Tim Parks - An Italian Education

‘I’m afraid,’ Nonna bends down to whisper dramatically, ‘that we’ve got to go and see a person we’ve just heard is very sick.’

This is a monstrous lie, invented entirely on the spot and only because it is unthinkable for Nonna to disappoint the little ones with the simple truth, that these old folks have had enough of children and grandchildren for a while; they want to be home. ‘We’re so upset to leave you, children,’ she says, ‘but Zia Bice has been taken very ill. She fell down the stairs and broke her hip. We’ll be back soon!’

Whether this final remark is true or not remains to be seen. But then, it doesn’t matter, since it’s the impression being created now, at this very moment, that matters, not how the kids feel later when their grandparents don’t in fact return. My in-laws are consummate politicians, issuing promises like pretend currency (and in this perhaps not entirely unlike Righetti and his fixed price for the garage). It’s an interesting debate afterwards between myself and Rita as to whether we should tell the children that there are no sick friends, no help to be given to a neighbour redecorating his house, no urgent consulting work that Nonno is doing for a building company, only two old people who want to be well thought of at a low price. Curiously, it’s the cold old protestant Englishman who doesn’t want to tell the kids, can’t see the point. At least about one’s grandparents one ought to be able to cultivate illusions. After all, they won’t be around long enough to oblige you to think otherwise. When it comes to builders, on the other hand, it’s very much a question of caveat emptor…

Let’s return to that pressing and so pertinent question my favourite lullaby posed: who can I give my baby to? There are, as I have said, the grandparents, generally more available, useful and conservative in other families than in our own; but then there is also the state nursery, the so-called nido . One would have imagined, given the near ubiquity of grandparents and their eagerness to muck in, and given too, the disastrous state of public finances in this country, that the Italian government would have been only too happy to have saved itself the expense of child minding and left the old folks to get on with it. But no. On the contrary, it is remarkable how far the state has gone in order to lighten even further the already light burden on this new generation of Italian parents. For Italy has the most generous maternity leave regulations and the most enlightened system of pre-school care of any country I know. Everything, it seems, is done to make child rearing easy and attractive. And still the birthrate falls.

The word nido means nest, but in recent years it has come to mean the first of two levels of state nursery schools, the one going from age six months to three years. I remember being amazed when I heard about the nido . It seemed so marvellous that there was a place where one’s child would be fed, changed and looked after from eight in the morning till four in the evening. True there were fees to be paid, but they were modest. I could not believe how bountiful the state was proving to be. The only problem, I then discovered, was that the number of places was limited.

We applied — this is going back to when Michele was about a year old — hoping to have at least the morning free to work. As so often in Italy, there was no pre-printed form, but Rita wrote a letter on expensively stamped legal paper and backed it up with the necessary certificates (of residency, of family relationships, of birth, of marriage, etc.) plus copies of our recent tax declaration. Soon afterwards a man came round to our house and asked searching questions about how many hours I worked at the university, questions to which I answered truthfully. He was polite but clearly looking for trouble, eyeing all around him, which in that particular apartment, before we moved to Righetti’s empire, amounted to no more than great icebergs of ugly fifties furniture frozen in a time unlikely to be remembered for its sense of grace, or even practicality. How big was the apartment, he asked, how many rooms were there, what kind of car did I have? His face was discouraging, sceptical. Clearly every answer was the wrong answer. Did I have a VAT number? he asked. I said I did. But this apparently was an indicator of wealth, rather than a token of bondage, and likewise the fact that we were renting furnished accommodation, since rents are high.

In any event, we were refused a place. Apparently, we earnt too much money and we spent a lot of our time working at home. But our real crime, as Stefano with his experience of accountancy explained, was that we were self-employed. What we should have done was start a company and then be employees of ourselves. He tapped his nose. ‘ Sai com’è ?’ he said. ‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a self-employed worker to get his child into a state nursery.’ He laughed. Young Beppe was spending his pre-school days with his grandmother.

Is it worth going into this admission process in just a little more detail? I think so, if only to appreciate the tendency the Italian authorities have of offering everybody a prize (to endear themselves to the electorate) and then, since they can’t actually afford to give it to everybody, setting up a maze, or obstacle race, to make sure that only those who really haggle for it (not those who need it) actually get it. It’s a mentality every Italian child will one day have to learn to react to, a touchstone situation around which many a personality will form, especially at that critical moment when young people leave school and have to fend for themselves. The question is, are you willing to fight for your gravy train, or aren’t you?

Back to the nido . Inevitably, there is a points system, in order to establish a graduatoria , i.e. a hierarchy of entitlement, a waiting list, or perhaps more simply a pecking order. Equally inevitably, the exact way in which points are allotted is obscure. The truth is that volumes could be written on the various graduatorie in Italian society — to get into a college hostel, to get a low-interest mortagage, a place in a housing project, a job. This very day I read an article on a graduatoria establishing the order in which, in a little village down south, those who have suffered the ignominy of being buried in the ground (considered plebeian) can expect to be shifted into loculi — grave niches in the wall — as soon as places become available in the municipal cemetery. A row has been sparked off because many of the relatives of the dear but ill-treated departed fear that the points system is being abused in order to favour people — corpses or their relatives? — with political contacts in the local authorities.

As for the nido’s points system, I never met anyone who understood exactly how it worked. Questions are asked about whether one’s parents were refugees from Fiume (the area of Italy returned to Yugoslavia in 1947), or war orphans, and clearly these are extremely advantageous positions to be in. Bizarre anachronisms aside, however, it in no secret that there are points for being a dipendente , an employee, and above all for being a statale , a state employee. Logically, the state looks after the child in order to be able to count on the presence at work of the parents. Not for nothing is the state often referred to here as mamma stato …

Desperately behind with deadlines, when Michele was perhaps eighteen months, Rita wrote a long letter to the selection committee for the local nurseries. She pointed out that it is impossible to translate with a child crawling over your typewriter. She remarked that work was work whether it happened at home or not. She drew their attention to the fact that we had no relatives in the immediate vicinity and that the income tax declaration we had showed them did not demonstrate excessive wealth; evasion could not just be assumed.