Tim Parks - An Italian Education

The paediatrian frowns. I can see I shall have to add the further ricatto that if he tells other people about our ricatti it’s as if he’d broken his side of the bargain before he started. We can discuss the matter over his ice cream.

Speaking of food, there’s a fine smell when we get back to Via delle Primule. It’s a warm spring evening and Silvio is inaugurating his barbecue (a neologism here, pronounced ba-bey-coo). This is not any old barbecue, such as one might pull out from a car boot for a picnic, tossing a little lighter fluid over those specially prepared barbecue nuggets. This is a deluxe item.

We walk round the back of the palazzina to admire it. Silvio has the good fortune to have a door in the back of his apartment which gives directly onto his garden, and he is already way ahead of anybody else in turning this into a patch of paradise. He got the grass down in late March and now, in early May, it’s already tough enough to walk on. The secret to this, he tells me, is the use of three times the amount of fertiliser suggested on the bag. The grass, I notice, does have a curious, chemical blue colour, and likewise the little laurel hedge he has planted all around it.

The barbecue stands at the far end of the lawn against the perimeter wall. Built in some white stone conglomerate, about two metres high, it looks like something in the so-called Monumental Cemetery in Verona, some kind of pompous headstone, or tomb. It even has a little terracotta roof around it with the big chimney passing through. The expression ‘charnel house’ immediately flickers to mind. Silvio already has some dead flesh on the grill, comfortably arranged about waist height over a space for storing split logs in the picturesque manner typical of Swiss farms. The meat sizzles in the warm spring air. ‘ Che profumino ,’ I say politely.

Waving a long thin stick, Silvio’s little boy, Giovanni, is running wildly round and round the garden inside the laurel hedge, which has begun to divide the patch from the other gardens. His wife, Sabrina, a very tall and attractive woman, is bringing a tray of garlic bread out of the kitchen to be barbecued with aubergines and olive oil. Hearing Michele and Giovanni shouting and playing together, big Gigi arrives carrying a plastic bag full of model cars. The kids start to play in the dirt where other people have yet to begin any serious gardening. Then Mario comes, and Francesco, and then Marcello, the boy whose family have bought the last remaining apartment for him and his girlfriend to live in as soon as they are married, in a year’s time.

Much technical discussion ensues as to the merits of this Rolls Royce of barbecues, its main advantage apparently being the draught its very large chimney creates, which allows the food to cook more quickly and cleanly. Inevitably, we are asked to hang around for at least an antipasto . We do. Rita comes down with Stefi on her shoulder, wailing. Seats are brought out, brand new folding garden chairs, which sink into the damp ground. Silvio looks with some concern at his bluish grass, which he plans to cut for the first time next week. Could it be that too much fertiliser will burn the roots? ‘Of the trees,’ Mario says knowingly, ‘but not the grass.’ Silvio has planted three ornamental fruit trees in a perfectly straight line in the exact middle of his lawn, the distance between the central tree and the two extremes of the line being exactly the same as between the latter and the neat rows of laurels that define the territory. Everywhere, in the perfect right angles of the hedge, the fierce pruning to shape the trees, the stiff verticality of the barbecue and the rectangular precision of the flower bed, one senses that modern love of an all-anaesthetizing symmetry that spreads outwards from the pages of design magazines, the sharply framed world of the television. It’s not unlike, it occurs to me, the fiercely geometric arrangements of the beach at Pescara, a charade of order in which everybody does more or less what they want — and most of all the children.

For now, right in the middle of a useful discussion as to which plants must go where and when, Giovanni suddenly starts throwing the small metal cars at the other boys and then at us. Silvio shouts, ‘ Smettila! ’ Giovanni ignores him. Silvio, a big muscular man who has been considering renting one of the semi-basement cellars in the condominium to set up a little gym for himself and his dumbbells, threatens, in fierce dialect, to hit the boy. Giovanni ignores him. Then, giggling satanically, the boy pulls his pants down and makes to pee on the lawn no more than a couple of yards away.

Somebody laughs.

Silvio shouts, ‘Ti farò a pezzi!’ I’ll chop you in bits. But despite this fighting talk, so far from the tone of Donna & Mamma , he still hasn’t moved from his elegantly striped chair. Giovanni pees, with that glorious golden trajectory infants have, pointing his pistolino , as they say here, up to the sky.

More laughter.

‘Good fertiliser,’ Mario says, lips dripping with olive oil. ‘No danger of burning out the tree roots.’

‘Well, I never,’ Silvio protests. ‘What can you do with a kid like that?’ Clearly, he’s somewhat embarrassed by his impotence, yet at the same time perversely proud of his child’s boldness. Looking round at the rest of us, his face seems to protest that he did everything possible. Meanwhile, Sabrina goes over to the boy and scolds him quietly. Giovanni scampers off giggling.

Then, just as the shadows are lengthening and the barbecue flames are brightening and the glass of wine I’ve drunk is beginning to take a few corners off the world, as Stefania finally nods off for a few moments and Silvio insists that Rita try a piece of sizzled sausage, Mario reopens the whole question of the automatic gate. He has checked with a company that produces a totally child-safe gate with light-sensitive trigger devices on both sides, so that it can never close if something is there. Never. The mechanism costs only two million lire, over and above the three million for the basic system, plus sixty thousand each for the remote controls.

His timing is perfect. What with the hospitality we have just accepted putting us in a weak position ( ricatto ), the pleasantness of the early evening, a general desire to please these generous people, and perhaps a new feeling that maybe if a child or two does have a close call with the gate that might not be a bad thing after all, Rita and I suddenly don’t feel like fighting a serious battle over this one. Especially when it comes out that the others have already enlisted Marcello on their side and are thus four against two. Rita, however, astutely feels that capitulation on our part should not come without concession. She suggests that since we have only one car and one garage, while they all have two, we should not pay more than a sixth of the price for the gate, despite having one of the two bigger apartments. With their Italian flair for compromise, and perhaps even imagining that this was our only reason for objecting to the project in the first place, Silvio and Mario accept at once, so that all things considered, it’s not quite clear who has blackmailed whom. In any event, everybody clinks glasses while the children are mildly told off for getting their clothes dirty.

A couple of weeks later, Michele tugs me by the hand and leads me to his little bedroom, whose window looks over the back of the house and the individual gardens (as opposed to the big communal garden round the side of the house). What he wants to show me is that a barbecue has appeared on Mario’s patch at the top of the territory, a barbecue identical to Silvio’s barbecue and arranged, as regards positioning and orientation, in exactly the same way. A month later it will be Marcello, who, though he still hasn’t moved into his apartment, has a third barbecue appear exactly midway between the other two.