Tim Parks - An Italian Education

Would he feel the same, I wonder, if they’d had a nice little girl first? So many only children here are boys…

Then he goes on to talk, far more enthusiastically, about the garden, which for the moment is just a thousand square metres of torn up hillside. He wants to get a small bulldozer in to take out the line of vines and the four cherry trees. Those kind of things don’t belong in a garden. I’m so busy thinking about my new baby I don’t even protest.

After which, some terracing will have to be done, to take the steepness off the slope, and then there will be a lot of plants to buy — oleanders, hibiscus, azaleas — plus the trees, of course; he has something Japanese in mind for that corner by the main door, though they don’t come cheap, unfortunately. Then before we do that we’ll have to get in a sprinkler system, for which we will need a small excavator. The ground is too tough to dig trenches because Righetti parked his machines here for a year and more. ‘We still have to get a quotation for that.’ Plus Mario (bigger upstairs apartment) has suggested that while we’re about it we may as well lay down the cable for some garden lighting…

I have finished fixing the rosette. ‘ Complimenti ,’ he says again. And shakes his head. He is a very handsome young man, Silvio, foreman in a factory that produces picture-frame mouldings. He speaks with disarming straight-forwardness. It would be so expensive to have another child…

Rosa e blu … There is an extraordinary conflict of cultures going on today in this little corner of the world that is provincial Veneto. Or at least so it seems at first glance. There are the old structures of a peasant, Catholic, superstitious Italy, physically present in the roadside shrines and Madonnas, in the vineyards and olive groves of the terraced hillsides, in the row of vines my neighbours are determined to tear down, in the cracked infrastructure of the old village, its tall stone walls and mill-wheels, its complex system of streams and irrigation canals dividing the many springs that rise here. Battered tractors muddy the streets. Heaps of manure steam on vegetable patches. Dogs are chained outside.

And it’s present, too, in those people, whether young or old, who seem to have preserved an ancient mentality intact: the men pushing their dogs into the boot of the car, the little children who serve you in far-flung trattorias, working hard at only nine or ten, the hunters with their battered hats and shotguns tramping the undergrowth, the grizzled cardplayers in the Bar Centrale with their red wine and untipped cigarettes, the women riding rusty bicycles to the cemetery, or doing their shopping in their slippers, the young mothers who cry when they hear they’ve had a girl rather than a boy, the teenagers who visit palmists, cartomancers and fortune tellers various to discover the astrological sign of the man they should marry. All these good people can be seen together in their Sunday best for Mass, of course.

But then there is the new Italy of fast roads and bright cars, the chase of polished steel, the new ersatz palazzine springing up around this village and filled for the most part with office workers from the town, so well behaved, so carefully dressed, oh not formally, in the way English people alternate stiff office suits for work with shabby casual wear at home, but with studied elegance, with a deep magazine-and-television-bred appreciation of what is fashionable, and therefore necessary.

This is the world of the telefonino — the portable phone — and the donna manager in her crisp tailleur , the fitted kitchen and the halogen lamp, the Japanese umbrella tree and the satellite dish. At the newsagent’s kiosk Casa bella and Elettronica rival Famiglia Cristiana and The Mortifications of San Gaspare ; the computer game takes over from the rosary (and hence the desire to invent a rosary that is a computer game).

But aside from the obvious outward phenomena, vices and virtues are shifting, too. Missing Mass is no longer a terrible crime, but spanking your children, or firing a worker, or even using unleaded petrol in a car without a catalytic converter, are atrocious, unthinkable acts. Most of all, of course, there is NO DIFFERENCE AT ALL between races white and black, between people who have handicaps and people who don’t, people who have AIDS and people who don’t. No, we are all and always and forever equal, especially men and women…

Yet little boys still get a blue rosette at birth, and nice little girls a pink. So gender conditioning begins, delightfully, at birth, in the teeth of the new orthodoxy, and in the modern home as much as in the traditional. Little Stefania, or Francesca, or Cristina will get her pink rosette, her pink hat, her pink shoes, her pink sleep suit. Little Enrico, or Gigi, or Maurizio will be clad in blue and given more aggressive rattles. Isabella will clutch a My Little Pony with a golden mane. Giovanni’s first toy car will coincide with Antonella’s first doll. Marco will be furiously attacking the pedals of his plastic tricycle when Marzia is tottering about pushing her first baby buggy.

The fragile structures of modern piety soon crumble before something so deeply felt as child rearing, though the most strenu ous attempts will be made to inculcate the dear little things with the very values the parents are ignoring, whether Christian or secular. The children will all be baptized and sent to catechism by parents who would never dream of darkening the proverbial door. The nursery will deny to the last that they divide the children up for boys’ games and girls’ games, that they teach them anything but the strictest parity of the sexes, whereas I have seen teachers protesting vigorously with one young fellow that little boys must never tie ribbons in their hair.

No, the remarkable thing about the Veneto is not its still engrained Catholicism, nor its rapturous embrace of all things modern, but the fact that these two should so happily and profitably coexist. Until it begins to dawn on you that there is no conflict of cultures at all here — that was an Anglo-Saxon presumption — no conflict, but a superim-position. As if values were held more for their aesthetic properties than anything else, and thus could no more be in conflict than Armani and Krizia, Michelangelo and Picasso. You can believe fervently that men and women should be equal — it’s an attractive thing to believe — but if a pink frilly rosette is likewise attractive, then by all means stick it up. Where’s the problem? Once determined to avoid gender conditioning at all costs, I personally succumbed long ago. Having fixed my rosette securely on the railings, I fluff up the net circles and smooth out the two sheeny ribbons that hang down almost to the wall. Honestly, it looks splendid…

I’m just going back into the house after my encounter with Silvio when Righetti arrives in his tiny car and climbs out with a pickaxe in his hand. He has seen the rosette and extends his warmest congratulations. ‘Of course,’ he says, ‘you already have un maschio .’ It’s a line I shall have to get used to.

‘And the mortgage? Has it come through yet?’ He is worried because I still owe him fifty million lire. I explain that the matter has been delayed because the bank insists on not only seeing but also keeping an original marriage certificate, which in England has to be made up by hand.

He shakes his head over our backwardness. Wooden houses, handwritten marriage certificates. It seems pointless trying to explain that in other countries some things are taken on trust. Or at worst photocopied.

‘And the rent for the garage?’ Since I am unable to buy the garage right now, he is renting it to me, so long as I undertake to buy it within a certain number of years. He has promised to hold the price steady.