Tim Parks - An Italian Education

‘I haven’t been in a week yet,’ I remind him.

‘Rent is always paid in advance.’

With his pickaxe Righetti climbs the broken terrain of our future garden to where a piece of plastic piping no more than two feet long is trapped in a discarded chunk of cement. Then, while I rustle myself up a quick family-free lunch (Michele is staying with Marta, Stefano and Beppe), he hacks away at that cement until finally he has freed the piece of pipe. Whistling contentedly, he picks it up and walks back to his battered 126, having saved himself, I imagine, something like five or ten pounds.

I then spend about double that on flowers and set off back to the hospital — only to discover that I’m not allowed to leave flowers in the wards. Flowers are unhygienic. I shall have to take them home with me. And I’ll have to do it now, because I’m not allowed to see my wife or my baby. Visiting hours are strictly three to four in the afternoon and eight to nine in the evening. Naturalness obviously ended, somewhat acrimoniously, with Dr Maroni in the delivery room.

As a husband, though, I do have the very special privilege of coming in at seven-thirty to see mother nursing baby. Then, before eight, the little ones will be removed and other visitors will be let in to discuss the gruesome birth details with mamma . But they don’t get to see the baby.

In the evening Stefano and Marta come early with me in the hope they’ll be let in at the privileged husband’s time, too. Apparently, a close friend of Stefano’s works on one of the wards, and Stefano is convinced that with a little manipulation they can wangle their way round the restrictions. Sai com’è? Stefano’s tubby moustache bristles. Marta, elegantly petite as ever, is almost beside herself with excitement. She loves babies, though she feels she should warn me that the chaos we’ll have to deal with at home with two of them will be horrific…

Outside the hospital Stefano calls his doctor friend in General Surgery on his mobile phone. The man promises he will talk to the duty nurse immediately. Stefano sketches a smirk and is solidly confident as we take the lift to the third floor. Marta wants to see the baby; he wants to get round the regulations.

But it’s not to be. As the lift doors open, we find ourselves pushing through a considerable crowd milling on the landing and up and down the stairs. All of them are watching the glass-and-aluminium door to which we’re headed. It’s locked. There is a bell beside the door, but underneath it says to ring only in emergencies. Stefano immediately says to ring. I hesitate. ‘Ring,’ Stefano says, ‘they just write that kind of thing to scare people.’ ‘But…’ Somebody behind explains that, though it says nothing about this on the door, it is generally understood that husbands are allowed to ring now that it’s past seven-thirty. So I do. Nothing. ‘Ring again,’ Stefano insists. After about two minutes a nurse appears. Who are we? In a perfectly relaxed fashion Stefano begins to explain that he just had a chat with Silvano Benigni who works in General Surgery, and he… The nurse doesn’t even let him finish. It is already an extraordinary concession, she says, that the husbands are allowed to see the babies feeding, an extraordinary and, frankly, she thinks, foolish concession. If they started letting others in, where would it end…?

Oxen, asses, foreign kings?

As I slip through the door, I leave Stefano and Marta in a huge crowd of eager grandparents, aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers, friends, all of whom, I now realise, hoped to be considered an exception to the rule, hoped that some contact they had would get them through that institutional door to the magic world of mother and child. There’s a grumble of discontent as the nurse turns the lock behind me.

In England, I’ve noticed, one can more or less wander into a maternity ward when and how one likes. The babies stay with their mothers all day. Their friends come and chat to them. There is no climate of crisis. But here I have to put on a green coat over my clothes and two elasticated plastic bags over my shoes. For this is why the others are excluded, of course. It’s the modern obsession with hygiene, with technique, with management, with control — the babies must not by any means be exposed to the outside world. Everything must be clinical and safe, while on the other side of that door behind me, as I fumble with the ties of my green coat, seethes the old world of Latin sentiment and immeasurable affection, the blind determination to get a sighting of the new child, to adore it, to bring it gifts: gold, gold and more gold these days, spices and oils being now cheaply supplied by the chemicals industry. As I walk off down the corridor to Rita’s room, the emergency bell is punished with monotonous and impatient regularity.

How can such an unfortunate clash be resolved? How can a grandmother see her newborn grandchild without feeling that she has prejudiced the dear babe’s health? The answer is simple, and they’ve written it right there on the panel by the door that explains the visiting hours. For beneath the numbers that limit access to the mother are the words:

VISIONE DEL BAMBINO

8.30 — 9.00 p.m.

Visione! What a pregnant word that is. Visione della Madonna. Visione del bambino …

In the corridor a woman with a decidedly southern accent is arguing heatedly with the nurse. Her baby boy has been brought to her in a pink tunic. Pink! The nurse tries to explain that since the hospital insists on dressing the babies in their own, the hospital’s, sterilised baby clothes, they can’t always guarantee that they will have sufficient tunics of the right colour. A lot of boys have been born in the last couple of days and…

‘Consider yourself lucky,’ the woman says ominously, ‘that my husband is in Germany…’

I find Rita chatting to the wife of a local bus driver in a room with only two beds. The babies have already had a first shot at sucking and are now dozing. The women chat, faintly euphoric, though nothing like the restive crowd outside. Then the bus driver himself arrives, nervous, young, long-haired, bringing packages. He sits down and squeezes his hands together in endearing embarrassment. The women go on chatting. I and the other husband are more or less ignored. Our duty is merely to watch, to wonder at the dear little creature rocked in Mamma’s arms, occasionally to pick something up, open a bottle of mineral water, explain that all is quiet back home on the domestic front.

The other woman, Fausta, talks about her other children. Yes, three others! With a shy smile the (now amazingly) young husband pushes his hand through greasy hair. (Should the nurse have provided us with hats perhaps?) When I congratulate them, Fausta laughs: ‘Figliole e fritelle, più se ne fanno, più vengono belle.’ ‘Little girls and pancakes, the more you cook the better they look.’

How do Italians remember all the proverbs they use?

Suddenly, from the corridor, the same southern voice I heard arguing with the nurse a few minutes before, shrieks, ‘Salvatore! O Salvatò!’ It’s a dramatic Latin yell, as though over a grave. At the same time there are sounds of bustle and protest at the main door along the corridor. The noise is so loud as to actually remove the seraphic look from the nursing mothers’ faces. What’s happening? The bus driver and I head for the door to discover that there is indeed a way of getting somebody else to join you when you come to see wife and baby: you handcuff yourself to the person and have him dress up as a carabiniere . It appears the southern woman’s husband was not in Germany at all…

Despite the handcuffs the couple embrace. Smaller than his wife and perhaps younger, the convict is at once surly and embarrassed. A second carabiniere is in attendance. Nobody is asked to wear a green coat. They disappear into her room. The protests a moment later must be when Salvatore discovers his maschio is wearing a femmina ’s pink tunic…