Tim Parks - Italian Neighbours - An Englishman in Verona

I generally accept this kind of thing now. But Giampaolo looked at his watch. ‘We’ll give him five minutes,’ he said ominously. As with his behaviour over Negretti and his dogs, phoning the police at the drop of a hat, I was surprised by his immediately tough, legalistic, although always reasonable approach. ‘We have come to a public office’, he told the women calmly. ‘There is no queue, and hence no reason why we shouldn’t be dealt with immediately.’ Orietta tugged at his elbow. ‘Giampaolo!’ she muttered.

But after five minutes Giampaolo again politely demanded to be served. The younger of the women, lavishly if not seductively made up, fashionably if not attractively dressed, said the man couldn’t possibly be much longer. Giampaolo asked where he was. The girl flustered. Nobody had registered a birth for a week or so, she said. And then they were so pushed still with the aftermath of the elections. Surely we could understand that? But if we were really in a hurry then she would try to handle the matter herself. Her voice echoed petulantly in the big room, designed, presumably, for nobler purposes. A great chandelier gathered dust above a VDU. The lighting was fluorescent.

We were in a hurry, Giampaolo said. We had come early because he had to get to work. People noticed, he remarked pointedly, when he was absent.

The girl, clearly resentful of the fact that her colleague hadn’t budged, came over to the counter, pulled a huge book out from a drawer beneath and asked us for our documents: Giampaolo’s, Orietta’s, my own. But when she saw the British passport she shook her head. Was I the father? She couldn’t possibly take it upon herself to register a foreigner’s birth. And she turned to the older woman: ‘Do we have any special conventions with England?’ The other didn’t know. I suggested that the conventions would be the same as for all EC countries. ‘Is England a member of the EC?’ the girl asked her colleague. ‘ Credo di sì ,’ came a monotone response. But the girl shook her head all the same. We would just have to wait for il responsabile .

‘But where is he?’ Giampaolo returned to the offensive. ‘We have no intention of waiting here all morning.’

The girl looked to the woman behind for support. This dusty creature said sourly: ‘Running an errand at the hospital.’ And she wouldn’t look up from her keyboard.

‘Ring him up.’

My neighbour, I was discovering, had the disturbingly professional belligerence of somebody who not only knows when to pick a fight but is also perfectly confident of how he is going to go about winning it.

The two hesitated.

Giampaolo announced: ‘This is a public service. The office is obliged to have somebody present who can register births. It is now officially open. You have admitted the man is not ill. At this point I am left with no alternative but to sporgere una denuncia ’ (i.e., report the matter to the police).

We had only been waiting ten minutes. It seemed perfectly normal to me.

‘Giampaolo!’ Orietta protested sotto voce .

Turning to us, the usually wooden Giampaolo grinned broadly and whispered: ‘The man’s in the bar. You’ll see. He’s having his breakfast.’

At the word ‘ denuncia ’ the two women, rather than protesting or growing more hostile, had begun to confabulate quite urgently under the cover of their computer printer. After a moment they pulled out the phone book and began to leaf quickly through.

‘They’d have the number to the hospital written down’, Giampaolo whispered. I was all admiration.

The girl picked up the phone, dialled, asked if Lucio was there, hung on. And then the obvious occurred to me. ‘It’s because the pasticceria at this side of the village is closed. He’s had to go to the one opposite the hospital and it’s taking him longer than it usually does.’

And, indeed, just five minutes later Lucio could be heard hurrying up the stairs, icing sugar on the bristles of a fine moustache. ‘ Bene, Signori, vediamo .’ He smiled broadly, rubbed his hands together, and scribbled down my passport number as if he saw a dozen a day. To my relief the delay was not mentioned. Everybody was extremely polite and friendly and we all wished each other buon giorno . But Giampaolo, walking down to the car, was gloating. If there’s one thing an impotent dipendente can do, it’s demand his rights from a statale . Such was the world into which my child had now been officially introduced.

SO MUCH GETS said about the inefficiency of Italian public services that I feel it my duty toward the end of this book to remark on how extraordinarily fast, even in the holiday season, the Gas, Water and Cemeteries Board (AGSM) will authorise a death notice. On every wall or space where ads and announcements are pasted up in the villages of the Veneto — behind the bus-stop, or higgledy-piggledy on a wall at a crossroads — you always find a couple of these simple manifesti funebri , giving their sad news. And from time to time, while picking up your newspaper or going for a haircut, you will turn a corner and see a familiar name. You know in Montecchio when your neighbours die. The cemetery encroaches on the shopping streets. Rightly so perhaps. And, while birth may be a frilly silk-blue or pink, death has no sex and, of course, only one colour. So you quickly learn to recognise the black borders and Christ’s upturned face with crown of thorns at the top in the centre. Across the middle of the poster there will be a name in large letters, and perhaps a nickname too, since nicknames are common in Italy (Dino Chiericatti, and beneath, ‘ detto, il capitano ’). The age is placed in brackets, likewise the married woman’s maiden name. There is the time and date of the funeral, gratitude in advance for those who attend. And a brief comment such as: ‘mourned by all her loved ones’, or ‘lost to the affection of family and friends’ — some appropriate, conventional formula, nothing fanciful. ‘Authorised by AGSM’, they have stamped askew in the bottom left-hand corner. The very day after Vittorina died the posters were already up all over the village.

Rita returned from the hospital just two days after Michele’s birth. In the meantime the old women had come back triumphantly sunburnt from their holiday and were fussing and clucking to see the child. We had barely laid the carrycot on the table before they were knocking on the door, bringing gifts in extravagant packages. They peeked under the covers, went into ecstasies: the first male child born on Via Colombare for heaven knows how long! A jinx had been broken! And again Lucilla made herself cry by recounting the story of her own little boy: the fever in the night, the hot poultices applied to quel povero corpicino . Again we said we were sure she had done everything that reasonably could be done. And I glanced up to check that I had written our paediatrician’s number on the board by the phone.

Giampaolo came upstairs. He didn’t want to disturb us. They would see the baby when we had all had time to settle down. He just wanted to let me know that I was released from my duties of watering and mowing the lawn for a little while. Then whenever we felt ready, we could pop the first of those bottles of prosecco together. He now had three in the back of the fridge.

The following afternoon, a day of stifling afa , Vittorina did not wake up from her siesta. Lucilla’s yells brought me running. Leone and Marisa were visiting and the three of them had discovered the corpse together. When I got downstairs, Lucilla had already recovered sufficiently to start pulling open drawers and thumbing through papers. It was intriguing that, for all the closeness of their friendship, Vittorina had never told her where she kept the will.