Tim Parks - An Italian Education

Lo darò al suo angiolino

Che lo tenga fino al mattino

I make no apologies for my inability to rhyme the translation…

Lullaby, lullaby

Who shall I give my baby to?

I’ll give him to his little angel

Who’ll keep him till the morning

In short, here’s a mother who’s reached that point where all she wants to do is find somebody else who’ll look after her child…

Nanna O, nanna O

Il mio bambino a chi lo do?

Lo darò al suo cherubino

Che lo tenga a se vicino

Lullaby, lullaby

Who shall I give my baby to?

I’ll give him to his little cherub

Who’ll keep him close by his side.

The poor mother then goes through a list of possible surrogates for herself including, notably the befana , an ugly but kindly witch, and at the last, inevitably, Gesù and Maria, this final solution rhyming with e così sia — so be it, as if to say: at this point I wash my hands of the whole miserable affair.

The tone of the song, in minor key, is insuperably plaintive, at once desperate and desperately resigned, perhaps faintly vindictive in places, especially when the befana is invited to keep the child a settimana , a whole week, and again, though more subtly, when the singer lights on the idea of unloading her sleepless brat on the Madonna and child, as if the whole awful situation were somehow entirely their fault in the first place. Not the father’s at all. And apparently father is a more unlikely babysitter than all these supernatural candidates. In any event, he’s never mentioned, not a whisper of papà , not even a plea that the fellow do his duty. So that pacing up and down with Stefi in the small hours and listening to those southern voices rolling their sad ‘r’s and dragging out doleful vowel sounds through heartbreaking, accordion-wheezed cadences, I felt I had good reason to wish I’d been born in the times when those lullabies were written. For in that case I would probably have never had to hear them at all.

One day I remarked to Marta, while Michele and Beppe were fooling around with their model cars together in the still huge pile of rubble outside their house, on this total absence of fathers in lullabies. Not true, she objected. I couldn’t have heard ‘Ninna nanna al mio papà’ — Lullaby for my dad. Sing it to me, I said. Instead, she went and got a tape from a shelf arranged in the kind of meticulous order my things will be in only after my final departure. Here, listen, she said. Very sure of herself. And, with bated breath, I did. It turned out to be one of those splendid cases of the exception that not only proves the rule but insists on it. Sung by the most winsome infant voices, here is how it goes:

Ninna nanna al mio papà

Al più buono e al più caro dei papà

Dormi, dormi, mio papà ,

Il tuo bimbo a te vicino resterà

Lullaby lullaby for my dad

For the best and the dearest of dads

Sleepy byes, sleepy byes, Daddy,

Your little boy is by your side.

In short, rather than Daddy helping to get baby to sleep, this is baby, or little boy, singing Daddy to sleep. Rather than being the sufferer struggling to have someone else accept the embrace of Morpheus, Dad is himself the baby, the object of soothing vocal caresses. A mad fantasy, you might think, a hallucination spawned from the exasperated nerves of the modern and politically correct father in the middle of another night in bianco . But I’m afraid not. No, I suspect the generative context of this little song is quite different and once again far less flattering to the paternal figure. For we’re in Italy, remember, and this must be siesta time. Dad is back from work, he wants a nap after lunch before starting his long afternoon, and quite probably he’s threatened the kids, now somewhat older, with God knows what if they don’t shut up and let him sleep. (Why else the appeasing ‘for the best and dearest of dads’?) Nobody is interested here whether the children sleep or not, so long as they don’t bother Papà. Thus, after the verse above, all that remains of the song is a soft spoken, almost fearful whisper:

Dormi, dormi, Papà

Io sono qui vicino a te

Zitto zitto, senza fare rumore

Sleep, Dad, sleep,

I’m here beside you

Quiet, quiet, without making a sound…

The whole song lasts exactly one minute and eighteen seconds, about twice as long as it would have taken me to get to sleep had Stefi been capable of doing the honours. Laughing with Marta, I asked her if Stefano had ever spent the night awake looking after the baby. But she said his work was far too important for that. When Beppe was little, he moved into the spare bedroom.

I could almost hear him saying, ‘ Sai com’è ,’ which this time can only mean ‘I bet you wish you did know how it is for me.’

Maybe three or four months into this via crucis , I remember discussing the problem on the phone with my ever resourceful mother-in-law three hundred miles away in Pescara. And she said, ‘ Ma Tim, le hai dato il sonno? ’ Literally, ‘But Tim, have you given her the sleep?’ For a moment I wondered if she might be referring to some drug I wasn’t aware of. Or perhaps it was merely that I hadn’t understood again.

‘I beg your pardon?’

Then she recalled that although I know Italian, I am not Italian.

‘Given her sleep. That means you put money somewhere in their clothes.’

‘Oh? Money?’

‘It gives them a feeling of security,’ she explained.

Why didn’t Nascimbeni tell me this? Or perhaps it was so obvious…

So one night in a volatile mental state between hilarity and despair, we decided to try this proverbial remedy. You never know. A five-hundred-lire coin in each sock and a fifty-thousand-lire note tucked into the top of her nappy, as if she were some kind of precocious belly dancer. It didn’t work. But then as Rita pointed out, I had forgotten to ask exactly how much money was required these days. Un milione? Un miliardo?

If I’d had it, I would have given it.

In the paediatrician’s waiting room, a little girl, perhaps four or five, tips over the low table holding the magazines, then begins to pick up the publications and toss them in the air. The mother shakes her head, says, ‘ Smettila, Jesseeca ’ (after Jessica Lange presumably), then rights the table. Other mothers smile indulgently. How can one control the dear little things? Since it doesn’t seem to bother anybody, I let Michele wander around singing to himself, pushing and poking the other toddlers, and in the meantime I pick up a copy of Donna & Mamma from the floor. The letter on the first page reads as follows:

We are two parents, aged 29 and 31, and we have a three-year-old girl who is getting us very worried indeed. Francesca was a first child, first grandchild, and, in fact, the first baby in a whole circle of friends. So she is surrounded by an army of people (grandparents, aunts and uncles, relatives, friends, and most of all ourselves, her parents) all ready to go into ecstasies over her. We both work only half days, so we can spend a lot of time with her and all four grandparents are very helpful. Result: Francesca is extremely fractious, bossy, moody…

Meanwhile, at the paediatrician’s, Jessica has managed to stand on a chair and is pulling a notice off the notice board announcing a lecture — ‘Intra and Extra Family Communications in a Pluralist Society’ — to be given in the town hall by some professor or other. The mother hurries to replace the torn notice and suggests that Jessica might like to play with some of the many toys that have been brought along: the frog that croaks, the doll that cries unless you keep a bottle stuck down its throat, etc. Jessica is not convinced. She wants to tear that notice down. Perhaps she’s not happy about living in a pluralist society.