Tim Parks - An Italian Education

A road sign near the school in the village warns cars to slow down. There is a silhouette of an adult holding a child’s hand as they cross the road. The child is the internationally stylized little girl with pigtails and skipping legs. The adult is bent with age and wears the kind of hat only old men wear: unmistakably Grandfather…

The whys and wherefores of this abundant availability of grandparents are easy enough to understand. The first thing is that Italians tend not to move unless they really have to, and since Verona is in an extremely affluent area with a low unemployment rate, very few are so obliged. In thirteen years of living in this village, I can think of nobody who has left to go and live elsewhere on a permanent basis, though some who did go away in the fifties and sixties have come back.

Then, it is popular wisdom in Italy that marriages to the girl next door are more successful than marriages to partners from afar. Corriere della Sera once ran an interesting feature on this subject, with detailed statistics to show that divorce rates were higher amongst international marriages than national ones, and again amongst interregional marriages than local ones. A crucial reason for this latter statistic, according to the newspaper, was to be found in the problem of cuisine. Once the ‘romance period’ was over, the man would feel unhappy to find that the meal on his plate was cooked, not as mother cooked it in Rome, but as Laura cooks it in Rovigo, the salad tossed not as Mamma tossed it in Palermo, but as Monica sees fit in Parma. For women are not thought of as good cooks or bad, but merely, or more importantly, as cooking in the way one does in a particular area: good cooking being by definition the cooking of the place you were born and bred. In any event, the paper implied, the only possible consequence of such radical dissatisfaction was divorce.

Assuming then that the boy remembers the determining importance of food and various other local mores and hence is wise enough to marry the girl next door, it clearly becomes much easier for all the parents to get together and buy an apartment. But if they are to make this generous gesture, it is also very clearly their right to insist (leaving aside the next-door image) that the new apartment be midway between their respective houses. Parents, after all, are entitled to enjoy their children and get some return on the effort spent bringing them up. The natural result of this is that even in these modern times a large majority of Italian couples have all four grandparents at their beck and call.

The availability of nonne — grandmothers — is then further increased by the fact that women in Italy retire at fifty-five (in the civil service the age is fifty), and in fact have all sorts of incentives for getting out even earlier, thus leaving millions of healthy and frighteningly energetic middle-aged grannies with nothing but time on their hands. Imagining, then, that their offspring (my generation) stick, as they usually do, to an average of just one child, and assuming that they don’t have too many brothers and sisters playing the same game, it is clear that these lucky young parents will have a never-ending source of babysitting at their disposal. Indeed, the problem for the modern Italian couple is not finding somebody to babysit, but avoiding giving offence to whichever of the grandparents is asked to babysit least, and then, of course, having to deal with the children after they have been spoilt and over-protected and stuffed full of caramelle and sat in front of the television all day and given the kind of expensive, battery-operated, showy and above all fragile toys that grandparents, in their determination to leave an impression on the last generation they are likely to know much about, do tend to buy.

No sooner, then, have I got to know the handsome Silvio and his equally handsome little boy, Giovanni, than I begin to see the little lad all around the village with his grandmother, most notably in the play area at Primo Maggio, the ex-Communist social club, where, even at four, the boy will still be forbidden to use either the slide or the bigger of the climbing frames, but will always able to get Nonna to buy him a lolly. ‘Still pees in his bed at night,’ she confides to me. ‘Just like his papà , oh you wouldn’t believe for how long. Eighteen or nineteen years old he was before he stopped.’ Having established her maternal authority over the little boys of two generations, she smiles fondly. Then shouts: ‘ Smettila , Giovà, you’ll get your trousers dirty!’

But Granny’s condescension aside, how I envy little Giovanni’s parents! Having dropped off their boy with Nonna, they are setting off for a pleasant game of tennis at the local sports club, while I have to watch Michele losing his temper because there’s something he can’t do on the climbing frame and Stefi crying because she’s banged her head on the slide.

Likewise, no sooner have I got to know Giorgio and Donatella, who have the apartment next to ours, a chubbily pleasant and supremely relaxed couple if ever there was one, than I begin to recognise the happy grandparents on her side who arrive daily to carry off little Martino for the day while our neighbours go off to work, and the happy grandparents on his side who arrive in the evening (rarely without a new toy) to look after darling Martino while they go out for a drink, or even while they stay in and watch TV. Again, how I envy these two, who, like the French aristocracy of the eighteenth century, appear to have discovered, rediscovered, the ideal method for bringing up children: having someone else bring them up for you. It was the dream expressed in the lullaby after all. Indeed, the modern Italian seems to have gone one better than the old French artistocracy in having chosen for the delicate task the most reliable servants in the world: those responsible for their own upbringing (with the not inconsiderable advantage that they don’t have to pay them anything for it). One only fears that if ever they (my generation) have to look after their own grandchildren, they won’t be equipped for it, having had so little experience. No, when it comes to parenthood, the younger generation will be out there on their own, reinventing the wheel all over again.

But most of all I envy Silvio and Sabrina, Giorgio and Donatella, because all our relatives, Rita’s and mine, are either in England or in Pescara, or dead. In any event, unavailable. Consequently, I very often, and especially in the first sleepless months of Stefi’s life, would find myself typing with a cot on the desk beside me or, later, with a child crawling on the cold tiles round my feet; and one disastrous day when I myself had simply fallen asleep over the keyboard, I woke to find that a bottle of ink had been poured over a freshly printed typescript. ‘Where,’ I cried, ‘where are those nonni ?’

I wasn’t quite the only one in Italy suffering this plight. Turning on the radio one fraught morning, I hear the presenter announcing a phone-in entitled ‘Intergenerational Solidarity and the Unnatural Grandparent’. Who would not listen to such a programme? What it turned out to be, however, was no more than an invitation to call up a group of ‘experts’ and complain of grandparents who were not doing what was expected of them, not, that is, writing cloying letters to their newborn grandchildren or arriving with proper regularity in their little Fiats so that their own children could drive off in their BMWs.

Almost immediately an outraged voice was on the line from somewhere like Ravenna or Cesena: ‘But since we’ve had the child, you understand, after all that was said beforehand, since we’ve actually had the child, I mean, they, my parents, have only offered to babysit, what, twice in two years, and they absolutely refuse to keep him while I’m out at work…’ The presenter and his panel are duly shocked. The legal specialist in particular informs us that a recent ground-breaking court ruling has established that grandparents have the legal right to see their grandchildren even if the parents don’t wish them to. This demonstrates the importance of the grandparent-grandchild bond and the unnaturalness of those who neglect it. For where there is a right, says the expert, there is inevitably a duty, too.