Tim Parks: An Italian Education

Walking towards the village alongside the flood-overflow ditch, I see a snake raise its head and move rapidly through the ivies on top of the wall. I try to point it out to the boy, swinging the buggy round, insisting on the direction. But he can’t see. The snake rustles quickly through the ivy and disappears. Then a great green lizard darts off a stuccoed wall, quick as a thought lost before it surfaced, certainly too quick for a two-year-old. It’s one aspect of Italy that can hardly be affecting him — yet.

What he can see though are the madly racing cars, and to every changing note of acceleration and deceleration round the tight curves of the village streets he responds with a furious ‘brum-brum’ between fat lips. The words he most enjoyes at the moment are ‘Alfa Trenta-Tre’. He repeats them lovingly despite considerable difficulty with the ‘r’s, and what he’s referring to, of course, is the smartly designed Alfa 33, a bright red version of which always sits right here outside the greengrocer’s.

‘Alfa Tenta Re!’ Michele shouts. He strains against the buggy’s safety belt.

Loading up cases of fruit against the wall, Salvatore, who owns the place, laughs and pulls the boy’s cap over his eyes, and gives him a peach to eat. Rather than saying thank you, Michele twists in his seat to gaze back at this car he has unaccountably fallen in love with, ‘Alfa Renta Te!’ When I try to adjust the sunshade, the pole is sticky with peach juice.

Then, in the supermarket, they haven’t got the thirty lire change, so they give Michele a sweet. ‘ Che caro! ’ the two girls at the tills say. What a darling! Serena at the far desk slips off her chair to come round and get a proper look and ruffle his blonde hair. They have a little supply of sweets by the supermarket tills to cover the change when it gets down under fifty lire, since nobody bothers with the smaller coins, or is even sure whether they’re current any more. But even when the change is right, the girls still give the sweets away to little children. They like to be nice, to think perhaps of the moment when they will finally be leaving the supermarket to have a child themselves. So now, as well as having a caramella in his mouth, Michele gets another to clutch in his hand. I try to protest. His teeth, his sugar levels… Serena says that her sister feeds her little baby spoonfuls of sugar. It’s good for children. Since her own teeth are unashamedly grey, I can’t even make the remark about it being good for dentists, too.

In the centre of the village I walk fairly fast and don’t always let people catch my eye. That way I’m only stopped, what, three times… ‘Che bel butin! Che boceto! Che biondin!’ The elderly ladies use little dialect words to express their affection. Babies are public property. They tweak his nose and pinch his cheeks. And if the boy doesn’t get a sweet in the newsagent’s, it’s only because I manage to spirit the thing away with my copy of the local paper and the obligatory Io e il mio bambino . Meanwhile, a girl is kissing him and putting his cap straight and feeling how chubby his knees are. Clearly it is quite wonderful being an infant in Italy, so much so that one fears nothing will ever be quite so good again…

I hurry the buggy along the street in search of some shade and play space. Piazza Buccari, the main square, has two small patches of dry grass with a patch of cracked asphalt between and an oval pool with marble surrounds in the middle. Released, Michele scurries straight across to stuff his fingers in the nozzles that send hoops of water from one side of the pool to the other. Safe in the knowledge that his mother cannot see him, I settle down to the papers.

There’s an article about an electronic pocket rosary invented by a certain Pasquale Silla, Rector of the Sanctuary of Divine Love in Rome, a fascinating device with a misteri button to select the desired mysteries and then an Ave Maria button to call up the appropriate prayers on a tiny liquid crystal screen: the invention is highly recommended for children.

Io e il mio bambino , on the other hand, has a long corres pondence about prejudice against baby girls. One letter remarks that whenever a boy is born people say, È nato un maschio — it’s a male — but when a girl is born they say, È nata una bella bambina — it’s a nice little girl — adding the ‘nice’ to make people feel better.

Frankly, with one maschio already sending the water in the fountain squirting all over the piazza and brum-brumming with every car that passes, I’m crossing my fingers for a bella bambina .

Then I have just embarked on an extremely serious horoscope purporting to analyse my future baby’s character depending on what time of what day the dear little creature is born, when Iacopo comes along, heading for the pasticceria .

Iacopo is an artist, a bull of a man, tall and broad with big shoulders and a big square face, a beard he has found some way of keeping forever at a length of exactly two virile millimetres. He paints. He thus feels a kindred soul to someone who is a writer, someone with whom he can complain about how desperately provincial the Veneto is, how an artist can never be accepted here, how his minutely detailed still-lifes of modern bric-a-brac — a telefonino by an aubergine, a madonna reflected in a microwave (which are indeed very witty) — will never be recognised. Whereas if we were in Rome…

Speaking to Iacopo, I always get the disconcerting feeling that we are rehearsing for an Italianized version of The Three Sisters . And yes, he insists that I have a cappuccino with him. My little boy — what’s he called again? — can have an ice cream.

So, after the peach and the two sweets, Michele is dragged away from the fountain, screaming, to be kept quiet, or almost, with, in the end and on his own insistence, a bomba , a doughnut, while Iacopo complains to me that to make money he’s presently having to paint the dullest mother-and-baby portraits. All people seem to want is pictures of themselves getting married or themselves holding their babies. Meanwhile, the girl at the bar becomes the nth person this morning to ruffle my little lad’s hair and kiss his forehead. Should I ask Iacopo to paint his picture? The girl bends prettily, cleavage in evidence, to cut the boy’s doughnut for him and whisper in his ear and tuck in his shirt and say what a little darling he is and slip a caramella in his pocket. I often wonder if Michele has already learnt to distinguish the generosity of men, chiefly aimed at buying space for themselves, and that of women, which presumably has to do with their yearnings for maternity. And if so, which he prefers. With any sense, I suppose, he will learn to exploit both.

Iacopo tells me he finds it very difficult to work because his own small baby keeps him awake at night and his wife is less amenable than she used to be. He has even taken to sleeping on a pallet in his studio on occasion. In return, I offer him the story of when, shortly after Michele’s birth, I heard my wife’s voice calling ‘ Amore? ’ from the kitchen. To which I replied ‘ Si cara? ’ Only to have to hear: ‘I wasn’t talking to you, stupido .’

Iacopo laughs. ‘ I sacrifici ,’ he says. ‘Oh, the sacrifices we have to make for our children!’

This reminds me that I am supposed to be house hunting. I explain our dilemma. We are expecting a second child and… lacopo pouts and frowns, as he did when complaining about the local lack of taste. A second child! Really… But then in that way Italians have of always feeling they personally are being called upon to help, to show their ability to do you a favour, he gives me the fatal piece of information. ‘Walk out of the village on Via Segheria,’ he says. ‘There are some villette going up on the hill there.’