Tim Parks - An Italian Education

‘The bad weather continues,’ apologises the man in air force uniform who reads the forecast on TV. And you think: ‘What bad weather?’ then remember a brief shower shortly before lunch. We once took a holiday with Stefano and Marta to the tiny Mediterranean island of Capraia, sharing the rent of a cottage. They insisted we all pull out after only a week because they felt the weather had let us down. It had rained twice and there had been some brisk wind. As we left, the temperature was up in the mid thirties and the water dazzling with light. But there was a forecast of gathering cloud, Marta pointed out, for the late afternoon…

Now Stefano remarks that Marta is particularly worried about Beppe getting his feet wet.

‘What are you going to do?’ he asks again. It’s part of the local genius for living in groups that everybody wants to know how everybody else is going to behave before they decide themselves. Ten or fifteen families may phone each other before deciding not to go for a picnic.

The children are squirming on the sofa. ‘ Per favore, Papà! ’ they whine. ‘ Per favore , we want to go.’

Michele is a big boy now, nearly seven years old, a strapping lad, blond, ungainly, tiggerish. At four-and-a-bit, Stefi is just losing her baby plumpness. ‘ Per favore Papà ,’ they beg, and both children cross themselves, which is a gesture they have seen Gianluca Vialli make on TV before he takes a penalty.

‘Well, we’ll certainly be taking our kids,’ I tell Stefano. ‘They can put their rain jackets and boots on.’

There’s a brief silence at the other end of the line. The idea that a walk will require protective clothing already relegates it to worse than second best. But at this end the children are cheering and jumping about — sometimes it’s worth having an English dad, even if he does send you to bed early. Amid the whooping, Stefi remembers to cross herself again, as Vialli does, if he scores. Sometimes I fear she may want to become a nun one day, just for the theatricality of it all.

‘But what if none of the others turn up,’ Stefano insists, and adds, ‘I suppose I could call Morazzoni and Castelli.’

‘The teachers will have to turn up,’ I point out, ‘since they arranged it. Then there’s ourselves. Worst comes to the worst there’ll be six or seven of us.’

Stefano says: ‘Look, I think Marta should talk to Rita.’ Clearly, it’s a question for mothers to decide.

In the event, it only takes Rita about fifteen minutes to persuade Marta that it will be safe to go on this walk, that there are plenty of places to take refuge if it rains, that the chosen picnic spot has benches so we won’t need to sit on the wet ground. My wife has considerable powers of persuasion.

Outside the school, about twenty minutes after the official rendezvous time, almost half the children have turned up as have a fair number of parents. By common telephonic consent, everybody has brought umbrellas and jackets with hoods, for there are still two or three clouds in the sky. As always in Italy, every pair of shoulders sports a small fluorescent backpack full of all kinds of emergency equipment.

It’s Saturday morning and Michele’s class, which goes to school from eight till four, five days a week, jeers at the other class, indistinctly to be seen through high windows beyond a fence, who go to school from eight till one, six days a week. Many parents are convinced that their children will suffer if they don’t eat at home and that they are anyway incapable of being away from their mothers for more than five hours at a time, so they choose the solution of the six-day week. Schools thus offer two completely different timetables, no doubt causing all kinds of complex logistical problems, though conveniently leading to the employment of more teachers than might otherwise be necessary.

Michele and Beppe wave sticks that are really swords at the window where their companions are working. Michele has become D’Artagnan, while Beppe is all three of the musketeers at once. In character, Beppe has a long, punk ponytail where his hair has been allowed to grow out of the fringe at the back. Stefano hates this, but since Beppe, at seven, says he wouldn’t feel himself without it, his mother won’t hear of his wishes being violated. We should not try to appropriate our children’s bodies…

The boys wave their sticks. They shout mild abuse. But when Michele pulls out the big catapult Nonno made him — one of the only kept promises I can recall — I have to intervene. No, not even a small stone.

On all country walks Michele carries his catapult, his penknife, a pack of cards showing high-performance cars and a long, pointed stick. He is obsessed by the fear of vipere , adders; the hills are full of vipere whose poisonous fangs will kill him stone dead if ever they get within range. Everybody knows that, he says, and almost the only thing he seems to catch on the radio news is rare cases of tourists rushed to hospital with snake bites. After thirteen years in Italy, I myself have still to see a vipera . On the other hand, I have seen plenty of high-performance cars.

Stefi carries her Topo Gigio shoulder purse and her Polly Pocket. ‘Polly Pocket — la tua amica piccina ’, the ad says. All over the world, English is everywhere in a child’s life. The unnatural thing is understanding it.

We walk out of the village towards the castello . The scene is extravagantly picturesque, as if in some kind of postcard conspiracy: ahead of us are turreted villas up a steep slope, mellow stuccos, ivy walls, iron gates overwhelmed by wisteria. A zigzag of tall cypresses shows the way. To the right and north lies the long valley of the Val Squaranto, narrowing to steep woodland. Above and behind range the bright white peaks of the Alps, sharp and clean as good ceramics in a top cupboard. ‘There’ll be a chill wind before long,’ Marta worries, noticing how last night’s rain fell as snow on Monte Tomba.

This castle on its hilltop, this long dark valley, these mountains… what we are walking into here is the romantic landscape of Stefi’s drawings, endlessly repeated in broad felt-tip with only a swift turnover of foreground protagonists for differentiation: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in the second year of the scuola materna ; the angel and the Virgin when despite poor staffing the ora di religione got that far; Nonno and Nonna after one of their rare visits (recognisable from Nonno’s paunch and trilby); Zia Natalina feeding Checca; and on one occasion, I remember, after reading some heavily abridged classics together, Iphigenia sacrificed to Zeus (sitting on top of the castello ). But default settings for the figures in Stefi’s drawings are Mamma and Papà, or a prince and princess, two couples who are frequently and flatteringly confused.

Michele, on the other hand, doesn’t see the castle, the valley, the mountains. His fantasy world is fed by the fast road we have just crossed that marks the end of the village. Give him colours and a piece of paper and he will stretch out its chase of polished steel into supersonic racing monsters perfectly capable of sprouting wings. And every sports car that goes by is a red Ferrari…

We follow a path which immediately steepens for the climb to the castle, upon which the children start to complain that they’re tired. Marta wonders if Stefano shouldn’t carry Beppe. Stefano refuses.

Marta is a curious creature. Petite without quite being frail, she falls into the category of those who despite having an obsession with cleanliness and safety nevertheless do want to have a second child. An unusual scenario. But for some reason she, or he, can’t. So they are trying to adopt. Only, adoption takes so long in Italy. There are so many rules. The child has to be safeguarded in so many ways that he ends up not being adopted at all. Twice they’ve been promised a child and then denied it at the last minute, the last time when the government suddenly introduced the rule that neither parent could be more than forty years older than the child. Since Stefano is now forty-two (his moustache is peppered white), this is making things impossible.