Tim Parks - An Italian Education

Eventually we got a reply, which came as rather a surprise, saying that our case had been reconsidered and we were now on the graduatoria for the four nidos in the area, albeit around number twenty-something of those excluded. There is always room in Italy for the special case. It is always worth screaming and making a noise, as most children know so well. All the same, we suspected that number twenty-something was as good as total exclusion.

We were wrong. Less than a month later we were already being offered a place, not in the local nido but in the bigger nearby suburb of San Michele, an ugly ribbon development along the road and railway running east from Verona to Vicenza. The speed with which twenty people had come off that waiting list should perhaps have warned us. For it meant that twenty children had been withdrawn. As it was, we accepted gratefully, even thought of ourselves as having scored a little victory.

The drive from Montecchio to San Michele is about seven kilometres. You leave the vaguely scenic village set off by steep hills, even mountains when the weather is clear; there’s the picturesque castello on the hillside to your right and one or two attractive villas with iron gates and ivy and wisteria. But as you turn left and south away from the hills, the scenery changes. On the right now is the long, high wall of a barracks, to the left the grey geometry of a top-security prison. Finally, the last glimpses of country give way to the most amorphous of suburban landscapes: interminable apartment blocks that all share the same fittings, the same mass-produced memories of nobler marbles and woods, while on the street outside, as outside Stefano’s house, the pavements are still unlaid, the weeds growing tall.

The nursery is a low prefab opposite a building site. Dropping-off time in the morning is from seven-thirty on, but most parents arrive, bleary-eyed, around eight. You are greeted by a girl, who ‘welcomes the baby’. She is not one of the senior staff, who will arrive only towards nine; she is a new and raw recruit. The girl takes a baby and smiles as she wrestles with it, inviting, begging, the mother to leave. Babies stop crying when their mothers are actually gone, she insists. But the mother, carefully made up, in fur coat and high heels (did the means inspector notice these things?), can’t bring herself to walk out on a crying child. Then another baby is brought in. The girl is supposed to welcome this child as well. And there is a two-year-old being led in by a man in a leather jacket, both of them sneezing fiercely. The girl is supposed to interview this man and ascertain whether it really is wise for him to leave his sneezing and doubtless infectious infant at a nursery full of tiny tots. But she is overwhelmed, she doesn’t know where to turn.

With this harrowing scenario repeated every morning, the only reasonable policy was to go in to the nursery itself, get Michele toddling about on a play mattress with plenty of toys and perhaps a couple of friends, wait till he was calm, then disappear. At first we were scolded for doing this, since hygiene demands that parents do not enter the play area with their shoes on. That’s why there is a girl on the threshold to welcome them. But it turned out this was one of those sensible rules that have to be broken from time to time (daily) in the name of convenience. The scolding wasn’t serious. Rosanna, as I discovered she was called, was grateful that one baby wasn’t yelling.

So much for the welcoming of the bambino . What the older and more experienced teachers then did with the children all day would remain a mystery to me and something I felt it might be wiser not to enquire into too closely. What does one do with tiny children all day? I continued to take Michele in in the morning and pick him up in the evening, and he didn’t seem any the worse for wear and tear. On the contrary. And I was assured, without asking for assurance, that there was no gender conditioning; I was assured that the children were spoken to in Italian and not dialect, though I’m sceptical on that point. I remember arriving one afternoon to hear the maestra singing a little song called ‘The Bells of Bovolon’, in celebration of a tiny village way off in the fog-bound plain. The song was in dialect and almost entirely incomprehensible to someone who only knew Italian, yet Michele understood it perfectly, waved his arms and cheered. I must say I was delighted. One takes great pleasure in seeing children acquire skills one does not have, seeing them become, thankfully, different from oneself.

But by far the most important thing a parent had to do when recovering his or her child was to look at the notice boards that gave the menu and the scariche .

The menu as one might expect, indicated what went into the children, the food being cooked on site from, we are assured and I do believe, the freshest ingredients. Minestrones, pastas and risottos, perhaps prepared according to Nonna’s secret recipe, were the regular fare for those old enough to eat them (the graduatoria for being a cook in one of these places is, I am told, quite endless). Scariche , on the other hand, means ‘discharges’ and referred to what came out of the children at the other end, as it were. A normal day’s notice board (scribbled in felt tip on plastic) might read:

MENU

purè, minestrone

yogurt, frutta

and, appropriately, underneath:

SCARICHE

Marco

:

uno bene

Stefania

:

due bene

Simonetta

:

due (liquido)

Thomas

:

–

Gigi

:

uno (abbondante)

Marzia

:

uno (duro)

Paola

:

diarrea

Francesca

:

uno (scarso)

For this alone, this observation and disposal of the faeces, I could have forgiven these nursery school teachers anything. They could have talked to my child in dialect all day and engaged in any gender distinction they chose, and it would not have bothered me at all. In the entrance, mothers would gaze long at the day’s results, as at other times of life into a lover’s eyes, then hurry into the class to discuss the finer points of due bene or uno abbondante with the poor maestra . I always used to hope that I would find the miraculous due bene and know that it was unlikely Michele would perform again that day.

One afternoon, however, another notice board appeared in the little porch to the school, a board that was to be the source of much contention. The authorities had decided to raise the amount of money we paid for the nursery service, basing payment on income (declared income, what else?). Perhaps it was merely in order to inform us what the new fees were that they decided to announce them in a complex table on a notice board. Or perhaps there was some provocative intent. You never know. In any event, all of a sudden everyone could see what everyone else was paying.

I thus discovered, Michele in my arms, that our own contribution was to be more than doubled to four hundred thousand lire per month, the maximum, worth at that time about two hundred pounds. One other person was paying this amount. One person was paying three hundred thousand; two or three, two hundred thousand; while the vast majority were paying about a hundred thousand, and some as little as fifty.

Annoyed, running through rapid calculations in my mind, I went outside and stood Michele on a low wall where he could brum brum to the diggers in the building site opposite, and I could watch the comings and goings of the parents. Some of them, it’s true, did arrive in little Fiat 126s. Some of them were not parents at all but grandparents wobbling on bicycles or slow old mopeds: an old woman sitting a child directly on the handlebars, an old man with a borsalino propping up a two-year-old on the transmission shaft of his Vespa. This was fair enough. But what was one to make of the arrival of perhaps twenty Volvos, BMWs, Mercedes in little over ten minutes?