Tim Parks - An Italian Education

One of the most characteristic Italian emotions, it seems to me, is that mixture of envy, perplexity and wonder that comes when one realises that others are working the system far more effectively than oneself — sai com’è? — this together with the knowledge that they are doing so and will continue to do so with absolute impunity. Until it dawns on you that the system was invented in order to be worked in this way… A black Saab rolled up. A man with gold wristwatch and mobile phone climbed out. Clearly, I had filled in some form or other wrongly.

A few months into this, after our next tax declaration and after the four hundred thousand a month had begun to bite, I managed to uncover a tiny office in a health administration centre in town, where a small woman looked through my file, sighed, then, at last, explained. As an autonomo — a self-employed person — I paid a straight ten percent of my salary in nursery fees, up to a maximum of four hundred thousand. If I had been a dipendente , I could have paid ten percent of seventy percent, and had I been a statale , I could have paid ten percent of fifty percent.

When I burst out laughing, she asked me why, and we had the tedious discussion as to whether such uneven treatment in fact legitimises tax evasion on the part of autonomi . In a recent conversation with a member of the railway police, I told her, I had heard that even they were paid their overtime under the table, tax free, yes, even the police, and of course statali were notorious for having other jobs in their plentiful spare time. This office, I remarked, was open only two hours a day on alternate days.

As I produced all this provocative talk, I was aware of having suddenly become a little bit more Italian, aware of the society and its language speaking through me, aware that I, like my son, was growing Italian, if not exactly growing up. There was a certain theatricality about it. It was exactly the show expected of an autonomo wounded in his wallet.

Far from being offended by my attack on statali , the polite, middle-aged but chiefly bored secretary was sympathetic. She remarked, whether in corroboration or opposition wasn’t clear, that she had noticed an interesting thing about this year’s declarations: they were lower than last year’s, lower, that is, than those presented before the new system of income-related fees was introduced.

I was taken aback. Why lower? Then I caught on. But it was surely unlikely, I said, that people would alter their whole income tax declaration merely in order to lower their nursery payments.

The declarations, she said, submitted for the purpose of calculating nursery fees were only photocopies, not originals. She smiled brightly. In front of her on the desk she had the usual impressive assortment of rubber stamps, perhaps fifteen or twenty on two revolving carousels. She gave them both a wry twirl.

‘But they could be compared with the orginals.’

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Why should they be?’

What she was suggesting, then, was that people were writing out a different, lower tax declaration for the purposes of the nido fees, and from her tone of voice I shall never understand whether she wasn’t perhaps encouraging me to do this myself in future, or whether she just felt like mentioning something that she probably felt she couldn’t mention in the official way of things. To show that she had her eyes open.

I went to a parents’ meeting and brought up the question. It was one of those dingy affairs where everybody sits on tiny infant seats in their overcoats because the time-switch for the heating has gone off. I said the new way of calculating fees penalized autonomi , as if we were all without exception tax evaders. ‘You are!’ somebody immediately shouted. When I mentioned what the woman in the fees office had said about lower declarations, I was immediately interrupted by the chair, an ostentatiously unshaven fellow, not to mention furious objections from the floor. It was not an experience I shall ever wish to repeat, if only because I felt so ingenuous and foolish afterwards. Given that I was the only parent there who was an autonomo , what solidarity could I expect from the others? Clearly the important thing now was to evade the amount of tax that would set this matter to rights…

But nursery fees were not to be an issue in my life for very much longer. Around that time something happened that decided us to withdraw Michele from the nido , and made sure that we never sent Stefi at all.

It was winter. Michele had been ill off and on for some weeks. Finally, when he was better, I took him in again. The weather was cold, and on driving towards San Michele the air slowly thickened to the inevitable fog. There was a horse in a little scrub of field by the barracks, and Michele would always twist in his seat to see this horse and shout ‘ Cavallo! ’ It made him feel good, especially when the creature had a kind of jacket affair on, an old red rug strapped round its back. Then he would shout, ‘ Cavallo con pullover! ’ — ‘pullover’ being one of the less likely words the Italians have borrowed from us, though with a mysterious shift of stress from the ‘u’ to the ‘o’. ‘ Cavallo con pullòver! ’ Michele yelled. That put him in an excellent mood. But this morning the horse was lost in a grey fuzz. Michele was glum.

In the little parking space, I drew up beside the black Saab, from which man and child were emerging into the fog in paroxysms of coughing. I arrived in the porch immediately after them. The little boy was feverish, his eyes streaming. The girl ‘welcoming’ was, as always, new, and I hadn’t yet learnt her name. Very timidly she asked if the child wasn’t ill.

Fiercely, the man said no.

‘But…’

The boy had a bit of a temperature, but nothing serious, he insisted. Anyway, he personally was going to work even if he didn’t feel well. He and his wife couldn’t just take time off, they had a company to run…

The girl wanted to protest, but didn’t, and the little boy was left holding her hand. ‘Come on, Thomas,’ I heard her saying as the toddler stood there in a daze of fever.

I had already taken Michele’s coat and hat off, but now, instead of going in with him, I walked over to the notice board that listed people’s fees, imagining that, for all English names are fashionable here, it is unlikely there would be more than one Thomas. I was right, and thus discovered that Thomas’s busy papà was paying only a hundred and ten thousand lire to use the nido not only as a nursery but as a nursing home.

Driving a Saab, he was declaring an income decidedly less than half my own, which at that time was hardly handsome.

In a little pique of self-righteousness I decided to take Michele home.

I’m at that stage in a book where you stop and wonder what kind of impression you’re giving. Will it seem from these pages that I have nothing but condescension for how Italians bring up their children, how they run their nurseries, that I believe the little Latin rascals are at once spoilt and frustrated, likely, if following their parents’ and grandparents’ example, to become woefully superficial, at once emotional and Machiavellian? Nothing could be further from the truth. A chapter on Zia and all she stands. for should set this to rights.

It might be said in passing, however, that the newspapers in Italy would tend to agree with the negative line (so long as it’s not elaborated by a foreigner). Their pages are full of horror stories about modern youth, its lack of spirituality, respect, and (surprise, surprise) basic values. Oddly, it is often those who represent the best in society, or at least the most solid and stable, those who are a proof that much is still as Pope and Frate Indovino would have it, who seem most ready to lament the ill wind that is abroad. Thus, almost every time I take baby Stefi or strapping Michele to Zia’s she has some horror story for me.