Tim Parks - Italian Neighbours - An Englishman in Verona

‘ Chi ti cucinerà ?’

‘Nobody, I can manage myself.’

She shook her head, whether in admiration, or despair at a changing world, I don’t know. ‘ Troppo bravo, troppo bravo ’, she said. ‘You English are so tough.’ And she added by way of valediction: ‘The full moon will be the night of the third.’

Inspired by the consultant gynaecologist who gave our prenatal course, we have decided to go to his hospital in the small town of Zevio. He appears to be the only consultant in the Italian state system practising the Leboyer method. Or so he says. Obviously, we’ve driven over there once or twice to check out the route: fifteen miles of twisting country roads, with the last stretch, unfortunately, being resurfaced and hence bumpy as hell. A useful stimulant perhaps, but also another complicating factor in that delicate equation: when to set off. We time the trip at thirty minutes. Getting out of the car to stretch our legs, we find a sleepy, overgrown village with a truly vast main square, in the middle of which is a villa-cum-castle surrounded by a moat. The rest of this inexplicably huge open area is just a desert of asphalt crisscrossed by fading white lines indicating where five or six roads might intersect. On Sundays, we discovered on our second trip, the space is packed to suffocation point with a bustling provincial market selling cheap clothes, fruit, vegetables, and adventurous underwear of mammoth proportions, presumably for ladies like Lucilla. The traffic was backed up for a kilometre and more. Another factor then, is that one must not go into labour on a Sunday morning.

The hot days drag on. We sit under the pergola at Centro Primo Maggio listening to the accordion. People with houses by the streams hang water-melons in the water to keep them cool. They’re too big for the fridge. Despite the predictable election results, the politicians, as Bepi predicted, have so far been unable to come up with a government. Nobody’s concerned. The shops begin to close as everybody goes off on holiday. There are the usual scandals about poor old people having to walk miles in suffocating heat to find a grocery open. By law, shops are obliged to run a rota system, but the fines are so small they tend to ignore the problem. You go to the post office and find it closes for the afternoon in July and August. There is alarmist talk about the unavailability of doctors in hospitals. We begin to get nervous.

And then the big day arrives at last. Or rather night. Towards two in the morning the terms of the equation are finally and ruthlessly satisfied: fierce contractions. We bundle into our despised orange car and head south across the bassa to Zevio. We’re about half-way — San Martino, Campalto, Mambrotta — driving along roads that twist and turn unaccountably through perfectly flat countryside, when, over a distant dike, what should sail up into the sky but the moon, a perfectly round, splendid, shining white moon, full as full can be, and apparently drawing us to Zevio as the natal star to Bethlehem. How infuriating! I can just see the satisfied smirk on the face of our lady of the twig broom. Even Giampaolo will consider it as confirmation of his prosecco- bottling technique. Yet one feels strangely satisfied to see it too. La luna . So bright! So large! We speed on through field after field of silvery peach orchards under that presageful ghostliness lunar light tends to have, especially at important moments in your life. And it does cross my mind for a moment that perhaps the moon has more influence in Italy than it does back home. This would explain so much.

The Chiarenzi hospital in Zevio has long corridors paved with cheap black stone. The porter gives a direction with his thumb, barely looking away from a TV screen. In a spare room, a nurse with nun’s headgear takes down the details. Then more corridors. At the entrance to the maternity ward a little waiting area is heaped with flowers and there is a small white statue of the Madonna. One gets to rely on her after a while: that simple passivity, absorbing all, at crossroads, hospital wards, cemeteries. Although somehow, through her very ubiquitousness, the quiescent figure becomes not so much a protecting presence as a reminder that, whatever happens, all will go on as before. Without her and her crucified son, usually much smaller and hidden away by some dusty central-heating pipe near the ceiling, you might imagine that what was happening to you here and now was unique, and desperately important.

Rather surprisingly, I find myself wondering if the Madonna doesn’t have some quality in common with the moon.

In the ward, a bright young nurse speaks to us in dialect and listens to the baby’s heartbeat through a wooden trumpet pressed against Rita’s belly. Interestingly, she is called Stefania, which is the name we have chosen if the baby is a girl. Which no doubt it will be. I’m pretty well resigned to that now. Not that I in any way mind having a girl. On the contrary. What could be more delightful than a little girl? Just that I had hoped the Via Colombare influence would not be confirmed. I’d far rather have a random world than a determinist one, however benevolent.

We spend the night in a tiny room with Rita in labour and me fighting sleep. Enticingly, there’s a pasticceria right across the street which will surely open at seven o’clock. Shortly after dawn, while a crow sits on a branch not a yard away, a priest leads four men carrying a rough wooden coffin out of the hospital into the street. I decide not to remark on this to Rita. And when a light goes on in the pasticceria around eight o’clock, I selfishly hurry out for a cappuccino , only to hear that the bar is closed for holidays. The man has merely come to do some decorating work. And the pasticceria the other side of the village is always closed Monday mornings. A test of the extent of your Italianisation is whether you still grind your teeth when you hear that something is closed.

In the event, the low lights and soft music of the Leboyer method have to be forgotten because that room is already occupied. ‘Full moon’, explains the nurse. ‘Haven’t had a birth for a week and then six in a single night.’ OK, OK, I give in. But the baby, when it finally shows up, is a big bouncy boy. We are both delighted.

The first duty of an Italian father is to buy a rosette, blue for a boy, pink for a girl, and stick it on some highly visible part of his house. Driving home that day, I found a tabaccheria in San Martino that sold me one for what seemed a rather expensive 10, 000 Lire. The lady at the till was desperately eager to engage me in conversation about the joys of parenthood: ‘ Sì, sì, sì , a great change in your life, you can’t even imagine yet,’ she says excitedly as I walk out in a daze without my receipt. Back in Via Colombare I taped the thing high on the front door of number 10 and hoped that all the zitelle in the street would see it immediately and eat their hearts out.

My second duty was to find two witnesses and take them along to register the birth. Since public offices are only open in the morning, this would have to wait till the following day. Giampaolo and Orietta were more than happy to help me out, and we set off early next morning so he wouldn’t be too late for work.

Registration had to be in the village of birth, so it was back along the winding road to Zevio again. The comune was a baroque palazzo in the huge main square where traffic crisscrossed with impressive confidence across the open asphalt. At the top of flights of eighteenth-century stairs, a huge room with ornate ceiling and a long wooden counter was occupied by just two women toying with computers.

The man who registered births was out for a minute, they said. Could we wait?