, ciliege avvelenate .

Bepi doesn’t stock cherries in his shop, because everybody, he says, either has a tree in their garden or steals from the orchards. As usual, his reflection comes complete with a tone and expression which suggest his disillusionment at the local situation (beneath contempt) and his confidence that he is smart enough to keep a step ahead all the same. Indeed, very few of the shops sell cherries. The farmers, it seems, mostly export their fruit to Austria and Germany. They have quotas to meet and the harvest was bad this year, thanks to that late flurry of snow. With the result that, despite all these hills upon hills of orchards, I personally end up eating very few cherries indeed. There are none at Via Colombare 10 of course, because fruit trees are very much a peasant thing, not part of a city person’s garden …

‘How long is it now?’ the woman with the twig broom rushes out to ask, as we return from a shopping expedition. Everyone wants to talk to Rita. There is a ground swell of solidarity which rises with the curve of her belly. We are just a few yards from where the Madonnina is clutching her own son. Beside the statue, a notice has gone up to tell us the name of the builder who will be converting the orchard behind into terraced housing. Like all notices in Italy it gives the reference number, section and paragraph of whatever law it is sanctions whatever is being announced.

‘Another two weeks,’ Rita says. ‘Election day more or less.’

This stout zitella’s brow knits as she thinks and calculates. ‘The full moon won’t be until a week after that. The third I think.’

I smile politely.

Lucilla and Vittorina are disappointed because they are going to be away. Their annual holiday. They have us over to say goodbye and show us photographs of a multi-storied modern hotel on the Adriatic coast north of Venice where they go every year. No more those magnificent adventures — Vienna, Prague — with il professore . Lucilla’s wistful face is clownish this evening behind approximate make-up. The photo shows miles of beach and the usual evenly spaced rows of brilliant sunshades, ten deep, all the same green and purple pattern, like soldiers on parade. ‘The sea air is so good for one’s pressure,’ Lucilla is confiding to Rita. ‘That’s why we go.’ Vittorina, with her rather dazed post-ictus expression and ever thinning hair, manages a faint, squeaky laugh, twisting her mouth. ‘Lucilla only goes for the men,’ she croaks. ‘Sitting in the bar chatting up men in the evening. And wearing her bikini on the beach naturally.’ The image is so bizarre one would like to ask for confirmation. But how? Far from chiding her sister-in-law, Lucilla grins a grin of unqualified self-satisfaction. She has invested a lot in this image of herself as femme fatale . She and Vittorina are a good act.

But on popping downstairs to enquire of Giampaolo whether I can start opening my prosecco bottles yet, it is to find the Visentinis seriously concerned. And precisely about the question of Lucilla and Vittorina’s holiday. Because, yes, sea air is good for high blood pressure, since the atmospherics tend to lower it, so the sea suits Lucilla and always has, but it is most definitely controindicato , i.e., a bad idea, for low blood pressure, which is Vittorina’s more serious problem. Vittorina should really go to the mountains, since atmospherics there tend to raise pressure. Orietta can’t understand why the doctor, who came today, hasn’t explained this to them. There is general agreement that the man just takes his money and runs.

For a while voices are urgent and low. Giampaolo and Orietta see the situation as posing a real moral dilemma. Ought they to go and enlighten the two women, encourage them to change destination, at the risk of merely making Vittorina anxious without actually convincing Lucilla, who always has the last word and is very eager to go to the sea and talk volubly to bronzed widowers on deckchairs? Or should they leave be and let the women have their fun, despite concern that the climate could bring on the notoriously fatal second stroke? Really, it was up to the doctor to talk to them about this …

Forgetting my prosecco , I get drawn into a discussion about the Visentini’s own holiday, still to be settled. And, like every Montecchio conversation on the subject, it soon develops into a rehearsal of the pros and cons of the invigorating mountains, the enervating sea. For any other destination is just too hot in holidaytime when factories and offices close. Only a foreigner, for example, would visit Florence or Rome in August, or embark on some walking tour of Tuscany.

Giampaolo declares himself for the mountains, the cool air, the great unspoilt panoramas, the brisk walks, the modern man’s righteous ecological pride when he doesn’t throw away a sandwich wrapper but tucks it back in his knapsack. Orietta is for the sea and lazy days under a sunshade which will never bring on her heart murmur, copies of her favourite women’s magazines, evening barbecues with other members of the holiday village, in Puglia, Calabria, beneath palm trees. Lara just begs and begs to be sent somewhere else, anywhere, on some camp or something, it doesn’t matter, so long as she can go on holiday without the family. But Orietta would worry too much.

In the end, as it turns out, Orietta will get her way on all fronts. Giampaolo will go to the travel agency at the last minute in a calculated piece of brinkmanship, hoping to pick up a cut-price place in an undersubscribed holiday village, a cancellation with any luck. Then, doing everything at the same time as they always do, he and twenty million other Italians will load the car in early August to face a seven-hundred kilometre drive in blazing sunshine with miles of tailbacks at every toll booth. But at least the expedition will justify the twin carburettor …

Bepi scorns them all, these provincials. For his first holiday since he set up shop, he goes off to the Seychelles. Where he meets more Italian greengrocers than he does at the market of a morning. Paradoxically, he seems quite pleased about this. He has made some useful contacts. New suppliers. Sheep’s cheese from a distributor in Lessinia. And, on returning, he asks me to translate a letter for a friend he made there who wants to get in touch with a native girl he fell in love with. The letter is touchingly ingenuous, swearing the writer’s determination to go back next year. Bepi seems very eager for me to finish it. His big burly presence and bright green eyes are extraordinary somehow against the funereal backdrop of Patuzzi’s bookcase. I tap it out for him: the girl’s beauty, their unending love. He watches the letters appear in sickly yellow on my processor screen. Is English the language he will have to learn to speak to girls? Somehow I already know he will not go back.

And, no, you can’t open those bottles yet, Giampaolo says, when I go down to ask him again. Not for another three weeks. There is an element of masochism about it, a casting about for virtue and self-esteem. His dipendente ’s long-suffering life. If he just bought the stuff from the shop, he wouldn’t have to survive this two-month period without. But having decided to bottle his own — because then it’s the real thing, alive, not pasteurized and dead on a supermarket shelf — he will never go out and buy a case or so to tide him over. It’s a point of honour. And he’s rather disappointed when I do. Only to savour the difference when ours is ready, I tell him.

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