Tim Parks - An Italian Education

Zia means no more and no less than aunt, or auntie, and as such is used in Italy, as elsewhere, to refer to those people we all feel should be relatives, but sadly are not. Zia Natalina is the person who substituted for the nido for us. Of the two, she certainly came closest to offering what one expects from an institution.

Determined not to send Stefi to the first-level nursery, not to have to decipher the difference between due bene and uno abbondante and gaze with envy at how little others were paying, Rita looked for a babysitter in the way one does these things here. One asks the people in the shops, who know everybody and everything, until sure enough one morning a tall solid sensible girl arrived and wheeled Stefi off in her blue carrozzino for a fine spring walk out of doors. Indeed, as I recall, this would have been right around the time that the back garden was taking on its crematorium appearance and perhaps the very day that a small van arrived with all kinds of complicated electronics and hydraulics to attach to the gate.

Milena, the girl’s name was, and she was training to look after handicapped children. She helped with the church’s summer school. In the afternoons she looked after a very beautiful, sadly retarded girl. On Saturday night she went to the disco, as it sometimes seems the whole of Italian youth does, but on Sunday she was always up in time for Mass. When the Pope came to Verona, she was one of the thousands filling the Arena, the old Roman amphitheatre, and listening, where lions once mauled Christians, to his peculiar homilies about not having sex, but how if you do have it, it’s better without contraceptives. How does he know? In any event, she had no boyfriend. What better sort of babysitter could one ask for?

A couple of hours after Milena left with Stefi, we received a telephone call. Our little girl had had one of her totally hysterical screaming fits, the kind of thing we were so used to at one and two and three o’clock at night. However, the person explaining this to us was not Milena, but her mother, Natalina. Yes, Stefi had gone quite wild for an hour. Was it all right if she looked after the child herself, and at her own house, rather than having Milena keep her outside? Somehow, just hearing the brisk warmth of that sensible voice down the phone one knew at once that this was the person to give the baby to, streets ahead of guardian angels and befane .

Very soon Zia Natalina was a fixture in our lives, a figure of monumental maternity to both children, somewhere between mother and grandmother, overwhelmingly wholesome without being bigoted. Of all the Italians I know, she is perhaps the only one, who, while pursuing the time-honoured Italian tradition of spoiling children rotten, manages nevertheless to get them to do as she wishes. It is a skill there is no question of acquiring, but has to do with such imponderables as presence and good will and complete freedom from neurosis or pretension, a total at-homeness with oneself. It has to do with being Zia.

You climb out of the car, perhaps with both children, always excited to be on their way to see Zia. The house is in the part of the village built in the 1950s, a big detached thing clumsily approximating some period image of luxury. There’s an extravagant Californian roof of big concrete beams sloping over a huge terraced balcony that never gets the sun.

You stand outside the black railing and buzz the bell to the upstairs flat, since, like so many Italian houses, this one is divided into a downstairs for Grandfather and an upstairs for the family. In the middle of the little front garden stands a tall cedar that has outgrown its original ornamental purposes and now threatens to obscure every window.

As always, Zia appears on the balcony. She beams. Michele waves and shouts: ‘Zia! Zia! Zia!’ Stefi says, ‘Tia!’ In a loose dress Zia puts her fists on ample hips. ‘Well, santa patata! look who it is!’

Zia is I think the only person I have ever heard who actually uses the expression santa patata . Holy potato. So determined is she to be harmless. At the same time I can’t imagine she is one of those people who put up DON’T BLASPHEME stickers on so many lampposts and buses.

You walk up weathered crazy paving to an unprepossessing door at the side of the house. On the wall by the door there is a huge fly, perhaps two feet long, done in wrought iron, and in the porch an even bigger spider, a good metre of him, crawling metallic up the whitewash. The children marvel at these things at once impressive and ugly. Zia’s husband made them.

You climb the stairs past the spider. The staircase is extravagantly wide and airy, but dark and cold too, being made of polished limestone laid over cement. The rooms, when you get into the apartment, are surprisingly small and ungracious. The kitchen, in particular, where everything happens, is so poky you wonder where all that space you imagined from outside could have gone, as if in one of those science fiction scenarios where things are different sizes without and within. Basically, there is a long wooden table, straight-backed chairs, cupboards of crockery, a television, and then a folding plastic screen to hide — as if it were a source of shame — a tiny space with cramped oven and sink. As late as the 1950s they still hadn’t seen the advantages of selling comfortable environments to women. And Zia hasn’t bothered to change things. She is not of the Via delle Primule generation.

While treating the children to whatever baking she has done, and in particular her Carnival galani — airy slivers of batter drenched in icing sugar — Natalina launches into one of her horror stories about the way society is going. So and so, the man across the street, you know, with the hardware shop, has left his wife, poveretta , and two young children, poverini , to run off after another woman, silly girl. And, ‘I don’t know, Signor Teem,’ Zia says, shaking her head, ‘I don’t know how anyone can do that. I bambini! Signor Teem! I bambini! How can a man leave his children?’

The conclusion, as always, is that people are becoming monstrously selfish. ‘ Non c’è più religione ,’ she sighs, offering the children another galano . No, there is no more religion.

In other company I might remark that, hardly devout myself, I still haven’t run off with one of my students. But the last thing I want is to get into a serious discussion, or dry up a valuable source of information. It was from Zia, after all, that I first heard the excellent news that Righetti had just had a baby girl, and then very soon afterwards that the wife was pregnant again, in search no doubt of a baby boy.

So I just nod my head in agreement. Then to feed her dismay, I tell her about an article I have read in the paper about police speed traps. The Italian police use the photograph method. When the autovelox , as it’s called, snaps someone speeding, a copy of the photo indicating date and place is sent to the motorist’s home along with, of course, a notice of the fine. But this led to a lot of wives discovering that their husbands were not quite where they were supposed to be, nor alone, either. A number of divorces resulted. Now, today’s paper tells me, the police have decided to send, not the photo and request for payment, but merely a letter that calls you along to the police station to discuss an unspecified traffic offence.

‘ Santa patata , Signor Teem,’ Zia says, shaking her head. ‘I just don’t know. I don’t know what the world is coming to…’

For my own part, I can’t help marvelling at this Latin gesture of male solidarity. It’s only another way of defending the family, after all, I tell her, and I can see my father-in-law laughing and clapping me on the back, or Nascimbeni now making more ambiguous corna .