Tim Parks - An Italian Education

Perhaps I should say at this point that, since all the owners are locals, condominium meetings at Via delle Primule 6 are conducted in dialect, not ‘proper’ Italian. As a result, it occurs to me now, as once before with Righetti, that I may have misunderstood, so bizarre do Silvio’s fears appear to be. But no, he now launches into an explanation of how, in summer, when doubtless many of us will be away on holiday at the same time, a truck could come in through the gates, park by the garages below his apartment on the ground floor above and load everything he has into the back. Thus while Righetti’s workers are almost expected to be careless and while the government can to a very great extent be ignored, thieves are assumed to be diabolically efficient and effective.

I apologise if I have occasionally left the gate unlocked. Doubtless this has been because I have been very taken up with the birth of Stefania… One of the wonderful things in Italy is that children are accepted as an excuse for more or less anything. I have even heard one man excuse an infidelity on the grounds that he was so happy his wife had just given birth to a… son.

Francesco now remarks how wearisome it is getting in and out of the car to fiddle with the gate when it is raining. Given that it hasn’t rained at all in the few days since people moved in, I imagine this must be a gesture of reconciliation towards me. But it turns out to be only a set-up for what he and Mario and Silvio have presumably agreed between them. Later I would appreciate that I am really the only one who comes cold to condominium meetings.

‘That’s why,’ Mario says, ‘I was thinking that we should invest in un cancello telecomandato ’ — a remote-controlled gate.

I have often wondered about the etymology of cancello , the Italian word for gate, since cancellare , the verb, means to cancel, annul, or erase, rub out, efface. Is there, to some extent, the residual idea that upon closing one’s gate one erases the outside world with all its contingent dangers? What better, then, than to have an automatic gate to cancel the world… automatically.

‘With a cancello telecomandato ,’ Mario earnestly confirms, ‘we won’t have to bother remembering to lock the gate, since it closes and locks itself on its own.’

Thus, in order to avoid the inconvenience of getting in and out of the car, we are now about to spend three million lire, of which I and Giorgio, since we own the largest apartments, will be called upon to pay the lion’s share, expenses being based on floor area occupied. Giorgio, guarded, polite, but capable of a certain taciturn belligerence, objects. He sells tickets at the local railway station and though hardly overworked is not overpaid, either.

But the other camp are compact and well organized. And in a majority. The fact is they want to have their cancello telecomandato . They really, really want it. And not just for the sake of security. Having bought their brand new white-stuccoed flats, they want to show they have arrived. In this sense the remote control gate is at once as superfluous and essential, or essentially superfluous, as the sprinkler system and the lawn lighting and the determination to cut down the cherry trees and remove the vines and have expensive tiles in the garage.

‘They already have a telecomandato at number 4,’ someone says, as though to clinch the matter.

But I’m dead against. In the wealthy American suburbs, I point out, they don’t, as I recall it, put fences round houses at all. The gardens just run down to the pavement. If we really want to save ourselves trouble, we could just remove the railings and the gate altogether. They would never present any real obstacle to a determined thief anyway.

Everybody laughs heartily, as when I suggested I hoped Righetti would have a baby daughter. What a great senso dell’umorismo the English have…

The rest of the evening is then spent choosing plants from Mario’s garden catalogues, with Gigi, showing no signs of sleepiness, pointing his chubby fingers at the glossy pages — ‘But I want this one, I want that one’ — then showing us the money in his wallet, then a scar on the back of his leg. At which the perfect defence suddenly comes to me.

‘They’re dangerous for children!’ I announce.

‘What?’

‘Automatic gates! There was a case in the Arena [the local paper] just the other week of a kid being killed when a gate closed around his neck.’

This is actually true. Remembering Nascimbeni, I make the corna gesture to ward off bad luck and am pleased to notice that nobody laughs at this.

‘I bought an apartment at the end of a quiet cul de sac so that the kids would be able to run out and play on their own,’ I go on with dreadful self-righteousness, ‘not so that I’d have to hang around worrying about a remote-controlled gate.’ In short, I don’t want the kids cancellati by the cancello …

Silence. In a rare moment of intuition, I have set two Italian ideals at loggerheads, or perhaps three: on one side, protection of the property, in this case reinforced by the fashionability of remote-controlled gates with flashing yellow lights on top and little beep boxes you can keep on the dashboard of your car; on the other, the safety of your only, high-investment child. It’s not unlike the collision of priorities that brought about the visione del bambino at the hospital. A tough one… Giorgio sends grateful glances across the table. Silvio admits he will have to investigate the safety aspect. The meeting is adjourned, and finally Gigi can retire to his, or rather his mother’s, bed.

Upstairs, there’s a message on the answering machine. Rita is already fed up with the hospital. The incessant sound of the emergency bell is driving her crazy. She has persuaded the doctors to let her come home tomorrow morning instead of making her stay the required three days. Can I perform accordingly?

In his room Michele is sound asleep. Looking at him, I reflect that at birth, as Stefania is just born, the child’s experience must be more or less universal. At what point then do they actually become Italian? I have seen Michele fiddling with the little button inside the perimeter wall that buzzes open the pedestrian gate out onto the street. It is put there for people departing, so they won’t have to use a key, but Michele has learnt that even on coming back to the house, people reach their hands over the wall and use it, including people who have never been to our house before but who know that such things are common. So, there is a lock on the gate and even a spring-shut device to keep out intruders. But for convenience sake, and because electrical things are attractive, there is a button on the wall that everybody can use to open the gate, intruders included; just as children should go to bed at eight, but don’t because they don’t want to, and as there are excellent rules about all kinds of things that for convenience sake everybody disobeys.

Has my son taken this in yet? At two and a half? Does he appreciate how absurd and attractive it is? Or does he not rather just enjoy seeing the gate slam itself shut and then buzzing the button with his pudgy little fingers to make it snap open again? And will he finally, as a result of experiences of this variety, approach that triumph of expediency that involves holding two separate and mutually contradictory propositions simultaneously, so as not to have to go through the anguish of rejecting either of them? Gate with lock for protection. Lock easy for everybody to open for convenience. Who knows?

He still wears a nappy at night. I check it, change it. The front of his little sleep suit says, in English, ‘Dreams of Gold’, an excellent literal translation of the Italian expression for ‘sweet dreams’, sogni d’oro . I wonder are Silvio and Mario perhaps at this very moment dreaming of golden gates, telecomandati , of course, and does that genitive in ‘dreams of gold’ mean that the dreams are golden or that they are about gold? Would this in modern Italy amount to the same thing? The size-tag at the back of the sleep suit has also been written in English to enhance the possibility of foreign sales. ‘For the kids great’, it says. That is: large size. My Michele, like Gigi, shows every sign of being a whopper. Or perhaps I should say, wopper.