Tim Parks - An Italian Education

Then she tells me to tell Rita that a certain Marco something or other, the husband of one of Rita’s friends, has died. It’s so ironic. He left his wife three years ago, set up with someone else, then died suddenly of a stroke. So it was all for nothing! In fact, the stress probably led to his death. And the poor wife had suffered so much, been in and out of mental hospital at a certain point…

Again, with other people one might get into some kind of argument over these subjects, one might start saying what a tough proposition marriage is, or how people can change and become incompatible, or how remarkable I find it that sixty or seventy percent of marriages do survive. But Zia is so convincing in her straightforward moral topography that I can’t help feeling that she is basically right. Invariably, there is a copy of Famiglia cristiana on the table, though she doesn’t go overboard for the more bizarre religious publications.

Her own husband, Zio Mauro, when he comes in, is a friendly hulk of a fellow, with huge thick red hands of the kind one can say are rubate all’agricoltura , stolen from the fields. He’s a mechanic with a partnership in a small garage where no doubt he makes his ironwork creations in his spare time (upstairs is a deer’s head with great antlers). Sometimes I see him playing bowls in his Sunday best at Centro Primo Maggio. He’s shy with me, and when he does speak it’s in a dialect so strong that I’m lost. Certainly, one can hardly imagine him walking out on his wife now, so that is not the problem. In any event, you can see he loves the children, always ruffles Michele’s hair, chats to him, even after a tough morning’s work.

Or is it that Zia is afraid Milena will be the silly girl who robs some other wife of her husband? The daughter does have a big solidly beautiful body when she wanders about the house in her pyjamas. But all she talks about are the difficulties of getting a job in the state sector. She has done a state exam, but everybody knows these are fixed, so much so that she is only thirty-somethingth on the graduatoria despite having heard from an inside informer that she scored far higher than various people further up…

Zia shakes her head and pouts, but fixing state jobs clearly isn’t as bad as men walking out on their families.

Michele drags himself away from the galani to find the remote control for the TV and switch it on.

‘ Santa patata ,’ Zia exclaims at this precocity. ‘I’ll spank you, I will!’ But you can tell she doesn’t really see it as a misdemeanour at all.

The television is showing Japanese cartoons dubbed with Roman accents. Our modern ecumenicism. The Italians seem to make no programmes of their own for younger children, though they don’t miss the opportunity of using the advertising space to sell the whole range of consumer goods. Apparently studies have shown that it is more and more the children who are responsible for the choice of purchases in Italian households, even when it comes to such things as video recorders and cars. Back in Via delle Primule there is certainly much rivalry between the boys about which car Papà has.

‘ Vacca! ’ young Michele shouts when a Japanese giant ray guns the knee-joints off a robot. ‘ Bravissimo! ’ the teeny voice of a rescued girl with Caucasian features cries.

‘ Vacca! ’ Michele repeats. But this is embarrassing. Vacca means no more than ‘cow’, but it is a short form for porca vacca , pig cow, or filthy cow, with all sorts of unpleasant connotations along the lines of women of easy virtue.

‘Michele!’

Zia says, ‘ Santa patata , Michele, you better not use that language with me.’

She turns to me and winks.

‘You better not,’ she insists, at once smiling and serious. Somehow it seems to work. ‘ Scusami , Zia,’ he says.

Then it’s handicapped children we’re discussing, Milena’s chosen field, the deaf in particular, which inevitably brings Zia to our mutual doctor’s husband, who has left his wife alone with their handicapped boy after running off with some silly girl he met doing amateur dramatics.

Finishing the fierce espresso I’m always offered, I remark, in line with the general tone of the conversation, that it is indeed a hard environment for a child to be born into. I’ve even heard, I say, of people using this as an explanation for not having kids at all.

But here Zia will not follow. This is merely a façade for selfishness. ‘ Ogni bambino ha il suo cestino ,’ she announces, with Frate Indovino facility. Literally translated this proverb means ‘Every baby has his own little basket.’ I ask for an explanation.

‘Every baby,’ she explains, picking up a very solid Stefi, ‘is born with what it needs to survive.’

On this supremely optimistic vision of providence, I escape, meeting on the stairs Nonno Ernesto, who is coming up to eat his lunch. He eats his meals upstairs, is led and served, then returns to his downstairs flat. He’s looked after, but doesn’t bother. I wonder why these happy solutions are so rare in my own country.

As I climb into the car; the children come out on the big terrace balcony to wave goodbye to me and say not to come and pick them up too soon. Later they will go out into the garden at the back, where Checca the raven lives in a cage the size of a gazebo and knows how to say ‘ciao’ to you hopping from perch to dirty perch, so they will say ‘ciao’ to each other there for a good ten minutes, with Checca teasing by making these monotonous humans wait for the response. Then they will be allowed to water all Nonno Ernesto’s huge vegetables that grow in military parade rows between neat walkways of paving. Under a blistering sun they will fight over a watering can of the variety Peter Rabbit fell into, while noble tomatoes, portly aubergines and fat young peppers stand to shiny attention before them. When no one is looking, Michele will toss some water over the big tortoises to see them pull in their scaly heads from the lettuce they’ve been thrown.

Other pleasures of Zia’s household, particularly when the sun is too hot and the radio warns you to keep children indoors, are the huge model railway up in the loft and the go-kart which one can pedal round the garage and the basement. Both these toys are twenty years old, but benefit from a strict maintenance routine; Zio Mauro, as his ancient 128 testifies, is another of those, like my mother-in-law, who find their vocation in preventing inanimate things from dying. While Stefi makes heart shapes out of pastry in the kitchen, Michele goes down to watch the man working in his dark basement workshop, filing railway lines, or replacing ball joints, or perhaps working on a large wrought-iron frog or some such thing. Towards Christmas there is a big nativity scene that has to be rewired, the holy family put in the shell of an old TV with papier-mâché landscape and three-phase lighting. My son and the mechanic speak dialect to each other, surrounded by cases of unlabelled wine bottles, the little boy all wonder at the man’s skills, not perceiving how firmly they place him amongst an older breed of Italians, which Zia’s own son, Nino, who occasionally passes by in a gleaming white Lancia Dedra, has already left behind.

I walk over to get them at five o’clock to find they are playing Scopa with Zia over a glass of Fanta. It’s a game of cards you usually see old men playing under dusty pergolas around bottles of the variety Zio Mauro has down in the cellar. Judiciously, Zia is losing.

Sauntering back home, Michele tells me that if I leave Mamma, he’ll kill me.

I beg your pardon.

‘If you leave Mamma, I’ll kill you!’ And he adds: ‘Francesca Tuppini’s papà has left her mamma .’