Tim Parks: An Italian Education

The apparent modesty involved in buying cooperative turns out to be only apparent. In the event, not one of the purchasers on this project accepted the standard materials in the contract. Though none, Stefano has a satisfied smile, have installed his wonderful cotto …

When we get inside we appreciate why. There’s consternation in the air. Cotto , unlike regular ceramics, stains; and the workers, Marta explains, holding their own little boy in her arms, the workers who installed the antique stone fireplace that is, must have brought some pasta with them and eaten it sitting on the floor. ‘Look here.’ She shows us where a few strands of pasta have left a definite dark scribble on a tile right by the fireplace. For an expert it might even be possible to tell whether they were eating lasagnette or tagliatelle. Stefano and Marta’s cotto is thus ruined even before they can begin to enjoy it.

‘Isn’t Beppe bound to drop things?’ I ask of their little boy, wriggling to be out of mother’s arms, ‘Food and all? Then there’ll be more stains. God knows, Michele throws his food around enough.’

‘Not on the cotto ,’ the child’s mother says confidently. Instinctively, Rita picks up Michele who was struggling to get out of his buggy.

For although people here must have a house in order to give their children security, it is certainly not with an eye to offering the little fellows freedom. Just as later they will give them the money to go to university, and give it to them for as many years as it takes, five perhaps, perhaps even ten, but not let them choose what they are going to study. They must study economics and business. They must study engineering. If the remarkable social stability of provincial Italy can be an enviably decorous thing, it is not bought cheap.

Stefano is a chubby-faced man who invariably displays a corpulent gravitas, just occasionally belied by a dimpling cheerfulness about salt-and-pepper moustaches. But this pasta stain has got the better of him. Grimly tugging his moustache, he warns us that we are bound to face something of the same problem, whatever kind of house we buy. ‘Because Italian workers are simply imbeciles.’ And he shows us what happened to his designer switches. They are lovely big matte-black switches in a matte-black frame, very handsome, silk-finished, and with a splendid soft click when you turn them on and off. More than a hundred thousand lire each, it seems, but of course one only buys these things once in one’s life… Anyway, they come with a protective adhesive sheet over them which is supposed to be left on until after the whitewashing is completed. Instead, Stefano complains, the fool took the protective plastic off as soon as he’d installed the switches, and the idiot imbianchino , the whitewasher, for all houses are whitewashed, didn’t notice and just sprayed the whole lot with his machine. As a result, although Stefano has now managed after patient hours to get the paint off the flat surface, when you turn on a switch, the part that comes slightly outward can be seen to have a white edge to it — ecco , there! — which is most unsightly.

Isn’t it?

I have to stoop to notice the offence, a hairline frosting on the deep silky black. Instinctively I know that I will never be able to reach such standards. I will never be modern enough or Italian enough to care about a small stain on a tile or a smudge of paint on a switch. Thus I will never really face the dilemma that confronts most contemporary Italian parents: how can I be an obsessive anal hedonist in a restricted space and at the same time spoil my children rotten. One partial answer, of course, is to have only one child.

Young Beppe wriggles even harder to be away. Marta, petite to the point of seeming packaged, complains that he has already put fingermarks on the fresh whitewash. When we look round, clutching Michele so tight he screams, and say, no, the place looks dazzlingly white, we are told that they have all been carefully wiped off. She has found that if you use a dry cloth and…

When I ask Stefano for a few more details about these sizing restrictions for case cooperative , he puts on his gravest face and takes me upstairs to show me a tiny bathroom. ‘’ Orribile , no? Far too small. But,’ he knocks on the wall and just fleetingly his cheeks dimple in a smile, ‘behind here there is an empty space. As soon as the inspectors are gone we can pull down this wall and put in a proper bath.’ His face has rediscovered its serious mask: ‘ Sai com’è? ’ he says almost apologetically — You know how it is? — and what he means is, this is the kind of subterfuge the state reduces us to. Except you can see he loves it, really. And I imagine him saying the same thing to all his clients when they present their tax problems. Sai com’è? Meaning, of course we all know how bad things are, but I can sort out your problems for you. Suddenly I understand why he bought cooperative. It was not quite in order to save, though he has saved something, nor quite in order to surround himself in luxury, though he has bought some beautiful fittings: no, it was to bask in what luxury he has in defiance of all the rules , in the teeth of government provisions. It makes the pleasure so much sweeter.

We retreat down the stairs, a cramped spiral of polished stones that Stefano chose himself, he explains, for the way their olive-green colour contrasts with the dark wood of the banister. To me it seems the whole thing is designed for children to fall and break their necks down.

Back on the cotto by the fireplace, Beppino has finally been released… into a baby pen.

We drink a glass of wine together on a polished granite table top, admiring the fitted kitchen, the halogen lighting sunk in the ceiling. There is some talk about the relative performances of the Opel and the new Passat, which Stefano believes is extremely stylish, while Marta complains it looks like a hearse. But of course there is nothing mutually exclusive in Latin culture about funerals and style. Everybody turns to look at the huge black thing through the kitchen window. First there’s a tiny garden surrounded by stout iron railings, then this great gleaming piece of German technology, then a wasteland of mud and discarded building materials. I ask when they’re likely to put in the road and the pavements. It’s been a while now, hasn’t it? Stefano sighs. The gravitas again. One of the things you have to put up with when you buy cooperative, he explains, is that the local council, rather than the builders, are responsible for the road and pavements. So, who knows? He makes a gesture of resignation. ‘ Sai com’è? ’ And this time his favourite expression means There’s no way round this one.

Five years after that conversation there is still no pavement outside the cherry orchard cooperative. But I had already decided to find some less exhausting way of buying.

It is not common to see Italian men pushing kids’ buggies around the streets. If they are doing so, it will be in the company of their wives, usually with a slightly bent and beaten posture, waiting to be free. For a writer, on the other hand, the fact that a kid is making too much noise and your wife is busy with some translation or other, gives you an excuse for a walk. And you can always say you’re heading off to look at some new house-building project.

You strap the little fellow into the buggy, get out into the street and start fooling with the sunshade. It’s August, the heat is overpowering and above all sultry. In his buggy Michele strains this way and that, little hands clasping for a butterfly — brown and purple — then a hornet. I try to discourage him. A big, somehow shiny boy, blond and pink, he has a round pork-pie face and almost Michelin arms of white lard, which he clasps tight to his chest for fear of the sunbaked metal of the buggy’s struts. Rita would have remembered to tie a towel round them.