Tim Parks - An Italian Education

And now something’s coming up behind too. Honking. We fall quickly into single file in the narrow space. It’s the car leading a bike race. It honks furiously, as if outraged to find parked cars and other cyclists on the route. The fishermen turn annoyed from their tackle. Then they forget their own competition and begin to cheer. Forza Dino! Come on! Forza Montecchio! We have to stop. The men, young and old, sweat by with their plastic crash-helmets and fancy fluorescent pants. How they love sports equipment! How they love having the name of their team on their shirts! Pedalling harder for the spectators, they flash past in a pack and are gone. The children applaud the spettacolo . Then we’re just speeding up again ourselves into the stillness of that flat countryside, when all at once something shocking happens. All at once I’m doing a somersault in the air, quite high in the air, actually. I go up and up and over and crash down on my bicycle, Michele underneath. After three years’ perfectly happy cycling on that seat, the boy has finally decided to poke his foot between the moving spokes. We might as well have been shot from behind.

The casualty ward, when a car gets us there, has a children’s section. They’re very kind. They make no criticism or comment. A dozen of these accidents a day. All Italians carry their children on bikes and mopeds and scooters. What better way to see the world! They put a couple of stitches in Michele’s leg. He screams, despite local anaesthetics. Nobody tells him to be a man. But the nurse shakes her head. ‘Che capitombolo,’ she tells him indulgently.

When they’re not off on a trip, after ice creams, or on biking expeditions, the children are naked in summer. They spend far more time naked than an English child ever could, and naked without shivering. Does this kind of thing really influence the character as much as one suspects it might?

Michele and Stefi roll about naked on a sheet on the tiles in the sitting room. They are naked on the lawn in a paddling pool while Rita pours buckets of water on them from twenty feet above. Giovanni joins in. And Gigi and little Martino, Giorgio’s son, and Gianluca, Mario’s little boy. Gianluca’s Serbian babysitter, who arrived to escape the war, stands and watches in a garden transformed from rubble to the lush pages of a magazine, the inverse process of what is happening in her country.

The children are naked, too, on our annual holiday in Pescara, where the toddling Stefi kneels in the great stone sink outside the house and showers herself with cold water under a fierce sun. They are naked at night in bed under a thin sheet. Too naked now. For one of the characteristic sounds of their childhood must be the dreadful whine of the mosquito over their fragrantly plump bodies. Zanzara , the Italian word for the beast, is more onomatopoeic, as befits a language historically closer to the menace. The children’s smooth brown nakedness is broken by the great red blotches of mosquito bites. How angry it makes them when they’re irritated with the heat! They scream for you to shut the windows, shut the doors. Despite the suffocating closeness. Then, ‘Papà, Papà, there’s a zanzara in the room! Come and kill it!’ I come in and perform with a copy of Io e il mio bambino . Righetti’s whitewashed wall has tiny blotches of blood. I wonder how my old friends Stefano and Marta get round this one, how do they keep those walls so free of fingerprints and blood?

In the middle of the night there’s a terrific bang and scream. Michele has tried to imitate Papà. Climbing naked over the furniture, brandishing a toy catalogue, he has crashlanded in his Duplo. Its sharp corners and little studs are printed all over his naked body. Like the grappa drinkers in the bar and the nun in San Zeno and the nurse at the casualty ward, Stefi rushes to help, and she wails: ‘Lele, Lele, che ca-i-omolo!’

My mail-order calendar-almanac, Il Frate Indovino (literally, The Fortune-telling Friar ), which I waste hours and hours consulting, has a section for every month entitled ‘ DONNE ’, WOMEN. The heading is scrawled large in awfully cheap calligraphy, yellow on green or pink on blue, and in the circle of the big ‘D’ of ‘ DONNE ’, or in a small space after the ‘E’, there will be the tiny illustration of a baby, or a plate with knives and forks on it, or an iron, or a washing machine. The Cappuccino priest who writes the thing clearly has no interest in glamorizing the sex he manfully renounced.

‘ DONNE ’ usually kicks off with endearing remarks of the variety ‘If we really considered the work that you women do every day in the home (11 million of you in Italy and 120 million in Europe) we would understand how much we need you, since without you the whole political, social and economic system would collapse. The housewife should be recognised as a productive worker and rewarded accordingly.’ It’s the kind of vague blandishment that for so many years won so many votes for the Christian Democratic party, always a great supporter of salaries for housewives, and indeed for everybody, if only there were enough money…

Inside this little section (which rubs shoulders with other sections entitled ‘Farming Tips’ or ‘The Stars Speak Out’ or ‘Did You Know?’) is a small subsection (yes, every month!) entitled ‘Children, or not?’, and this little paragraph is packed with considerations clearly designed to stop the demographic slide and maintain the Friar’s reading public in the future. This month’s offering observes:

‘To have children or not? Here is a problem that obsesses and frightens every couple. Why? Usually it’s just selfishness: we don’t want to make any sacrifici .’

Sacrifici again. The word comes back obsessively.

But apart from buying their house and taking out life insurance (which I very much expect they would do anyway), how many sacrifici does the Italian couple really make when they embark on child-rearing? What follows was published as a prizewinning letter in one of the mother and baby magazines…

LETTER FROM A GRANDMOTHER TO HER NEWBORN GRANDCHILD

Dearest Anna,

I shan’t explain to you who I am because it’s too complicated, but when you’re big you’ll understand. Oh, I don’t mean really big, but a little bit big, when I’ll be playing with you and passing the time with you telling you fables and fairy stories, just the way I did with your mother…

Speaking of which, your mother and father were so happy when they knew you were going to be born because they also knew that they would be giving you to me to look after, and your mother remembers how much time and energy I spent to bring her up good and kind. Of course I was able to spend all that time on her because I only did the housework, while your mother will soon have to leave you to me; she has to work outside the home to help make ends meet (that means buying everything necessary for eating, dressing and having fun on a level with everyone else. That’s what life’s like today, Anna. Your mother says that if there hadn’t been me, she probably wouldn’t have been able to bring you into the world, knowing how difficult it would have been for her and your father)…

Well, I’d say Rita and I had been in our Via delle Primule palazzina no more than a week before we became fascinated by the constant coming and going of certain solid respectable folk in late middle age. They would arrive with admirable regularity in their small Fiats or on puttering old Vespas either to pick up a young child and take him off for the day, or to stay with him for the evening, while the parents went out. Only a few months later and we had learnt to recognise and more or less place all these good people — exactly four per family — until greeting them had become a staple of condominium routine. For all the parents in the building work, mothers and fathers alike. Otherwise, how could they eat and dress and have fun (and drive cars) ‘on a level with everyone else’, i.e. a level considerably above that of their own parents, these grandmothers and grandfathers, who more than anybody else appear to be the ones making all the sacrifici …