Tim Parks - An Italian Education

‘I’d have to do some sums,’ he says cautiously. He talks with a very strong nasal accent and has to make an effort not to slip into the dialect he speaks with his workers. He’ll phone me, he says, this evening, if I’ll give him my number.

‘Look, okay,’ I agree, ‘I’d be interested in this flat, but only if it were in the other building, the one looking out over the country. There must be an identical flat there.’

‘ Naturalmente ,’ he laughs, shaking his head in a knowing way. ‘And how many people have said the same thing! But unfortunately it’s already taken. Inevitable, really.’ Righetti has a way of shifting his weight from one foot to another and generally looking more boyish and innocent than he can possibly be. My age? A year or two more or less. His hands are folded on his chest, which is the colour almost of Stefano’s cotto . I should think it over anyway, he says. I won’t find any better apartment than this in Montecchio. And these, he repeats, these are professional people’s apartments, not cooperatives. ‘People who live here,’ he confides, ‘might perfectly well buy a Mercedes…’

Outside he tousles Michele’s hair once again, tells me he is soon to be a father himself and how important it is, how absolutely vital, in fact, to feel that one owns one’s own house when one has children. ‘ In gioia e in lutto la casa è tutto! Or no?’ He laughs. It’s the kind of proverb you’d expect a builder to know. Then he races off in his rusty white 126, an attractive touch in someone who is obviously making money ‘in shovel fuls’, as they say here. Later I would come to associate that car with the man’s outrageous meanness.

‘I can’t imagine,’ I tell Rita later, ‘why Michele’s off his food, he certainly didn’t have anything when he was out with me…’

The boy sits in his highchair on the balcony looking out across the street where other children are playing a kind of hopscotch now between the passing cars. He picks up a bit of egg and throws it over the parapet. Could egg stain the marble of the parapet below? Perhaps I should have got Nascimbeni’s insurance after all. And I insist: ‘I just can’t understand it.’

Rita frowns. She agrees entirely with me that we are not going to pay God knows how many million just to stare into the garages of another apartment block. However expensively paved. If we want to do that we may as well go and live in the city. So that evening when Righetti phones to say 158 million, we tell him we would only be interested if it was in the other apartment, and he rings off.

Then rings back a month later. We still haven’t told him what we’d decided about that flat.

Which flat? Ah, yes. No, we said we’d only be interested if it was in the palazzina looking over the country.

But haven’t we decided whether to buy it yet or not?

Sorry, but hadn’t he said it wasn’t free?

Not at all. Naturalmente it’s free. It hasn’t even been built yet, has it?

One of the problems of living in a foreign country is that there is always half a chance you didn’t understand something properly. In this sense it is perhaps not entirely unlike being partially deaf. Had Righetti been having me on, or hadn’t he?

‘All payments to be made in cash,’ the voice was now saying, ‘ naturalmente .’

Can there be anything particularly Italian about a birth? We are driving fast across the flat country to the south of the village on a winter night. The contractions arrived very suddenly and were immediately fast and rhythmical. Earlier on in the day there had been no warning whatsoever. So much so that we spent the afternoon in a dull office in the centre of town while a solicitor read out the conditions of a contract of purchase at a price of one hundred and ten million lire, all of which had been fully paid. This for the authorities. To avoid some taxes. Then he read out a second contract that said that despite what had been said in the first contract, we still owed Righetti & Co. fifty million lire. This for us and while Michele examined the entire length of the skirting, and Christ surveyed the scene with weary indifference from above a handsomely framed scroll declaring the solicitor’s credentials (credential: ‘giving a title to belief or credit’ — Chambers). This second contract, which is probably still in the glove compartment of the car as we drive cross-country to the hospital, includes a self-destruct clause that says we agree to tear it up in the presence of the other signatories as soon as the money is paid. Hence, there will be no record of what we really paid. With that safely settled and behind us, the poker faces of builder and credit-worthy solicitor broke into broad complicitous smiles and wished Rita auguroni — big wishes — for the birth of the child.

Which is now quite suddenly upon us.

It’s a cold frost-hard night: patches of fog on a dark flat landscape, narrow empty provincial roads. Rita urges me to drive faster. She feels things are moving more rapidly than they should. But with the winter’s heavy frost the asphalt is broken and potholed. The car shudders. At 100 kph it bounces fiercely. One can appreciate why Stefano switched to his funereal Passat. Rita cries out. And another bump… It’s an interesting question whether we’re more likely to reach the hospital ‘in time’ driving faster or slower. What kind of parameters would one need to know to work this out, I ask her. But Rita is rehearsing names again.

‘Okay, so if it’s another boy we call him Filippo, right?’

‘Right.’

‘And if it’s a girl, Stefania.’

Both names translate easily into English. No trouble for the relatives. Steer clear of Girolamo, Giuseppe, Amalia and the like.

I’m already half wishing we had steered clear of Guglielmo…

‘And if it’s a Marocchino?’ Rita asks, mooting the notion of a possible infidelity with one of the Moroccans who walk the streets here selling rugs and tablecloths. Or if it has a peg leg and makes le corna? She tries to laugh gritting her teeth at the same time, while I am reminded that we have still to see Nascimbeni about the new house insurance. Already children have made the man a staple in my life.

‘Esposito,’ I suggest. It was the name given to children abandoned at the church door, and it means, literally, ‘exposed’. As opposed, of course, to protected, like all the other babies in the safely owned bricks and mortar of Nascimbeni’s cautious world. There have been a spate of babies abandoned recently, usually and so sadly in the cassonetti , the big communal bins on the street where one has to take one’s rubbish. And just yesterday a newborn fell through the lavatory tube of the Milan — Venice Rapido as it left the station of Vicenza…

But these are not helpful thoughts on such an occasion.

So I turn on the radio, just in time to hear a sentence so remarkable that despite our own dramatic situation, Rita and I make a point of remembering it. The late news on Rai 1, the main public station, announces the arrest of a killer who it described as: ‘ un sicario di spicco molto attivo durante il riassetto degli organigrammi gerarchici della camorra nei primi anni ottanta ’ — a notable hitman particularly active during the re-equilibration of the organizational hierarchy of the Neapolitan mafia in the early 1980s.

Will our children ever learn how to speak like that? Do we want them to? And what kind of nation is it that speaks about its criminals as if they were just another large bureaucratic corporation?

The car hits another pothole. At the same time we have to hear of yet another case of TB in Naples because people haven’t been bothering to vaccinate their children. And gypsies have been stealing little girls again and selling them as prostitutes…