Tim Parks: Italian Neighbours: An Englishman in Verona

Election day finally comes around. The baby is due now, but lying doggo. We wake to a perfect Sunday morning and hear the radio reminding the population that it’s not just a right, but a duty to vote. They must get along to their polling station before dashing off to swim at the lake or picnic in the mountains. They mustn’t let the election be won by apathy and indifference. ‘And if you really can’t vote today, remember that you have the right to take time off work to vote tomorrow morning. Up to two o’clock. ‘The amount of concern suggests fears of an abysmal turnout. Which I would find only too understandable. We shall see.

Being a dutiful citizen, Rita sets off to vote. Who for, I have no idea. We follow the dusty road over the first and second bridges where people take the corners so courageously. The car park is full for early Mass. Six girls pass us on three bicycles. In each case the passenger stands on the saddle with her hands on the shoulders of the rider. One has an ice-lolly in her mouth, another a cigarette. The vines are stretching their tendrils across the pergola of the Bar Centrale in Piazza Buccari, where Moreno the halfwit, in deerstalker hat despite the heat, is cadging cigarettes and being gently mocked by men reading La Gazzetta dello Sport . And it’s only half past eight. One learns to rise early here to get the best of the day.

We arrive at the other end of the village where the local school has been closed for the last three days to prepare it as a polling station. Although it’s difficult to imagine why so much time was needed. In the main entrance, a computer printout has each person’s name and, for some reason, their profession. There is an obsession about categorising people by profession. You then go to vote in one of a variety of classrooms, and in each classroom there are two scrutatori or observers. Not surprisingly, these are mainly the children of local bigwigs, glad to pick up the 80,000 Lire they get for their services. In the booth, you put a cross over the emblem of the party you want, and then, if you like, the name of one of the many many people who are standing for that party. Each constituency returns a number of deputies, and each party can offer a whole range of possible choices to fill those positions. Which means you can vote for someone in some particular faction of your chosen party, or for the man who has already done you a favour. Or is going to if he gets in. It makes counting terribly complicated.

Curiously absent from the whole process is any real suspense vis-à-vis the result. The evening news offers no ‘swingometers’, no eager experts discussing marginal states or constituencies, no surveys taken of people leaving polling stations. This is partly because the quite extreme system of proportional representation removes any seesaw effect. A swing of 5 per cent means nothing more than a swing of 5 per cent. Not the difference between one government and another. And anyway no such swings are likely to occur. Perhaps 2 or 3 per cent will leave this party, but only to disperse among five or six others. Perhaps at the end of the day one party will have crept forward the few points required to shout victory. But, in the main, the status quo will be left untouched. For the truth is that, disillusioned as they are, most Italians will always get out there and vote for the same party they always have. The football supporter mentality, Giampaolo calls it: ‘You stay with them even when they’re losing every game and charging you more to watch every time.’

Thus, despite the carefully deployed anxiety of the public broadcasting service before the event, and despite the fact that so many people hold residency and thus voting rights in cities far away from where they live, the turnout is a huge 90 per cent. This truly amazes me, and I bully everybody I know to try and extort some satisfactory explanation. To no avail. A love of secrecy, writing down the name of a friend of a friend in the polling booth perhaps? A residual concern that not voting might prejudice one’s position in some concorso to become a teacher, or caretaker (Vittorina and Lucilla were both unaccountably worried about missing the election)? Genuine fear of a Communist government? Or perhaps — and it’s the explanation I would plump for — perhaps, despite all disillusionment, a very profound, heartfelt satisfaction with the way things are and a determination that they should remain so. I plump for it because it has the hallmark of that profound schizophrenia, which is also the charm, of all matters Italian: the Pope adored and ignored, the law admired and flouted, politicians despised and re-elected. The gulf between officialdom’s façade and private thought could not be greater than it is here. But in the secret of the ballot box that façade is always supported. Nothing changes. Italy, one sometimes thinks, is as if frozen in the high noon of its post-war prosperity.

I played a little game with my students on our last lesson of the year. I suggested they write down who they think their barber/hairdresser votes for and why. Normally responsive and fun to teach, my request left them nonplussed, diffident, reticent. It was as if one had asked some ancient Athenian to explain the Eleusinian mysteries. A completely taboo subject. Montecchio, in the event, returned the Christian Democrats with the usual 70 per cent of the vote, but I have yet to meet anyone here who will speak well of the party. ‘The only good thing about elections’ — Bepi deigned to mention the subject over an espresso with grappa at eight in the morning — ‘is that the results are so complicated that for a month and more afterwards there’s no government at all. And so for a while, non possono rompere le palle !’ Which loosely translated means, They can’t get on our fannies.

‘If the country’, comments il frate indovino , ear perfectly tuned to the popular mood, ‘could buy politicians for what they’re really worth and then sell them for what they claim they’re worth, it could pay off its deficit in no time at all.’

Doubtless our witty priest votes Christian Democrat.

THE BABY WAS late. Rita was finding the heat and summer afa oppressive. We bought a fan and she sat at her typewriter in a stream of dusty air. When the Visentini got to know, Orietta felt it her duty to come upstairs and warn us that fans were controindicati . You sweated, then sat in the air from the fan, and inevitably caught a cold. She was also worried that we hadn’t got rid of our cat. Cats could cause all kinds of diseases when one had a little baby in the house. I often wonder if perhaps Italian houses of the future won’t be designed with some sort of disinfectant footbath in the entrance way. We liked our cat.

Meanwhile, whenever I bumped into anyone in Via Colombare an eyebrow would be raised. Any news yet? If there’s anything I can do … Even the mechanic at the end of the street, smelling strongly of grappa after lunch as always, was in the know. Did I want my car looking over before the all-important trip? The last thing I needed was a breakdown on the way to the hospital … I thanked him and got filters, plugs and points changed at a very reasonable price. ‘ Buon giorno Signor Teem .’ said old Marini’s wife ‘and how is your signora this morning?’

What a far cry from the kind of reception I had been getting a year before! Clearly, I thought, a child is the ultimate passport to society here, a blank cheque to draw against vast reserves of Latin sentiment. Far from having my greetings rejected, I now had the opposite problem of having to discuss the relative merits of the various local hospitals with the vaguely mongol-looking woman, while the woman with the twig broom came to clap me on the back and tell ghastly stories about the gynaecologists at Borgo Roma where her sister-in-law had given birth. ‘ Macellai ’, she insisted. ‘Butchers. They jump on your belly to push the child out. ‘And she asked who would be coming in to look after me while my wife was away at the hospital. I wondered for a moment if I had understood this correctly.