Tim Parks - An Italian Education

Roberto looks at her with blank complacency, dipping panettone in his wine. He has no idea what she is talking about. So she has to spell it out: she was appalled, yes, totally appalled, in Pescara last summer when they brought a neighbour’s relative for him to see, yes, for their son and doctor to see, about the poor man’s prostate, and he, Berto, appeared in his bathing shorts . He saw the man in his bathing shorts! What a terrible loss of face. Her grandmother, Nonna Matilda, used to say that…

There is an advert on Italian television that shows a young man in a supermarket queue buying onions, potatoes, vegetables various. The cashier, an unfashionably fleshy beauty, plumply pale under the blackest jet curls, asks the fellow if he is making a minestrone. ‘Yes,’ he admits shyly. And what a sympathetic smile the dear girl has as she leans her big breasts forward over her electronic till to tell him not to forget the leeks. No, don’t forget the leeks… Her grandmother always used to say that leeks were the secret to a good minestrone… Meanwhile, a caption floats up across vegetables, whose generous roundness is somehow underlined by proximity to those breasts, to the effect that you always get the human touch in Conad (yes, Conad) supermarkets.

So now Roberto, having to hear for the thousandth time what his mother’s grandmother may or may not have said about how doctors should behave (for it may be that ‘my grandmother said’ is only a way of lending ancestral authority to a private and self-interested opinion), Roberto shouts, ‘ Sì Mamma, sì Mamma , anything you say, Mamma ,’ but laughing; and just as both children return to beg a last glass of water and to go round kissing everybody again, he begins to recount a spoof of this television advert, which he has seen on some late night satirical programme.

So, in the spoof everybody in the supermarket queue begins to say what their grandmother put in her minestrone, a huge list of vegetables, some of them most unlikely, with one customer insisting, against all reason, that the real secret to a good minestrone was… watermelon. Yes, watermelon, in the minestrone. An argument flares up, while other customers who are eager to be served and to get along home begin to shout in frustration, until one woman cries out loud, ‘You know what my grandmother did? You want to know what my grandmother put in her minestrone? My grandmother pissed in her minestrone, that’s what she did.’ To which the woman’s antagonist replies, ‘And my grandmother pissed in your grandmother’s minestrone…’

Berto bangs his fist down on the table three times. Everybody laughs. Nonna included. Rushing off to bed both Michele and Stefi are repeating — ‘My grandmother pissed in your grandmother’s minestrone, my grandmother pissed in your grandmother’s minestrone’ — and giggling their little heads off.

Then Nonna draws a deep breath and, quite unembarrassed, insists that what her Nonna Matilda used to say was that a doctor, like a priest…

Berto covers his face with freckled hands showing a gold signet ring and gold bracelet. But for all this mock despair, just two minutes later he is bothering somebody else in exactly the same way his mother has been bothering him, though his appeal is to a different type of authority. No sooner has Nonno Adelmo cut himself a slice of panettone than Roberto begins to criticise and advise him about his diet, to tell him what, according to the latest research, he should eat and what he shouldn’t eat, the dangers of obesity, his chances of heart attack. Nonno shakes his head as though in melancholy irritation with somebody who, like his wife, has understood so little about life he isn’t even worth arguing with. But then only a few moments later it will be his turn to advise us, Rita and myself that is, as to how we should proceed with some changes he feels need making to our apartment, tools we need to buy, a product that would be very good for protecting the shutters against weathering. Not to be left out, Rita responds by advising her parents against taking holiday-makers in their spare apartment in Pescara over the summer. It tires them out so much. They would be much better advised to…

What Berto didn’t mention when he recounted the story of the supermarket spoof was the caption that floated up at the end of it. For I saw the programme, too. It said, if I rightly recall, ‘Conad, the supermarket where nobody minds their own business.’ Well, nobody minds their own business in the Italian family, nor is expected to. Everybody’s behaviour is fair game for everybody else. Even the long dead grandparents of the grandparents are still there, having their say by proxy, turning in their graves, insisting on tradition. If the original Conad advertisement is effective, it’s because it plays on a situation everybody recognises. If the spoof makes people laugh, it’s because things are just beginning to change.

Our family evening thus proceeds in a sort of merry-go-round of well-meant advice, every last word of which is just so much form, so much water off another duck’s back. But these ducks swim in such water. They like to feel it running down their feathers. Towards eleven o’clock, after very generous embracing, Nonna and Nonno retire to the spare room upstairs and we to the main bedroom downstairs, while Berto retreats into the fog to buzz open the doors of his extravagant Lancia Thema, everybody thinking exactly what they like about everybody else, and having quite forgotten every single word of advice given or received.

These visits from the grandparents last two or three days on average, though on arrival they often speak of staying two or three weeks. Perhaps this is just part of the show. Nonno gets up before seven to go out and buy fresh croissants for our breakfast, plus two or three newspapers to read, a gesture that scores very highly with me. It also gives him the chance to smoke a private morning cigarette. Not that he can’t smoke inside the house, quite the contrary, but he doesn’t like his wife to see him indulging, though of course she knows that this is why he goes out. After breakfast he takes the children to school or nursery and together with Nonna retrieves them in the evening. Then he buys them sweets and ice cream and cakes and toys while she fusses over them, her voice squeezing itself into little trills and warbles of affection which puff off into the emotional air as though shot through the hot fissure of one of those volcanoes that for all their furious activity never quite erupt.

One of these visits, I remember, coincided, most appropriately, with carnival time. Michele and Stefi were dressed up as Batman and Isabella Queen of Spain in costumes peer pressure forces you to buy ready-made and unwashable from Standa, the department store. Nonno and Nonna took them into town to see the carnival procession with all the floats and clowns and pretty fairies tossing caramelle through freezing February air into a sea of little angels and devils and Japanese robots and D’Artagnans and Tarzans, all wondering how exactly their costumes should inspire them to act. When hero and royalty came back, full of sweets and soda, it occurred to me there could be nobody better suited to take a child to carnival than Nonno and Nonna, nobody more profoundly in tune with the spirit of the thing.

Then, on the third or fourth morning, their own show is suddenly over. It’s been a short run. They’re leaving, as unexpectedly as they arrived: usual departure time, six-thirty a.m. You’ll be fast asleep and they’ll wake you all to tell you they’re off. The children stand flat-footed on icy tiles, rubbing their eyes. ‘Oh, but why do you have to go, Nonno? You promised you’d take us to the mountains. But you promised. Please don’t go.’ If the kids occasionally forget to say thank you, they have no trouble in playing this part. They love their grandparents so.