Tim Parks - An Italian Education

Someone phones to say that her mother will look after the grandchild but then perversely refuses to change him. As a result, she feels cruel leaving the little boy with his grandmother for more than, say, a couple of hours.

‘We could phone in ourselves,’ I suggest to Rita. ‘Surely there must be some law that denies grandparents the right to live more than twenty miles away from their grandchildren.’

From her position on the sofa Rita opens one comatose eye. ‘You hate it when they come,’ she says.

She’s right…

Imagine a dull afternoon late February. The doorbell makes you jump. You pick up the intercom, ready to tell the Jehovah’s Witnesses that you don’t want to discuss the end of the world, you believe it happened long ago. Or it could be Righetti, who has a way of turning up at the most inappropriate moments asking for that rent on his garage, which was supposed to be a mere formality but now turns out to be deadly serious, especially since we’re now supposed to buy the thing but can’t afford to. Far from keeping the price steady, as pledged, he has increased it in line with the general property boom, naturalmente . We forgot to get him to write something down. He claims never to have made any such promise.

The intercom crackles, but no one is there. ‘ Chi è? Chi è? ’ Nobody. Children mucking around, you think, more relieved than angry. You’re just putting the thing down when from far away a voice calls ‘It’s us!’ Because what my in-laws do is get out of the car and ring the bell, to get gate and door buzzed open, then go back to the car to unpack. But this is also a call for help. They will have lots and lots of things to carry…

I run down with Michele, now five years old, perhaps, clumsily quick and wildly excited at the prospect of an unannounced visit from those great, if only occasional, benefactors, his grandparents. Outside a freezing twilight is stiffening to fog. The garden is a huge trench because, after repeated flooding, a solemn condominium meeting decided to link all the drainpipes from the gutters to the central sewage system. This is illegal for some reason I don’t understand, but common practice, not to worry.

Nonno Adelmo, my father-in-law, drives an ancient Ford Fiesta, bought second-hand when he and Nonna Maria returned to Italy to retire some years ago. Despite boasting that this remarkable car has done more than three hundred thousand kilometres, Nonno would clearly like something more comfortable. Nonna, however, still lives in a post-war mentality where things that work have to be made to go on working, and on and on and on, just as food on the plate has to be finished, not thrown away, and just as the rather unattractive fruit from the old trees they have on their acre of land in Pescara has to be gathered, to the very last sour plum and pippy grape, and given to friends and relatives and even the merest acquaintances. So as well as having to drive an ancient car, Nonno now has to fiddle in the back of it to tug out two big crates of homemade jams — fig, apricot, and medlar — plus bottle upon bottle of laboriously prepared tomato preserve for pasta.

The curiosity about Nonna Maria is that she mixes this obsessive peasant parsimony with a flamboyant love of style. Her father was a cinema projectionist in Rimini; she grew up with the fashion-saturated films of the twenties and thirties. Early photographs always show her assuming extravagant poses, perhaps draped over the parapet at the seafront or simpering beside some monument in Rome, her fine-boned face set in a smirk of insuperable complacency. Even now, stepping out of this ramshackle car at almost seventy, she is wearing a wide-brimmed green felt hat with big pin and an attractive shawl tied with a silver brooch. The fact that both are battered and somewhat the worse for wear and tear gives her a decidedly raffish look in the thickening fog as she lifts Michele into her arms. She smells of sweet scents and applies make-up generously, frequently disappearing with Rita’s perfumes and lipsticks when a visit is over.

It would truly be hard to exaggerate the cooing and crying and sighing and kissing and nose-tweaking and exclamations and tears and tickles and cuddles that now have to take place. The children must imagine they are the only people in the whole universe. Nonna lifts up Michele and dances round and round with him and ‘ O che bel bambino! O che ometto splendido! O che spettacolo! ’ She holds him up to her hawkish face, rubs noses (losing some powder from hers), then swirls him round again, then crouches down to put her own old cheeks next to his. And now Stefi catches up, toddling and waddling down the path, and the whole extravagant process has to be repeated: the whirling in the air, the nose rubbing, the kissing.

It’s what the Italians enthusiastically call fare festa a qualcuno , which, literally translated, means ‘to make a party for someone’, and combines the ideas of welcoming them and smothering them with physical affection. Comparison of this expression with the slightly disapproving ‘to make a fuss of’ speaks worlds about the difference between Italian and English approaches to such occasions.

‘Michelino, look what we’ve got for you!’ Nonno shouts, pulling more packets from the car. ‘Stefi, look what’s here!’

Michele immediately frees himself from Nonna to run to Nonno.

‘Are you mad Adelmo?’ Nonna demands. ‘The children will freeze if they start fiddling with their presents out here. Poveretti , they’re both so thin!’

This is patently not true. Michele is nothing if not a hefty fellow. Already I’m asking him to ease up when he jumps off the sofa onto my neck as I read. Stefi shows every sign of being equally robust. In any event, the children have now grabbed two big presents from Grandfather and are fighting with the wrapping paper shopgirls always apply so attractively and efficiently here, thus denying you the problem and pleasure of wrapping them yourself. Still protesting the children will catch their deaths, Nonna somehow grabs both of them, presents and all, and with considerable effort starts to heave and coerce them toward the house. As she sways up the front path in the fog, dragging them by their wrists, we can hear her launching into some story or other with her favourite expression: ‘ Bambini , you know what my grandmother used to say? Do you? She used to say that little children should always…’

Nonno shakes his head, clearly annoyed that he is to be excluded from the present-opening scene which can only occur the very moment the children are through the door and Nonna frees their hands. Easier to keep a dog off red meat than a child from wrapping paper. He had obviously been looking forward to that.

Good journey? I ask, taking hold of a whole box of medlar jam, which I truly loathe. Nonno cheers up telling me that they found a service station with an excellent restaurant, just this side of Bologna. In that way Europeans have of getting back at us for our linguistic hegemony by inventing awful English words that aren’t really English, the service station is called the Auto-grill, pronounced Owtoe greel. Apparently in no hurry to get indoors out of the cold, he finds his trilby and overcoat on the back seat, puts them on, then leans on the top of the Fiesta to enjoy a cigarette. ‘Women,’ he signs with extravagant eloquence, and already he is looking for that male complicity which can at once bind in-laws together while keeping the family as a whole in galvanized tension.

‘By the way,’ he says, nodding at the crate I’ve got stuck holding, ‘you don’t need to actually eat that stuff. Just wait till we’ve gone before throwing it away.’ I laugh, but to be on the safe side thank him just the same. He shakes his old trilbied head. Obviously it hasn’t been an easy journey. Foolishly, I ask why they didn’t announce their arrival. ‘Women,’ he repeats. ‘What do you want?’