Tim Parks - An Italian Education

At six months Stefi manages to roll off her changing table… and cries for hours. At ten months she is discovering how many sharp edges Righetti built into his stylish spiral staircase. The small balcony tiles, our builder assured us, were baked specially hard to resist the fiercest heat, to stay cool. But when a tiny girl pulls herself up on the railing, she soon finds that the metal is scorching. In honour of Nascimbeni she tosses all her toys down between the bars, but never manages to hit anyone. Only gloomy Francesca in the apartment below complains about finding Pinocchio and Topo Gigio and an incongruous Big Bird amongst the underwear she hangs out from the balcony on a projecting clothes horse.

Hard surfaces make for hard noises. Windows opened in sultry heat suddenly bang when the sirocco rises. A loose shutter rattles. Reaching up to swing on a door, one-year-old Stefi finds it’s stuck. The handle behind is tied with a handbag strap to the coat hanger to stop it slamming, to let the blessed breeze pass through the house. The bathroom door is tied to a dressing gown on a peg. The air stirs in the house, bringing with it the shrill cries of Gigi and Giovanni and Michele, shouting at each other from respective balconies, then Stefi’s shriek when a door suddenly gives and her head crashes back on the tiles. ‘O che capitombolo!’ echoes Mother’s voice. What a tumble that was!

Through the afternoon dropped toys and wooden bricks ring on the ceramics. When a child rolls a wooden ball at skittles in some other apartment the noise is of distant thunder, then comes the explosion if the ball’s on target. Outside, the harsh drone of the cicalas is as compact as waxed stucco. And after twilight the jarring trill of the crickets… Oh, for the soft tinkle of the ice cream van in a mild London suburb!

I take the children to the bar for ice creams. At eighteen months, Stefi is remarkably precocious in the handling of pistacchio and stracciatella . Michele still gets his zabaione all over his pudding face. On the tables round about young men and old are drinking beer and wine and grappa. Michele tries mine sometimes, a sip now and then, a little gulp. There will be no momentous initiation into the world of alcohol for these children, as when my friends and I first ventured into pubs to get the oldest-looking amongst us to buy a beer. There is no mystique to drinking here. Which is perhaps why so many of the young people are still tamely swallowing Coke and Fanta. They tried Papà’s beer and didn’t like it.

Leaving the bar, Stefi trips on the base of a sunshade and goes down on her face. At least a dozen people rush to lift her up, men and women alike. And O che capitombolo! Che povera povera piccina! Poor little thing! They’re so sure she’s hurt herself, the girl wails in fright.

In town the big churches offer occasional protection from the heat. They have the same gloom the house has when you half close shutters against direct sunlight. They have the same hard surfaces, the stone floor, stone steps, the same sudden sharp sounds when a sacristan starts to move some chairs, when an elegant woman’s heels scrape as she genuflects. After all, there is a lot in common between casa and chiesa . Both are sacred. I have seen Marta polish the parapet of her balcony with the same sacrificial intensity of the old women who bring out the shine on the altar rail here in San Zeno. Certainly, Stefano decants his home-bottled wine with more reverence than the acolytes who carry the Host. Here the drone of the cicalas is replaced by the monotone of a priest reading some special Mass in a side chapel. Apparently for one long dead. I try to get Michele to behave, to show respect, to just sit and enjoy the cool, but suddenly he hoists himself up on the baptismal font to get a look inside, and, slipping on the smooth stone, catches his chin, bites his tongue, falls. A nun rushes from her prayers. O povero povero bambino! The boy wails even louder. The sympathy grows correspondingly. O povero piccolino! Now Michele’s howl fills the huge church. Then Stefi cries, imagining something awful has happened to her Lele, as she calls him. They make an incredible noise. But nobody complains. Neither the huddle in the little side chapel, nor the old women kneeling. Nobody tries to hush them, as I suspect the good folk would if we were in the Südtirol. No, it’s I who attract frowns of disapproval when I insist the boy get back on his feet again and pull himself together, when I tell him how silly it was to go climbing up the font. Only after I had been in Italy a very long time did I begin to appreciate that weeping is something to be savoured rather than curtailed. There is so much quality in a child’s tears.

At almost two Stefi chases a lizard across the floor upstairs. It must have fallen in through a skylight. Its little feet slither on the shiny surface of Righetti’s titles. Its tail curls this way and that. Wildly excited, Stefi runs straight into Rita’s desk. ‘ O che capitombolo! ’ I tell her, going to gather her up. She howls and shrieks. ‘ O povera, povera Stefi! ’ It seems I’ve converted.

In the main piazza of the village, Michele dances round the oval parapet of the fountain. It’s bright winter weather now, the light icily, harshly brilliant as it never can be in England. We’ve just come out of the pasticceria . Rita has gone off to the greengrocer who sells the best grapes. I’m sitting on a bench with Stefi in my arms under bare trees, and ‘Don’t fall in, Michele!’ I shout, ‘Don’t fall in!’ But I pride myself on not being one of those parents who frustrate their children’s desire for adventure.

Michele runs around the cheap marble waving his arms and shrieking and bending down to splash the water hooping from low jets. His blue overalls, made in Italy, announce ‘CALIFORNIA DAYS’.

‘Don’t fall in!’

Then Iacopo arrives. You can set your watch by Iacopo’s arrival at the pasticceria . He’s on a huge black motorbike today. Perhaps because he has just left his wife and child. And he says he would like me to have a coffee with him to discuss matters. How can an artist, he demands, be expected to pay much in the way of alimony? His wife comes from a rich family, they…

I’m just trying to explain that I’ve already indulged (in coffee), when there’s a splash, a big splash. Michele’s in, with the algae and the lollipop sticks, and floating litter and freezing cold. He stands there knee-deep in dazed disbelief that things really can go wrong in life. Then begins to wail. ‘ Che capitombolo! ’ Iacopo breathes, unusually aware of something outside of himself. For my own part, what I’m most aware of is that there is no man in greater trouble than an Italian husband who has been careless enough to let a child catch a cold. It’s far, far worse than mere desertion or problems with alimony.

Six months later, with Michele almost five and Stefi two and a half, he sits on a seat attached behind the handlebars of my bike and she on a seat on Rita’s. There is no better way to travel. Little hands flail to touch each other as we ride side by side. Little songs are sung. ‘Lele,’ Stefi shouts, ‘Stefi,’ he answers, and they love to feel the breeze on their faces. The road is flat, narrow, dusty with summer sun. Swallow shadows flit quick across the asphalt. There’s a sensible, flat green stillness about the broad landscape as it sits out another long summer day, quietly, patiently. The corn doesn’t wave, it waits. The trees are silent. Only lizards scuttle in the leaves, and sparrows perhaps. Until, round a bend, we find men by a stream, too many men, one after another: a fishing competition. Suddenly the road is lined with their cars. We slow down.